This TED Talk is full of bad ideas | Gabe Whaley

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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hume. What if sometimes the bad ideas are good? In this talk, mischief maker and artist Gabe Whaley shares how he built a collective of artists whose seemingly bad or wonky ideas for art and products often go viral and sell for thousands of dollars.

Gabe Explore is why the things that make them so exciting and popular are never the art itself, because after all, the most exciting part about exploring any idea is giving ourselves the chance to try. Good morning, everyone. My name is Gabe. I'm a traveling car salesman. So today I'm actually, I'm here to sell you the keys to this car, this beautiful vintage PT Cruiser. I'm told it's got turbo. Look, it's a work of art.

Trust me. Now, when I say that I'm selling the keys to this car, I really mean it. I have 5,000 of these keys, and every single last one of them works to that car. You click the key fob once, it unlocks the door. You click it twice, it starts the engine. If you buy any one of these 5,000 keys from me, naturally you get access to the car, but so do 4,999 other people.

Whatever happens beyond that is not necessarily my problem. Like I said, I'm just a car salesman. So you're probably wondering at this point, like, is this real? Is this guy just making this stuff up? Well, it is real. My name is Gabe.

and I'm actually the founder of an art collective based in New York City called Mischief. Mischief is a bit of a difficult beast to explain, and I'm not going to even try to describe it. Let me give you a couple examples to help paint that picture or confuse you even further. Handbags. Handbags are really expensive, and incredibly, the smaller they get, the more expensive they become. So a few summers ago, we actually endeavored to make the world's smallest handbag, microscopic in fact.

And somehow it ended up selling at auction for $63,000, incidentally making it the world's most expensive handbag per volume. Here's another one. You've probably seen those Boston Dynamics spot dog robots that... do TikTok dances with K-pop stars on YouTube. Well, we managed to get one. Instead of making a dance, we strapped a paintball gun to it, and we connected it remotely to a website where people could take turns driving it and firing it.

and an art gallery that we constructed. Boston Dynamics did not like that one very much. So you've probably figured out by now that I'm not actually here to sell you keys to a car. Today I'm here to talk to you about bad ideas. The kind of ideas that typically die on the vine because reason or work colleagues get in the way. But to me, these are the most exciting ideas because you just never know what might happen.

Take these crazy-looking shoes, for example. I think it was like the spring of 2023. My colleagues and I were sketching out the initial prototypes of the big red boot. I remember us being equal parts terrified because, of course, like... Who's going to wear these, much less spend money on them? But at the same time, the moment that we put on the initial prototypes ourselves, we were filled with such a chaotic sense of glee.

That we were like, you know what? We just got to do it. So we committed to making a couple hundred pairs. We priced them at $350. And we just prayed that there would be a few hundred people out there in the world who would spend money on these crazy looking things. A week before the drop, we leaked this image through a friend's Instagram account. Again, just hoping that people don't hate it, or even worse, that they don't ignore it.

In hindsight, we needn't have worried. The algorithm smiled quite fondly upon the big red boot, and all of a sudden, this thing was everywhere. Like, I don't even, I can't even, it's basically like a blur. Like, I don't understand what happened. All of a sudden, people were wearing them courtside at NBA games. I saw Lil Wayne wearing them in a music video.

I remember my dad calling me and saying, hey, Gabe, there's a professional WWE wrestler wearing your boots on live pay-per-view TV. And he just curb stomped another guy. It's incredible. And yet we almost didn't do it. People told us it was not a great business decision, and honestly, I get it. But what started as a bad idea ended up becoming a very interesting idea. Here's another one. The idea was an ATM machine.

Totally normal, functional, operational, extremely legal ATM machine with one catch. Attached to the ATM is a digital leaderboard that ranks people based on the amount of money in their remaining account balances. I'm glad you guys think it's funny. I thought it was horrifying. So it wasn't enough for us to just make this. We had to put it in the right place. Does it go outside our studio in Brooklyn? Do we put it in Times Square?

My colleagues and I conferred for a little bit and we realized there's only one place that this thing can ever go. It's Art Basel, Miami. So we take it to Miami. Somehow we get our way into a gallery and we get into a booth. And on day one, people were actually a little bit hesitant to engage, which I totally get it. It's a little bit shady. It's a participatory, I understand. But eventually, people would muster up the courage to swipe their card.

They would clock in at like $100 in their bank account balance, maybe $1,200 in their bank account balance. By the end of the day, however, someone ended up swiping and clocked in at $12,000 in their bank account balance. And then things started to get a little bit weird.

