Liquid Death’s Andy Pearson on humour and entertainment

welcome to the media cat magazine podcast I'm your host Mike pigger editor at the magazine and today we have a special podcast on our July theme of Fame and attention where I'm handing over control of the Pod to regular media cat contributor author and co-founder of Genius Steels Farris yakob uh in this discussion Farris is interviewing Andy Pearson VP of creative at liquid death so that's enough for me and uh without further Ado over to Paris [Music] hello and welcome to the mediacat magazine podcast an audio extension of a digital magazine about media advertising marketing culture and everything in between I am today's humble host farist and author of best-selling advertising classic paid attention which is not solely self-indulgence self-promotion but is rather Germain to the conversation because today we'll be talking about attention and fame two closely related Concepts that have become a lot more salent for some reason maybe my book who knows in the advertising industry in the last few years specifically of late uh there's been quite a lot of professorial pundit polarized discourse about a nature of a particular brand that's made itself un inarguably famous uh in a very few short years and um well I thought I would just you know go directly to the source and uh like their source for their Mountain sparkling water I I thought I just talked to liquid death directly and so I'm absolutely delighted to introduce Our Guest today Andy pson Ultra Runner lovely human being I got to meet him randomly in New Zealand a long time ago and most recently having created a very popular board game uh card game VP of creative at liquid death Andy how are you I'm doing well thank you I am delighted to hear that sir where are you currently I am up in rightwood California up in the mountains outside Los Angeles yeah beautiful beautiful uh I'm in chattanoga we'll meet again next time in in Queenstown okay so thanks so much for agreeing to do this it's a a lot of fun hopefully and everybody's very interested in your brand and I wanted to talk to you about how you think about marketing creative Fame attention and how those things Drive um well growth and how your business is grown so so much um so uh I guess the first thing I wanted to talk about a little bit is that liquid death doesn't tend to do a lot of media buys or significant media buys is that fair is that right that's correct yeah so you tend to focus your your budget on on production uh and then use own media channels for deployment and kind of PR is a big part of that how how do you think about paid media yeah do you use it at all is there any any bit of it yeah we you know we certainly are doing things in paid but I but you know from the beginning we realized that well one people hate advertising and marketing and so instead of advertising marketing can we make stuff that people genuinely love and want to uh want to interact with want to watch and so as you kind of said can we take that money that we would have spent on media and instead push it into making more content that people love and uh and kind of through that process we have as you said created our own media channels essentially you know where the we have uh nine million combined followers across Instagram and Tik Tok and so when we push something out we you know we often are doing it in a way that is going to automatically reach an audience that we've built over time and we've created our own media so lot of times we look at it as we are both the the brand the company the marketing agency the production company and our own media channel or our own influencer and so we actually have now started getting a lot of Brands coming to us wanting to work together because we've become influencers the brand has become an influencer as well and is willing to kind of collab with other people kind of a fascinating idea you do a lot of interesting collabs we'll get to that because I do want to talk about them especially the new thing you announced I think today that the golfing collaboration with bad birdie um yeah so like I get the idea you mentioned at the beginning your kind of macro Insight that people hate ads and uh marketing is that kind of the overwhelming kind of cult like audience Insight that you guys bring to the the kind of work you do yeah I mean it's not an Insight it's the truth it's like I think if people if people in marketing acknowledged that we're generally making things that people hate suddenly if you're starting from that conceit yeah how does that alter the thing that you're making in the first place right and I I think too often we think that we're surgeons in an ER saving lives and the thing we're doing is the most important thing in the world right and if you step back and and kind of look at it in a skeptical sense you might start making work that's actually more interesting to more people and and more fulfill to yourself and other people as well does your experience working in advertising for kind of established big Brands directly inform some of that I guess thinking because whilst at some level all of your work feels like it deeply understands and satirizes advertising I don't think Sati is exactly what it is in some ways like everything starts out as a there's a joke somewhere like OG said you know make your thinking is funny as possible but your stuff isn't like just postmodern silliness it's got always a serious point