How Gareb Shamus Built Comic-Con and Changed Pop Culture Forever

I do really believe 100% from every part of me that everyone has the capacity to be able to do the things that they want and not to be held back by the mental baggage that's in our head that we want to push through.

Welcome to the do the Thing podcast. In each episode, we get down and personal with people who go after the things they want to make all their wildest dreams come true. Join us as we unveil and dissect a formula for what it takes to do the thing. Here is your host, Stacy Lauren.

Hello, everybody. This is, like, such an exciting day. Hey, Carmen. Good to see you. Such an exciting day. So one of the things that. Hey, Bri, how are you? One of the things that happened when I was in the middle of, like, experimenting with the do the Thing for formula and doing the TEDx talk was really starting to really uncover people that have built these, like, really massive movements, you know, and been able to take it from, like, just an idea in your head to. To being able to bring it out. And so, anyway, it's been. It's been exciting to explore that. And then suddenly I met Garib, who is amazing. We've had an opportunity to talk a couple times prior to this party. Just so you know, Garrett, we call these my people parties. What is a my people party? It's basically when you have a goal of something that you're wanting. We kind of just gather around it, and so it just becomes this really fun conversation amongst people. And so anyway, that's what we're basically going to get to do today. And everyone I know was really excited to hear your story and then also the new projects that you're working on. But I'd love you to maybe we can start off, have you introduce yourself and maybe just share even that. I loved hearing the thread from the magazine to everything there, so maybe just going into a little bit of that, too. So welcome.

Oh, thank you. Thank you, everybody. So nice to meet you all and see you all. Yeah. So my name is Garab Seamus, and I've been in the superhero world my entire life. I've collected sports cards and comic books. As a kid, I had three brothers. So it became such a big family business and hobby that my mom wound up opening up a sports card and comic shop when I was a kid. So it was literally like having a candy store in the family. And I was very blessed. I had a very fun, amazing childhood and very loving family. And when I went to college, I became an expert in desktop publishing. When it first Started emerging. I. So we're talking about mid to late 80s here. And I wound up collecting. You know, we wound up, I was selling ads for the newspaper. I did very well selling ads that we went completely desktop. So I became an expert in Apple computers. And then we had laser printers and all that. And then when I graduated college, it was 1990, couldn't get a job. It was a terrible economy. So I wound up working in the comic shop. And I really did not like working directly with customers. I didn't like the one on one kind of stuff. I really felt like there was something bigger there. And I had an Apple computer and a photocopy machine. So I started farming out articles to be written by some of our customers who were literally high school kids. And the guy that ran the comic shop was like a comic genius. And he and I, and we put the whole newsletter together about comic books and our sales went through the roof. So this was literally 1990s. Then by 1991, I decided I wanted to turn it into a magazine, you know, that we were really, we were really helping fans figure out what comics were coming out. And we knew ahead of time what was coming out because we were on the, on the retail side of it. And there was no Internet back then, so there's no place to find out this stuff except through the trade. So we were able to take this trade information and make it very consumer friendly. So I started a magazine called wizard. And in the summer of 1991, and it was a tough sale. I mean, people were like, we don't need this. I'd give it to them, free copies, they'd hand it back to me. It was really tough. But we were getting some of the biggest names in comics to do covers for us. So we still had some way of reaching the fans and the distribution of it. And then about a year in, just about a year less in, these seven artists that worked for Marvel were all really, really big names at the time. And they decided to leave Marvel and start their own company. And this was in 1992. And there was no Internet, there was no mobile phones. There's no way to find out what was going on. The world did not care about what was going on in the comic book industry except for my magazine. And we went from literally 20, 25,000 copies a month in sales to over 2, 300,000 copies overnight. I mean, it was just extraordinary how everybody, the only place to find out what was going on was through my magazine. And then by the mid-1990s, we were doing about 400,000 copies a month. We were in 75 countries in a dozen languages and decided to throw a party for our fans called a comic con. And 20,000 people showed up. I mean, it was this really, it was a really magical experience because being a geek or a nerd back in those days was literally a very derogatory term. I mean, like, if you wanted to make fun of someone or belittle them, you can call them a name or you can call them a geek or a nerd. And that was trying to make someone feel bad about themselves. So I used to joke, we might as well put a sign outside that says geeks and nerds inside. Enter at your own risk. You might catch something. And so, yeah, so it was really incredible because it was a place where all these disenfranchised people were able to come together and feel like they belonged. And we didn't care who you were, what you look like, what you did, how much you were worth. If you liked comic books and superheroes, you were welcome here. So that's how it got.

That's unbelievable. It's just incredible how like, you like connected people together. Right. That didn't feel connected and you, you created a, like a space for acceptance. You know, also, and I'd love to know, like you mentioned. It's funny, when we first talked, I didn't hear this part. So it's cool that where people actually said, we don't need this to like, then what happened? Like, what was that? How did, how did that connect? How did that work? You know, like where it's like, like nobody got it, you're trying to do it for free, and then all of a sudden it's like, boom.

Yeah. So like in a lot of industries there's always like the old guard and then the new people coming up. And I was a 21, 22 year old kid, you know, even though I have the demeanor I have now, I mean, I really had an ego. And back then to where like nothing could stop me. Like, I didn't care what anybody thought. Like, I knew that this is what people wanted. I saw it firsthand in our store. Like how, how many, you know, thousands of percent. Our comic book sales went up when people had this information in their hands. So I knew that the only way I was going to make it work was to get the fans to get behind me. So I had kind of like this fight that was going on, which was retailers had to buy my magazine and ordered in advance. And yet it was only based on what they thought they could sell not based on the demand from the fans. So I had to run a campaign in the magazine. Our entire campaign was tell your friends, tell your retailer, do everything we could to get the fans to tell their friends to demand it. And that's really was the big thing. And then our big break happened when these guys left Marvel and I had another issue which was we had the three biggest artists in the world at the time. They were going to be doing sequential covers to our magazines for our 10th, 11th, and 12th issue. And I knew that our 13th issue was going to be very challenging because our sales were going to go up tremendously, and I didn't want them to fall back off the cliff. So I was like, what can I do in the 10th, 11th, and 12th issue that was going to get people to continue buying the 13th, regardless of what they originally purchased the magazine for to begin with? So I came up with this idea of doing trading cards. And we would do trading cards, and issue 10 would have card number one in it, and issue two would have card number two, and then card number three. So by the time the 13th issue came out, it had the fourth card in it. And knowing that we dealt with collectors, it was like, you have to have the card number four. You're going to just stop collecting all of a sudden. So that really worked out very well. It didn't drop off that much. And then that gave us a lot of the breathing room to build the campaign more, because by this point, a lot of people were starting to read our magazine and the retailers knew they had a, you know, order more copies to keep up with it. And, you know, we were just kind of off to the races there. But. But a lot of it was like, leveraging our fans to. To our benefit.

