She Built Millions From Problems Everyone Ignored

As a woman, having a period is messy. You're putting a bleached thing inside of the most sensitive part of your body and it's just so not the way it's meant to happen. It's meant to flow out. It's meant to be like a true cleansing every single month and the products have not improved because it's so taboo and so the idea for things came, same thing with Tushy, like every time I went to the bathroom, I had to take a shower because I'm just like, you're literally wiping with dried paper and smearing. Poop everywhere and then when I had my son Hiro, realizing every baby goes through 6000 diapers that take 400 to 500 years to break down, 100 billion diapers end up in landfills every single year and that's what we're leaving our children behind with that level of mess, no, we're the first to create shelf stable and scalable fungi. They're designed to break down plastic and really showcase a true solution in a practical way around the number one household plastic waste item, which is a baby diaper. Mickey Agarwal, thank you for coming on the show. Absolutely, you're the woman who turns basic bodily functions into billion dollar brands.

At some point they're, there's 9 figures for now. Yeah, they're on their way. Do you feel like you've made that? Like, did you choose those industries on purpose or was it sort of an accident that you fell into those things and realized, hey, here's a hole in the market and I have a solution? Yeah, I mean, actually in my book Do Cool Shit, I talk about the three questions I asked myself before starting any business. So the first question is what sucks in my world? The second question is, does it suck for a lot of people? And the third question is, can I be passionate about this for a really long time, Issue cause or community for a really long time. And so, You know, as a, as a woman, having a period is messy. It's a messy experience. You're putting a bleached thing inside of the most sensitive, absorbent part of your body and it's just so not the way it's meant to happen. It's meant to flow out. It's meant to be like a true cleansing every single month, especially not having a child. And so to have it be stigmatized, a period is so stigmatized. Meanwhile, every one of us is here because of that. Without it, we would not be here.

And the products have not improved or have had any innovation because it's so taboo and they're like, OK, I guess the the very bulky pad or a tampon is like what you put in. That's just the way it is. And it's like, no, there's there must be a better way. And I think growing up, you know, to an Indian father, Japanese mother in French Canada, you were able to really debate and, you know, ask a lot of different questions and say, wait, this is there a better way? There's not just one way of doing something. And so, Um, so when it came to like bodily functions for me, it was just like, whoa, this is messy. Like I every month I was like, oh shit, like it was such a pain and, and then so the idea for for things came um from our just our own personal what sucks in my world. Same thing with tushy, like every time I went to the bathroom, I had to take a shower because I'm just like, you're literally wiping with dry paper and smearing poop everywhere. What did you do if you're in public? Exactly. I was like I would have to literally, it would, I would go to the sink with wads of toilet paper and I would wet it and I would have like toilet paper, like watery because the toilet paper disintegrates, especially in public cheap toilet paper. He was like getting this single ply bullshit and you're just like, and it's you're bringing it back to the stall and then you, and then you're like it's just, it was a horrible experience. I really tried really hard not.

To go to the bathroom publicly, but it was truly just sucked in my world. I'm such a clean human, you know, and um so it's so Japanese, like, you know, and the Japanese are just like appalled by the American way of not having bidets, you know, and, um, and then most recently when I had my son Hiro yesterday was his birthday. Um, Just going through the massive amounts of waste and just being like, wow, like just looking it up and saying wow, like realizing every baby goes through 6000 diapers that take 4 to 500 years to break down. 100 billion diapers end up in landfills every single year and that's what we're leaving our children behind with that level of mess, like, no, now all that plastic has entered our brains, our bloodstreams, in our, in your gonads, in our reproductive organs, in our babies' umbilical cords, in our brain stem like. It's real, you know, and for us to just like keep throwing plastic away, like one to go, you know, bag of like a lunch, you just how much waste you create. It's insane.

And so, um, it sucked in my world. It sucks in the world of everyone and can we harness nature to heal nature? We're the first to create shelf stable and scalable fungi. They're designed to break down plastic and really, you know, showcase the true solution in a practical way around the number one household plastic waste item, which is a baby diaper. So I'm curious though because You'll have conversations with just like your buddy in the kitchen or whatever, you're like, man, wouldn't it be cool, this thing sucks, we should make this thing. People come up with those ideas all the time, but then how do you Have that conversation and then all of a sudden now you have these wildly large successful brands. Like what's the, what inspired you and pushed you to even go into that cause that's a lot to take on. Yeah, I mean, I always think that if, if there is a hole, if there's like a true hole in the market or there's something that people are, it does suck for so many people like going to the bathroom and perioding. It's like a really messy, gross experience and they have not changed in the late 1800s. Like there is a better way. And so for me it was just like, OK, how do you take something as Like human as pooping and puring for women, peeing and make it cool and make it fun and make it sexy actually and make it playful and make it artful, high art with the contrast of really funny copy. Can you make like that that real that tender.

between an artful aesthetic and really, really funny copy creates that, that level of like, oh my God, like I just looked at something beautiful and it made me laugh and it's talking about poop or periods. Like, it just opened up my heart a little bit to take a step forward versus like, uh, you know, um, And there's authenticity in the way we talk and ultimately it's about from my perspective, it's just doing something over and over and over again in different high art funny ways, you know, for for things we we put on all kinds of events that were just that drew press there that were just random fun events with, you know, we we created a subway campaign that went viral for Tushy. We threw events like, you know, um, Uh, but con, which is like Comic Con, but all things but, and we had like literally like the twerking champion of the world. We had like the number one, you know, gut and poop doctor. We had like the the number one anal porn star. We had like the number one everything the pimple, the pimple expert for butt pimples, like the, you know, the the the Kim Kardashian's like workout butt workout person. Like we had like all the butt people come to butt.

How many people came to Butt. It was sold out. It was like, I think 500 people came. And then fortissue, we also did that must have been an interesting audience. Oh yeah, an array of individuals, including, including 49 press of the top media. Yeah. And so those kinds of things like we, we did an event called your mic's just going soft on you. We did we did it we did it. An event called Funeral for a Tree, where we basically rented out Judson Memorial Church in the middle of Washington Square Park, the biggest church, like in New York, and we held a funeral for a dead tree. And we had a whole production of like, you know, Matthew Morrison, who's on the show Glee. He played the Reverend who, who, you know, basically, um, Oh yeah. Yeah, no worries. I think we're good. Just melting over there. It's it's getting too hot. Texas heat. Yeah, there we go. OK, um. Yeah, we just held like a funeral for a dead tree and we had, it was again sold out audience, like 450 people came to just see what we wer, we basically had a 25 part choir. We had a whole scripted thing around like a total real funeral for a tree. We had Shiitesca Martinez, the guy who sued um uh the government for hurting the Amazon rain for killing trees, you know, that that the Native American kid who was epic rapper kid and he came and spoke. It was just, Awesome. So we just, we, we just do things that make people stop scrolling and and look and read and those things, it costs us $0 for ButtC because we got a few people to table like the butt pimple person had products like, OK, if you want to come to ButtC, you have to give us $5000 to set up a table. And so we got like 5 different like sponsors, micro sponsors who want to show their products at ButC like we're going to have a ton of press come.

And so it cost us $0 to make funeral for retreat cost us pretty much $0 as well because we had sponsorships as well through just coming up with smart, smart ways like we had, you know, um, an event, um, that we basically call the poop up shop. It's like the pop-up shop, but again, like we had a partner who came and did a bunch of sponsor, like who did it with us, who paid for the thing, but we put it on. And so it's all by Tushy and got us a ton of press, media, walk-ins interest, but we paid zero for it. So people are like, how do you do all these things with, with, you know, and able to build a brand from nothing. Well, you have to like actually like get creative, find ways that it's a win-win always for everyone. It's not just like, can you, can you help me versus like, no, no, no, I'm going to help, I'm going to bring you a ton of press if you sponsor just a small table for 5000. What's your thought process for that, like masterminding. A plan where everybody wins and you get to market your product for free. It's like, do you have an SOP in your head for that, or is it just, OK, everybody sit down and let's fucking brainstorm for 5 hours and see what we can come up with?

I mean, oftentimes it's just like instinctive. It's like we're going to do this, we're not going to overthink it. We're just going to make it happen. I'm going to do it at my house. I'm going to find a place. I'm going to get these people. I'm going to call. There's not like, oh, like mapping it. It's just like, I don't know who's going to show up, we're just going to try, you know, and it's like a lot of throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks and having the energy and effervescence to just go for it. Over and over and over again until there's a critical mass who's like, whoa, I just washed my boat. So she, that was epic. I'm telling 10 of my friends and all of a sudden it becomes its own viral thing within within homes. Like a lot of our best stuff is like literally word of mouth, you know, um, but yeah, it's it's a lot of Not overthinking. You know, I think when we we often tend to overthink, like what if, what are people gonna, it's like, no, just, just print, you know, just get, just get it out, see what happens. And if it works, great. If it doesn't, great, we didn't lose our shirt on it. It costs us time, but didn't cost us much money. Like, let's just go for it.

