#251: Manish Vora - Reconnect with Play and Bring Out Your Inner Child!
Manish Vora want you to explore your inner child and play!
Are you ready to rediscover the kid in you and rekindle some of that lost joy? If so, you’ll love today’s fun interview with Manish Vora, Co-Founder of the extremely popular Museum of Ice Cream.
Manish shares insights into the process of testing over 125 exhibits through pop-up locations in various cities before establishing the flagship museum in New York City. Despite facing challenges and setbacks due to COVID, the company expanded to multiple locations, embracing the fusion of museum experiences with ice cream nostalgia. Rip and Manish emphasize the importance of human connection in a technology-driven society and interaction away from digital distractions.
As we kick off summer here in the United States and you look for activities and places to go with your family, this episode will inspire you with a little lighthearted play, nostalgia, and good old-fashioned FUN.
Whether it’s an immersive art experience like the Museum of Ice Cream, or even just getting out to an adventure of your choosing, the message of today’s episode is this – don’t forget what makes you happy!
PS - And, if you’re wondering, the museum has plenty of plant-based ice cream options :)
Episode Highlights
3:26 Catching Up with Manish Vora
13:02 The Origin Story of Figure Eight
28:39 The Impact of Social Media on our Society
35:33 Exploring His Indian Roots and the Meaning of Love
42:18 The Origin of Museum of Ice Cream
45:40 Creating a Nostalgic and Playful Museum Experience
56:19 A Space for Joy and Play Every Family Will Love
1:07:59 HomeCourt Concept and Future Plans For Immersive Experiences
About Manish Vora
Manish Vora, founder of Figure-8 and The Museum of Ice Cream
Since Manish and his partner, Maryellis Bunn launched the first Museum of Ice Cream pop-up together in 2016, Manish has been essential not only in bringing the vision to life but in ensuring that success continues to spur the company to new heights. With an illustrious career that has seen him pivot from investment banking to experiential design, Manish brings a unique blend of financial acumen and creative flair to the forefront of the brand.
A graduate in Economics from Yale University, Manish’s journey began as an investment banker before he embarked on a path of innovation, art and immersive experiences. Today, he spearheads the business and operational aspects of the brand, playing a pivotal role in Figure 8’s phenomenal growth. Before venturing into experiential design alongside Maryellis Bunn, Manish served as the CEO of the cutting-edge experience-tech venue, Lightbox.
He also co-founded the contemporary art platform Grey Area, where he cultivated art partnerships with distinguished names such as Helmut Lang, Stella McCartney, the Guggenheim Museum, Smart Car and Bergdorf Goodman.
Episode Resources
Learn more about The Museum of Ice Cream
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Full Transcription via AI Transcription Service
[0:00] I'm Rip Esselstyn, and you're listening to the PLANTSTRONG Podcast. Are you ready to rediscover the kid in you and rekindle some of that lost joy? If so, you're going to love today's fun interview with Manish Vora, co-founder of Figure 8 Experiences and the extremely popular Museum of Ice Cream. You'll hear more about how to cone-nect with others right after this message from PLANTSTRONG.
[0:36] Have you heard about the hottest news that's coming across the wires in the month of May? Here it is. We at , we are hosting our 13th annual PLANT-STOCK weekend in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and you are invited to join us. We're going to be sharing laughs, learning, and a whole lot of plant-based meals, August 16th to the 18th. Bring a friend and come mingle with folks from all across the country that are coming together with one goal, to eat more plants. We'll have inspiring talks from Dr. Dawn Musalem, Dr. Gemma Newman, Dr. Will Bulsiewicz, and John Mackey, and many more, and entertaining food demos by Carleigh Bodrug, my sister Jane and Ann, and so much more. Come for the food, stay for the fun. We'll have tons of outdoor activities, including swimming, hiking, pickleball, cornhole, tennis, and a whole lot more. It's a great opportunity to build connection and community, and we hope that you'll join us. Visit liveplantstrong.com today for all the details.