Yeah. I mean, it really spark. It speaks to the spark of, like, you, like, not listening to the noise of people saying, like, no, we don't want this, you know, and you, like, kind of like tapping in so deep in your heart of knowing what people wanted.

Yeah.

You were able to keep going through that hard time. And then. And then the fans saw that, you know, like, they felt it. Right. The passion behind it.

And. And then what happened was we started selling more than, you know, 95% of the comic books out there in terms of our units. So all of a sudden we started having an impact on sales, and there was no greater impact that we could have had than affecting people's bottom line. Because if we recommended a book, people bought it, and if they went from 20,000 to 30,000, that was a 50% increase. And if we took something that nobody knew about to 50,000 or 100,000, all of a sudden, not only the retailers had to see what we were doing because they had to prepare for the onslaught of fans asking for it. And then it created a situation where every single creator, comic book artist, writer company wanted to have us feature their stuff because they knew the impact that we would have. And then once I started feeling that power, I definitely wielded it, but I wielded it in a way that was to their benefit, which was. And which was. I used to. It's going to sound funny, but I would tell people, if you didn't give us the information first, I didn't care, I don't want to hear about it. So if somebody wanted to break a new book or a new comic or a new toy, you name it, and they didn't give us the information first or they decided they wanted to give it to somebody else, we said, fine, we're just not going to cover it. And, and then that. What happened was if that happened, people like, they wouldn't sell, so they needed to come back to us. So I really leveraged that hammer in a big way, but it was actually to their benefit because if we got the information first, we actually used it to help them to tell everybody what was going on. So it was kind of interesting that even though we were, we were like a golden velvet hammer, you know, over everyone's head, because we really had such a big impact and if you worked with us, you got the whole benefit of that. And that was really. And so that became really special in the sense that we helped so many first time companies, publishers, artists, writers get their first break. We used to call it the, I used to call it the mommy factor. And because all these people that created comics or toys or games or especially comics, they felt like everybody around them in their family or friend group would think that they were wasting their time or what are they doing with their life. And when all of a sudden they could show their picture or their creation in our magazine. And knowing that everyone in the world in 75 countries were going to see this, they could go back to their mom and say, look what I did. And it kind of validated who they were. And it gives me goosebumps today every time I meet with people that we helped get started and they tell me the impact that we had at that first very moment of inception of what their products were and how we were able to give them the boost that they needed. At the right time in their lives.

Wow. So you gave them a platform almost like to share their voice through art. And then that helped them kind of build the confidence up. And that almost like reignited them into the core of what you were building.

Absolutely. Because it was also a world dominated by Marvel Comics and DC Comics and they were starting to get very, very popular. And when these image guys left, they became much, much stricter about creator rights and giving equity in the characters. And then they started eventually working on the movies and they didn't want to have to pay royalties to the creators. So what we really helped facilitate was this extraordinary movement towards the creator economy actually. Because if a comic wasn't published by Marvel or dc, it almost had no secondary value to it. So what we almost did was we not only validated people's purchase and investment in there, we also enabled people to believe that a comic book that's not published by Marvel or DC is worth something. And we really helped validate the creator owned economy and really pushed it and told fans it's okay to buy something that's not Marvel or dc. And that was so transformative, I think in the whole world. I mean we were on the forefront of so many trends and movements here. That is one that when I look back of what I helped happen over the years, the, one of the biggest ones is the creator rights and, and really pushing for people to own and to own their own creations and to benefit from the success that they could create and then giving them a platform to make that happen. Because you gotta, because you remember there was no social media, there was no cell phone cameras, there was no social media, there was no Internet that people. There was no Internet. Like there was, there was nothing out there for someone to be able to do this on their own. Everybody was dependent on some form of media or distribution that was owned by somebody else.

Wow. So what do you think? Like helped them feel safe to be themselves and like what you were creating.

So the thing that was that, that helped create that kind of safeness was the voice of the magazine. We were a magazine that was produced by teenage slash, early 20 year old guys. And we were not afraid to speak our voice in our voice. So we were self deprecating. We talked like we were your best friend telling you what to do. We had the toilet humor. We got in trouble for making fun of things. We had all those kind of irreverence that unfortunately today it'd be hard to get away with. But back then we just didn't care because there were no rules. There was no. I didn't have a boss, and I was in my 20s, and I'm like, this is fun. And as long as we were making money, literally nobody could tell us what to do. So we were very, very true to our voice. And if someone didn't like it and they wanted to pull their advertising, well, then pull your advertising. I didn't care. Like my allegian was to the fans who bought us. And when people knew that we were their friend and that we told them. When we liked something, we told them. When we didn't like something, we told them and shared with them stuff that they would never find out otherwise. We made them look good because they could read our magazine or come to our comic Cons, discover something, and then share it with their friends. And then all of a sudden, they look like they knew what they were doing. So that was also a very big part of what we do. And I actually talk about that as well as one of the things that. That really drove a huge amount of success for us, which is what I call the discovery, which is us discovering. Us discovering things and then sharing it. And that made our fans feel like they were. They saw something first, and when they could share it with their friends and their network, they'd be like, oh, wow, I got to pay attention to this person because, you know, they're sharing stuff with me that I wouldn't have known otherwise. And. And it really elevated them in their friend group.

