Creating Values-Based Products That Leave a Legacy w/ Michael Tennant
Michael and his work has been featured by the New York Times, Beyoncé, the Today show, Good Morning America, and many others. In his role as founder and CEO of Curiosity Lab, Michael creates and incubates businesses to help values-aligned individuals and organizations use empathy to live happier and healthier lives, and to nurture inclusive and innovative environments. In 2022, Curiosity Lab received an investment from Pharrell and the Black Ambition Prize.
In this episode Michael shares his journey from the world of advertising to creating tools that foster connections and social impact. We explore the importance of values, the science of empathy, and Michael’s vision for building a legacy through Curiosity Lab.
Learn how Actually Curious was created to promote empathy through gamified conversation.
Discover Michael’s transition from corporate life to mission-driven work at Curiosity Lab.
Understand the impact of values and purpose on building a lasting legacy.
Gain insights into practical ways to bring empathy into professional and educational spaces.
Learn how you can create your own card deck aligned with your business values
GIFT FOR YOU
If you’re a meditation teacher or coach who wants to create unique meditations people listen to over and over again, enroll in my free course Meditation Script Mastery
Music Credit: Nova by River Roots - https://www.youtube.com/riverroots
Podcast Transcript
Lou: Dear listeners, welcome to another episode of the Art and Business of Meditation podcast. I always say I'm excited to interview our guest and sometimes I get to interview friends and today's one of those times. So I'm uber excited because I don't normally interview friends. We have different containers and engagements. But anyway, long winded intro to Michael Tennant and Michael's got a dope bio, so I need to share his bio with you all. Michael is the founder and CEO of Curiosity Lab, a purpose driven venture studio and consultancy that builds products and experiences that teach empathy. He's the creator of the card game actually Curious and the author of the Power of Empty. The Power of Empty EMP Empty. I've never had this problem with this word, Michael. Maybe you've seen other people flurry over the word anyway, which his book is described by INC as effectively balancing a self help approach with a practical explanation of how we can use empath as a tool. I need to share a little bit more about Michael. Michael's work has been featured by New York Times, Beyonce, the Today Show, Good Morning America, and many others. In his role as CEO, Michael creates and incubates businesses to help values aligned individuals and organizations use empathy to live happier, healthier lives and to nurture inclusive and innovative environments. In 2022, Curiosity Lab received an investment from Pharrell and the Black Ambition Prize. That's just an amazing, amazing, amazing. Michael. Thank you for joining. Welcome to the show.
Michael: Thank you. And thank you. You went with the long bio. I appreciate that.
Lou: Yeah, I never know. You know. I'd love for you to tell me, our listeners to tell me. I always like wonder, should I do the bio before they get on? Is that annoying for them to listen to? It is do I do the bio afterward? Like, I never really know. I'm still working it out so well.
Michael: I feel honored to have someone with such a soothing and just aesthetically pleasing voice read my bio. That was the best.
Lou: Maybe that would be.
Michael: I stumble on empathy sometimes too. You say it enough and it gets stuck. Even though it's a simple word.
Lou: That should be like a thing that I create. It's like, send me your bio and I'll create like a sleep meditation with it or something. Or your desired bio. It's almost like a manifesting technique. You send me a desired bio. You listen to that on repeat. As you sleep, it gets into your subconscious. That is a good idea. That is not even a bad idea.
Michael: That's a great idea. We're like two manifesters right now. Just amplifying one another. I love it.
Lou: We are. I just got Michael into human design, and I love finding a fellow manifesto. So we were just geeking out about that. Maybe that'll come back around here in a second. But the essence of a manifester is bringing things into the earth, creating, initiating things, and not needing to wait for the universe to give us the sign. We kind of get it from within. And I remember I met Michael once. The first time I met Michael was in 2021 at a retreat with a men's group called Everyman. And then in 2022, me and Michael both did Everyman's foundations kind of leadership training together. And we were actually paired in a threesome to start. And when I met Michael and remember it, I remember exactly where I was, because I was in Guatemala. It was January of 2022. And I remember Michael saying something that stuck out with me in our initial chat. And Michael said. Or you said, michael, I don't know. I'm talking to the audience. I'm talking to you at the same time. But you said, michael, like, I'm really embarrassed. I don't know if it was embodied. It was some word about being embodied in your purpose. You were like, yeah, I'm really embodied in my purpose. I'm really living my purpose. I forget what it was. And so I wanted to start there to just ask you, what does it feel like? One, that was two years ago. So curious what, if anything's changed, but what does it feel like to be embodied in your purpose?