[1:58] Manish Vora and I first met over a game of, you guessed it, pickleball, and we became fast friends immediately. He has this youthful and playfulness about him, a zest for life that was really irresistible. So it's no surprise to learn that his passion in life is getting adults to play like kids again and again and again through connection and immersive experiences and art that we have simply lost in this society for the most part. Well, as we kick off the start of summer here in the good old United States of America, and you're looking for activities and places to go with your family, I want to inspire you with a little lighthearted play, nostalgia, and good old-fashioned F-U-N fun. Whether it's an immersive art experience like the Museum of Ice Cream or even just getting out to an adventure of your choosing, the message of today's episode is this. Don't forget what makes you happy. And for most of us, connection equals happiness. And if you're wondering, they have plenty of plant-based ice cream options at the Museum of Ice Cream. I had a raspberry, a strawberry, and a lemon lime that were outstanding.
[3:27] All right, I'm here with Manish Vora. Welcome to the PLANTSTRONG Podcast. I'm excited to be here. Excited to have you. So we met, I don't know, probably seven, eight months ago, and it was through our mutual friend, John Mackey. Yep. You guys were in a kind of pickleball league slash tournament. Yeah, we needed a rip in third and we stole you onto our team. Right and and in order to be part of this kind of group you you have to be a founder yeah it's uh it's a pickleball league for founders and uh founder of a company founder of companies yes yeah yeah and so you you brought me in I think John had to go out of town for some reason and so So I came in to fill his shoes and we had good chemistry. We played well and we made it, I think we made it to the quarter quarterfinals or semifinals.
[4:28] And we were competitive. We were competitive. And, you know, I think the best thing about pickleball is that it's this equalizer. No, you know, even though we were playing in this league of founders, it was actually my least favorite part of the league is that the founders part of this, because it doesn't matter. It's, That's what the beauty of pickleball is, is that it's an equalizer. It's democratic. You can jump right in. Of course, we're all very competitive. John Mackey, extremely competitive. I mean, man, he's an inspiration in so many ways. But I think I'm more inspired by him now just seeing his dedication to craft and to getting better and improvement. Also, just when you and I were playing together, him coaching us, I was like, man, I need to become a better coach watching him play. Well, he definitely likes to win. Yeah. No doubt about it.
[5:16] But one of the things that I was really taken by was –, your fun-loving spirit, how friendly you were, how encouraging you were, and just a bunch of qualities that I like in a person. And then when I found out about the business that you're involved in, I immediately was like, oh my God, I want to do a team build filled with you leading our team. So I appreciate you coming on the podcast because we're not going to be talking food and plants for the most part. We're going to be talking about these really cool, I think, experiences that you and your company have been able to create for people. And you've been doing it for what, five years? Eight years. Eight years. So why don't we jump in? Yeah. So the company that you are a co-founder of is called? Figure Eight. Figure Eight. And Museum of Ice Cream is the core of our business today, and that's what we created. Yeah. And so I don't want to talk about the museum quite yet. I'd like to talk about Figure Eight.
[6:32] So why Figure Eight? Why is that the name of your company? So, the many elements of the numerology of 1 and 8, 108 in Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, it's a spiritual number. But that infinity, that figure eight sign really is, to me, represents endless possibility and connection. And the thing that I have always been most interested in as an extrovert and for many years didn't feel that I could pursue this as a career is connection, is ultimately how do we connect as humans. And I think that's my calling and my talent in my life is to bring a playful, joyful approach to the world, a childlike wonder. And when I think of so many elements of the figure eight, it's like you're as a kid just doodling, you know, these infinity signs and that figure eight. The figure eight represents that possibility of creative possibility.
[7:41] Yeah, I've always been fascinated with my favorite number, as long as I can remember, has been 18. Yeah. There is something about that eight that I absolutely adore. And 18 is the number. Our company, actually the corporate name of the company has 18 in it. Oh, really? And then figure eight is the kind of name because you can't really name your company 18. Right. Well, what's also interesting is the morning after I proposed to my wife, This was at the Esselstyn family farm. We decided that we would go jump off this platform. It's like a 20-foot platform into the pond. It's a five-acre pond.
