Behind the Brand with Bryan Elliott

From the Behind the Brand archive: originally published August 12, 2022.

On co-founder Olivier Bernhard joins Bryan Elliott to share how a lifelong runner and champion triathlete set out to create a different running experience—and helped build a challenger brand.

This is a replay of the original conversation. Business details and any sponsor mentions or offers in the recording reflect the original release and may no longer be current.

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Tomi Mikula spent more than a decade inside dealerships. Now he negotiates against them for a $1,000 flat fee. Here is when to buy, where your money disappears, and how to walk out with the deal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The company has no foam experts on staff.

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

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

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

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Vanessa Van Edwards studied hundreds of Shark Tank pitches and spent nearly 20 years on her new book, Conversation. Her verdict on smart founders is blunt. Here is what her playbook says about winning the room, and how she built a business where the book is the smallest piece.

Vanessa Van Edwards walked into a PTA meeting at her daughter's school and saw the problem in one glance. Every parent in the room was staring at a phone.

"Now my conversation is competing with their feed," she told me.

"How's the weather?" loses to Instagram every time. To win, her opener has to beat the feed today and give the other person a reason to stay off the phone next time, too.

Van Edwards founded Science of People, teaches at Harvard, and wrote Captivate and Cues, an instant Wall Street Journal bestseller. More than 75 million people have watched her on YouTube and in her TEDxLondon talk. Her new book, Conversation: How to Connect with Anyone and Make Every Interaction Count, came out from Portfolio on October 6. Vanessa told me that she researched the book for almost 20 years and kept holding the manuscript back. Then AI arrived, and she rushed to publish. We talk to our technology more than we talk to each other, she argues, and we have become "conversationally flabby."

She calls conversation skills career insurance in the age of AI. Master conversationalists get remembered faster, she told me. When an idea, an opportunity, or an invitation comes up, their names come to mind first.

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She sold her first AI startup, then started posting TikToks. Her mom asked if she had run out of money. I believe the best way to learn anything is to model the people who are doing what you want to do at a high level. 

Steal a page from Sabrina’s playbook and your chances of making your first million with AI are high. 

When Sabrina Ramonov started posting TikTok videos, her mom had one question. Had she run out of money?

From a Silicon Valley point of view, the question made sense. Ramonov, then Sabrina Atienza, co-founded Qurious.io, an AI speech-analytics company, and sold the company to Pegasystems in January 2021. Forbes had already named her and her co-founder, George Ramonov, to its 30 Under 30 list in enterprise technology. Founders with an exit on the books rarely start filming themselves without makeup or fancy filters for strangers on the internet. "People thought I was being weird and cringe," she told me.

Build the tool you need

Ramonov does not love making content and she’s honest and unapologetic about it. She loves building, learning, and teaching. She is a phenomenal teacher. In my experience, being a great teacher requires equal parts patience and empathy. The “soft skills.” But these skills are hardly soft anymore as self-awareness, honesty, vulnerability and relatability are the new currency. Content is the tax she pays to reach millions of people. So she built software to cut the tax.

"I built it for myself because I'm really lazy with content creation," she said.

The tool is Blotato. On a typical Saturday, she batches 14 to 20 TikTok videos. Blotato works with AI agents, like ChatGPT and Claude, to automatically schedule social media posts across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Threads, X, Bluesky, and Substack. When a viewer comments a keyword, Blotato sends the prompts or resource they asked for via DM automation. The Starter plan costs $29 a month for 20 social accounts. She priced Blotato for the solo business owner "in the grind trying to make it work."

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James Dumoulin built one of the biggest interview brands on the internet by walking up to strangers and asking how much money they make.

He co-founded School of Hard Knocks in 2021 with his brother Jack and friend Joshua Smith. The early channel gave business advice and stalled around 25,000 followers. So James flipped the format. He started cold-approaching millionaires and billionaires on the street, pointed the camera at them, and let them talk. His 2022 Mark Cuban interview changed everything.

Today School of Hard Knocks reaches more than 17 million followers and over 4 billion views across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. The clips run under five minutes. The business behind them runs on four engines: ad revenue, brand partnerships, high-ticket consulting, and School of Mentors, a paid community of nearly 6,000 entrepreneurs. In August 2025, James reported his biggest month yet, with 700,000 dollars in revenue and 400,000 in profit. At 23, he became a millionaire and put his first major check into a 200-unit apartment complex in Texas.

In this conversation, we cover the pivot, the real hit rate on cold approaches, the money behind the views, and what hundreds of interviews with the wealthy taught him about building wealth of his own.

Follow James and School of Hard Knocks: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theschoolofhardknocks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/realjamesdumoulin/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@theschoolofhardknocks

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Brendan Kane built a social media following of one million people in 30 days. Not with a big budget. Not with a team of 40 like Gary Vaynerchuk. Just relentless testing and a framework most people overlook entirely.

Kane is the founder and CEO of HookPoint and the author of three books: "1 Million Followers," "Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a Three Second World," and "The Guide to Going Viral." He has spent over 20 years decoding what makes content break through on social media, and his findings might surprise you.

In this episode, we dig into why storytelling is the only metric that matters, how formats rooted in 1920s entertainment still dominate today's feeds, and why 99% of creators are focused on the wrong things. Kane explains the science behind the three-second hook, what the algorithm is actually looking for, and how a creator with 10 followers can outperform one with 10 million.

We also get into the costly mistakes brands and entrepreneurs make when trying to grow on social, why copying what works for someone else usually fails, and how to find the format that fits your personality and goals before you create a single piece of content.

If you are trying to build a personal brand, grow an audience, or figure out why your content keeps falling flat, this one is for you.

Brendan Kane | HookPoint.com

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Robert Greene has sold over twenty million copies of The 48 Laws of Power. His books are favorites of rapper 50 Cent and millions of people trying to get a grip on the dynamics of power. They've also been banned in prisons. He doesn't lose sleep over any of it.

In this episode, Greene takes me through the winding road that led to his first bestseller: 60-plus jobs, years living across Europe, a brutal rejection from a magazine editor, a stint in Hollywood watching power moves play out up close, and finally, a sunny afternoon in Venice where he improvised the pitch of his life to a book producer he'd just met.

Greene talks about why making yourself indispensable is the most important of his 48 laws, and what that actually looks like in practice. Don't make people like you. Make them need you. Spread your roots across a company, build a skill set nobody else has, and become the person who's too costly to lose.

He also gets into how he's handled critics throughout his career, the difference between knowing your life's task and being a con artist, and why every bad boss, dead-end job, and rejected manuscript ultimately ended up in his books.

His newest book at the time of this recording was The Daily Laws. Nothing in his career, it turns out, was wasted.

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