Michael: Great question to open an interview. Best possible question to open an interview I've ever received. I mean, it feels great waking up every Monday and pretty much every day, even. Even the hard days, it doesn't feel weighty. It feels easy to make challenging decisions that once you make it, you know, you know, it's. You know, it's within your purpose. And it's funny because I'm wondering. At that point, I hadn't started the process of cataloging how I arrive at deeply resonant purpose. I think I was just starting to realize that it might be within my power to create a way for people to tap. One way potentially for people to find that when it's such a sometimes elusive thing to. To tap,
Michael: you know, I'm sure we'll get into it. The last four years has been a roller coaster. It's been up and down, but they're just like every day, way more fulfilling than the days where I was making hundreds of thousands of dollars as an advertising executive working with top Brands and winning awards and living in Manhattan in a dope apartment and just having all of these like external validations. But that internal was missing. Those Mondays felt horrible. Like I drank away my feelings, I did drugs and did other things to escape. And like now it's just a constant refinement of wanting actually more clarity. Like once you tap that, that vein it's like you just have to keep going, keep going.
Lou: For me at least I don't know if you feel this like a no looking back. In some ways you can't unsee it or you can't unexperience it. Like, okay, I get a taste of what this type of life and what this kind of expression and creativity and it's hard to, at least for me to think about going back. I didn't have a very high paying corporate role like you did. But I have seen your journey. I have seen your ups and your downs and just a little bit more background. Me and Michael were also in a weekly men's group for about a year and a half together. And so I get to, would get to see some of those lows and some of those challenges that Michael would face. And so maybe a question you're used to being asked in interviews. I know your background of with working with companies like Proctor Gamble, Google being in the corpus sphere. And then in 2018 you create very manifesto like this card game called actually Curious. And so maybe just taking to the 0 to 1 of how that came to be. And were you still, I don't know if I know if you were still doing your corporate role or did you, you know, when was that stepping in? Because I think that's, I think that that moment is always interesting for people to hear.
Michael: Well the cool part about that follow up question is that in. So I left corporate advertising in 2016 and some of the inspirations for it was, were that well, my brother Chris had a stroke and when I was navigating how, you know, my kind of like really driving inclination to spend more time with my family than was probably appropriate for, for a corporate executive.
Lou: I.
Michael: Got pushed back and in a pretty harsh way that made me know that I needed to leave simultaneously. So that's 2016. That same year Trump got elected and I mean I was escaping so much. I, I think I voted like but if I did vote, that was the only thing that I did to fight for my beliefs and my purpose that year. And I watched that election happened and I, I sobbed, I sobbed with shame that I did nothing. I just assumed, I just assumed that it was going to go in the direction that every many of my peers and most of the world, most of the country thought. Right? So these two things kind of shook up my world in a way where there were ideas about purpose, there were ideas about distancing from materialism, there were ideas about how much effort and money were going into these ad campaigns that I was leading that just like distract people. And those things all mixed up for me to decide, all right, I'm going to leave advertising. I created Curiosity Lab. And the link is that the thesis around Curiosity Lab, which was a services, a marketing services business back then, was that we were going to individuals and organizations to build lasting community around their values. So before even even thinking about experimenting with values really specifically to the individual, I started playing with how to get organizations, how to get brands like people as brand, to use it as a beacon for how to act from the inside out, how to treat themselves, how to treat their partners, how to treat their, their business partners, how to treat their employees. Because what I found was I was always at the end of the spear where the values were all jumbled up. But I mean, even like the briefs and there was competition happening across competing agencies and, and you know, I would witness four months of alignment activities, meetings and meetings and travel and all this stuff just to align to a direction that should have been there before it got to marketing, you know. So that's where I started working with values. And you know, ironically, we managed to get some early clients that were really exciting, like Zico, the coconut water brand. We were helping them do some community building and to compete against Vita, Coco and Oatley, we helped Oatley launch on the west coast and to establish really authentic relationships with social justice motivated influencers and baristas and kind of bringing this intersection of kind of activism and coffee. But, you know, one day we, we looked inward and we realized we didn't know our own company's values. So we were kind of being hypocrites in that sense. So we took a full day, brought in all of our interns. They were all of, they were, you know, of a different generation. So now I'm like an older millennial. They're like either like the bottom of the millennial cusp or they, they were Gen Z. So we really wanted to bring in the youth into us, unearthing what the values of Curiosity Lab were meant to be. And you know, at this point, I don't remember all five, but I do remember that empathy, community and connection were three of them. And you Know, I didn't want them to have a BS internship, so I devised a project that was time based, a smart project. You know, specific, memorable, actionable, relevant and time based, measurable action memorable. Maybe that's better.
Lou: That's a new one. That's a new one. You're gonna.