[8:26] And as we were getting ready right before we left, out in the middle of the pond, we saw these two huge black water moccasins that were kind of weaving in and out. And so on the back of our wedding rings we have these basically like the snakes but in a figure eight oh wow yeah yeah so there was a reason why this conversation was meant to happen then absolutely I love that absolutely did you so you have a co-founder yep um mary ellis and so So she seems like she's super young. How did you guys come to? Well, after nine years of this, I think we're both less young than we once were. But she was the ice cream passionate person. I had been exploring concepts and experiences, really, in many ways, like a failed entrepreneur in the art world. And really thinking about art and culture as a place of connection and how do we make art accessible and doing that in New York City. I fundamentally was becoming an art dealer.
[9:34] And I was like, this is not what I want to be. And my heart is in experiences and joy and connection. And I stopped finding that in the art world. And she was really the driver to say, I had this idea of building a for-profit museum and really thinking about museums that I've always been passionate about as places of connection, as places of education, of places of like gathering. When I was a kid. This is what I went to with my father. He loved his opportunity coming to America from India. That was the thing that we did when we traveled. We went to museums, we went to castles, we went to tours. We were just constantly sightseeing with guides. And that's what all he wanted to do was just like, go, go, go.
[10:16] And so I had this idea of building a for-profit museum and thinking about museums in a completely different way that were rooted in fun? What if the museum could have music and we could have dancers flying through and it's art in its best form, in my view, which is interactive and immersive art. And my partner was the ice cream crazy person. And that's how this company really got started.
[10:39] Which was she started taking me to ice cream shops in New York City. And then we were traveling. And I would see in the middle of winter, there'd be lines out the door at these boutique artisanal ice cream shops that I'd never heard of. And there were lines of girls, 20-something girls. And I was like, what the heck have I been doing for the last 10 years of my life in New York when nobody our age, nobody in their 20s and 30s, they're struggling to go out again. We're all stuck on our phones even eight years ago. We're still stuck. Back then it was on Facebook and the beginnings of Instagram where all the brands are having trouble getting people out the door. But I'm like, these ice cream shops, they're packed.
[11:16] And it's not the old school ice cream shops. Those ones were, you know, kind of struggling. The ones that were lower quality that weren't focused on hospitality. But these beautifully designed, still rooting back to, like, you know, nostalgia and hospitality. And that's when we started joking about this idea of, like, hey, why isn't there something dedicated to ice cream and joy? Because this is the most joyful place in the world. And we started exploring. We started looking for festivals. We went to an ice cream festival, the Ice Cream Festival of Delaware. And we drove down to Delaware, never been to Delaware before. And this was a sad, sad ice cream festival. It was like a country fair, so it was fun. But there were three ice cream vendors. There were more ice cream shops on our street in New York City than there were at this ice cream festival. But it was the simple formula. It was an ice cream festival that had carnival games, and it had joy, it had the nostalgia. And that's when we started saying, like, maybe no one has figured this out, that the happiest place for many people, maybe your first memory, your first childhood memory, your first time spending money, the first time you ever as a child, it's probably your parents giving you money and going to give money to the ice cream truck.
[12:27] So your first transaction, your tethering to wanting to make money is to buy ice cream and candy. Remember as a kid, that's all you wanted. You wanted to buy soda, ice cream, and candy. So you're like, one day when I grow up, I'm gonna make a lot of money to do what? Not to build big houses and fancy cars and luxury bags. Like that's not what it's about. And maybe we've all forgotten that. And that's how the business really came about, which was like, wait, ice cream equals joy. And what if we used ice cream as that leverage point? Yeah, yeah.
[13:02] So where and when did you open up the first museum? So back to this idea around play, the first actual experience that the two of us created that is really the origin story of Figure Eight is that we built an adult summer camp for our friends. And we rented out a kid's summer camp.
[13:25] And I had done it casually the year before. But this is, to me, the origin story of the Museum of Ice Cream. It is in kids' summer camp, but for adults. And we took this camp and we created a whole weekend of fun and joy.