Do you have any of these marketing experiments that you've tried that didn't work? Obviously, ButC was a success, but what, what was the but con that that didn't pan out well? We did an event, um, recently, uh, basically called the confessional confession booth, where we set up like a confession station in Central Park, um, where it did, it got some like some social PR but we were hoping to get like a ton of press there where we we had this like, you know, This funny drag queen basically bring you into a stall and you'd have to do a confessional like at a, you know, like a church confessional and then instead of like, you know, putting you in water, we would bidet you, you know, and it was like clean your butt and you're washed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And so that one, it, it was like a fun experiment. It didn't like pan out from a lens of like we got all the press we wanted, we got, so we did a lot, a lot of ton of those where we we tested, we tried a bunch of stuff. Some people came, there's lines of people wanting to get, you know, do the confessional, but it didn't garner a lot of press or it didn't get a lot of You know, a lot of movement in that way, but it, it was enough for people who are walking by saw it, but it was, you know what I mean, it's not like millions of views, like, um, so lots of those, you know, lots of like, OK, like what's next? You know, try things, see what happens. Some things you're like, wait, I had no idea that that would just blow up. Like, for example, with things when we had the subway campaign, we had like barely any, we had just had enough money to Do like a remnant ad subway campaign. So in in New York City or most places, if there isn't an advertiser that advertises for the month, you have like, you can get a remnant ad spot, you can just get as many of the posters in as fast as possible, get them printed, and you get them for like 80% discount. And so we were like, oh, we can, we can afford that. And um and so we we had our team like,

Worked literally like slept under their tables for like two weeks to get like 75 posters done for Grand Central Station, Union Square, like, you know, we did Bedford L subway station. It was like the most epic, you know, um, subway stations ever for a whole month of think campaigns. And then when we went to go publish them, the New York City subways were like, um, you can't say the word period in the subways. And we're like, No, you didn't. You can have breast augmentation ads and and like showing grapefruits as like bigger boobs and little little oranges or small innuendos and for exactly. And for us, we had a grapefruit represent a vagina, but it was just to have the grapefruit as an image. That's it. And they're like, oh, you can't say the word period. You can't have to have grapefruit. We're like, you use the same fruit to represent breast augmentation in the subway and that's OK. So it became like we're like, if you don't let us publish this, we're going to go to press. And they're like, go to press. We're like, we called our bluff. We don't know any press at this point. Um, so, but then we like reached out to like one friend who was like knew one person at like one place and we got like an article written and it miraculously went viral. Yeah, I feel like that would be even better. It was the fact that you're like, fighting the subway. Exactly. So it's like MTA, this, you know, the most in the most progressive city in the world, like, you know, like just like, you know, disallow like doesn't allow like, you know, this period company to whatever to share its its subway. So this literally like went viral internationally and then we all then after on the other side of it, we got to put the ads in the subways. So we had double whammy of that, which was amazing. And then we're like, fuck it, let's run it back when we had tushy.

They weren't letting us put our ads in the subways either because they were like, because we, we had like, you know, like clean your rusty starfish. We had this like funny little innuendos, but they were like, you can't, you know, so we're like, let's just run it back and see if we'll, you know, get another twice like why not? It worked once. Why, why not? And, um, and we ran it back and one like New York Daily News, it wasn't had no, it didn't have any traction, but we had the New York Daily News write a public an article that says the MTA flushes down Tushy's ads in the in the toilet. But what we didn't know was Saturday Night Live goes through the New York dailies to find funny stories and Michael Che, the head writer of SNL found that article. He's obsessed with Tushy and bidets. So he made a 3 minute rant on Weekend Update on SNL that rant about Tushy, about why our tushy bidet ads should not. have been like like removed from the subways and why they should be and it literally put us on the map. Like you can't I remember I was in Morocco when that happened. I remember that like my my um co-founder was like, SNL just did a weekend update about Tushy. Oh my God, we're like, wait, and you can't, you can't pay, you can't afford that's millions of dollars.

That's the best marketing you're gonna get. It's like a three-minute rant about why Tushy should be on the subways and why this was in 2018 or 2019. It was, it was a minute ago, but it put us on. The map by it was, it was a miracle. And this thing you can't predict virality. You can't and people like, I'm going to make a viral video and you're like, bro, like shut the fuck, you know, like, no, but you, you can throw as much shit against the wall and you've no idea what's going to go viral, what's going to hit like we had no idea that the running it back and doing the tushy thing would just get a daily news article that no one really read or cared about. And we didn't know that SNL would look at all the funny thing, you know, you can't predict. Michael Che is going to find it and he's going to want to make a whole Weekend Update 3 minute round about it. In that moment, he's feeling good about bidets. Do you know what I mean? Like, there's too many variables to know too many variables for this miraculous you have to send it. And I think that's such a, such a valuable lesson or, Just, yeah, I think for entrepreneurs and founders to know, especially if you're starting off, like, people might look at Bt Connor, these like marketing, you know, Tasks that you've put forward and see how successful they are, but you talking about the things that didn't work is so valuable because it's like, yeah, you have to just fucking send it sometimes.

Cuban intuition is so important because people are running all these ideas through AI so much now and it's like, no, it's thinking so logically, which In that lens that makes sense, but it can never predict what your gut tells you. Yeah. And then you would have missed all those opportunities if you just followed that. 100%. And we are also at Hero, for example, my newest company, you know, we are like, you know, Doing a lot more paid paid marketing campaigns. we're talking to Claude, we're asking them questions, and we're like now I'm just like, no, no more, like we're authentic, authenticity is where we're who we are, like, we're not doing that anymore. And it just already feels just like, OK, like when we're back to like the humanness of it all, that feels you can't, you can't, you can't substitute that. You just can't. You know, and so one of the things that we did at Hero recently is we I had this vision for years and years. Of creating a 6000 diaper statue and it's like basically taking 6000 diapers and making a pile and then transporting this across the country. The pile just so people can see every baby goes through 6000 diapers. One baby put it on a truck and it drives around the country. It drives around the country.

So we did it and we drove it through the country and brought it to New York and had like a big press event at my restaurant actually in New York City. And, and revealed this big giant 6000 diaper statue and then put it on social media and it had a big viral, had a had a great viral, you know, moment. And again, like now what's cool about social media is like you can put some, you know, thumb stopping content and you don't have to wait for press to make it go viral. You can put your own shit out and it can go viral yourself too, which is really cool. My, my, my TED Talk went viral on social media as well, which was kind of cool. So you can't predict viral. You just can't predict it. You just have to keep sending, you have to keep printing. What were some of the comments like, why do you think it went viral? Like looking back on it? The one with the diaper statue? No, the your TED Talk. Um, I think people like what was the resonance of just the idea of plastic eating fungi, like fungi that can break down diapers and the diaper plastics that no one knew 100 billion diapers end up in landfills. They had no idea that they take 400 to 500 years to break down. They just didn't realize that fungi are designed to break down the carbon backbone of trees.

And the carbon backbone of plastic is very similar to the carbon backbone of trees. And so fungi can break down trees, can also break down plastic, like ding ding ding, like what a cool thing to learn, you know, and I think that was a piece of the piece of the nugget that was explained. It's like, oh yeah, like, Fungi have been for hundreds of millions of years, breaking things down and returning it to the earth because before that, before fungi had evolved to figure out how to do that, trees, when they would die, they would just be strewn around the planet like plastic. And so then what would happen over, over, over 100 million years, all of the dead trees and animals that were not getting returned to the earth from fungi and all the other microbes and all the other beings that had evolved to do that for 100 million years. they would just have to get compressed and compressed and compressed and compressed underground, which became our fossil fuels. So our fossil fuels is actually compressed dead trees and dead animals, right? That now we're harvesting to use for oil. But now what, where does plastic come from? Plastic comes from fossil fuels, fossil fuels comes from dead trees and dead animals. Fungi have learned how to break down dead trees and dead animals. They can break down plastic, the same carbon backbone, very similar carbon backbone.

So it's like that kind of like, oh my God, that's so cool. So I think that was like teaching people a little nugget. was probably what what would help to go viral. Did that just come to you when you were developing that product? Like, was it like an aha, like it's like it's the most amazing like universe like story actually of how this idea came to be. So I started taking Fridays as I call thinking days. So. I don't take calls or meetings on Fridays. I've been doing it for 8 years. Um, and, you know, I watched, you know, a documentary where, you know, these, these leaders would go into nature once every quarter with a bag of books and just like hole up for a week and just read and just think and I was like, oh, I'm gonna do that every Friday. And I started doing that every Friday, like 8 years ago, and it's one of my best ideas, the best downloads. It's the most spacious, you need spaciousness to be creative. You can't be creative with just like reacting to shit, you know. And so, In the spaciousness, it was like, I was like looking at the window, sitting in my bedroom and I was like, wait a minute, breast milk is liquid gold because it's so nutrient rich, right? So baby poop must be fertilizer gold.