Michael: And, and actually that's funny that happened organically because that is really what, what I aim for with, with anything that I do. So like, you know, not move forward until I feel a deep resonance that it has this potential to be memorable, to be relevant, to be like not corny and trendy 10, 20 years, to like live on. So that summer, through the values of connection, empathy and community, we decided to take on the problem of divisiveness in this country. To think 2018, we were thinking, wow, this is the worst divisiveness we've ever seen. And, and then you know, actually in the shower one day, I was thinking about, I was thinking about my brothers, my three older brothers and my parents who are, who are everybody's have like really strong personalities. All them are actually bigger than me too. So there's like this size dominance as well. And, and you know, my way of being and existing in my family has always kind of been to take, take the low road, to sometimes like take an L on a conversation. Like present the, the potential that I might be wrong in order to further the conversation. You know, even when in my band in college, you know, I was the lead singer, but there was a really like ego heavy lead guitarist and, and I just had to like, I was, I was the last, last man in the group. So I kind of, you know, I just kept it humble and played, played my part in corporate as an introvert working in entertainment. You know, it took a while for me to figure out how do I get these smart things in my head out while having this leaning of wanting to like let. Let the loud people go first, you know. And so from that I was kind of like, why, you know, why aren't more people willing to just like list like, like give people a moment and let them share what they have to say, even if they disagree. And it was that, that was the inspiration that had me pair this idea of conversation cards that we had done for Oatley event. We had done like, just like we'd done like maybe 50 questions that we wrote specific for this Oatley event and got them designed. Like my boy designed it one night late when I was like freaking out. We got it printed the next day and then like went to this Event in la. And. And they were a hit. And all of a sudden, like, you know, the idea was like, man, I wish, like, I kind of want to make a cards for me, but I need it. I needed it to be like something that wasn't just creating cards or it wasn't just, you know, something that anyone else could have done. So the insight was, how do we get people to lower, lower their ego for a moment to hear the other side then like instrument or these like cards. And then it was like, but what's, like, what's the science behind it? And we started doing, doing research. We came across the 36 questions that lead to Love, which is a New York Times article that basically says that you start, oh, this is actually curious, by the way.
Lou: Boom.
Michael: And I was fidgeting with it. It's my fidget toy on interviews.
Michael: And it's basically that you use the 36 questions. You start at the first one, which is a light question, and you level up into more difficult questions gradually. And when do it. You fall in love. And then when I like read into it, there it was science backed. It was backed by. It was essentially theories created by Dr. Arthur Aaron, I want to say Suny Stony Brook. He's a, he's a conflict me, mediator and psychologist. And so, you know, we're. This is the deep cut. We got on calls. We got on calls with Mandy, the author of that article in the New York Times. We got on the phone with Dr. Arthur Aaron. Actually, I think we got on the phone with him once. We already had some prototypes of the questions. The questions for actually curious. The original game, it's essentially four levels that allow you to start light and level up as your group builds trust. And in it are, you know, just some fun questions, kind of like the ones that are and, you know, vulnerable questions that we took out of a romantic context, even if it were like, inspired by some of the questions in 36 questions that lead to Love. But we also tapped the UN Sustainable Development Goals, of which there are eight, and we started drafting questions that would level up conversations from that are like, relevant to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. And then we mixed them all up, leveled them up, like copywrote them so that they were fun and timeless and voila.
Lou: So I love that you didn't just be like, what's like, you know, 20 questions I could ask. Like, there's clearly like a lot more research and thought and like framework around what are we actually trying to accomplish with people asking these questions. And I'm sure That makes it. It's a better sell. Like it's. It makes it. There's more to it. There's more energy to it. There's more. It's easier to talk about. And I want to come back to the actual like nuts and bolts of that a little bit specifically for this audience because I think and I know I've spoken to people who have that that's almost like a dream of them. They want to create some kind of card deck or something, some product that is like with you know, whether it's questions or whether it's connection, whether it's practices like mindfulness or meditation practices. But I want to just come back and focus a little bit. I was going to ask you this question. You talked about values and that's something you have on your website. Helping people like find their values. And I think that's an. It's an important practice for anyone at any time in their life. I'm wondering for you specifically Michael. Do you the difference between your personal values and your business values. Do you find. Do you for. Do you have a difference like let's say Michael Tenet versus actually Curious like are those different values or is it so much you that it's just like a reflection of your own values?
Michael: You know, it's a good question because I think that's. That's in flux I think the last two years as a business coming you know out of you know the work that I do is just at a. At a. At its largest umbrella is spreading the practice of. Of empathy. The ability tools models that help you practice empathy. Skills that in many especially the some of the places that drive a lot of have driven a lot of the revenue for us is very adjacent to which has been under attack for the last two years. So that's all to say that at this point I Curiosity lab actually curious. It's kind of all one thing stemming out of me it's almost like a solopreneur with a bunch of tools. So yeah but I don't think that that is probably the best structure for this business. I do have a dream to that of being able to spin out actually Curious alongside other consumer products into a consumer product division. I'm blessed that we have five SKUs of actually curious now with a kids edition and some light icebreaker editions all like you so keenly noted have very specific thesis that they. That they deliver upon in terms of helping to practice empathy. But yeah, I think that it is prudent to when you have the space and you have the Resources to communicate and to really live those values separately to create the abundant opportunity of really delineating. But for now, yeah, I don't really contemplate any separate values for the businesses from my own.
Lou: Yeah, it's something that I've been thinking about recently way before having this conversation. I'm like, yeah, does a business have different values? Like, you know, in some ways that it serves me as personal. Is business different? Like there's some things that I, you know, value that maybe wouldn't serve the business. I don't know. So it's. Yeah, it's a good. Thanks for. Thanks for.