Wow. Oh, that's brilliant. Yeah. I wonder too, if it's like part of that, like where all of a sudden they didn't feel alone anymore. You know, like everyone's kind of like in their own vacuum, you know, like liking comic books and all the things, right. And then maybe the people around them aren't understanding what they're doing. Right. And then all of a sudden, they meet all these other people that are into it too. And now all of a sudden it's like that connectedness now also makes you stronger because you realize you're part of something much bigger.

Yeah, that's exactly what the comic Cons did for us up until this point. Reading a comic book was a very lonely experience because it was very looked down upon, so it wasn't something somebody did in public. So, you know, that whole kind of stigma of the kid that lives in the parents basement of the house, like, that was literally how people thought of you if you said that you were into comics. The other ironic part of that is people thought you were stupid. You know, when you read Comic books, like, oh, they're reading picture books. When in fact, it was actually the opposite, which is your reading comprehension skills were through the roof, because comics discussed a lot of science and math and physics and all kinds of social issues and interpersonal relationships. I mean, it. On steroids, right? So it. It actually was the opposite of what most people thought. And when the Comic Con, when we did our Comic Con, that to me, is when the movement really started. Because up until that point, if you were reading comic books, you thought you were doing something wrong with your life. You thought that you had to keep it hidden. You were kind of shying away from the world of what you were involved with. And then when you showed up at the Comic Con for the first time and you saw all these people that had the same interest that you had. And in a lot of cases, you saw people there that you knew, but you had no idea they were also into comic books or superheroes. Because it was, you know, because this, the first one that we did was in Chicago. So you got to see people that you knew there too. And it was across every socioeconomic background. It was lawyers and accountants and teachers, and it was people that worked in fast food, and it was kids that did paper routes. I mean, it was. The whole gamut of people were there. But you all of a sudden, for the first time in your life, you felt good about something that you were doing. And that, to me was the critical part of what changed is the self confidence. And that to me, is what changed everything in life. Because to me, Spider man has always been the same. Right? So when I first started reading Spider man or when he first started to today, Spider man has always been Spider Man. He hasn't really changed as a character. He's always stood for what he stood for. But what was it about that world that changed? And it was the perception of the people that are into Spider man that had a change. And the first step of that needed to be the self confidence of the person who liked the characters. It had to start from within. And once people went from I don't want to talk publicly about what I do to then speaking very proudly about what I do, all of a sudden, that tonal shift started to change. And that was kind of the germ of how things started to switch. For being into superheroes going from not cool to cool, that to me, is the core origination of that happening.

It's so interesting because I know when I was thinking about you this morning, and I'm like, I was excited to talk to Dive deeper. I was thinking of how cool it was that you created the space of acceptance so people didn't feel alone anymore. But what I'm hearing now is it was so much bigger than that. And I'm getting chills thinking about it. You got people to accept themselves, you know, and then that then led into this. This whole thing. It was like. It was like both. You know, you got them to accept themselves and then accept each other, which then led to all of this.

Yeah, absolutely. Because, you know, from the outside looking in, everyone thinks, oh, Spider man went from not being cool to being cool. But that's. That's not what happened. It had nothing to do with the characters. Right. Because to me, they were always cool. Spider man was always a cool character. Right. Spider man never changed. It's that perception. And like you said, it really did come from within. Then that's when it started to change. And that's when also as the demographics got older. So when I started, the average age of my person who read my magazine was about 14, 15. And we were almost aging year for year. So five years old. We were five years old. Our average age was 19 to 20. And we were getting a lot of new kids, but we weren't losing anybody. And then what was happening was if someone started when they were 20 and now they're 25, all of a sudden those people started getting jobs at the studios and the television networks and the video game and the toy companies. And that's when their influence started taking root. And that's why it took decades for there to be that shift. Because as these kids grew up and started being decision makers at these companies, or let's say they read scripts for a big producer, all of a sudden they were deciding behind the scenes which scripts they were going to read first or which ones they were going to recommend higher. And if they had an affinity towards a superhero character versus some drama. Right. They were going to put the superhero project on top. Right. So all those kind of subtle things took a long time, but eventually they started taking root.

Wow. So good. Okay, guys, I'd love to open it up. I'm seeing a lot of love in the chat. And then feel free if you're on Facebook also, but why don't we just share any takeaways or just like, oh, my gosh. And feel free to. To just, like, raise your hand or your zoom hand. And Jared, with the. With the bomb of the. He gave a megaphone to the muted. Amazing.

This is phenomenal. I have now heard the story that actually Played the origin story role for a group of individuals I. I love immensely. And they're from Texas. I'm in Texas. I'm from Texas. Garb. I. I am 100 confident at some point in time. You have heard of Dream Con, right?

Where is that?

Intensive.

Yeah.

Yes. And that's RDC World, y'.

All.

If y' all don't know who that is. What he did for the comics, they have done for the manga, which is Japanese comics. And to hear everything that he expressed all came down to identity who he was and who he was not going to compromise, not being. To giving others an opportunity to be the same. And he wasn't doing it because it was, oh, I want to change the world. It's like, man, I don't want to be the only one. And he wasn't. So to actually show up the way that he did in business community and everything compounded over time. This is all compound. Then the infiltration, because those same individuals were in their twenties and whatnot, now working at. I mean, technically now Disney, but Marvel and Lucas and all of this stuff is like, whoa, whoa, what happened? Garob is the godfather.