that lands with something fresh and and interesting each time I like that you say that because I do I do always say internally I think the best things that we make that often perform the best have a a really like a a cultural critique hidden deep inside of it that on the surface isn't there but when you dig into like when we did the Tony Hawk bloodb thing that was kind of this commentary on Celebrity endorsements and how they're all [ __ ] right and so how can we prove that the celebrity believes so much in the product that they're willing to give us his own you know pint of blood right and so everything has a little bit of that like cultural insight and so I think I I it's cool to hear you say that because things are it's definitely there's a lot of satire but there's also culture commentary there's a lot of kind of uh daada postmodern silliness involved there's a lot of things all kind of mixed up and when you look at the stuff that I of the best that we've done and that has done the best you I don't think you can quite quantify what the thing we're doing is we just shot something last week where I hopped on a call with all the actors that were about to come in on set and I explained like the four levels of humor that we were going to be working with the next day because you kind of have to dissect all the different things that were doing simultaneously to understand how to how to pull it off and kind of stick the landing on it so I mean there's lots of parts of your marketing operation think the death machine is your creative U um function I guess that's your the production company yeah right absolutely so I wanted to ask about that how much production is actually done in house is it all you guys and and you know pretty much 100% at this point right yeah we're we're we're um we have our our team of producers and we have a great roster of kind of co-conspirators that we pull in on every production um and then yeah and then we've kind of taken to really directing it ourselves now I either direct or co-direct with my EP out of convenience which sounds weird but it was it was like the more we were doing stuff the easier it was if we just did it ourselves and we could do it faster and cheaper and have more creative control over it yeah it seems like a very kind of modern model rather than just building an in-house agency having a creative perspective kind of from the very outset right because in some ways the brand is is incredibly creative but also it's it's it's a core a purpose brand and I don't want to say purpose language like in an annoying way but it is right like that's what it actually is yeah yeah and and it's funny you say that too because I remember when I first started and and when I first started it was literally a a couple of us and I was asked he was like hey do you want to you want this to be like an internal agency like with a name and stuff like that and um I was just like no I want this to be liquid death this is just who we are this is all it is and we're all on the same team and I do I I understand the need for internal agencies to be branded as their own thing and feel like they have their own autonomy but for me it was really important that from the jump it's all liquid death we're all on the same team together and there's not this like marketing's over here and they they are the cool kids doing this thing honestly when I joined I was like I've never been the least cool person in an organization ever I was like I have one tattoo compared to everyone else I have the least number of tattoos on this entire in the entire company so so I think that's a really important part of this is that we're all genuinely just playing together you know I mean I love that I mean it must be easier then to work kind of like you've got one Vision holistically as a company and you can operate that way you speak to the agility of that to some degree I think you mentioned once um considering an RFP for an agency and then coming up with a taste test idea 15 minutes instead and going I'll just do that and it'll be great yeah I must make things much faster obviously like yeah yeah exactly we couldn't we couldn't do the stuff we did if we weren't just willing to say yes we like that idea go and I think that's you know just coming from as you said the agency world it's like you spend months and months worrying about the right strategy and about this execution and going back and forth on the scripts and you know a lot of of times we'll we'll sell in ideas to ourselves or to Partners and we don't have a script until like like a lock script until sometimes like a couple days before I'm like oh shoot we got to write the script for this but because I think I think that thing is very freeing because it it it means like cool can we all agree that this is a great idea one and then can we agree that two we feel confident enough we can make this hilarious and entertaining and so if it just is a lot easier to work with people when you're not so like mired in the details because that's what the production process is is when you get is once you get in the details that's when you're making all like the little tweaks and creative decisions and dialing in the script but you know the creative process lasts all the way into the edit and can totally take a different leftand turn in the edit once you get it there so I think we allow we we don't ever want to have like a final answer and I think how how many times have