Michael: Yeah, I mean I can give you like even just like a specific where. Where I wish or I have questions, you know, actually curious. There are a lot of conversation games out right now. I mean since we created in 2018, I would say that like, you know, the cat's kind of out the bag. Like anyone who wants to make a conversation game just needs to Google. But I mean the reason I say that is that, you know, a lot of the audience that that has really, you know, supported actually curious and in a significant way has been
Michael: a general audience who have found out about it through press.
Michael: There are. It's been able to resonate a lot with middle America still probably liberal leaning middle America and female, slightly female skewing liberal America. Middle America.
Lou: Welcome to Insight Timer.
Michael: That I didn't know that it's definitely.
Lou: Yeah, that means definitely more female than male.
Michael: That makes sense. And wellness. Wellness in general, right?
Lou: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Michael: But I guess what I'm trying to paint is that I think that the audience for the conversation game sometimes we think is, is like a lighter aud than say the more, slightly more curious or advanced or maybe kind of committed personal development or professional development consumer. But after facing these headwinds and frankly be using my values to navigate them, that's like my number, my number one anchor in decision making is mindfulness meditation and then values. So every morning I meditate and then I write my purpose statement which is made up of my five core values at the top of my journal. And then I just give myself a loving free page. But even, even that just allows me to like root my intention and my values on a daily basis with a habit. And so you know, what I've found is and when you, you have multiple tools at times you really need to focus on the ones that are paying the bills that are driving revenue the most. And frankly, actually curious used to be 70% of our revenue and now it's maybe closer to like 40 or 30 with workshops and speaking and doing learning and development with corporate being. The thing that the market is telling me that as far as empathy and practicing empathy, the market is telling me that's your most mature audience base to kind of grow back out from. So the reason I went through all of that is I've started angling the way I market actually curious a little bit more to a professional audience. Educators, learning and development coaches, people who not only already resonate with the word empathy, but when they learn that these cards are also used to gamify teaching, growth, teaching, confronting difficult emotions, then I have a greater opportunity of converting them across. Across the suite of things with a narrower focus with the resources that I have today.
Lou: That's brilliant. And I hope people listening can kind of hear behind the story of kind of like a product market fit and having to go through navig. Navigating different audiences and seeing. Okay, well, this what I'm hearing from you, correct me if I'm wrong, it sounds like the earlier, maybe less devoted to their personal growth journey. Like they have this card. Maybe they're at a friend's house. Maybe they're having, I don't know, like a wine night. Not that it's supposed to pair with wine. And it's like, hey, we got these questions. And it's like it's almost sometimes people that don't have a lot of any of these conversations. I mean, Michael, we run in circles where I feel like having these type of conversations is pretty normal in some ways or normalized at least. But for people that it's new, it can be a big like, whoa. Like this was really nourishing. And I think it speaks to. We can always serve people at different stages of their journey. And then it just deciding at different times what is going to. What's the balance between serving that. But also where is our business wanting to take us and where are more opportunities that can. That can. Not that we don't have to totally let go of that. But it sounds like in shifting your branding and your copywriting, you'll still include that people will still find it. But you're also opening up this other maybe you know, just more opportunities, of course, within the training and leadership development and using. I could totally see how that's a big thing. I'm just. If you were to wave a magic wand, Michael, and you got to. You say this part, this product, right? You have your. You have your book too, which I know we haven't talked about this product or this thing Boom wave magic wand is bringing all my revenue or this amount of revenue and I don't have to do any of this other things that I don't want. Like what, what would that, what would that look like?
Michael: You said magic wand. If I have a magic wand. I mean I know the number but like it's not a magic wand number.
Lou: Well would like for example like I don't know, maybe sometimes I some and I don't think I actually want. Maybe I partively wants this, I want this to be happening. But I'd still do like one on one stuff. I definitely still would have a coaching practice to some extent. But sometimes I think man, if I can just have in some ways insight timer does this but not to the level that it's, that it's sustainable. Especially now as they change it things change. It changed things. But of like I just have courses that and have evergreen funnels and I like write a blog post when I feel inspired and I do create something when I feel inspired and it's just running in the background and I'm you know, making you know, 20k a month just through you know, the work that I've done and I don't have to do anything else. You know what I mean? Like that's kind of like a dream dream scenario in some ways.