The next day, a famous celebrity DJ named Diplo showed up with his entire entourage, pulled out his debit card, swiped it in the machine, clocked in at $3 million in his bank account, and shot to the top of the leaderboard. And honestly, like the rest... is kind of hazy because a crowd amassed so huge around the ATM machine for the following three days that the art fair actually assigned five extra security guards not to protect the ATM machine.

but to keep the crowd from bumping into the artworks of the neighboring galleries, which was actually very funny. But the most interesting thing that I got to observe here was this unexpected crowd dynamic where... When people with astonishingly low bank accounts would swipe their cards in front of this captive audience, by the way, when they would, and I'm talking really low, like $2, like concerningly low, they would swipe.

they would get ranked at the bottom, and then they would turn around to face the audience, and the audience would lose their minds. Like they were cheering and screaming and celebrating and clapping and taking pictures. And it was sincere. It was actually like this wholesome one of us like celebration, which was not anything that we expected. And then...

To sort of like wrap up that week, the funny thing is a buyer ended up acquiring the ATM machine as a sculpture for a whopping $75,000. But the funny thing to me is I don't think that person ever realized that the artwork was not the ATM machine. The artwork was the act of people engaging with the ATM machine. The actual artwork was the relationships that people developed with one another via the ATM machine.

See, when we made this thing originally, we were pretty sure it was going to reflect all the worst parts of humanity at Art Basel Miami. But we were wrong. It ended up just being a random crowd of total strangers having a great time together. big, awkward shared moment of financial transparency. Oh, I'm not done yet. I'm not done yet. So...

When you open Pandora's box of bad ideas, clearly the sky's the limit. So let's keep pushing it. I got three minutes. This is a big fruit loop. There's not much else to say. It's real. It's about the size of a dinner plate. It takes a lot of milk to put down, but I assure you it's just as good as the original. This is what we call an Alexa gate.

It's an electronics device armed with seven ultrasonic speakers at its base that blasts white noise into the mic of any Alexa device to keep it from eavesdropping on you when you're not using it. And then this one is a life-size sculpture that keeps track of and counts the number of times anyone has touched it. Because if you ever go to a gallery museum, you're not supposed to touch the art, so this is supposed to discourage people touching the art.

Right. Oh, actually, I wanted to wrap up the story about the car. The car was real. The 5,000 keys were real. We released this to the world in the fall of 2022. And for the following nine months, we actually got to watch this thing change hands hundreds, if not thousands of times, mostly via very peaceful communal meetups and the occasional Grand Theft Auto, which I can't really talk too much about here. Over that nine months...

It started in New York. It made its way down to Philadelphia. It stayed in Philadelphia for a few days, Grand Theft Auto. And then eventually made its way across the Midwest to the West Coast, where nine months later... I mean, the GPS stopped. We kind of assumed that the project was over, which is okay. It had a glorious life. But then one day, I get a call, and it's a call from a tow pound. And the tow pound is saying, hey, we're pretty sure that we have your car.

Because it is registered under your name, but it's such a weird thing because people keep showing up and claiming the car, and they all have keys that work. So... We ended up taking the car back. It was no longer functional. And we decided to place it in an art gallery in Los Angeles. And at this gallery, actually, I got to attend the opening. And at the opening, I observed something that I totally did not expect to see, which was...

purchasers of the key had flown in from all over the country, not just to see the thing that they had touched and, you know, interacted with show up in a gallery, but they were actually there to meet each other for the first time. Right? Like, I watched them taking photos and sharing stories of their own individual escapades with the car, and I took a step back and realized this project was never about the car. It was never about the keys. It was about the people.

Like, it really was about the friends you make along the way. And now if you see the car, it looks nothing like it did when we started out. The faux wood paneling is gone, regrettably. But now it's covered in paint, drawings. scribbled messages from complete strangers to other total strangers, it's no longer a car. Now it's a rallying point for this weird little random community that sprang up out of nowhere and gave this thing a life of its own. And with that...

I'd like to invite each and every one of you to reach under your seat because I've placed... Sorry, sorry, sorry. They told me not to do that. I did it anyways. This is my first and last TED Talk, whatever. Anyways, we all know that keys, they start cars just like ATM machines are supposed to dispense cash, just like big red boots are supposed to be shoes.

In the case of the bad idea, none of these ended up being what they appeared to be on the surface. They ended up taking a life of their own, and they all became something else entirely, for better or for worse. And to me, that's the most exciting thing about it all. I'm not necessarily saying that bad ideas are good ideas. All I'm saying is give yourself a chance to explore the thing that makes you uncomfortable because you just never know what might happen. All right. Thank you.

That was Gabe Whaley at TED 2025. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonsika Sungmarni.

This episode was mixed by Christopher Fasey Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. New products to launch, new people to develop, new goals to crush. Workday Go is designed for small and mid-sized businesses. By bringing HR and finance together on one AI platform, you'll have everything you need to think big.

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