And right now we're wrapping billions of pounds of this mamajuju breastfed fertilizer in plastic, billions of them and throwing it in the trash. Like what the, like what if, what if when the baby poops in the diaper, it can trigger something to grow and maybe eat the diaper? I don't know what could eat diaper plastic? What could eat plastic? Literally in that moment I was like, what could eat plastic on my thinking day, my son Hiro at 2 years old comes running into my room, points to a book in my nightstand. While saying Pachamama, which means Mother Earth, I look at my nightstand, I pull out this book. It's called Pacha's Pajamas. It's a children's book. I had no business being my bedroom nightstand. This book was given to me at a conference like 2 years prior, and then you get books given to you and you put in your library downstairs, you kind of forget about it, like, right? This book made its way up the stairs to my bedroom nightstand in that moment where I was like, what can break down plastic? My son hero saying Pachamama, Mother Earth points his book. I pull it out, I open it, fungi can break down plastic. Holy shit, dude tapped in.

I mean, it was tapped in, you know what happened after that? Did you go fungi? Did you talk to a chemist? Like what did you do? I'm listening universe. Like it was that moment where I just was like, holy shit, this is a moment in time that I'm that that that it's like it's in French we call it coup de foudre. It's like a wow moment. It's like a boom moment. And So then I was like, plastic eating fungi, oh my God. And so I started researching. I just, I, I, I learned about Paul Stamitz. Paul Stamitz lives in the middle of nowhere in Vancouver Island, like middle of nowhere, happened to be in New York City. My, I told my, I happened to tell my friend this crazy story of this plasticating fungi, and she's like, oh my God, Paul Stamitz is coming to my store on Wednesday. You want to meet him? So it was like I met him two days later. serendipitous. It's like you can, it happened, then COVID happened, moved to Austin, Texas, went from a house full of friends, hundreds of friends to zero, and so we're like, uh, I need friends in Austin. And so we basically, you know, and my ex-husband at the time and I, we were like, we're like, all right, let's build community. Let's do this. And so we started and it was like, One person at a time and we were like, OK, we reached out to all our friends in New York. Like, if you know anyone in Austin, connect us. The very first person we got introduced to was Tarot, the founder for Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee Company, like a mushroom forager guy, you know, and I was just like, whoa, OK. And so we invited him and his pregnant wife to our home and we had our first dinner. I told him about the idea of Hero and he was like, I'm in.

And so we became co-founders and all of a sudden this mushroom forager like partner, like, you know, and then I and I sent one email out to friends, raise the money in 5 minutes. You know, it's like that kind of stuff where you just can't make it up where it's so aligned. It's like Abraham Hicks, you know, Abraham Hicks, like Abrahams about talks about Abraham Hicks talks about being in the vortex versus like fucking rowing upstream like so hard. It's like, wow, like it's just you're in the vortex and you're just like, this is what alignment looks like. Do you have anything that allows you to be In the vortex, because it clearly, it's like you you you're able to harness that creativity and push it through you out into the world quickly. Has that been a process, you've always kind of been like that since like a little girl? Did you develop that as you were growing up? It's like a natural. Talent or, you know, communication. I mean, I think we're we're all like those of us who are super excited about life are just generally impatient, you know, and it's like, I want to see what happens. Like I had this idea now, like, let's do it now. You know, my team is like, well we have like 5 other priorities, you know, but I'm like, no, but like, can we do it now like ASAP like they're they call me ASAP Mickey and I'm like, I'm so sorry. Like, I'm like, I need ASAP and they're like, OK, which ASAP is priority?

ASAP ASAP, um. But yeah, there's like the, you know, it's like that that famous quote, like I want to skid to death's door sideways, not in a well preserved body thoroughly used up loudly proclaiming, proclaiming, wow, what a life. You know, it's like you want to just suck the marrow and juice out of life of every moment because, you know, I was talking to a cat in the car about like where this whole journey began was like actually on 9/11, you know, I was supposed to be under World Trade on 9/11 at 22 years old, I was working investment banking. The worst banker on earth right here. Um, but somehow got a job in investment banking. After Cornell and um. And 9/11 happened. I was supposed to be there under two World Trade Center. 700 people in my girlfriend's office died on that day. Two people in my office died on that day. And it was the single only day in my life. I slept through my alarm clock. Only day, only day to this day. I'm the lightest sleeper, like a little beep wakes me up. And so, um, it was like a moment that really like like I I I I really saw that the mystery of life is you never know when it's going to end. You never know. The time is now ASAP to make it count.

And so it was like, I'm going to make movies, start a business. Well, first was play soccer professionally, then make movies and start a business. I did all those things, you know, and that's kind of started the whole, the whole journey of entrepreneurship was like now because, Meteor could, you know, I don't know, like right now, like, well, you're supposed to be alive. What was going through, I'm so curious, like what was going through your head? You wake up 9/11, you probably see on the news at what was it like 9:10 in the morning that this happens. Yeah, like what's going through your head knowing that you slept through that? I remember it was so disorienting. I remember cause I woke up and I was like, oh shit, I'm late for my job. I just started investment banking. They're so strict. You have to wear a suit and pearl like I'm just like, you know, and I was like fuck. And so I, I picked up the phone to try and call a cab to take me. Every line was busy and I'm like, what's happening? Like I, you know, out of context, you're like, what's going on? Lines were busy. I kept calling and calling and I was like lines were busy at the time there's no Uber, so I call a cab. Laundry busy, laundry busy. Finally I got, I was like, I need to, I need to get to my office.

And all I heard was turn your TV on, click. And it was like when you're out of context, like turn your TV on and then hang up the phone. You're just like, I don't understand, so. I then somehow got my cell phone and I was like, I had hundreds of messages. Are you OK? Are you OK? Where are you? Where are you? Where are you, where you? And I was like, what is and then I finally I was like, I don't know what's happened and I turned the TV on and it was like the smoking World Trade Centers and I was just like, And I thought about my friend Laura, who worked on the 100th floor at Aon where 700 people died and I thought she was dead for 3 weeks and I was like sobbing and I was just like, because we couldn't all the lines were busy. Everything was just clogged. And she had gone down to get coffee right before the first plane hit. And it was just like everyone in her office died and 2 people in my office died. As well as so many men we were working directly across from 2 World Trade Center, but it was like, and I was and I was telling Kat as well like, I was the only person to volunteer because I had such like kind of survivor's guilt because I wasn't even there and I felt so bad.

That I was the only one to volunteer when the bank was like, we need, we need volunteers to retrieve, go into the investment bank and retrieve critical documents for this multi-billion dollar Deutsche Bank. And I was the only volunteer and I was like, I'm a, you know, Division One soccer player, I played, you know, for the Magic, like I could do like I can crawl under. I'm tiny like and um and they're like, you're the only volunteer you're in. And um and so I went with a marine, 2 moon suits, gas mask, goggles, flashlight, and 9 pages of critical documents to go into the rubble of the bank and look for these documents. And it was like a kind of a service, a moment of just giving back to the bank, but like in my own way to like do something for those who passed. It was just like, So then that after that, I was like, I'm going to play soccer for the New York Mets. I'm going to go try out, fuck it, I'm going to make movies, I'm going to start a business and it's sort of like totally led me on this path of entrepreneurship. Yeah, your whole story is about doing cool shit from that point forward.

Yeah, because, yeah, and having, you know, like this next, I was, I was, you know, what I'm, what I've said to myself is like, For the from now to the rest of my life, I'm what I'm optimizing for is fun. Like it's not fun. I'm not doing it. And there's like there's wax on, wax out. There's going to be parts of anything that's like, you know, there's there's there's thing, but it's, it's, it's gonna, it's got to be fun. And if it's not, I'm doing it to like make the money. I'm doing it on all of it, none of it matters. Like it matters, but it doesn't. It's just like. We're all going to die with nothing. And so do you have a lot of people come up to you and are like, you're so inspiring, and I don't even know where to begin to. Begin to follow the cool things I wanna do, have hesitation or limiting beliefs, like, how do you help people work through that? But just reminding them that they're like the most creative person. That they've ever met, you know, and it's like to to remember that you're so creative, that every one of us is a born creation. Like we are, we are creation and it's like to not limit yourself to what you're like, you know, what you've been taught to smallify yourself. In my book Disruptor, I talk about, you know, the story of this, um, Hallmark executive who goes to Um, elementary schools to go and seek inspiration for all the Hallmark cards, like, you know, as as the creative directing all these like the new, the next, the next batch of of creative ideas, he'd go to elementary school kids and he would go to the kindergarten kids like, who hears an artist and like every kid would be like me, me, like maybe like every single kid would be like, I'm an artist, I'm an artist, I'm an artist. And then he would go to the first graders, who hears an artist? Half the kids raise their hands like this.

By the time he got to 6th grade, who hears an artist, it's like one kid like. You know, we get unfortunately stamped out this like creative spark and juice inside of all of us and it's it is really sad until you realize like, wait, this like Horace Mann's like a normal school and common school. I talk a lot about like the whole education system to try to try to create cogs and machines during the industrial revolution and how much that, stifled our creativity and how we can just put shit out and just be goofy and just beer. Who the fuck cares? Like who cares? What are people going to say about me? What about doesn't, what if this doesn't go viral? What if no one cares? What if, so what? Try again. So what? Do it again. So what? Try again. Like I got taken down publicly one time back in the day, you know, and it's like now. OK, do you want to take another shot? Like go for it. But I know that on the other side of it is a sunny day. Like I know on the other side of it there's the clouds are going to clear. Like, did I go through a lot of pain the first time because it was really fucking hard? Yes. And do I know what happened to the other side of it? Yes too. So now there's nothing to lose, you know, it's like we're just going to try shit and what's the worst that happens? You look bad.