Michael: I mean I think I have like two answers for this. There are three things I want you to know that this question sparked for me. One is it made me realize that I'm really grateful that I have stretched into enjoying enjoying teaching the five phases of empathy model. That is what underpins my corporate work. Whereas as an introverted leaning person, as someone who never sought to be say a coach or a facilitator or anything like that, it's taking me a while to feel in my like flow with it and like now I feel that and I'm really grateful for that. So I don't know like the and not need to do anything else doesn't resonate as much because I'm like I can really propel this movement to spread empathy. Like that's what I was put here to do. Somehow the other thing is then I realized that my goal isn't with actually curious is sometimes numeric but it's actually a reach of impact goal. I would love for at least 50% of this country to have at least one of our decks in their home. But then like the numbers one is a much more conservative answer because honestly like I have, I have my, my family, I have my wife, I have my Baby I have, like, my parents are still alive and healthy, even though we lost two of my brothers. I have good friends, much better social network than I'd had before. I managed to achieve the dream, paid for by actually curious, of buying a home. And I'm still paying for it, but I managed to achieve that. And there's just, like, all of these milestones that actually curious was one manifestation. But the process that through which it was manifested actually links back to values. And out of those values comes these really, really clear goals that are like, I want to own the home before. Before my baby is born, so that when she's born, she's living in the home that her. Her parents own. You know, and literally all of those things lined up, like, right in the same very tumultuous, like, interest rates were going up. Caroline and I are flying back and forth from Boston to Florida. She's four, then five, then six months pregnant. We're about to go to Copenhagen. We don't have the house. We're getting outbid. Interest rates are starting to go up more. And then we find the home, and then we hop on a plane two weeks later, and we go have our baby in Copenhagen, where Caroline's from. But I guess that's, like. It goes back to your first question, where it's like, sometimes it feels like I'm, like, riding an untamed Clydesdale or something. I don't know if those ever come untamed, but, like, you know, just like a horse that I can't, like, really. But the thing is, is it's going in the direction that I need it to go because the values anchor me on a daily basis.
Lou: What you're bringing up is having, you know, having those goals, having those mile markers. But you're reminding me in a sense that, you know, so often I think we get on this path and wanting to, what do I want? Like, what do I want this to be? Rather than asking, like, what does it want? Like, what does this thing, this opportunities platform that I have, what does it want out of me? Like, instead of it serving us, what if we're serving it? And how does that shift the awareness? How does that shift the humility that we might have around it in some ways? Or, like, you know, when we're. When it's asking us to maybe step into a new territory or something that maybe we don't feel like we love doing, but knowing that. Well, actually, if, you know, if my vision is, you know, to serve 50% and to get these cards out there, like, what Is that going to demand of me? It's probably going to demand me doing some things that, you know, if I sure, I can hang out and relax and chill and have some money coming in. But, you know, what we're here to do is really to serve or to make an impact. And so yeah, it just kind of clicked for me around shifting that, you know, what does it want? What does the business want? I think our business is its own entity. Like seeing it as its own entity is important. Which is why I asked the values question and letting it, you know, we talk about in group, right? Like the third body of the group. It's like there's this other entity here that we need to serve. And how does it, how does it grow? It's like a baby. How does it live up to whatever it can be? So let's come back just if we can get a little granular and I know people can Google it, but sometimes the best is to learn from the people that done it. Creating a card game, like the actual tactical. What would someone need to know? Like the back end is it, you know, does it simply as. Are there platforms that are doing it? I know you talked about, you know, coming up with some guidebook on like how to create your own deck or something. Like any feedback around that process just because I know people would be interested to hear.
Michael: Well, I think the very, very first thing is really coming up with an idea that's resonant.
Michael: I mean, I think that's 98% of the. Something that's unique is resonant, that has like a target audience.
Lou: I'll pause you on that. Is it is idea 98% because I don't know, there's a great article by a guy named Derek Sivers that talks about the idea execution lever of like actually an idea with no execution is worth nothing. Like a $20 idea with like 10% execution.
Michael: But I just mean if you already. What I mean is, if you already know, you're like, I'm going to make a card game, right? Yeah. The thing is it's kind of like a commodity. It's paper, it's just like it's paper, it's cardstock, right? So then like, it's like, you know, the funny thing is when I created the conversation game, I was like, I can't create meditation, I can't create water. I'm like, what is something that costs nothing that I can like that or close to nothing that I can like essentially imbue a brand into and make it worth something. And so if you already know that that's what you're. You're doing and like, I mean, go. Go to Target. You know, like, part of the reason why I sometimes get sensitive about talking about conversation games because is. Because. Is because it triggers like the scarcity within me, but that maybe we get there.
Lou: Thanks for naming it.
Michael: Maybe we'll get there. But because it's funny because before we went. I was wondering if. Before we went down this line, I was wondering if I bring up this because you were talking about serving the product and I wanted to say that it's actually bigger than that. It's like it's serving the universe. It's like asking, or at least for me, it's asking,
Michael: what can I leave behind? And like, what am I? What do I have? The skill sets, the assets, the money to. To be able to put that in motion. Because then, you know, other things come. But what else? Let's see. I mean, I just genuinely, like, if it's a. Like, how many tarot cards have you seen? Right. It's. There needs to be something breakthrough about the art or the creator or the direction before the thing is created in order for that thing to break through. So just to lean on the idea.