you I know personally got into an edit for something that you had the script you everyone agreed was this was this was the best it can be and then you get in the script or you get in an edit and you're like oh man this sucks and there's no way to save it and it's on points but it's not right right and and so I think if you allow every piece of the process to be developing in real time it will ultimately build up to the best creative product um yeah the same way like think about again I we always make analogies to SNL but I think it is it's a it it it's a parallel in a lot of ways like you're always constantly writing and writing up until the last minute until the thing is on air and fixing that thing and it's not like they don't write something on Monday and they're like well we're done see you see you next Monday right um it has to be kind of a constant iteration creatively which is sort of difficult with the waterfall process of you know an agency structure where the client signed off on the script and therefore you're sort of beholden to the you know uh the agreements that you've made um exactly how how famous is liquid death and how do you think about that and do you measure it in any way or I think we're I think we're pretty famous at this point I mean how famous yeah I mean I mean you me brand awareness for example or some sort of proxy yeah I mean we certainly you know we certainly have our we have our research that we do and you know we're we're looking at um at the data and you know determining you know kind of plotting future uh where we're going um I think we're hitting the mark on a lot of the stuff we we want to be doing and then you know in terms of famous I think there's also different ways to measure that I think there's I think we've grown in ways that are outsize to even the audience and so I what I mean by that is I think I think strategically we've become friends and gotten ourselves in the right places where we are known by famous people as well and thus that happen that opens a lot of doors so we have a lot of celebrity ambassadors ber Cher Tony Hawk wi Khalifa you know Wendy Cummings um you know Travis Barker all these people and and you know I think we have genuine relationships with them where they really support what we're doing they like the crazy stuff that we're doing and vice versa and so it is kind of a mutually beneficial relationship it's not this um it's not this thing where we're just paying a celebrity to hold hold a product and say I like this brand right and so I think and said go Mission convinced people to take part otherwise you thought wouldn't a few times I that kind of thing's happened right yeah and I mean even like in in the thing that is nice to that opens doors is both the brand but then also our death to plastic Mission which you know look on look at um Productions like TV and movie sets there's um how many bottles of water are used throughout our production so we in a lot of opportunity we've had a lot of opportunities where a lot of Productions have adopted liquid death on set because they can be recycled right and so now suddenly we have all these you know people of higher status who are coming in contact or all these Productions that are coming in contact and now it's just easier for us to to go and you know do something interesting with people because they've already they already like us it's not like we're fighting an uphill battle right they're approaching you now rather than you're approaching them going you can do something really fun um I love that um and I do think that's part of the the smartness of let's say your initial distribution strategy which seemed to find really interesting mechanisms kind of the closest analog is like Red Bull 20 years ago right yeah started a lot by by being in you know bars and music venues and stuff like that rather than uh you know just trying to be on a grocery store shelf which uh you know I think established you know established kind of what we were doing from the beginning yeah I mean the obviously the innovation in product is it's a can that looks like a beer essentially or something like that that we can carry without any kind of whatever seeming social stigma that may be associated with not wanting to drink all the time whatever that might currently be in whichever youth culture we're talking about um yeah but like so I mean the can and the design really pops but speaking of distribution so yeah there's some you know and sports that makes obvious place the the set stuff is incredibly smart I love that but like how did you get into all major retailers in America like that seems like a very difficult thing to do without TV spend historically right isn't that one of the points of the of trade you know yeah yeah and I mean there are there are people that can speak much more eloquently to to that than I can certainly but um yeah I think you know we started when I started almost exactly three years ago ago we were just getting into our first retail door and now we're across about 12,000 doors worldwide across us UK Ireland uh Australia New Zealand and a couple other little ones peppered in there so we've really I mean the explosive growth has happened because you know I think it's you go to Just you go to uh you know on the surface liquid death is a tough sell and then it but at a certain point it's hard to argue with the momentum that we've had and so um yeah it's really helped it's helped open a lot of