Oh, thank you. You know, it reminds me of a story I was pitching. This very, very big advertising agency. I was finally able to get a meeting, and they owned a lot of. They handled a lot of brands, like consumer products, like soft drinks and sports apparel and all kinds of stuff. And I was able to kind of pull this meeting together, and they just kept inviting more and more people. And I get into this big conference room, and, I mean, no joke, there's probably close to 20 people here, at least eight, nine deep on each side and two or three in front of me. And I give this presentation about. About comics and superheroes and, you know, how they should be advertising their brands. And while I'm talking through this presentation that I'm doing, you can hear the snickering and the laughing, and they're just. They're literally laughing at me right to my face. Like, it's. We're in a conference room, and they're whispering and laughing, and, you know, and they literally say to me at the. You know, during the meeting, they're like, how could we put our cool brands alongside these superheroes? Like, literally, like, how could we ever mix the two in a way? And, you know, and I left and got no business out of it. And, you know, and I remember leaving that room and saying to myself, you know, not. There was, like, no doubt in my mind. Like, I'm like, I can't believe how not one of them knows what they're doing. Not, like, how do I. Did I miss something? But how do they. Every single person there. Don't, don't. Not one of them knew anything. And, you know, so. Yeah, so you need. I needed that kind of self confidence in what we were doing to kind of put up with. And I had lots of those meetings, but that one in particular, you know, because they were literally laughing in my face, you know, while I was there.

Yeah.

Wow. Stacey, wouldn't that make him like Steve Jobs originally with the iPhone?

Yeah, you know, it's. It's having the vision when other people don't have it yet.

And.

And like, I know I've gone through that personally, like, for the last, like, six months as I've been getting the challenges out. And literally, I hear people, I'll say, like, this is gonna save your, like, save, not save, but, like, this is really gonna help. Like, everything that you're doing, just plug this challenge into your thing. And they're like, they don't. They don't understand it. And it's like, I almost felt like. And I don't know how. How you felt, Gara, but, like, the visual that I keep doing sometimes, especially when I'm in large groups of people and they don't understand what I'm saying. It's a. Like, I have tape on my mouth and like, I'm trying to talk, but they, like, can't hear me, you know?

Right.

And I'm like, how do you transmute that so then they hear, but it sounds like you figured out, had to tap so deep into your own, you know, like, desire that you weren't able. It didn't bother you, or I don't know if it bothered you, but if it didn't.

Yeah, yeah, I knew that. That it was a percentage game for me, which is. Which is. And I always joke that whatever room I walk into, I'm the biggest failure in the room on a percentage basis. Now, my wins are big, but I would. I would. I would send a hundred emails out and get a couple of responses. So my hit rate was 2%, 3%. You know, I'd lose 97% of the time, but I took a lot of chances. I spoke to every single person I could speak to. I sent emails or calls, everybody I could possibly call. I used my platform as a way to call every head of every studio, every video game company, every toy company. I made sure that we sent magazines to every single PR person in the business. We just needed to be ubiquitous. And. And we failed a lot. But. But what I did do was I worked really hard for and with the people that wanted to work with me. So I wanted to use them as a shining example of what we can do. And all those people. And by the way, that's. That's exactly. I know how a company is going to do based on how they used to react to us. I knew a company would fail if they wouldn't work with us, and I knew they would succeed if they worked very well with us. And I knew they'd be mediocre if they just worked a little bit with us. I could see it because I talked to everybody. I knew how it was going to happen. I use this example a lot. I talk to people. I use this example. I don't tell people most because it's like one of my little secret gems. But I'll tell you guys, I think of every industry as a game of chess. And every single person here, you could look at the business you're in. You know who the king is, you know who the queen is, you know who the pawns are. You know the people that move linear, the people that move diagonal, the people that move crooked. Right. You know all those people or companies in your space, you know them all. So you know how they're going to move based on how you react. They're going to be aggressive, they're going to be defensive. And you play chess enough that you know how those people are going to work and react. So I can go into almost any industry ever, like, moving forward, and I identify the pieces on the chessboard, and once I know who the pieces are, I know how the game is going to go. And it's just a really great way of figuring out the world that you're in by just identifying the pieces on the board and how they move and how they're going to react to your moves.

It almost helps you from hearing you say that. It's almost also like you're able to almost not be personally attached to the outcome either, because you're able to, like, kind of trick your brain to look at it as a game of chess, which I love that. I think that's brilliant.