[13:42] And that was our first collaboration that said, yeah, and there was ice cream there, of course, and s'mores and the whole nine yards. But we created this camp and it was about play. And we did color wars and team building and icebreakers. And a lot of people who had never met each other came out in relationships and new best friends and business partnerships all on this one weekend. And of course, there's been a lot of adult summer camps out there. But this really solidified our vision that we could build a company based rooted in play. Ice cream is secondary to like you know our we're most known obviously for the museum of ice cream but it's secondary to the mission and the idea that the museum of ice cream originally was built as a place for adults to play like kids it was not we didn't even think about children as an audience and obviously we've seen now three million visitors and we've probably seen a million children um but we never thought about kids I was I lived in downtown new york city Ibarely saw a kid um you know below 14th street I have no kids I have a nephew and a niece um and i'm now the coolest uncle on the planet coolest godfather i'm up i'm i'm available for for godfathering.
[14:58] Okay so I gave you a lot there yeah yeah yeah um where was that that first museum was new york city downtown uh across from the whitney museum so in the meatpacking district and purposefully it was It was purposefully across from, frankly, my favorite museum in the city that had just moved down there a year before. It was the most trafficked museum other than the Met. It was brand new, all about American art, one of my passions. And it was a little bit of a F you to the art world at the same time. The door was facing the door of the Whitney. My theory was that when parents were coming out of the museum with kids or adults were coming out and being like, eh, it was kind of fun, but it wasn't that fun. And then they saw a museum of ice cream, they were going to be like, I just walked from a museum, a traditional art museum.
[15:46] And we would be able to sell tickets. Lo and behold, we were only planning on being open for 30 days. We had sold out every ticket before we had even built a wall or had a photo on the internet because we hadn't built anything, number one. Number two, we had 7,000 people show up on the first day, lined up starting at 3 a.m., not knowing what it was. How exciting was that for you? Terrifying. For a moment, it was exciting and then terrifying because we were like, holy crap, we have to deliver on something here. and we also had to turn away 6,000 and 600 people out of the 7,000. Why is that? Because we could only fit 400 people through the doors. The museum was about, I don't know, one-fifteenth the size of the New York Museum, the permanent museum. So that was our first pop-up. It was about experimentation and testing, but the same principles were there. Ice cream, free ice cream throughout the experience.
[16:39] Actors or guides who we trained to just be more than joyful, be enablers of connection to be themselves to be weird to be crazy to be characters but not um pretending to be something they're not but really focusing on how do we enable people to play how do we get them to tell your you tell us your stories your memories your nostalgia, your your best friend who did you eat ice cream with first and then get focusing on the present who are you with why are you with them and what why don't you know what their favorite ice cream flavor is rip what is your favorite ice cream flavor I don't know i've been playing pickleball with you I don't know what your favorite ice cream is chocolate, it's chocolate definitely I still say mint chocolate chip but chocolate's a good one yeah yeah.
[17:20] All right so you, you guys hit it out of the park in New York um, How long was it before you decided to open up a second and then a third and all that? It took us about six months. I had to quit my day job. This was a project. I had not realized that this was going to be my business card. This wasn't, you know, that wasn't, we didn't have really a plan that this was going to be my life's work, you know. You know, and six months later, we opened a pop-up. And essentially, and this is a current passion of mine, I'm really fascinated by circuses and studying circuses. Cirque du Soleil type stuff? Cirque du Soleil, historical circuses. I just read this book called The Night Circus. There's, you know, circus is amazing.
[18:16] And we were a traveling circus for the next two years. We opened four more locations with a super small team. We traveled and lived in those cities. We went to L.A., San Francisco, and Miami. So these weren't permanent locations? These were pop-ups, yeah. So when you say a pop-up, it's there for a month or two? No, we were doing six months to two years. Oh, as a pop-up. As a pop-up, yeah. But it was meant to be testing. So we really weren't building full permanent infrastructures. We were trying to really test different types of exhibits. And in those first five pop-ups we did, we tested over 125 exhibits, and almost every museum had a new experience. The Sprinkle Bowl, which is our signature, is always there, usually an old-school diner, and what we call an onboarding room. But everything else was different, testing different types of rides, slides, just learning how to be museum of ice cream circus builders. And probably durability. Durability, learning so much about materials, so much about food regulations and what ice cream works, how do you get enough soft serve out of a machine, what thickness works.