Lou: Totally, I hear you. In what's going to be. You're playing at a level, Michael, that is a different level than I think most people that are having this, at least currently, you're playing at this level of scale and you've proven it and you have this kind of substantial mark of what actually curious is. And I could also see this just as some people and some people see their book. There's two different roads. It's like, yes, you could be writing the next Atomic habits. You can, you know, I think you did amazing by having your tradition like a publisher and how you're using that now to like build your brand and business and workshop. And like, that can be very. I don't think you were fully strategical on it. I think there was like your heart wanting to share what you've come across. And you can come and say, just, you know, what, you know, I just want to share my story or I just want to write because this feels like a worthwhile thing. I want to create a card deck that sure, I can leave behind, but I'm just. It's going to be fun. Like people are going to, you know, I have my little business. I'm not looking to get into Target or, you know, any stores, but I have my shop on my website and I have my own Card game. And some of you know, the people that I'm connecting with to clients I given as a gift. So like, if you were to just shrink the scale of like someone who just kind of wants, hey, this is just a fun product for my thing where I don't, where I'm going to put myself into it in some ways. Like I'm going to put my art and creativity and ideas obviously into it, but it doesn't. Without needing it to be, I need to get this on the shelves of, you know, a bunch of stores. Does that make sense? Yeah.
Michael: You're saying like a hobbyist or like, like just like someone who may just be, you know, making another set of like cards that.
Lou: Yeah, hobbyist is one way. I mean, I could see it.
Michael: Like, I'm not, I don't, I'm playing, I'm playing.
Lou: I don't plan on doing it, but if I was like wanting to like, hey, I'm gonna make a card deck and I'm gonna put out my website and it's gonna be a fun thing that I give to people. And it's just like it adds to the value and adds to brand. It's something people can purchase. So it's like kind of in that small business, one person type of thing. Again, rather than I'm going to, you know, my vision is getting this out to stores across the country.
Michael: I mean, I don't know, I mean, you would think about what, like how many you want to create, what size cards you might pick up some similar products just to get some education. I mean, once you have an idea of what it is you want to produce, you're going to want to start researching vendors. You're going to have two macro options, domestic or international, international being China or India. And, and then you're going to want to get samples from them. Samples in pricing. You want to start building your business model. Like, how much are you going to charge for it? How much is it going to cost you? I think something that we didn't do, two things that we didn't do very well to start is, I mean, and I still don't necessarily do this very well is I don't factor in all the cost outside of production, like design costs. I mean, if you're really being meticulous, you might, you might kind of budget time too, but just,
Michael: you know, design, prototyping, etc, that, that kind of like, I can't help but think about it in a, in a like a more like kind of like holistic business model way. What else.
Lou: Like do I just go, okay, so I just say, hey, Google vendor for card deck and just do my research basically.
Michael: Exactly.
Lou: Yeah. Okay. Or vendor for card deck us, vendor for card deck International or China or. And then I go do my research, find, you know, talk to the reps that they have and go from there.
Michael: I mean, they're also probably local partners. I mean, truth is, at this point, most games, if you pick them up and target or wherever they're printing in China based on like we're printing in, in China. We design, we do everything else here. I mean even there's like the big dogs like bicycle, they do some like private label production as well. And yeah, of course, if anyone wants like privileged direct advice, I offer consulting where I give people advice on that specifically. But yeah, it's not that you can, you can kind of navigate it through. The thing is, is that there are mistakes that happen along the way sometimes like picking the wrong vendor. Once I printed from someone on Alibaba just trying to cut a corner, cut a deal or get it faster or something like that. And I ended up blowing a couple thousand dollars doing that and missing, missing my deadline for an event. So I mean, it's fairly simple. But if you are looking for kind of, hey, Give me your 10 years of experience and pitfalls or what have you and help me do that, then then just it's on my values that I get paid for that.
Lou: I love that. I love it. Yeah, if you're like really wanting to understand the intricacies, but I figured I wanted to inspire some people and just hopefully make it more doable or just sound a little bit more doable if you're just wanting to make it. And maybe there is an argument that if you're just doing it for the sake of it, for the heck of not for the sake of it, but you're just doing it because you think it would be cool rather than you actually have an idea that would be interesting and wanting to create that and maybe think twice, but maybe shifting now to the one that might bring up some scarcity for you, Michael, and thinking of someone who's maybe they already have a platform, maybe they're wanting to make reach, not necessarily in the how to's. You can hire Michael one on one for that. But how you've thought about the branding around. Maybe we talked about it a little bit with the values, but you mentioned, you know, some of that may be shifting and how you're talking about it. But like what, what do you think has been important around the Branding of actually curious and how it's expanded with the book. And you're welcome also to take this wherever feels inspired. I know that could be a broad question to answer, but you mentioned your part of the little inquiry that I have developing brands and products that have timeless potential. And so any insight around how does one do that, whether it's a par deck or whether it's their business in general?
Michael: Yeah, I'm trying to come up with an answer that's. That's better than that just is genuinely what I believe is my superpower is not wanting to. I'm really stubborn about moving forward until it feels really, really resonant.
Lou: I'm so let's double click on that. I think that's important. That's. That's interesting to think about because I tend to maybe not be as much like that meaning and I think of like reading like a Rick Rubin. I don't know if you read his recent book or Creative Act. I don't know if I talked to you about Rick Rubin before. But anyway, like he's always talking about really like continuing to refine like the art, the product, the album, like to like it's gotta be like you're continuing to just refine, refine, refine until it has that kind of energy. And I don't know what it is, but for me, I like ship and I go quick and I'm not as much of like waiting. So yeah, maybe just take through that experience because that might be helpful. I'm curious about it.