doors and you know obviously the the retailers are extremely happy with how it's been performing I have been talking to some people doing you know let's call it research for the sake of my professional Acumen and uh you know I found it interesting that some people I've mentioned your bran to the brand 2 I've only really encountered it at venues festivals and and uh in supermarkets and that kind of thing and I wonder how I mean I'm an extremely online extremely ad person I am extremely aware of nearly everything you do because that's what I do right yeah but how very online do you consider your audience to be and how do you think about your audience beyond that I know yeah I mean I think I think we you know we have a massive like I said massive online following as you say we have amazing way to reach people through you know strategic Partnerships with Live Events and venues and that sort of thing the nice thing I think is that when you if you're well the the thing I love about someone being introduced at a venue is I always say it's like you experience the entire brand within about five minutes where you get you get the can what we hear a lot we hear all the time is people always are like you know I thought it was energy drink I thought it was hard Seltzer I thought it was whatever um and then you get handed it for the first time and and you're like that's not what I ordered and then they're like oh it's just water oh and there's this like crazy mental flip because a lot of people have either seen it but they haven't fully dove into it yet and so there's this like real like rain melting 180 that kind of happens when they when you have that first Sip and then you know you're like oh it's water and then you're like oh it's really cold refreshing water in a can and then you look up the side and we have the funny you know the story on the side you're like oh and it's funny water and then you finish it and then you go to throw it away and you're like oh and now I recycle it and you go to the recycling bin and so you have and you're like oh wow and it's water that isn't in a plastic bottle and so you have the full brand experience in five minutes or so and then at at a certain point like you once you're exposed to it we have an an insane body of work I would say that we've developed over the last last you know five or so years and so then once you dive into it you've just gone down this crazy Rabbit Hole of of everything we've done and and that's where people really that's where you see people like really the fandom explodes so yeah it kind of every step there's all these different ways into what we're doing and then once you find it you can kind of have your own relationship with with it whether it's like Ultra fandom and the 300 plus people who have gotten tattoos of our logo on their bodies or whether it's you know a a lighter casual user who who just loves something cold at a venue you know um so you sort of traded time spent in large multi- agency meetings uh negotiating you know every single word in a script for what appears to be a truly punishing production schedule so to your point you make a vast amount of work yeah at least it seems that way to me do you think it is because it seems like a great deal of work is coming out all of the time yeah yeah I mean we just we just launched something today and I was on with the team as we were pressing the go button and I was like oh man it feels like it's been a long time since we launched something and it had been three weeks I think since the last thing we put out it's amazing I mean as an ultra Runner do you think you have incredible stamina to just go through because production is hard right it's it's a lot yeah yeah I mean I think we try to make it as we really do work to make it as easy on ourselves and the people involved and even when we pitch uh celebrities or brands on stuff our our goal is always to make it minimum friction uh for everyone involved and I I think because we realize if we make it hard on anybody it's going to be hard on everybody and so I want and just internally like we just want to be a company that is really kind to our people and kind to people we work with and that's a real a core value and it and I and I know if we're if we do that it will pay dividends on the the ultimately on how happy and and creative people are and even I'm really proud of this even on sets that we we do we rap and the crew there is like man I love working on jobs with you guys they're so fun and you guys are so chill this is but we had someone the other day someone uh we were collaborating with and the they were there and they were like man this is my favorite shoot I've ever been on in my entire career and like I I want that ease because if we don't have that the thing we it becomes very hard on ourselves and so I talk a lot about that too it's like just across agencies and Brands and marketing departments we have to find ways we're making it too hard on ourselves and it doesn't have to be as hard as we're all making it and and I I hope that's a prime example because I think quality of life I I I don't know I have a I grew up at crisen in the days where like there was the sweat shop cover on creativity magazine Lally I remember it well indeed yeah and so I that's like a core part of my personality or like ultr running right like I'm super into working as hard as humanly possible to get the thing that we want to do but at a certain point we have to