[19:30] I mean, there's been 100,000 learnings in that first three years of the pop-up journey. And then, you know, we went on to opening our permanent museum and our flagship in New York City 90 days before COVID.
[19:47] And then, you know, obviously that was a whole journey. But we're back to New York, Chicago, Austin, Singapore open. And we have Miami opening this summer. And we have Boston opening this fall. Wow. So we have, it's been an up and down journey with a lot of mistakes, a lot of learnings. But at the end of the day, we're, you know, by the end of this year, we're going to be seeing over a million visitors a year. And should you be hopefully getting to 2 million visitors a year soon after? Well, it's part of the entrepreneurial ride, right? Yeah.
[20:32] So I would imagine this took a fair amount of capital. So do you have a large investor base? We didn't actually, you know, if I can go back in time, it would have said never have taken capital. It was just tried to grow too fast. We've always run as a profitable business, minus COVID.
[20:50] So we did end up taking capital, but we didn't for the first three years. It was all self-funded. It was all funded by operations, cash flow from operations, the old school way of doing it. Um, and, uh, something that when you look at hospitality and experiences, I think, you know, oftentimes too many people are trying to take like a tech approach and be like, I have to raise a lot of capital and spend years doing it. And I'm a believer, man, and just getting a product out there, learning, testing, finding out. And we found out real early that museum plus ice cream was going to be a good formula that that our formula worked, experience, nostalgia, joy, connection, being enablers of connection, adding a little theater to the component of it. And we haven't really had to change that much of that. And so I think part of that's luck. But at the end of the day, we also built this first museum in 90 days. We didn't take two years trying to research and learn this. And, yeah, there's been a lot of learnings on the way. So the one in New York City, you guys built in 90 days? No, no. That was the original pop-up was built in 90 days from start to finish of like even thinking about the idea. We probably were only in the build on site for maybe three weeks.
[22:05] So, I went and visited Austin with my kids this last weekend. Um, give me an idea, like how long did it take to put that one together? Yeah. So that's, that's actually our smallest one, uh, that's open. Uh, but it's, these museums now take a year to two years to build. Right. Um, and even six to 12 months before that of planning and design before they even go into certain under construction. So now there are two to three year processes out. So we're, we're building locations now for 2026 and 2027 that we haven't even announced. Announced and that we've already been building and planning for six months so it's it's gotten a lot longer the construction timelines out there are longer um but yeah I get to I get to do something I love here and we were talking earlier about just how even the perception of ice cream has changed in in these eight years the perception of of of social media and and and interaction and one of the things that we're often known for is this is a pretty crazy fact but we're if not the most social media venue in the world by square foot. We're one of the top.
[23:14] We're certainly the top museum in that category of the most social media posts per square foot, which is an interesting stat but also a big burden because I'm a believer in the cell phone and social media and technology being our biggest problem, our biggest epidemic. You guys talk a lot on this podcast about a lot of challenges in the food systems. And I agree and I'm passionate about what you're doing and changing my behaviors and diets. And I would say the thing that is the most conflicting component of it is that we find that you probably took 100 photos with your family, but the best moments and memories were when your phone was in your pocket, you were jumping in sprinkles, diving in, going down a slide, climbing a playground, riding a carousel, playing one of the games, spinning a wheel, eating your ice cream with no hands, just acting like a kid. And acting like a kid. No kid comes into our museum and is on their cell phone, right? We have 100% satisfaction rate with children. And the biggest thing that we see is that adults, the biggest barrier to entry is like.