Michael: Yeah, I mean I think there's like a lot of life experience that comes into play. Like I was a philosophy major and an econ major. Both of those are these like habits and practices of putting premises together that lead to conclusions that are trackable almost over time. It's very much like what sparked curiosity in like human behavior and how to influence it in a positive way.
Michael: So. But, but, but the, but the, the simplest thing to take away from sharing all that is like almost anything in my, in my, in my whole world. It's. It's annoying for, for my wife because it's kind of like how I structure conversations sometimes that are like these like low key like. But it has to be like a logical like premise A plus premise B equals premise C. And so like anything I do also most often, and this is probably why I'm not so great at community building or like high volume communication is that I overthink it. Like what's the strategic goal of this piece of comms? And then what do we know about the audience that's intended that I should put here alongside this thing and then let me brainstorm some headlines and then let me like, which one of those feels like the best. And now let's like. And then let's review the whole thing and make sure that all of those bullets of that brief, that's how I write an email to, to an audience, let alone to create a product. It's often like, you know, a 10x like extrapolated version of that. Like for example, I told you about the original. Actually curious like the hot pink deck. The hot pink pink deck was actually like made shortly before you met me. But like when I was working through, trying to figure out how I was gonna heal from losing my brothers. And then I realized that they were so big a part of my self understanding, my self confidence, that they were almost like the way that I treated drugs and alcohol and sex. They were like these, these things that buttressed and filled in the cracks in my own self confidence. And so in order to survive, I had to learn how to spring that from, from the inside. And I'd also started dating my now wife and I was learning about genuine love and self love. And so I created a deck of questions that reverse engineered that process of learning how to discover where there were gaps in loving myself and how people find their genuine happiness intrinsically. And I basically reverse engineered that into 52 questions that help people find the things that make them happy. And we called it the happy hour deck because people are searching for games for game night or for like drinking night. So we wanted people to bring this wellness tool into that. So just to give you a sense of like the journey that then goes into 52 questions. Right?
Lou: Brilliant. It's brilliant.
Michael: But I guess, okay, so I mean, look, to me, to me that's important. But I think that, you know, I debate this with my wife all the time. She's like, you think we put too much effort into, into like these questions? Could we be churning out more decks if we didn't, you know, need it to be this like deeply intentional brief that gives birth to them. And for me, that's a no. But I think there are a lot of card games out there that have gotten more scale. That probably that's a yes. You know, you go check them out, then check ours out. And you see.
Lou: Michael, I think something that I know I'm kind of refining, as we always are, like, what are, what are the things that we help people with most? What is like the essence for you? You might Say empathy helping people connect or develop empathy and connection through the myriad of ways you do it. And I think more and more for me, sometimes it's around just trust. Like faith, I guess, or confidence is how I might package it sometimes. But to just help people continue trusting that if they're devoted, if they're aligned with their head, heart and gut and mind and spirit, that, that their dreams or their purpose or whatever it is like that they're cared for and that they're going to figure it out and just stay, stay in the game. And that's based on my own experience. Knowing your story, knowing your ups and downs. And how do you. How have you found the ability or the resilience? Resilience is a piece of this too, for sure. To trust even when things weren't going so right. And you're welcome to share specifics of like a point of that. But I'd be curious to hear how you think of trusting that it's going to work when you don't see it working or feel like the doubt of giving up and quitting. Because I've heard you talk about selling it or this, things that you've talked about before, you know, how have you. How are you still in it?
Michael: You mean from a, from a, from a business standpoint with. Actually. Curious?
Lou: Yes.
Michael: You like, I think or.
Lou: I think so. I don't know. What's the other standpoint? Like, I mean, you could see. Yeah, yeah.
Michael: Well, I mean, I was trying to, like a lot of times I talk about losing my brother Chris and that being my Kanye through the wire moment. It was a moment where, I mean, I don't know, maybe this is a lot. I think you and I have talked, talked about it. I don't think it's too much for your listeners, but I had like a serious casual cocaine habit when I lost Chris. And the Saturday night, he died on a Friday, the Saturday night afterwards, I thought I was going to od and I had to really humble myself. I called my ex, my ex girlfriend, whom, you know, God bless her, she's one of the best people who've ever entered my life. We're not, we're not very friendly today. But she stayed up with me and helped me stay awake so that I could feel like my heart rate was coming down. The combination of needing to like, get her help and losing my brother and feeling like I was going to die, it made me and, and, and then surviving that, it made me like rethink the short term decisions. The, the things that weren't Rooted in. In, like, loving myself and. And believing that I deserve to live. So I think that, like, I don't think everyone needs, like, a Kanye through the wire moment to make a shift, but I would say that, like, when things get really hard, I can remember, like, how hard that was and. And I can remember that. That I survived it. And then it kind of makes, like, everything else pretty easy, you know, having the ability to kind of look back at, like, how disconnected I was from my purpose and for myself. And now, like, just like, even, like, the subtlest things that my daughter does that are new and that show me gratitude, it means that, like, it doesn't fucking matter. The money part really, you know, it's. It's really about how it feels and that we feel safe and that we're so much of. And, like, we only touched on abundance, but so much of, like, what's been constructed around us societally is to, like, convince us that not all of us are deserving of safety and rest and space to love and play. And so we buy into that and then we, like. I mean, I'm kind of in it in a way. You know, I wanted the American dream, but now this house is my largest expense, which makes it, like, so that I can't just, like, hop and travel around the world. I gotta pay this mortgage. Excuse me. Am I allowed to curse on your show?