Yeah. Yeah. So. So, like, the. The new company that I started, there's. There's two parts to it. One of them I'm going to go over very quickly because the second part is the part where we. I had this kind of eureka moment. So when I got out of the Comic Con business, my brother and I produced 200 comic consultants. We've probably sold 5 million tickets. We've reached billions and billions of people around the world. And not just affected the geek and nerd culture, but also I think all culture of companies that want to speak to their fans and how they do that and how they need to now respect their audience and their fans and speak to them a certain way and treat them with a certain level of respect. And it's everything from Pizza Con to Beautycon, you name it. Everybody's created their conversion, you know, of their worlds. So a lot of them wanted us to, a lot of the agents and managers wanted us to keep going with the celebrities because we, we spent a lot of money in the celebrity talent. So I started a company called Star Picks to do celebrity autograph trading cards. So I'll show you a whole bunch of them. So this is Patrick Stewart. I created a company called Star Pick. So he hand signed every card. They come encapsulated, they're notarized, they're in these tamper proof UV protected holders. Everything's got QR codes. There are different gold versions of the card. So. And they're all different values. This is Mark Hamill. This one's probably about a $1200 card because he's hard to get. So one that's a little bit more topical. Nicholas Holt, he plays Lex Luthor in the new Spider man and the new Superman movie that just came out. So we did a signing with him. We did Hal Berry, she was awesome, super sweet. We did Megan Fox and we're working with a ton. Oh, here's a couple cool ones. We did Robert De Niro, all hand signed on card, Paul Rudd. And then I'm going to show you one too that we never showed anybody. But I'm going to show you. I just put it on Instagram today. We did a signing with Ozzy also that we never released yet. He loved the cards because we did these dual cards of him. And so we did a signing with him late last year in person. He loved the cards and it was just, it was a very wonderful experience. So you know, at some point we'll release them but not, not now. And so we started that and we're off to a, you know, we're building out the whole, we built out our whole distribution network. Got a couple hundred thousand people in our database already. We built our Shopify store. I've got my fulfillment company in Texas. I've got the company that does the grading and authenticating. So we're all set on that. But something very interesting Happened because I happen to also be a professional artist myself. I started painting about 10 years ago. This is one of my paintings and I do individual drops of paint and my pieces. This one probably has about 12,000 drops. And I use very similar to pastry tools that I dropped them. So my brother says to me because of the card business, he goes garab, can you, can you do, can you paint, make paintings the size of a trading card? And I was like yes. So I started making trading cards using my, my drops of paint. There's another one that I did purple. And then the company that does the, the authentication, I had them build me a special holder for my art. So now I do. So now I've been making fine art trading cards. And the fine art market is twice the size of trading cards, sports cards, comic books and coins combined. And there's probably five times the number of collectors. And even more importantly there's 25 million artists in the world. And I saw that what was going to happen is that as we go very digital, there's going to be a push towards human made. And I have an affinity towards artists because I've been working with thousands of them over my life. And how do we create an opportunity for artists to create collectible, portable, tradable entry point art for them? And all of a sudden that doesn't have a stigma, that there's no, you know, there's no intimidation factor of walking into a gallery and asking how much and being selected, that if the gallery or an art show doesn't want you, like you can't go because it's not open to just an artist. You have to go through intermediaries. But yet all these artists have fans and followers on social. But selling art that way doesn't work. So I took something that's literally a hundred year old business of trading cards and established collectible and now we're doing fine art. So I started reaching out to a lot of my other artist friends. So I'll show you. I had them start making oil paintings of some of the superheroes. These are, these are original oil paintings. These are probably sell like for three, 400 bucks. And then I have, I, I mean you could even. This one I even have in a picture frame that I can hang on the wall. So they make frames for them. I can put it on my desk. So I mean the thing is that the encapsulation business is the thing that accelerated cards, coins and comic sales online for the last 30 years because for the first time I could buy a collectible from you because there's already a third party authentication factor in the art world. There is. There's basically zero peer to peer sales because no one's going to buy a painting for more than a few hundred bucks thinking that it maybe it's fake, it's not real, it's not this, it's not that. But for the first time now, we've created an opportunity where there's going to be, I think, this mass acceleration of collecting art for people. Because now all of a sudden, Instead of spending 10 or 12,000 for something like this, for $300, somebody can get a painting from me. Whereas before, it might be an all or nothing kind of situation, now I'm accessible to almost everybody that would want one of my pieces. And. Yeah, so that's what I'm working on now. And we're building a submission system where any one of 25 million artists in the world can submit their cards to us. We'll get them encapsulated, and then we have a marketplace where we could sell it for them. So for an artist that only wants to create art, here's a way for them just to create the art, and we'll take care of everything.

Wow, that's so incredible. And actually, Stu just joined. His son's an artist. Maybe you guys can connect. Yeah, it's like your, your common thread is. Well, number one, you've understood. You understand collector's psychology, you know, like, and like what, like collectors look for, right? Like, I'm looking at all three of the businesses that you've like, kind of like created. And, and you're, you're giving all these people a platform. Like, that's what you did with Comic Con. That's what you're doing with the celebrity even. Right. Like, we can now you have a legacy like Ozzy. You have a signature with him now that like, lives on. On for everybody, you know. And then with the artist, you're giving them a platform that they might not have had before. So that's going back to what Jared said with the. What did you say? The mute Jared, what was it again? I really like that. The billboard bill megaphone. You're giving a megaphone to the muted. You're like constantly being able to like, showcase people and their skills.

Yeah. And this was not meant to be like a platform business. This was just like, can I create my own card art that I could sell on our platform? And then it led to. It actually originated out of a conversation. I was at an entrepreneur conference, and one of the speakers I Can't remember his name, but he's a very famous author and it's going to kill me. I'll remember it right after this call. And he basically gave this talk about how do you 100x your business? And the theme of it wasn't just how do you just, there's no amount of more phone calls or more hours you're going to work or more emails you send out that's going to 100 extra business. It's just not going to happen. Like, there's. There's no amount of that that you're going to do to 100x your business. So I don't want to think about how to 2x or 5x or 10x. It's like, how did I 100x? And then all of a sudden, I started thinking about what worked for me, and I started thinking about how what I just explained to you in the art world, I already did in the comic book world. Because about over 25 years ago, the company that does the card grading came to me and said, we want to do comic grading. And I put together their marketing plan for it. I started talking about how we're going to feature it in the magazine. But one of the key things was going to be, we're going to set you up at our comic cons so that not only people can see what they look like and feel, but any single person now could bring their comic books to the show so that they can physically hand them to you so they feel like it's safe. It's going from the one hand to the right hand. And then I started thinking about our business and how even our comic cons, once we started doing all this stuff, hundreds of comic cons popped up. And at first I was like, wow, I hate competitors. And then all of a sudden, I realized that my business started doing great because these other comic cons became theater businesses for us. The more popular these local shows became, the more people wanted to go to the big shows that I was doing. So all of this kind of mangled up together, started getting people to think that, wow, there's an extraordinary web of galleries and art fairs out there in the world that I could use as my theater systems to get artists to submit art to us, whether it's through our website or in person, and build this business the way I built the comic book business. And go from an industry where people were dead set against getting things encapsulated, too. You won't buy a comic book, a card, or a coin unless it's encapsulated and I'm going to take advantage of that feeder system. Over the years, I've become friends with a lot of the fair owners and a lot of gallery owners. And instead of pushing them away, I'm going to build a big tent and figure out how to get them to be our feeder network for this. And that's how we 100x the business. Wow.

I love the concept of the. The big tent, too. That's so good. All right, guys, I'd love to open this up. Who would like to Bri share?

Hey, thanks for being with us today, Garb. I'm in the intermediate stage between your immediate success and then the global explosion of how you avoided the trap of getting kind of ossified or deadened. Right. If you think about even like religions, right, because you could consider Comic Con as like a sort of religion, right? Is that people buy in initially and then the community changes because it's gotten so successful and global. And it seems like you've been really uniquely able to maintain a lot of vitality and vibrancy in your events and your members over a long amount of time. And you spoke to a piece of that, which is like people are aging with you and staying committed. But it seems like if you're thinking about the formula for keeping a large global community vital over decades, like, what are the other ingredients of success in.