like figure out you learn that you can do it in a way where you're not redlining at all times and I both in running and in and in you know creative that we do it's like you gotta you got to operate right under that and find ways to to do it ultra running it's all about as being as efficient as you possibly can because you have to last a 100 miles from here to the finish line so how can we make everything we do super smooth so that we can we can get to that end result that we want without bread lining I am now going to open a can of liquid death mango chainsaw and experience the uh fizzy refreshing deliciousness oh it's great stuff isn't it oh so you de a lot with uh water is water wet I think so for the most part so things in water are wet things out of water they get wet but water itself can it be wet we have the wetest water I would say I know people say you can't distinguish water but I I do think our water is wetter than most feels very wet to me um is death dead it can be but also sometimes it's not look at Neil Patrick Harris uh that guy came back from that guy was nowhere and then suddenly he was in uh herin Kumar and then just totally reborn his career so I would say that guy's born again we we love a we love a good comeback then is liquid death wet or dead it's wet death I would say thank you um what do you uh so like a lot of your work seems to okay let's talk about today's work actually today's work appears to be a very good example of today's launch I believe it's it's a a golf campaign with bad birdie with a particular kind of golf club do you want to tell us about that for a second sure yeah we we partner with bad birdie we have a whole collection of golf gear um that they design that's great polos hats t-shirts um and then also we created the Euro club which sorry we did not create it we actually the Euro Club is a product that actually is a real product that existed uh for many years was actually on Shark Tank developed by developed by a real urologist wow okay and um and we contacted him and asked if he would be willing to create a liquid death and bad birdie edition of the club uh which he graciously allowed us to license and then we made an ad uh and the Euro Club is it's exactly what it sounds like it's a golf club with a hollowed out Reservoir and a Twist toop uh tip that you can relieve yourself into if you've had one too many liquid deaths or other beverages on the golf course as you know 18 holes is a long time and if you're drinking liquid death as we actually see a lot of a lot of golfers really enjoy liquid death you're pretty much just running to the woods so this is a discreet way to pee into a uh hollowed out Golf Club so encapsulates a lot of the things I love about your work it has you know an insight about specific segment audience Community something really gerain to you know golfers especially older men golfers we have our particular needs and prostate so on um but it also like you used to talk a lot about your show your work being episodes of this ongoing liquid death story show maybe TV show The Writers room sense and I love that thought increasingly it feels like you're doing drops uh I'm wearing my uh hilarious satirical t-shirt uh about that to some degree because like these limited edition you know products uh they come out with a campaign a concept and then very clear community and a bunch of drops I mean do you feel to me the closest thing that I can think of as to what you guys now do apart from maybe really good old chrispin work back in the day when you were doing that uh is mischief um not want to overuse Mischief as a kind of they are very good at Fame and attention generation they seem to be very very good at it in a way that you guys are do you feel a kinship with the way they approach the work yeah certainly I mean we've actually you know we we've chatted with those guys a couple times uh we actually sent some liquid death to one of their openings one that they were doing um yeah I mean I think there's you know there's a number of people that we look around and feel like we're kind of peers in a sense with um you know I think they're great at developing you know intensely conceptual products yeah yeah and and and they're you know everything they're doing is an art piece I think we sometimes talk about liquid death is kind of an elaborate art piece as well yeah I think you know we yeah certainly feel Kindred Spirits I think we lean probably more into the like comedy video aspect of ours but the way I the way I like to think of it is I I've kind of I don't know if I coined it I think I did but this term like 3D humor where the the fun thing about us is it's not just that we made a haha funny video it's like oh no they're real you follow through yeah you can really buy this golf club we really stole Tony's blood we really took sto's hair and made it into voodoo dolls that were put together by a weird warlock you know like we had it it's and and then so it's this thing thing that you can touch and feel and um man one of the best examples actually is we teamed up with Burton to do uh the death trap which was a snowboard that was had no camber so it's basically entirely flat and it's shaped like a coffin and it was like you literally the ad was like literally don't ride this you will die and even all the the lawyers were like you can't let anybody ride this so the whole commercial was like literally please do not ride this uh I think it I think it