Lou: I didn't curse on here, man. There's no.
Michael: There's.
Lou: Yeah, no, no, no, no. We're welcome.
Michael: Don't bleep me.
Lou: Rogue spiritualists. No, for sure.
Michael: No, but. But I guess, like, with. With actually curious. I think. I think. I think. I think we know that we've built something really meaningful. It still continues. I used to have a publicist that supported it, and it still continues to get press just organically, because it's just a really thoughtful product, I feel like. And I feed myself with stories of resilience and survival. And one that's really good for the aspiring product makers out there is that. I don't know if you know. Do you know the story of Monopoly? No, I don't know it, like, verbatim, but I can tell you that it was made some, like, 30 years or so before it ever, like, broke into some sort of tipping point. And it was made by, like, a dad in his garage who just, like, made this board game. And he was quite zealous about it. He went out and he. But people didn't get it right away. And I feel like with actually curious. It's going to be this thing where, yeah, it's got its audience and it's finding people, but then one day, like. Like something is going to happen where millions of people get it. And it doesn't matter if you have a conversation game or what have you. It's like you need this one in your collection as well.
Lou: I'm so inspired by your story and love the story on Monopoly. It reminds me of similar with Paulo Coelho's the Alchemist. Like, it was. It sold nine. It sold like 900 copies and then was out of print and then somehow found a publisher and it became this, like, you know, one of the most famous type of, like, spiritual journey books. And you know, what you're speaking to, Michael, your story. Obviously everyone's story is going to be different around the wounds, the low points, the initiations into a different way of being. We all have to find it somehow. And those often when we reflect. Sometimes we need to do this more or I need to do this more. It's like, let's look back from whatever. For me, it was a moment, Memorial day weekend of 2014, of being up all night on ecstasy and not being able to fall asleep and just feeling like, what the heck am I doing in my life? And it was just like, it's a moment of clarity that led to a lot of other moments from that. But that was like one of the earlier ones that I remember. And if I actually like, zoom back, like 10 years ago, whoa, what the heck has happened? How much gratitude and appreciation. And so for anyone listening too, like, you know, for you, Michael, it was thinking of where you were back then, like, navigating that tragic loss or losses to here being like, whoa. Yeah. So for whoever's listening, like, yeah, when you're struggling, totally look back, like you're on this path, you're probably a lot better off in some ways. Maybe things aren't working financially, but trusting that you were cared for in different ways. So, yeah, really beautiful, Michael. I really appreciate you sharing your heart.
Michael: Can I share one other way? I've been framing this journey, particularly as it relates to this purpose of spreading empathy, is that I got brought into this and called into this work four, five years ago now, like a refined version of it, I made the game in 2018. But where the pieces of, like, wanting to use it to gamify, teaching people to be with their difficult emotions, teaching somatic experiencing, teaching perspective taking, teaching conflict mitigation.
Michael: That was five years ago, right? I graduated college in 2020. So that was. Wait, sorry, 2000. Sorry, 2000. Four, 2004.
Lou: I was like, I thought you were way older than I thought you were.
Michael: Yeah, sorry, yeah. At this point, dates in the past. Right. But 2004, so that's 20, 21 years ago. Right. So I've been working for 21 years. I've found my purpose five years now. Now I want to do this until I'm old. I want to do this until I'm in my 80s. I get to live my purpose for the next 40 plus years. All that stuff that I've been talking about, that like, exciting thrill ride of waking up every day and like, knowing that I'm going that way, you know, that's it.
Lou: Like, amen. Preach. That's. That's the message right there. It's like, wow, we've only been doing this for this much time. Like, we got so much longer to go. Oh, man. Thanks for that, Michael. Any last words or anywhere else you want to point people to from my audience?
Michael: Yeah, just check us out at CuriosityLab IO where you can find all of our products that will help you to connect better to yourself, to one another, and hopefully to unlock abundance in society. And follow me at Michael Tennantnyc on all platforms.
Lou: Michael Tennant nyc, who lives in Florida. He's a little. He's on a shady moves on there. No, no, I'm just messing with you. Thanks, Michael.
Michael: Born and raised. I'm not giving up my New York card and I might be coming back.
Lou: Oh, interesting. Thanks, Michael. And yeah, go check them out and go reach out, leave a comment if you have an idea for a card or something, reach out to us and go hire Michael to help you bring it to existence. All right, thanks, friends. Take care.
Michael: Thank you.