Do you think people are going to remember or care about you like 5 minutes from now? No, like don't think you're that precious, like you're not, you know, and so it's sort of like we have to just get over ourselves and just like try again and like, you know, like put more shit out there and like people forgot, people forget and then they, you know, it's like, Oh, I love tushy. Oh my God, you know, it's like, oh my God, I love here, like. They don't, it's just like it's like we're such, we think it's like all about our own like what happened to us and why it's already happened. The rest is a story in your head that you're just making up over and over and over again and it's just like actually hindering you, you know, and I will firsthand say, I just, I just came. This is like I'm going on major tangents right now, but it, you know, I just did, I did I begin in January of this year. And boy, Did it send me on a left turn? You know, it took me on a Like unforeseen journey that I thought I'd never have to experience and it was like every one of the traumas or the experiences of of unfinished energy that's incomplete in your body, that's stuck in our systems, in our nervous systems, which all of us have unless we've really, really looked at them and actually integrated everything, which you can't. This was like a 20 year journey in one in like two sittings, you know, of just looking at all of the stuff.

And it's so interesting because. You know, when so much stuff gets kicked up, you know, you're like, oh wow, like all these things happened. The rest is a story. Like I don't need to keep revisiting, but if it's an incomplete energy that's stuck in your body, you have to meet it. Every one of them. It's so intense. What does that feel? because Brent just did I began a few months ago also. What, but I'm curious, what did, what is the physical sensation feel like for you, like that stuck energy in your body? It's like heat under my skin. It it felt like Feel like I felt personally, when it it was a series of events that happened like right after I did I Begin it. I had to go to my, my co-founder and thinks his funeral. It was like 2 days. I was too late, my nervous system was like wide open and it was like, It made me really afraid of dying actually. And so I had to like confront my fear of death and I had to confront like fear of fear itself, like what fear feels like in my body and just like allow that like My nervous system to like, yeah, feel it, feel it all the way and it's been like I can, I'm going to cry about it, but it's like deep. Like what was your experience like?

That's a, that's a, that's a long. That's a long answer. It's a whole new podcast. Well, I'm, I'll, I'll tell you a little bit first, but I'm curious what led you to Ivy Gaine because Ivy Gaine's not a It's the Mac Daddy. Yeah, it's not like a, yeah, I'm gonna go for an update or a creative reboot or, you know, it's a system reset move through some emotional stuff or whatnot. It's like. This isn't working, or Yeah, I got, I, I, everything's I've tried is, I can't get to it. For me, it was like. Well, 12 of my besties did, Dr. Mark Hyman, he's like, oh my God, neurogenesis, my brain grew, like my white matter grew 20%, like, whoa, I'm just like, wow, I want that. The longevity aspects of it is amazing and will then. But then you have to face, oh yeah, you don't get it for, you don't, for months and months and months. I don't think, I mean, I don't know, it depends on the person, but for me, I had to, yeah, it's it's it's it's, it's, it's very interesting compared to other psychedelics. It's not like a Pop out all rosy. You in some ways you are, but yeah, I don't, it's hard to explain. What do you mean you don't get the longevity effects until months later?

No, no, basically your, your, your white matter, there's a, there's major neurogenesis that happens across your entire nerve system. So basically what happens is all of your nerves across your system, most of your nerves cluster in your brain, your heart and your gut actually. And um what happens is it's basically a neuronal reset. So it resets all of your, your um your neurons basically to factory setting. But what happens is like on the other side of that, if you don't have proper integration, like we didn't have great integration at the center, unfortunately, that um That I didn't know not to go to a funeral to today. Like I didn't know that. I mean, I was so open and so vulnerable and so that it just was like it it it what what it opened in me was like like fear of fear of dying actually. And it was really scary for a while and it prevented me from sleeping for a minute. And so like for a while and so like I had my first time having like real insomnia, which I was just like, fuck, it brings you to your knees like I Yeah, and so this, this year has been so much about.

Looking at everything that's misaligned and how it has to align or you're not going to sleep. You know, so for me it's like going through every piece of my life looking at my relation, my ex-husband. I, I went straight from that relationship to another one, right from that one to another one, and I've 15 years of just like relationship after relationship without integrating any of it, you know, and I'm running so fast. My businesses, I'm just not able. I just more shit under the rug. So doing I began had to confront. All of the heartbreak from my marriage, the heartbreak, the pain, the hard stuff from the relationships I've had, you know, with the masculine and just like my, my pain body around the masculine in general and um Yeah, and then around my own body, it's just like so many things. I played soccer, I had 3 ACL reconstruction, I had a C-section. There's a lot of things you go through as a human being, as an athlete, as a, you know, person that you're You don't integrate. Like those are big, those are big things that you go through, you know, and they, um, and so did you ever see anything from like when you were very little that you're open to sharing?

Yeah, I saw, I mean, I was in the incubator when I was born. My sister and I were born premature and we were put in these little, um, like plastic incubator tubes for separated at birth, like we were identical twins and then separated and put in these incubators for a couple of weeks. Like no parents knew what that meant, but they were just like, we, you know, we're 5 pounds each, we're tiny, we're, you know, and so whatever it takes to keep them alive, you know, we got kicked out after 4 days because we drank the milk, you know, it was great, but At the time it was like, or after, you know, a couple weeks, but. Um, so a little bit of that where I just needed to be held like skin to skin. So I did this thing called sapiens, which is this really cool experience. It's like Avalon. It's like a It's like you're, it's so sounds so crazy, but you're you're you're, you're in a room with like 24 people and then you just have these like a bell rings and then you just have these meetings with people that just Like emerge. So all of a sudden I'm a baby screaming, bawling in the arms of my mother who's played by this woman who she was meeting her daughter for the first time. It was like, it was like it's like this the level of healing that happens, but it's all somatic and all organic and all like emergent. Like you can't just be like, because at first I was like, OK, I'm going to play the role of this thing and you're going to be my dad and he's like, no, that's not that's you don't feel the changes unless you feel the emergence of it. So I'm learning.

So much the somatic. So I'm working with the somatic therapist now as well where it's like, how much of your, how much do we move with our heads versus like, OK, like where in your body do you feel the thing and just feel like you saying Neville Goddard, like feeling is a secret. Like you feel, you feel your way into the wish fulfilled and, and then as soon as you feel like really feel it, it will happen. It's inevitable to happen. And so I think for for me like I'm going, I'm jumping around a lot. You're fine. But the idea of like of doing the I. Um, and then on the other side of it, I like anything misaligned. Like I just, it had to go. It had to, it had to like there was no choice. My businesses got restructured. Um, I took myself out of the hamster wheel of both my companies no longer operational. I put myself in a sabbatical because I'm like, wow, like, There's still parts of me inside of me that are misaligned around that are conditioned from the old paradigm of thinking around business that I've been trained myself into that I don't want to bring forward into hero or my next company is where I want it's, it's it's literally nature healing nature like I'm not going to bring like next quarter, you know, like energy into something that does have like that requires a little bit more time.

Um, to grow even if I'm like ASAP Mickey. So there's so much of what's inside of me that's having to get rejiggered to slow down a little bit. Twice I did ayahuasca in the Amazon rainforest with the Sara nation and the Achuar people, never been to the modern world, flew there and, you know, um, in the Amazon, in the, in the the grandmother made the ayahuasca, drank it over New Year's a couple of years ago and You know what came up like a line, Move slowly and you get to meet the moment. Move slowly and you get to meet the moment, a moment. Because when I move too quickly ASAP I'm just missing, I missed the moment. I miss it. Come on to the next moment. I'm not in the moment. I'm missing it every time. And so even if I'm in the moment and the creativity strikes and you make it happen, then you're gone to the, but there's you're just if you move slower, you get to like savor it, you get to enjoy it, you get to Taste it in all the parts of your mouth, you know, and Um, Yeah, so I'm, I'm learning that now. I'm still learning that. Like I took this is my, I'm on my first sabbatical right now and it's If you ask Kat, it's like, it's hard. It's hard for me going from running a million miles an hour to stopping. It's like, it's so hard. I was like crying every day like I didn't, you know.

When you're so creative, you get creative impulses to try to constantly like, OK, just relax a second. Just relax. Just I'm honestly about. I just, you're like, nope, nope, nope, over and over again. No, it's like there's a readiness. You're just like, it's like someone needs me. OK, you know, I'm available, you know, you're just too eager all the time. I'm just eagerly waiting to like solve a problem, you know. I'm just like, no, Mickey, like I'm learning how to be. I wrote an album, a film, a music album. It's on Spotify. Check it out. It's it's, it's called it all exists. And it's my moniker of my little band, me and my girlfriend Happy. It's called Soul Gaze. And we have a song called Do Less, Be More. And it's just like, man, we live in such a doing culture, which is do, do, do like we we get our accolades, we get our puffy chesty Audi, like, you know, energy from doing. Me too. I've come from samurai lineage. I've had to like talk to my ancestors. I literally have to turn around and wave the white flag. I'm like, guys, like we're, we can stop, like we can chill for a second, you know, stop pushing me, you know, and so it's been so much of that.