That it was always innovating and not being afraid to innovate. And by the way, I've fallen into those traps, too. So I'll give you an example, and then I'll tell you an example of the trap. And then what we did around it in the magazine business, we found that Wolverine sold better than every other character that we could put on the COVID And we fell into the trap that we would put Wolverine on half the covers we were doing, half the newsstand covers all had Wolverine on it. And that's not what made us successful. What was successful was taking chances with new characters and new ideas and new companies and new everything. And it doesn't mean that we shouldn't do Wolverine. But we started overusing what was working because we got. And it wasn't even that we were complacent. It was. We got less, we got more risk averse. And that really. And then that started to really hurt us because we started becoming too big for ourselves in that regard and we lost that, that, that fresh energy. So. So, yeah, and if we didn't put Wolverine on it, we'd actually lose. We'd lose 20, 30,000 sales did we want to take that kind of hit? The answer is no. So. So what do you do? Right? What do you do? And eventually the Internet hit big and phones came out, and the magazine world really kind of died out. So that's where I doubled down on the comic side of things, on the Comic Con side, where I went from two or three Comic Cons to then I started acquiring a lot of the regional comic cons around the country. So we went from two or three comic cons to almost 20 comic cons overnight. And by overnight, I mean a year or two. But very quickly, we started going from a model of doing one Comic Con or two at a time to now setting up a system so that it was almost. I don't want to use this word like Comic Con in a box, but basically we'd stick the Comic Con on a truck and take it from city to city. But it gave us a lot of power. It actually is very similar to the way we thought about it. Very similar to like a fast food chain opening up, where you go from one or two restaurants to 20 restaurants. All of a sudden you have a central kitchen instead of local kitchen. And it's like Instead of making one sign, you're making 20 signs instead of. We would go to the talent agencies, and instead of saying, hey, we need the actor for this one show or two shows we're doing, we're like, can they do 10 shows this year? And then we'll put them in all these cities when they're available? So. So we were constantly innovating as we got bigger. And then what happened also was as the movies came out and as social media grew, there were all these natural ways for us to grow, which was originally, the value proposition was, hey, I want to get an autograph from a celebrity. Which signified that I met them, right? And that was popular for the first. You know, that was popular for hundreds of years. But now, all of a sudden, the currency became. I met Tom Holland, who plays Spider Man. I met Gal Gadot who plays Wonder Woman. And people wanted the pictures because the picture on Instagram became the currency. So we be even before that. We. We actually were just trying to figure out how to make more money to pay the celebrities to get bigger celebrities. So we started charging for pictures, which was like. Which was sacrilege. People would yell and scream at us, how could you charge 20 bucks to take a picture with somebody like that? Never happened because everybody wanted the autograph. So we had to take a lot of bullets to establish getting photos. And then what would happen is once we started charging 20 bucks, 50 bucks, 100 bucks, all of a sudden we could pay to bring in bigger celebrities. So that changed and then probably the next biggest change for us, and again we were just always very innovative, we had to stay on top of things. But one of the things that I noticed was there was one year that we did 24 events, probably almost a million people through the door. That one year we had so many big celebrities, so many avengers, but yet I could never get Samsung or any one of these kind of big media companies or brands or, or product good companies to come in and sponsor us in a big way. Not talking about endemics like the movies or toy companies, things like that. I'm talking about companies that didn't sell in our market that were bigger than. And no matter how many people go through the door, it was never going to be interesting enough for the Samsungs of the world to want to participate. So that's when I had taken a little bit of a break. And then when we came back the new thought was how do we reach billions of people? Because we were reaching billions, but how do I deliver the billions to the Samsungs? And that's when we decided to do smaller shows to do more kind of VIP type experiences. And so we would only do like 10 to 20,000 people and try to keep the shows under 400,000 square feet. I mean so, so those were boutique, boutique events for us. And, and what we would do is we would live stream the events. And that was before live streaming was becoming what it was because pre Covid we had to like literally tap into YouTube and Facebook and Instagram and you know, Twitter like literally directly. And we had to set up separate cameras for each of them. There was no, you know, system for doing live streaming. And that's what we did. We, we live streamed the events. We enabled every fan to bring their phones with them and, and, and literally record. So we'd have an arena of 12, 000 people. Every single one of them was streaming to their, to their fan bases. Wow. So the, so basically the answer was we always needed to stay ahead of the curve and innovate because you're only as good as your last show. I mean every, unfortunately, every business I was always in was a reinvention every single time. You know, I didn't have a consumer product that I could just market and market and market and market. So it was, it was, you know, I wanted to get back into, I wanted to eventually start a business that wasn't just Reinvention every single day of the year. I think with this we've got that kind of platform now where I make it enabled where once I set up the technology for people to do the submissions, it could scale very, very big without having to reinvent it. We could just create new features for it. But. But it builds on itself. So to me, that's very exciting. But. But we always had to innovate because it didn't matter if it doesn't matter what you did last show, it's who's coming to the next show.

Yeah, I'm almost thinking with this one, you can even do like a subscription model, like where the people, you know, that like really want to get the, the, the, the art cards that they're gonna, you know, sign up and have it recurring and then they get the first, the first thing and then you're not having to constantly be. Anyway just.

Yeah. The minute they set up their account, it's very, very easy to submit because all their information is there. They just literally have to put in the name of the piece of art, the medium, you know, the price, and that's it. And you know, you're talking about something that's two and a half by three and a half inch in size. So for an artist, you know, the, the worst part of being an artist is carrying your art and transporting your art and moving your art. My pieces are on wood. So, you know, this thing weighs, you know, £25. So to put it in a box, it's not going to get destroyed. And then I gotta, I can't just carry it to ups, you know, it's, it's a pain in the ass. But all of a sudden now, you know, this is. You stick it in an envelope with some cardboard around it and I can submit it.

Yeah. So good. Love that. Okay, we have time for one more question. Anyone else want to ask a question or any kind of reflection, raise your hand or your zoom hand. I saw some coming in on Facebook. I can mention this one. Christina was just wondering what was your biggest learning from hosting the events over the years?