was like aund I want to say $325 I want to say was the price tag and it sold out in 25 minutes uh so meaning all these people bought a snowboard for hundreds of dollars you literally couldn't ride um it's art yeah exactly it is it's it's it's a humor piece it's you know it's something that you want to be involved with a piece of Pop Culture piece of humor in in a way like I said in a way that you know as you know we love sketch comedy I mean there's so many amazing you know I think you should leave and SNL and all kinds of amazing stuff out there but they don't get they make the fake commercials for the fake products but we make a real commercial for a real product yeah and you can really walk into a store and see liquid death sitting on the shelf um so I think that's this weird blending of like real world meets fantasy world and that's kind of the I think the Fun Line we're always towing with liid with death is is this thing real or not and oh my God it is real that's why I love so much about it I think is that you know I used to be into this thing I used to call Brand actions but I mean like do actual things in the world and then tell people about it don't just pretend to have done stuff that seems to be a very cool way of like I don't know being interesting and the as the world gets more virtual and more social and digital the realness of your work I think comes through the screen which is kind of yeah it makes it different right it's not just uh I'm not even gonna mention AI I don't want to talk about it is that okay yeah I I prefer we don't I mean that' be perfect okay good you did right now but it's fine oh yeah so obviously when you create work to be funny and attract attention you must be thinking about audience and some degree community and like the Insight that you have about people hating ads that sort of meta level thing but yeah are there any other kind of things you build into the system of creative or Communications distribution that are designed to help PR pick up things I guess yeah I mean I think from uh yeah I think we've designed we we've done it enough and this goes back to the question of like wow you guys do a lot of stuff that wasn't a question that was a statement but that statement of wow you guys do a lot of stuff and yeah the only reason why we've learned over time is because now we have the instincts when we do something new we're like oh if we do this this is going to really help it or if I know I'm going to get this one shot in here that's going to help this thing really travel or this one line that I'm going to throw in to the script we we have we've done it enough that you've that we've gotten much more versed in those things and I probably won't tell all our secrets no no fair enough but but what I mean is like in the it's like yeah if you were you have to just practice that stuff right you have to go you have to make a lot of stuff to understand which stuff is going to work and not just writing stuff it's not like again going back to the agencies it's like not just building decks and writing scripts you have to everybody has to make stuff but because you only learn the most by making things then making another thing the next time and you've learned from that last experience so I think there's a there should be more importance on making as much stuff as possible rather than making the biggest most integrated thing that we possibly can I think that I think that's just such old school um dinosaur thinking in in the modern marketing age so it's a sort of human approach to attention and you have a community this nine million kind of follower base who are G to hit get your stuff first I see your stuff immediately on LinkedIn because that's I guess the primary social network now for yeah men whatever this is yeah exactly whoever we are whatever ever that is but like I wonder um thinking about attention online right there's obviously a kind of interruptive barrier called the algorithm and Mr Beast famously has teams of people obsessing over every kind of possible optimization tweak to every algorithm on every platform he can possibly imagine and find himself blah blah do you even think about that stuff or are you more just thinking about your community what works with people yeah I mean you know we definitely you know again we we have gotten pretty good understanding of how tweaking our content to meet the moment and meet the platform um we've gotten we've gotten good at that but also the really funny thing is we've been told by the platform sometimes like because we we've talked to them and you know asked for advice on things and they're like honestly um we would recommend doing the opposite of what you guys are doing but the thing you're doing is performing insanely well and so we can't tell we think you should just keep doing the thing so the example is like on Tik Tok it's always like oh make it feel really organic and you know just buy someone real make it feel real and shot on a phone and then you look at our stuff and the stuff that performs best are these like overly produced fake parody ads and they're like we would literally never tell anybody to ever do that but somehow your stuff Garners millions of views do doing it so they they just s kind of like ah I just keep doing what you're doing is this partially the curse of best practices just normalizing everything down to kind of homogeneous blandness that fits within the right pixel ratio of right platforms