Um, unlearning, you know, and just learning how to be still and just like gaze into the eyes and just like savor the moment and I'm just like, like, what's the, you know, and so I'm, I'm slowly on, I'm slowly open. I'm going to spend a couple of weeks. At a at a um at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck. It's like um Kripalu. It's kind of like a yoga meditation place that you can do lots of different like, it's, you know, um, it's an it's such a nature sanctuary where you can do like yoga meditation, just like be slow and in Rhinebeck, New York. Yeah, so I'm going to spend a couple of weeks there. Um, next week, starting next week, and, um, and just like learn to be, you know, more, you know, it's, it's easy when I'm like on a Friday thinking day. I could do it for one day because I'm, it's productive, you know, but when you're just learning how to be and heal through just being.

It's its own, it's its own thing. Yeah, I think. It's such a hard Reset in that you look at your whole life and it makes you hyper-aware of being intentional. And so like you're like, OK. I really need to think about and like you're doing is like pull out all the plugs that don't. Match anymore, but you really have to reflect pretty deeply to figure out like what is that? And where do you want to go and what does resonate. And so that makes sense why you're in the sabbatical cause you're like, I have to recalibrate to the present moment to be able to even pick up on that. Exactly, yeah, and it's like. And that's the other piece where it's like exactly like when you do I begin, it just kicks up your whole life's worth of incomplete energies and so and then you're on top of that, having to navigate present day life and new inputs coming in, new stuff, new problems, new stuff. You're, I have a kid, I have my home, I have my business. How so I'm like, whoa, I got to cut out. You want to have a midlife crisis immediately, you go, do I have again, meaning like you were like the crisis of I'm aware, I'm in my life like.

That's, you know, midlife crisis to me represents like all of a sudden kind of waking up and fully like pulling out your whole timeline and going, whoa, this is what we've been doing. We should really think about what's the next steps instead of just going, going, going, going, going the same way. And it's like when I was building my third company or like like Hero, I'm like, oh my God, I'm doing it the same. I'm not, no, absolutely not. I'm not building this the same way I've done my last 3 companies not doing it. Sorry, no. I'm out of alignment within myself. Let me go sit for a while and find the alignment, the way I'm going to do it this time. And you know, I know the way I've done it before works. So all my investors are like, do it that way, you know, and I'm like, no, I'm going this way and I don't know what's going to, I don't know if it's just this way is better or not, but I'm going a new way. I'll let you know what happens, you know, and so it's sort of like it's also scary in and of itself of trying doing something slower, taking a break, actually thinking and feeling, learning how to feel in my body versus the mind taking over and knowing what to do and what the steps in this and that, you know, it's like It's a very completely different way of operating and I'm just so it's I'm so early in this in this journey on the other side, but I begin like finally I'm like sleeping and I'm finally like on the other side of like the extremes, like the harder, the harder days I would say.

Um, but, um, yeah, it was, it definitely showed me the parts that are like, no, I'm not doing that this way again. No, it's not happening. I'm out. You know, and so, and I'm not saying I'm not going to come back in. I'm going to say I'm going to come back in when I'm ready, come from a completely from a place that feels the most aligned to me right now. And I'm not going to waiver on that because otherwise it's just not going to work. So, what are those ways that you used to do it before that you refuse to do now? Just, just overriding myself over and over again, pushing past my back like, like, like the ASAP Mickey's amazing, but how many things, like how much revved engine can I keep going as a woman too? I want to be held. I want to be loved and I want to, I want to be taken out on dates. You know what I mean? Like I don't need your adrenal gland 24/7 at what point, you know, and so it's like I do, I do need to, yeah, just like.

Like take a breath and just I'm, I've done it. I've made it. I'm good. You've done it a couple times I've done it. Like what am I proving? Like who am I who am I proving to? Like what am I doing? Like if it's not joyful, like fuck, this is awesome. I love making. I love creating. There's no, there's no question. I'm not going to be. I have so many ideas. I'm already like, you know, but I'm not ready to be like, Let's go. You know, like, I'm not, I'm not ready for that. I don't even want to do it that way. Like Harvard Business School did a case study on things. So all the business school students are studying, studying our company. It's like the coolest thing ever. I want I want a Harvard Business School case study to be about hero, to be about how we built it. Wow, we launched the company as a prayer. Most companies like, what's what's our launch strategy? Like we literally held a a a a a a vigil with the indigenous leaders in the Amazon rainforest, with the Sara nation, uh, Chief, with the Mayan grandmother with spiritual teachers from the banks of the Ganga River, they came and prayed on the seed of our project so that it does not ever move out of integrity. And so that we launched from a beautiful place. Did that make us money? No, but it started it from the energetic source that I want to build from.

And it's going to be slower. I know it. And it's, it's like bamboo grows underground for 4 years and then shoots 39 inches per day, you know. Uh, you know, I'm I'm, I'm, I'm bullish on nature consciousness and the way nature does it. It's on its own timeline. It actually is not linear. It's not a linear growth strategy. Nature grows when she's ready. She stops when she wants and she fucking flourishes and she's always giving. That's this consciousness in which I want to build hero with and I believe it's going to be the most like interesting way to build through emergence and then cultivate like what emerges and you cultivate that, then like the next thing emerges and you cultivate that and that's really how most businesses get built, but to do it intentionally through true emergence and true cultivation is a different different way. Of thinking about a business versus next quarter, next quarter, next quarter, next month. How are we going to grow? Like what's the fake metrics that you're looking for? So easy to get pulled into that, especially with social media. You're fed so much of that.

Focus on this strategy, this numbers, blah, blah blah blah blah. It's like grinding porn. Right, it's like hustle and grind. I know, and even just like building your, like, you know, your, your social media presence like I started working with this guy like Who's like gonna, you know, I was like, yeah, you know, maybe it's good to build a founder profile, like, let me Spend a little bit more time like working on my social media, just like a little bit more. I'll film once a month and put out content. And he's like putting out content every other day, like supposedly he has whatever, um, but like, It's happening, so like I can't even react, it's just like. It's so it it's, it's, it's not super authentic to my to way my cadence normally is, which is like when I have a hit of idea, I just put it out and it's just authentically me versus like we're going to put out content every other day and you have to now fit this algorithm and you have to make it, otherwise it's not gonna, I'm just like, fuck you just follow the inspiration. I follow the inspiration, the emergence, and so I'm, I'm, I'm moving away from This process of like, yeah, like, oh, the founder, yeah, it's just like now whatever's authentic, whatever's emergent, that's it. That's it. That's it.

It's funny when I was in Ivy game and I was laying in the bed afterwards as you're kind of like in it, but kind of done with the main piece. I, where they take your phone away for like 72 hours, and I kept having I kept Thinking I was pulling my phone out and looking at it over and over again, I kept having this feeling of, oh, you're supposed to not have your phone. Oh my God, you're in trouble. Like don't do that. And then I realized my hand wasn't even there. Like I was, it wasn't even real. Like I was having this, I was like in between this dream and real estate and, and then I started looking around everybody so addicted to their phones, and I'd been pondering this for a while. And then when I got back and Tony picked me up in the car, it like hit me. I was like, I have to get rid of my smartphone. I have to get rid of it. That is the thing fucking me up the most. And so, I ordered this company Linux. It's like an old school software company. They came out with this new flip phone that sells like WhatsApp and Google Maps but has no social media on it because it, it, it drains your creativity and it implants bullshit into your head. And so I was like, that is like one of the, it was like a side.

Nugget I got that was like so key because they see how the algorithm is intensifying. You become the algorithm when you're when you're in the social media feed 89 years ago. I don't read it. I don't know any because I'm like, if something's gonna come to my desk, so if I'm going to find out something, it's gonna be through a friend because it's that big. It's important you say turn on your TV on TV you didn't even know about 9/11. Exactly. So I'm like, I'm, I'm no, I'm not, I don't watch, I don't read the news, watch the news. I don't even spend any time. I don't even watch any movies that aren't feel good, that aren't like loving, that aren't like if it palpitates my I'm out like I'm like why would, why would I do that to my nervous system, like not interested. Like that's just me. Like I've always loved rom-coms and just like coms and like documentaries. Good vibes. Like anything good vibes, let's go. Anything that's like conspiracy. I'm just like, why? Like why, you know, you're like the diet the amygdala, the amygdala, it's like, fuck that. No, the content diet that you take in is exactly like your food diet, and people don't think about that. And it's like you, you want the majority to be good stuff. Like you want to always eat healthy and like, yeah, maybe you have a junk food here and there, but if your whole diet, if half the day you're eating junk food, it's going to be really fucking bad for your health. And if you're consuming.

You know, nervous system destroying content where you're just adrenal glands going crazy and your adrenaline's through the roof. Yeah, it's not going to be good for you either. It has to, I like, I love the rom-com and documentaries and like, yeah, choose and be deliberate about what you put in your eyes and ears just like you are with your mouth. 100% and my son as well, like he's 9 and he's being influenced by his friends who are like he's like, he's like they all play, you know, whatever that game is that all the kids are playing and I'm just like, no, you're not playing that game. He's like, but now I'm going to be like the only kid who doesn't play this game. And I'm like, yeah, it's um Minecraft, not Minecraft, it's the other one. It's the one yeah. And um and it's just like it's the it's the it's like it's like Fritz is your fucking brain. So we took out that we took away the iPad for the last two months and he's like I bet. It's like a different child, like actually, not that we even, not that we even let him watch more than like on a Sunday morning. Like I mean at my house, he watches, he gets, they get, he gets games. Andrew Andrew's house, he watches on Sunday morning. We both have the same thing. Sunday mornings is, is, is game days, mornings, but you can already tell.