The secret, secret, secret is hospitality. And we over indexed on the hospitality side of it, you know, so even though people thought that we would bring in lots of superhero fans that work with us that needed to know the subject matter, the reality was that we would bring in people that were in hospitality because the best thing that we could do was to give the fans a great experience and to make them feel welcome and happy to be there and that we empowered the people that Work there. Because whenever you go to an event, the person that you talk to, that, whether they bring you to your seats or you buy your tickets from them, that's the person in front of you. And you're going to treat them like they're the CEO of the company and they need to help you. And if they can't help you, you got a problem. So we would talk to all the staff before all the shows, and we would fly our staff from show to show. We wouldn't even rely on local help. And we would tell everybody, we'd remind them that to the fans, you're the CEO of this company. And we had to empower them to help the fans. And if it meant that we had to give them something extra or get them in line or do whatever it took, it wasn't worth having to take their problem, bring it to somebody else. To bring it to somebody else. Like, that was too much. Like, just figure out how to solve it. Either get it to the person that could solve it, or you solve it. But 95% of the problems could be solved, like, right there, even if it meant a few extra bucks. It didn't matter. It didn't matter. You just don't want problems on the floor.

Yeah. It sounds like you just really respect the room and. Yeah, no, I love that. And Luis is driving, so he can't be on camera, but he was asking if you guessed on podcasts. I'm imagining he wants you to come on his.

Yeah, I love doing podcasts, as you can tell. I love talking about superhero stuff. You know, nothing gives me greater pleasure than to be able to share this with people. You know, I've been very blessed to have, you know, some extraordinary experiences in life, and I didn't have a lot of great mentors growing up until this whole entrepreneur world started up. So I had to figure out a lot of the stuff on my own. And a lot of what I talk about, I didn't know at the time. It was more instinct and doing than understanding. And it's only through looking back in time can I articulate what we did in order for it to work right. So everything I'm talking to you about pretty much I didn't analyze at the time. I didn't really know that that's what we were doing it, why we were doing it. We were just doing it because that just would seem normal or natural at the time. So it's only in retrospect. And that's really what I like talking about, which is, you know, you know, to always do what you feel is right at that time. Because you may not really know. It's only going to be over time that you realize what you. Why you were doing something or why you were doing it the way you were doing it. But if you always do what you think is right at that time, and it doesn't mean that it's always going to be right. We made lots of mistakes. You know, we've hired many of the wrong people and spent tons of money in the wrong areas or went down the wrong path or partnered with the wrong companies. We did all those things. So. But, you know, luckily we did enough right things, you know, where we followed our guts and our heart, you know, for it to work out.

Wow. So good. Thank you so much for coming on. Do you have an extra three minutes? I see Stu has his hand up. Or do you?

Yeah, of course.

Yeah.

Okay.

Thank you so much. Thank you, Stacy.

Yeah, it's a pleasure. I'm glad I could zoom in. First of all, thank you. Because back in the early mid 2000s, I had an out of home media business, alternative billboards and mobile billboard trucks. And so your event anchored a nice revenue stream for me. But I always want, I always want, and this may be offline, I always wanted to know, how did you hack the city of San Diego for those wallscape billboards? Was that Comic Con or was that the independent studios working with the properties in the cities? Because that showed, I mean, Mike Aguirre, the city attorney, was threatening to throw me in jail for first, you know, advertising on San Diego Bay on a floating billboard. But how did that come about, if you'd share that? Because that, to me was so unbelievably impressive. Was that part of how you negotiated with the city and the convention center, or was that totally external?

Yeah, so San Diego isn't one of my shows. So we grew up with San Diego. Chicago is my big one. But, but, I know, but, but, but we were, we were very good friends. And, and we kind of grew up together because, you know, they were one show a year, but I was a 365 day year business. So I kind of used to make a joke that even though San Diego was show, if you called them up on Monday and said, hey, I got a project, they'd say, you know, you know, you got to wait 360 days, you know, to work with us. Whereas I could on Tuesday, you know, we had magazines coming out, we had websites, we had more Comic Cons. But the thing is that a lot of that grew Organically, you know, San Diego, I compare it to like an Art Basel type show where, you know, they might own the main center, but they really didn't participate or control what happened around the city. So a lot of that was like the studios buying space outside of the convention. They didn't control any other space other than the, than the physical convention center, you know, and to me, that was one of the things that, that, that they never really took advantage of because even though I was very good friends with them, they were very, very difficult to work with. And because of that, everybody tried to go around them and figure out how to work and do things. Now over time, they tried to consolidate other areas or partnerships around. But the reality is that being difficult to work with meant people went around them. And in our case, we would kind of, because we had the magazines, we would put together campaigns for people for whether it was a two or three month campaign or a year long campaign, we would do that. What was fascinating actually come to think of it, was how the dog and the tail switched on us. Because when we first started, my magazines were very, very powerful. I had magazines. I had the first magazine for anime and manga in the US I had the first action figure magazine, card gaming, and my comic book magazine, we were at our peak, we were doing about 750,000 copies a month. And everybody wanted to be in the magazine and we would have to give them space and give them things in the Comic Con in order to participate. And then it wasn't until the early 2000s where all of a sudden the dog and the tail switched where everybody wanted Comic Con and they didn't care about the magazines as much. So I was very lucky that I had again the hammer of the Comic Con. And it was like, all right, if you want the Comic Con, this is what you got to do in the magazine, not the opposite. So it was kind of funny how that switched on us. And again, it was a very enlightening moment. And also, by the way, it was very, very hard pill to swallow because, you know, I thought of, I used to joke my magazine was called wizard, the main one was called wizard. And I used to joke that I didn't even have a last name. My name was Garab from Wizard. I didn't need a last name. All I had to say was I was from Uizard, and that was enough. So when all of a sudden the shows started having the cachet over the magazines, I felt like it was a little blow to my ego, even though I own both of them.

So Good.

I hear the word innovation just exudes through this whole webinar. And I'm curious if you actually formally focus grouped your sponsors, your attendees, your, your participants and, and, and your vendors, so to speak, or did you just organically meet as a team internally and, and assess it?