essentially exactly I mean God the the one thing that's really funny to me now is on Tik I just seen stuff the other day this like the Tik Tok little like finger thing and it's seeped down into EV like every single person is doing that now or or or people watching movies with the subtitles on yeah I I just think like you look at all the stuff that's happening and how how best practices or all these you know it just it's kind of seeping across culture and for us we've always wanted to cut counter to culture and and particularly marketing so I think um doing something that's the opposite of what is expected is also going to perform if you're just chasing yeah which is which is the essence of what I think strategy apparently was and creat right like here's what everyone should do now do the opposite of that otherwise you're doing literally what everyone else is doing yeah I mean you know I think our founder Mike has a really good perspective on this which is you know if you're just trying to chase success you're all you're doing is replicating something that's been done before and you know kind of have moderate success but if you're actually starting from this place if we always talk about like what's the dumbest thing we could do if you're starting from that place where where you're just freeing yourself to entertain things that have never been entertained before that's where like truly innovative ideas and practices come from is because you're starting from a place that no one who is being trying to be successful would allow them to start to to allow themselves to start there right yeah so again putting water in a can you know I you know people always would say we get on calls and people like that no one's ever going to drink water out of a aluminum can that's insane no no one will ever do that and as I you know that that's how it started when I joined and then a year year and a half in we'd get on calls and people are like oh water in a can that's so obvious I wish I had thought of that and and yeah like everything is so stupid until at one day it's not right 100% yes that's kind of what we're operating on is that that kind of notion I guess is like what can we do that's feels so stupid and counterintuitive but we know is actually brilliant and we're GNA put it out there and then people catch up to it or they catch up to the humor they catch up to whatever we're doing right um absolutely yes and I think we're gonna sort of have a couple more questions hopefully we have time for that I think that we are I forgot to set the timer to be honest but that's just me isn't it we got we got all there so speaking of uh so all these merchandise opportunities I mean promotional products and so on uh the drops Mischief kind of moved into that and then started just selling a lot of shoes you've obviously expanded into this excellent green tea agave and neutral enhanced vitamin beverage line very much within the liquid death thing you didn't call it water so all liquid is your is your domain in theory and you've got the death the death dust electrolyte dust for the the water is there any other thoughts at least or germs of ideas of like product lines that may extend that just feels that your brand has stretch uh to me yeah I mean absolutely I mean you know I can't talk about anything we're developing here um this would I wouldn't ask you that would be Absol no offense but but yeah I mean we're as we say we're like you know a healthy beverage platform and so there's a lot of you know obviously there's there's more interesting stuff that that we are interested in doing I think also as you said we have a whole merch line which is its own its own you know business essentially um and then also supply chain whole different supply chain different kind of yeah yeah yeah and we have you know massive fans under that as well and then also you know ultimately we want to be an entertainment company you know and that's how we see ourselves as well um and so we you know we dropped a The Adventures of murder Man trailer that we're trying to to get picked up as a real show um you know I I may have missed that in my research can you speak to that for a second yeah so we um we created a trailer um for this animated show called The Adventures of murder man which is our mascot um which is yes sorry did say that yeah okay and so and so we are um yeah we're we're working on you know getting that picked up and turned into a a legitimate program not just and not as an advertising vehicle as like we just want to make something entertaining and funny and it happens to have a guy with a liquid death can for a head but it's not like an ad right we're just making a funny show because we have the people uh you know will carola is um is our Creer director here and he had a longtime show on Adult Swim um you know so he he wrote and directed that William Street amazing production mean William Street at the probably highest hit right and yeah and we worked with tit Mouse on that and um yeah so we're working on you know how do we develop this property I think we've got plenty of aims on other stuff that we want to do from an entertainment perspective so um I think you know the the possibilities are fairly Limitless because we you know again we have we're a healthy beverage brand but also this entertainment brand and so anywhere there's just a lot of places that we can go and if you look at the span of the products we make I mean we make everything