Call it angry. He gets angry afterwards, like video angry, like when he's, when he's like playing video games because it's like a withdrawal from a drug. It's just crazy. And so I'm just like, no, no, absolutely not. And I don't care how much you cry. That's why I love he's at this school Acton Academy, which teaches you how to learn and not um, Not like I've never heard of that school. Yeah, it's it's basically there's no teachers or guides. Um, it's it's student led and you have your core skills that you have to like self guide yourself into finishing and completing in order to graduate. You have to, so it's it's all and then the afternoons are all kids who are doing um School, like, like group projects, like entrepreneurship projects. It's really cool. And at first it's called Acton. So Alpha Alpha is a little too alpha for me. OK. I didn't know there was another alternative. That's cool because I have a lot of clients with kids and I'm always like, I care about like growing up, school is awful.

I know is fucking awful. And so it's like there's so many cool schools now. It's cool to see parents put them in schools like that. It's like to know you could actually have an amazing experience, not just like, but it's interesting because you're my, my kid who had traditional education for. Um, 7 years, 7 years, and before switching to acting, and he was like, like being told what to do. He's like, this is too weird. Like I'm not, no one's teaching me. I'm like, you got to teach yourself. You got to guide yourself. You've got to learn how to love to learn. And so self sufficiency. Exactly. And so at first he's like, I don't know if I can, you know, he's like, I hate this. I hate this. I hate this. I hate that. I miss my friends. I miss being having a teacher just tell us, to teach us things. And but now he's like starting to understand like, OK, if I don't advance myself in these core skills, I'm not going to graduate. So I actually have to go and finish my math thing. I have to actually go finish the English. It's on me. I can't just kind of tune out, get a test, get a D, kind of move through. That's right. Yeah. And even in regular school, the students that got A's, a lot of the time, they're not.

They're like book smart. They don't have the same like self-sufficiency and intelligence. This is like forcing kids to use the critical parts of their brain and use common sense. And it's interesting because I spoke to one of the parents before putting him in school and I was like, what do you like about acting for your for your kid? And he said, you know, They might, she he was like, both my son and my daughter might be a little bit behind in their like. core skills right now in the beginning early, they were behind in the early days, but their EQ and their ability to communicate, look people in the eye, talk to them, negotiate, figure out problems, like, like solve problems, like when there's a fight, how to actually navigate just just between like The soft skills are so like higher than any other kid that they've met in any other school. And so it's just like, wow, like that's that's what you actually need are the soft skills like do you really need to learn algebra? Like no, you know, add, subtract, multiply, divide, like that's actually like like that's it.

And so all those shit's like whatever, but like the soft skills like how to sit in a corner when you have an argument, how to resolve conflict. How do you actually self guide yourself to love to learn the parts of things that you love to learn? How do you teach another kid who's younger than you because it's all age and the kids? How do you get taught by another kid older than you? How do you actually co-create in a group and present a project to, you know, to the to the to the to the parents or whatever. It's like, It's soft skills that I'm like, huh, cause at first I was like the school is a bit janky. I was like, you know, it's like dirty and they're like, yeah, because the kids are cleaning up the classroom. If they're not cleaning it, it's dirty. And I'm like, uh, you know, and so I'm like, wow, that's great actually. Like the kids have to learn how to clean up after themselves or they're going to be living in a pigsty, you know, so there's like things like that that I'm like, You know, that at first you're just like, uh, and then you're like, oh, you know, they're being taught how to be humans. Yeah, they're being taught how to be humans. Yeah, good humans resolve. It was interesting because like he was it was hero's birthday yesterday, my son's birthday, and I had 11 kids. We took them on an Escalade limo ride to Austin's to go on like bumper cars and whatever and in the arcades and in the limo ride.

I was just sitting in the back watching all the kids and they were self-directing. It's like, OK, everyone gets to pick one song. OK, you go first. OK, now, OK, now it's this person's. OK, you know, and like one person took another kid's toy and the other kids are like, give the toy back and they were all like, and at first I was like, you know, like going to interject, but then it was like, no, no, no, like just watch them and see how they self. Govern, but because they're all acting kids, they were all like, hey, don't actually give that back to him. Like that's his and like they were governed. It was like self governed. In fact, when I actually interfered, it was, it became, I shouldn't have, you know, because afterwards I did because I was like, all right, give it be a good boy, but give the toy back. Like, come on, you know, like, but, but they eventually the other kids were really, it was, it was awesome. And and it was so different than like the other schools they're like like going to the parents like they didn't give the toy back paddling, right? It's so annoying how much tattling happens in the school when there's like a parent to go and tug on versus like kids self governing. It was like real time witnessing.

Of what what this school is doing, which is really cool. Damn, that's super cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's here in Austin. Do they have other locations? So, so there's like now like 400 Atons around the world. And this is the, I think it's the 2nd or the 3rd, I think the 3rd actton ever. So it's been around for like 18 years. Yeah, yeah, definitely can upgrade the campus vibe like this, the, it's like, but it was actually meant to be like schoolhouse like from the 19 set like, you know. I like that it's a little gritty because that's like. be in that, you know, kids should be overly sanitized. It's true, you know, because their immune system up. His previous school was like, fucking like blazers and everyone wearing the thing and they're all such bitches. Yeah, I know, I know, like, I realized something kind of on the topic we were just discussing. Oh, we should talk about your book soon. Um. With like the kids watching iPads and TV and things like that and I Like I have a bunch of nieces and nephews. I've, I think 11, I lose count, 11 nieces and nephew. And so I watched like the shows they watch and I see the TV they watch. And then recently I saw cartoons from like, The 80s and or even maybe even earlier, and it was such a slower vibe, like cartoons for kids were slow and deliberate and it was like, you know, Goodnight Moon or Moon and the Bear or whatever that was and.

I realize now that cartoons for kids are so ADHD. It's like it's a million colors and the frame changes every 4 seconds and there's new shit and boom, boom, boom and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, this is a kid whose brain just got made like a couple of years ago and you're throwing so much stimulation at them where like a kid should, if they're gonna watch TV it should be like. Slow and relaxing and, and video games and I have a whole project that I'm like secretly working on, like, spiritually right now because I'm not working right now. But um allegedly allegedly spiritually, I'm just like in the in the dreaming phase, but I'm like, it's going to, it's going to resurrect the American dream for kids. Like that's like a whole thing that I'm that I'm I'm like, Envisioning and see it happening. Yeah, you have a client. She, they, a client for what, what do you, what do you do? A personal trainer, a high-end escort. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and her kid, I think it's age 1 through 5, it's called Sachi. I think it's a Japanese program, and he developed where it's like slow moving images and they just moved through the program at their own pace and it's Focused on developing the right side of the brain, because the right side of the brain only develops until like you're 5 years old, and then you can get better with whatever you've developed, but you can't develop more. And that's where like, you know, a lot of farmers or people that worked with their hands or whatnot is they're Have a really developed bright side of their brain. That's why they're very good at problem solving or being creative. And so it's a very interesting program that you can use. And a lot of it, I had to sit there and watch a whole episode with them. And it's like, it's like 3 horses, and they're just like slowly moving. It's like, look at the brown tail, look at the one with the white coat, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, it's really interesting. It's a cool program. So what does it do?

So. He's figured out how to develop the right side of the brain with kids, and it's ages 1 through 5, and you go through like year-long courses. Each day you watch like a 2015, 20 or 30 minute episode with your kid, and then they do a little booklet thing. Even at the end, there's like a hyperfast flashcard. Which I guess helps them actually identify things really quickly, just at the very end. It's, he tried to explain it to me, the husband, who was like, how it's broken down, but he like did all this research and he programmed each lesson to develop that side of the brain with the workbooks. That's cool. Yeah, that's dope. Yeah, I mean, 1 to 5 is critical. Like one of the things I do with my son Hero is like he's like before he gets to do whatever he wants, he has to make me an invention, a haiku and a song. And all of them and he's made me hundreds and hundreds of inventions, haikus and songs. Like one of his haikus is my favorite, which I memorized because I'm like, how did you write this? You're a child. He's like, the haiku is, Tiny scarlet leaves hanging tightly from the trees. It's time to let go.