We didn't do any kind of formal anything on feedback. We, we just knew it, you know, because on site people are going to just tell you, you know, this works, this doesn't work. You know, the way you do the seating for the VIPs for the panels. We don't like it. You know, you just know like you didn't have to do. We didn't have to do anything like that. And again, that was why we excelled, because we had the best gut for what was happening and what was going on. And everybody else was working out of their rear view mirrors. We were looking out the windshield for what we were doing. We were always taking action and doing.

The, doing the thing. I'm a top down planner, which is how I met. You know, one of the reasons that I'm following Stacy so closely is because doing the thing and failing and then pivoting and innovating and keeping on doing the next thing without worrying about the hundred thousand foot master plan succeeding.

Yeah. Also, we had an incredible advantage. So in the magazine world, we always had the next issue. So if something didn't work, we fixed it the next issue. Like, like there was no, we didn't have to wait a year cycle to run the next show or the next magazine to figure out what to do. So we were constantly tweaking and adjusting every single time. And then the same thing with the shows. If something didn't work, we were doing up to 24 shows a year. We could just not do it at the next show. And other people didn't have that advantage if they had an annual Comic Con or an annual show that they did. If it didn't work, they had to wait a whole year to figure it out and then, and then see if what they fixed worked again. Right. So if it didn't work after they fixed it, they'd have to wait another whole year to get it right. We could iterate month after month after month or week after week. We could iterate. So we built a cycle where we just knew what was working and what wasn't working. Thank you.

Yeah, it sounds like it was built so fast because you had the speed right. Because you were like, we're like, we're like going. You had the community, the connection. And then also the immediate market feedback.

Yeah, we had the sample size. We could get a $300,000 guest, and if they sell, they sell. If they don't, they don't. If they don't sell, we don't bring them back. And if they sold out in a minute, we bring them back and get them to as many shows as we can. Right? It's like, that's it. And we were very flexible. So if you got time for one more example, like somebody like Norman Reedus, who was the star of the Walking Dead TV show. So my brother and I were very big fans of the Boondock Saints. My brother and I were hysterical because if we liked an actor or a TV show, we would just call them up and bring them to the show just because we liked him. Like, we could call anybody and get anybody. So. So we were just their fans. Like, it didn't. Well, like, we'll get you a flight in a hotel. Would you come to the show? And they'd be like, yeah, so Norman Reedus, we like that Boondock Saints were like, we got to get Norman to the show. We love that movie. Let's get him. So literally, for, like, a hotel, airfare, and a few bucks for food, you know, we'd get Norman to the show, and then all of a sudden, he gets on a show called the Walking Dead, and he goes from not being a household name to 20 million people a week watching him on television. But we didn't treat Norman like the Boondock Saints guy. We had to shift our mentality to going from, okay, Norman, instead of paying you for a hotel and airfare, we now have to start paying you $200,000 a show. And just six months ago, we were paying you. It cost us $5,000. And it's very, very hard, I think, in life to start thinking about the people around you that you're used to paying or treating them a certain way, and then they change, and then to think of them as. As who they are going forward. And I think a lot of people lose relationships because they want to say, well, I was there for you. If it wasn't for me, you know, you wouldn't have. People wouldn't have discovered you at the shows. And we were there when nobody else cared about you. And it's like, that doesn't matter. You know, he's a big star now, and we got to pay him for that, you know, and we always felt that way about the people that we love. That worked for us was we didn't wait for them to come to us. For a raise. Like, if they're doing the job of two people, then they deserve to get a lot more money because we don't want to replace them. And we didn't do that for everybody or most of the people. There was just handfuls of people that were always like, we see them for who they are now, not for who they were based on what we did for them. Like, you know, even though they might have gotten to where they are in life because of we gave them that opportunity, it doesn't matter. You know, we have to treat them who they are at that time.

Yeah. No, so good. And Jared said our perspective must grow as their identity grows.

Oh, yes.

Yeah, yeah. So good. Oh, my gosh, Garb, thank you so much. I'd love to have you share where people can, like, continue to follow along with the journey, especially with the new projects you have going to.

Oh, yeah. The best way is Instagram. It's just my name at Garab Seamus. I'm also on X. I'm starting to do a lot more there. And then. Yeah, I'm trying to think of where else my art. I. I haven't updated my site in a while because I started painting these small ones, but. But it's just. Garabchamus.com is. Is online. Just. That's my art. I haven't updated in a while, which I'm going to do soon. But I'm going to build. I'm going to do it on my platform because we're good. Because as part of what we're doing for artists is we'll also create a gallery. So every piece that they submit is going to be a gallery on our site that people could like or share. We'll create some social features. It's not about commentary. It's more about appreciation. And yeah. So we're going to make it really, really easy for artists. And I'll be the biggest guinea pig on there.

That's so exciting. Oh, my gosh. I cannot. I can't wait to just continue to just you guys be like, we, like, heard it here first. Isn't this exciting?

Yeah. I shared a lot of stuff that I haven't spoken about publicly, but. But yeah. And I'm happy to come back sometime.

Oh, so good. Thank you so much. And you're getting a lot of love in the chat.

Oh, awesome.

Sabrina said, love the creativity. Jared just followed you. Carmen said, thank you. What an opportunity. Lynn said, this is amazing. So, yeah. Thank you so much. Thanks, everyone, for coming.

Thank you.

Thanks for. And we're just so excited to see all of this come to. I mean, it's already in life, but like, just kind of like, see where it's going. It's really exciting.

Amazing. Thank you.

All right, guys, do the thing. Don't wait for opportunity. Create it.

Bye.

Thank you. Bye, everyone. Hey, guys, have you checked out my Facebook group yet? Go to do the thing collaboration.com thanks.

For listening to the do the Thing podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. But even more, we hope you'll be inspired to do the thing. Do you have a burning question on Doing the Thing that you'd like answered? How about an inspiring do the Thing story of your own that you'd like to share? We'd love to hear all about it. Just leave us a voice message at dothing callcast co or email us@helloothething podcast.com.