from pint glasses to water bottles to beach chairs to we have a there's a I can't talk to it but there's another pro project coming up that if it goes through I'm an entertainment thing that I am it's gonna be wild if it happens so you know it's it's kind of Limitless because we're just a humor brand and that's you know at the core doing I sort of love that I mean there's something about something of and I don't mean to be either flattering or dismissive of the of the maximum effort Ryan Reynolds kind of flavor character you know just the ability to bring the fourth War down and speak to advertising as a thing which I find very uh pleasing last couple I think maybe we'll squeeze something in the collabs especially the entertainment collabs obviously bring you to a different audience right that's kind of the how collabs essentially work to some degree yeah but the stuff with the Deep felt particularly deep without being fasile like because the boys and you guys have such a strong kind of yeah intersectional comedic kind of thing how did that come about and like any any tea on the Deep yeah so um we actually did something with them two years ago for season two or between season two and season three and yeah that was a you know a partnership that they they came to us with um yeah I mean we we love obviously just on a personal level love that show love everybody over there and I think it it goes back to that thing that I was talking about before which is this melding of like real world and fantasy and fake world and is this real and the boys has done such a great job of being very real but very satirical and again like I think liquid death exists within that sensibility and so that's we always talk about this it's like we love properties IP where it it's always living on the cusp of that because because that's how so so we like to kind of move into that world and treat that world like it's real we're not going to use it as like this vehicle to you know slap somebody's logo on and and be like get the you know the boy happy meal at blah blah blah it's not like that it's like we want to make something that treats their world as if it's the real world and and and vice versa and so so yeah that was that was great and it was very fun to be able to write for you know characters that we love like that's always kind of cool um to get to do and uh yeah I'm stoked on that one and that thing that thing just blew up I think it's like I want say it's like almost like 23 million views just on Instagram alone now um which is which is wild no it's incredible I mean yeah again I love the show very much but the way you did it was so nice and again the message is there and I guess I'll end with that which just that like plastic recycling is a scam right it just is we know that it it it's non-profitable no one really does it and yet we still pretend that that's okay and it's like you know we we you're doing you're doing important Lord's work here whilst at the same time entertaining at least a lot of us so I I can only only thank you for that I suppose we're trying to have fun you know like I said I think it's it's this brand that is built on all kinds of things that are important to us I think like that kind of singular Focus that brands have had where it has to be an easy thing our stuff is you can laugh at it at like I said you can laugh at like the funny physical humor but then there's like a social commentary involved and we have this mission to give people healthier options and there's this that the plastic initiative there's all these different and there's this like marketing self-loathing involved in it as well right and so yeah you can you can I don't know I I mean I I don't mean this in a self aggrandizing way like I'm as big of a fan of what we're doing as anyone else because I genuinely I genuinely enjoy what we get to do and I know everybody else does here too and we're just trying to put stuff out I mean like we talk about this a lot but at the end of the day our our number one goal is just to be the best thing someone sees that day and like it's such a simple it's such a simple Mission and if if the thing we're doing isn't isn't honoring that and isn't pushing us towards that then we either don't need to do it or we need to to rethink what we're doing and so that kind of Guiding Light is is what you know in in the marketing department Beyond that's like all we're trying to do it's not it's not harder than that I mean I but it's it's it's it's it's much much harder than than it seems but it's very uh done effortlessly at least it seems that way production all looks amazing and I guess yeah that's it really um I uh I think there's something really powerful in I guess serious stupidity if you want to give ATT tension framework in a Crispin sort of way uh but there is something really powerful in that mode it's not silliness for the sake of surreality it's not scolding or trying to tell me to recycle if I'm a large plastic manufacturer and I'm like why should I be fixing your problems that you created for us and so on so I I think there's something lovely in that and yes we like to say it genius steals it won't be any good if it isn't any fun and it really seems clear that you guys are having a lot of fun and it is very good so Andy Pon thank you so much for your time I really appreciate you and it's lovely to see you uh after all this time yeah man thank you so much it's really good to see you too [Music]