Whoa. OK, Rumi. He's like, he like wrote the, I'm just like, what? You know, I got an old school typewriter. So he typed it on the old school typewriter. And I'm just like, bro, this is poetry, you know, and he's made me inventions like he's like, I have an idea. Like what if you can just And it's presented like this is my new invention. The problem I'm solving is the trash problem, you know, and he's like, right now there's trash everywhere. What if we can just take the trash and put it in outer space? And I'm like, that's what Jeff Bezos is doing. You know what I mean? So he's like he's coming up with so much, he's like, OK, so as a kid you grow out of your grow out of your clothes really fast. So what if there's a robot that could just get have just the amount of fabric to make it one size bigger and one size bigger and you don't have to buy new clothes, but just, it just robot makes the next size up. I'm like, brilliant. Like get Elon Musk on that right now. Do you know what I mean? And so like he's had like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of inventions, haikus. I have like a folder in my phone that I record some of them. And and songs and his songs he can freestyle sing anything with like the most epic melodies, epic like he's, you know, and all kids are able to do that if you just, if you massage that that primate. Yeah, and I and he has no fear of going to speak in front of people. He has no fear of making a song and singing in front of 100 people. Like, you know, it's, it's, it's cool. It's cool when you're like, wow, like, You do something repeatedly enough times, it's just not a thing, where some kids are like, so stage frighty, you know.

It's interesting. There's a podcast recently with the creator of Perplexy, Perplexity. I saw that on Joe Rogan and he said like the most valuable thing or the most is curiosity that human beings are. It's funny you sent that, and I forgot to tell you this, but I made, because, OK, so I'll tell you a quick side tangent. You sent me that and I thought, interesting. That's like a, a trait that you would want to evolve in, right? And I thought, OK, well, what if humans are like video game characters, and we had our traits, and if we were like in an RPG, you know, you would have all these different traits and you try to uplevel on all these traits, and whatever traits you're strongest in kind of dictates your character. Like you could be a warlock or you could be a whatever, right? And you would have these strengths that would dictate that, and then you have your weaknesses. And if we could then measure all of those traits and like measure them quarterly and then try to up level on all of them. And so then I, I, I went like down a clawed rabbit hole and I made a character sheet that you then like you have to grade yourself on 28 different metrics and traits and then you have to give an explanation as to why you have to have evidence. You can't just grade it. So you have to like, you know, defend your position on why you grade yourself that and then it creates this almost like personality test and gives you a score and a, um.

Like a character name of like what kind of class you are in the video game. And then the goal is like to progress and you're not going to be a 10 out of 10 on everything, right? So you look at your top stats and the goal is to be like a 10 out of 10 on like 3 things and you just fucking focus on those strengths and then you just get everything that's like a 1 or a 2 or a 3 because that's like a liability. If you're that low. You just need to get those to like a 5. Just get those to baseline and then just focus on building. Strengths. So anyways, I forgot to send it to you, but that's cool. I have a whole cool thing. That would be a fun thing to just have people like opt into a newsletter. You're just like find your thing right instead of your horoscope. You're like, what is my character? Yeah, what's your character in the video game? Yeah, in the simulation. Yeah, I'll send it to both of you guys. That's cool. What's your? What's your character? Uh, mine was the juggernaut because it was basically like grit and Determination over all the other do you think makes you grit and determined. Having to do is kind of the opposite of what you've been talking about for the last hour, which is like finding the, the flow and the joy of things. I've just been like head down for and for a lot of reasons which we won't get into, but just had to like head down, focus and get rid of fun in a way which is kind of sad and a little depressing, but that's on.

Work essentially and just grinding on things and I'm I'm in a new season now where I don't want to be the juggernaut, but, but is it fun? You said it's not fun, right? Parts of it are fun, but some of it isn't fun. Some of it is just like it's just grinding. It's funny because I was talking to my friend who, who just built literally like it's went from 0 to like 2 billion. I can't say who and what, but in like, you know, in, in a, in a cool space, um. Um, And he was like, I would say 20% is fun, 80% is so not fun. I like building a business, like it's just like, there's just a grind, you know, and it depends on who it is. Like if it's the founder, like, he's a visionary founder like me, like he's a creative founder like me. He's not um, An operator, operational founder. He's an operations founder. That part's like he's like a fish out of water, like me, you know, I like my first hires are always COOs, like head of operations, like I cannot operate things. Like I'm a creative, I'm a bit like I have like, oh, like the downloads and then I'm like, go.

Yeah, that's like me trying to figure out shit and then just confusing the fuck out of everybody because I have no idea what I'm doing. Yeah, and it's OK because some people love taking the creative ideas and then operationalizing it. Like it's awesome. My team, but both my teams are amazing. Like operator, operational teams. And so, yeah, I think that's a critical piece as well around like finding the, you know, um, like I call it a zone of genius, like what is your zone of genius and it's like my zone of genius is not operations. My zone of genius is creative and so I'm just going to stay in my lane and, you know, that's it. That's it. And then and then the rest will just fall into place. And I often always see so many founders who are CEOs. And they're grinding and they're just like, I'm just like, get a CEO, get a CEO like we can't afford it, we can't afford it. I'm like, trust me, you'll figure it out. Go raise like a little bit more, go like give them more, give a shit ton of like just do it and watch your business go like this. And it does every time because then you get to be in your zone of genius. They get to be in theirs and it just shifts the entire energy of the thing that you're creating.

Yeah. Tell us about these books before we gotta go. Yeah, and also, yeah, I want to show you the products too. Um. So I wrote do cool shit when I had like one restaurant, you know, my, my ex-husband's mom is like an incredible book. She's written 12 books and she's like, you need to write a book and I was like, OK. And um HarperCollins picked it up. No idea like how or why, but um, it's really going from step zero to step one in business and in life. Like I think most people are like, and then I got it. I had a million dollars and then I raised this and you're like, but like, how'd you get your first check? Like your first, what email did you write to like when you had no context to get the person to even show up to meet with you to maybe invest in your business? Like, what was the first like text you sent? like what like all of that. That's in this book, like detailed to like, this is the email I wrote to get 20 people to show up to my meeting of the minds. Here's the email I wrote to get 20 people to show up to my investor meeting when I didn't even know what investor meeting was like investor dinner, you know, like here's what I did to exactly step by step to go from 0 to step 1, but in a really fun, like what's going to happen next, you know, kind of chapter. So people read in like one day because there's it's such a It's a fast read, but it tells you step by step the kind of things that most people want to know, like what did you send them? Like, who did you talk to? How did you make your first investor deck? What does it even mean? Like, so that it's like 0 to step 0 to step 1 in business and life. So.

It's cool because like the founder of the biggest non-alcoholic like beverage company read my book Do Cool Shit. Now it's like a billion dollar business. Like so many cool epic people like read my book and then they went on to build. There's so many ancillary cool things that happen. It's like, you know, like the secondary effects of like, wow, like this book helped this guy start his business, which then hired 1000 people and then, you know what I mean, and their lives change like whatever. It's just like how many hundreds of people, 100,000 people bought this book and Like what is the ripple effect of all the different lives that have been changed through through through a book. So that's, I'm very, very proud of this of this of do cool shit. And then Disruptor, I wrote after I had my crazy You know, experience with um the media and with the board and board dynamic, like all the stuff that just like, I didn't understand what like, like the next level of business when you build something, a nine-figure business, like what happens and how much people just change, you know, and so I think um I want to write a book around like, You know, I, I have an incredible coach, Lauren Zander, who I've been working with for many, many years and she coaches like all these top celebs and founders of huge Fortune member companies and she's been my like spiritual teacher for so long. And um, Um, she.

You know, and I have looked at all like the major areas in my life, you know, money, family, business, career, love, relationship, friendship, but there's so many different areas in your life. So it's the 12, there's 12 major areas in your life through the through that lens. And so I kind of go through um all the different kind of major things like career, money, all those different parts and it's like, what is the current structure that we've been indoctrinated to believe is the system that we're now like living into like around money, around career, around relationships, around all the areas that you're like, wait, all of these constructs have been made up. Let me understand how they got made up. Let me understand the school system. I talked about horsemen, I talk about, again, all the different systems that we've been taught. Indoctrinated to believe and then how we can disrupt them one by one. You can disrupt every single area in your life. You can disrupt love, you can disrupt money, you can disrupt every single thing that you think has a construct, you can disrupt them all. And here's how you can literally find agency in your life across every area in your life, um, which is really That's wrap. Very cool.

Yeah. Do you do, is it on Audible? It's on. I read the book. Even better. Good job. I love it. Cool. And what's in the boxes? Yeah, I mean, sushi bidet, if you haven't seen one, you should see one for sure, but I, I'll just go on record to say that I love my tushi. I've had, so before tushi became really popular, I had. A bidet. It was some other brand. I don't remember what it was, but this is like 2011, and I've, I've always been on clean team butt. I love, I love that. And then I upgraded. I upgraded and got a tushy after that. Thank you. You're welcome. Before I knew you. Do you have the original one? Do you have the new, which one do you have? I think I have an OG. OK, well, you can keep that one. I'll give, I'll get, I'll get you one as well. No, thank you. Yeah, of course, yeah. Well, I have one. You keep this one and then I'll take, I'll take the next one. Yeah, nice. And this is hero. Yeah, I'm so curious about these. Yeah, so this is, and, you know, we, I wanted to also, when you think about the aesthetics of it, like these are all actual mushroom spores, prints, spore prints very on brand for this podcast. Yeah, and then, um, this is, yeah, um, the product. So basically, oh yeah, sorry.

Let me show you. I'll just do, I'll just do one. So in here are diapers. If you know what a diaper looks like, it's pretty straightforward. But this is the only unbleached diaper on the market, made with local American cotton. It's like, it's the best diaper, unbleached diaper on the market period. No toxic blue line. It's 50% less plastic up to, you know, like than leading brands. It's just, it's the best, cleanest unbleached diaper. The best part though, it comes with these little micro pots and they look like They're now square and they're now much bigger, but um, you just drop one into the diaper after every diaper change. You don't open it, you just drop the whole thing in and that's it. In a couple of weeks, these little spores inside this that are culinary grade non-toxic. They're, we went through all microtoxin tested. They're food grade, you can eat them, don't eat them, but you can eat them. Um, I'm getting mixed signals here. Should I eat them? You can, but don't. Yeah. And so basically you just open the diaper after the baby poops, you take it off the baby, you drop, you drop one of these in, you close it and that's it. We call it one inspired action. That's it. You just need to take one inspired action to truly shift consciousness and partner with nature to heal nature together. So we're not able, we're not having to Wash the dirty diapers that, you know, like the, like, you know, if you're an eco parent, you have to like and you're buying all like the reused diapers, cloth diapers, and you're just like, you're washing this shit and you're like trying to recover and you're feeding your baby, you're not sleeping, you're like that's just not and you're a working woman, 66% of women are now primary mothers are primary co-breadwinners. And so it's like how Are you going to do all of that and then wash shit out of the diapers? No. Let's find ways that are regenerative and still are in support of the modern parenting.

Yeah. So this is like a big, big giant leap forward for sort of a true marriage between people and the planet. And can this work? I mean, I know it's made for the diapers specifically, but I imagine this fungus can also break down other types of plastic. Yes. So these mycelium inside can are designed specifically for this diaper. We put them through like 26 generations of, you know, of, of natural selection. So it's been like and continuing. So it keeps wanting to favor eating this diaper over anything else. So we have a library of hundreds and hundreds of strains and we have like thousands, we have over a million data points collected. So it's like now as like big plastic companies are like, hey, can you do this for my squeeze pack for like the squeeze pack things that all billions of those end up in landfills too. We're like, yeah, like send us a squeeze packs. We're going to, we'll put this strain that we know is good for PET. Let's do an experiment together and see if there's something we can do. So now we're like the first to have like this level of a library of fungi and the different plastics that it can digest over time and now different bigger companies were like doing experiments with them and seeing which ones make sense for their afterlife of their packaging as well, which could be really cool.

That's it's amazing. I've always been on fungi for breaking stuff down and like I'm like, why are people not When we, when we started, there was no prior art in patents, which means that there was no prior company trying to harness fungi to break down plastic. So we literally have all of the patents around fungi that can break down plastic and over time, we're going to open source it to all individuals who want to do it at home. Any company can pay us for it and license it. But any, any person for their home can do it, open source, which will be really cool. Do you have a timestamp of the diaper being broken down? They're not a timestamp, but a time lapse. Yeah. Oh my God, I love to watch that. Yeah, we have, we have an amazing video of, of seeing the diaper like we basically, you see it and then you, you see dirt and it's like in 6 months in our lab inside of a fish tank. So I'll send you the fish tank case study and you can see it. It's really, really cool.

Um, I start crying in the video because I'm like, I thought it was a different fish tank, but it was the same. It was just like a I was like, wait. Where do they go? It was just a, it was, it was truly a moment. I was like, oh my God, it's working, it's working, it's working, you know, and It was a moment. It was a real moment. And it's so interesting because the more aligned we are to this, to the mission, the more these fungi appear. Like a newest strain appeared out of the blue. Like 6 years, like we're 5 and 5+ years in and just like appear that breaks down part of the plastic better than any of the other strains ever. Yeah, it's been really, really cool, but yeah, so much time energy went into making This guy. Yeah, and it's just now it's like way, way more, but that's like inside are just little spores, you don't need much. That's what's so crazy about it. It's like a little spore.

Like a sphere, like a hardened little sphere. They're like a bunch of little, little, little pods, pods. Amazing. Well, what Advice for like the last couple of minutes. Like, what advice do you have for upcoming founders and people that, you know, you mentioned that you just got to live life with that. Joie de vivre, you know, like people that feel stuck, that feel that, you know, there maybe isn't all this excitement. How do they start to live with that than buy the book? Yeah, other than by the book, yeah, definitely buy the book, first mini step, yeah, people that didn't have this like incredible God moment where they woke up and didn't go to the Twin Towers that day. Like, where do they find that inspiration if they don't have something like that. Going into nature and giving yourself space. Like even if you say, I'm going to do 2 hours every Friday or every Saturday, I'm going to give myself half a day on Saturday or the whole day on Saturday and make Sunday the social day and fun day, whatever, but give myself a day where I or even a few hours where I create real space for myself and you're going to be so impressed with yourself.

With how much comes through. Like we are creative beings. We know what's like what's the next step. We often are like asking externally, which I during post I began, I'm like, am I OK? Am I OK? And I'm like, no, no, no, I'm OK. Like I had to go in and be like, oh Micy, like this is all for you. Like this is for you. Like Go in, you're OK. Like, you know, and it's so you like, is this idea good? Is this good? It's like, no, tune in. You'll know if this is needed, if it's worth it. If if you're willing to spend 10 years of your life, because it takes 10 years to be an overnight success. It's true. Some like there's some outliers, but it's minimum 10 years usually. Can you do this and really with a smile on your face for the next 10 years and love it. You know, ask yourself, are you doing it because it's like product market fit, like, you know, like crypto, like, no, you know, like do it because your heart sings when you think about it, when you're like, oh my God, like, The world would love having a clean butt. Like what's obviously tushy, duh, like, of course every parent would want to not leave their babies with 100 billion diapers in a landfill every single year, and, and which by the way, a majority of that ends up in our waterways because so much of it's mismanaged, especially in the developing world, you know, and so it's like, What I want, why would I see a world that's so much more beautiful? I, I really believe in beauty, like the beauty of our world, the beauty of like, uh, the juice of life. Like I always think about food. I'm like, gosh, this could taste like gasoline, but fuck, this cherry tastes so good. Like this mango, like it could just taste like fuel, like I'm fueling my car. Like I always think about that. Like I was like all the things our eyes see, it's like it could be just gray or We're so lucky. Like we get to see and taste and feel and like, you know, and and experience all the different pieces.

And And sometimes it's not easy. And so I say to people like, Just make and print. It doesn't have to be perfect. You don't have to hoard your idea until you launch it. People like, I don't know what to tell people who no one's going to do the thing the way you're going to do it. People are way less motivated than you think they are. They're not. They're not going to steal your idea. Like, just tell everyone and see what they say. They might actually give you good 99% of the time they're like, oh, what if you did this, and it's a better idea than you came up with versus you thinking that you have to hoard your idea and not tell anyone. And, and we're collaborative in by nature. We should just keep telling people, keep spreading, keep adding, keep printing, keep making. You're gonna mess up, you're you're gonna look back, you're gonna make a mistake. Who cares? Just, just keep, just keep, just keep going like. If there's one thing we're gonna do is keep going until we die. Perfect segue is let's give her a gift.

Exactly. Almost forgot that's a perfect. That's speaking of just making shit and just being boom, here's some shit that we just made. Two colors for you. Do you, uh, do you like to take it out and guess? Just take it out and hat. Yeah. Do you like? A sauna. She's so smart. I'm just building a sauna right now, so I'm like looking for sauna hats. Well, there you go. Yeah, well, no one for you sauna hat is ever going to be that cool. Yeah, this is the best one. Anybody trying to, you have no idea. One for you, one for hero, dude, I am so thrilled. Let's go. I mean, it's a vibe. Oh yeah, that's it. With the green underneath too it looks like this is the stem. This is the cap. Come on, I will take it. No, I literally am in the process of building a sauna right now and it's like been a whole project, but it'll be complete in 2 weeks, right, Kat? Um, and so this is the most, I, you know, I call this sacred sequence. Everything has been such a sacred sequence of like this thing going to I begin and then I'm then I go to sapiens and I then I go to like I have to then I go to my ex-husband's 40th birthday where I have to give a speech about You know, the time we had together and then I met my ex-boyfriend at the thing and I had to like confront that like awkward. Then I had to like, you know, it's just like it's such and then I moved through all of the pieces that showed up in I began, all of these things.

have been showing up in in in I began that showed up, showed me all this. First I have to like clean up my businesses. I have to do this. I have to, then I have to go look at all my mirror. I have to look at all my stuff and it's just a sacred sequence. This is part of the sacred sequence. This on a hat, sacred sequence, right on time. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you for taking the time to come hang out with us. We really appreciate it. It was amazing. Yeah, really fun. Where do you want people to go? Should they find you? What do you want listeners to do next? Well, definitely go to hellushi.com if you want a clean butt and actually like feel confident about yourself. And if you know of any pregnant or baby mama or baby papa who cares about the planet, please tell them about Hero. Hero diapers, please go to hero diapers.com, H I R O diapers.com. So important. Um, and then if you want to follow my stuff, it's just at Mickey Agar on Instagram is where I really share most of my stuff and then grab the books if you care to go deeper in disrupting your life or doing cool shit. The end.

Beautiful. Perfect. Thank you, Mickey. Thank you.