[24:30] Whether you're going to spend your time anymore in spaces with other humans. And that's, it was even the case before COVID, but to me, that's our biggest challenge. And that's the, you know, where I would love to like dig in, in terms of happiness and joy, and what we're up against in society around experiences and hospitality. And, and I think much like our food systems, our connection systems are completely broken in this country. And it's not a children problem. It's not kids on video games and kids on their iPads. To me, what I see in the museum now, what I didn't see before COVID, is that the biggest challenge is people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s who are on their phones sending text messages, not connecting with other strangers, But I'm seeing teenagers now, when they come in, they'll capture their content, and they'll put their phone away, and then they'll have fun with their friends.
[25:37] Where now, you know, my mom is like, her phone's in her hand. You know, she won't not pick up that phone call. And so I think that that's our biggest challenge going forward from what we're focused on in terms of health, that health of society is going to require connection. AI is going to provide more opportunities for time. I'm not interested in technology. I'm interested in how we're going to utilize that time, not on these devices, not on technology, because our attention spans are down. Are, as everybody knows here, I think we're up to averaging six to seven hours of phone time, two hours a day on social media for adults, four to five hours for youth on social media, seven hours a week. I always say this, that if you spent that much time, you could go to 35, you could go to 35 Museum of Ice Creams a week. We could go to 35 Museum of Ice Creams a week for and the amount of time we're spending on the cell phone, imagine how much fun we're going to have in our lives. We could play 35 hours of pickleball.
[26:50] I saw a study, I think it was a couple months ago, and it talked about how the average youth right now is on a screen seven to eight hours a day, and they're moving, exercising 12 minutes a day. That's, that's, that's not good. I mean, there's so many statistics. Yoan Hari, the book Stolen Focus, I think they said our attention span, they've been tracking it has been going down so far that it's closer to eight to 10 seconds now, just our, just our attention span. So what does that mean? And then, you know, with, with this time spend, one of the, one of my, I would say colleague slash mentors, cause she's my age, uh, is a professor at Yale named Lori Santos, who who has a podcast called Happiness Lab. And we have been on it and guest lectured with her at Yale. And actually, we've had our entire team do the online course of Happiness Lab. But one of the things that really struck me, and I also went to Yale, so this is my alma mater, that we were sitting and giving this talk in the dining hall there.
[28:00] And she had a non-precise statistic, but she said something like when 20 years ago when I was there versus today that the decibel levels in the dining hall have declined by over 50 because everybody's not talking there's not there's less people talking to each other 50 this isn't like a few percent this is half the level of the sound in the cafeteria that felt like so tangible for somebody who's multi-sensory and focused on multi-sensory experiences. I was like, imagine if the world was 50% quieter.
[28:39] It's pretty wild. I'm going to pivot for a second. Yeah. Did you grow up being a dancer? I grew up with a lot of dance. I have that Indian blood in me. But yeah, I did compete in Indian dance in college and –.
[29:00] And was definitely, I grew up in the 90s, so it was hip hop was my rooting as a hip hop dancer. So was it at Yale that you danced? I did what we call the Bhangra team, which is a mix of Indian Punjabi dance, like choreographed dance with hip hop.
[29:18] Well, you were nice enough to invite John and I over. You had a Diwali party a couple months ago. For those that don't know, can you let everybody know what the Diwali celebration is? Yes, Diwali is the Festival of Lights, and it is this incredibly joyous, kind of easiest to equate it to our New Year's during that week. And it's also not a great place for plants, because it's a place where they eat a ton of sweets. And you put all these different Indian sweets around the altars of the gods, and they bless these. And it's very traditional to eat a lot of desserts. It's kind of like our super unhealthy period. But it's also a place where these dance celebrations are many nights. And it's like a New Year's that goes on for a couple weeks. When I was there, you had some incredible vegan fare. Yes. And it was delicious. I knocked myself out. Well, I'm sure you guys have – lentils are a huge component. And I come – my region of India is Gujarat.
[30:33] And my mom is from Mumbai, but it's on the border.
[30:38] And Gujaratis actually do not have meat in the whole state. And so we grew up in a vegetarian household. And my mom's never –.
[30:49] Purposefully meet, um, though she's been in America for 50 years. And funny enough, she, she, um, to learn English when she arrived, uh, first time ever on a plane after an arranged marriage to Wisconsin, where I was born outside of, outside of Milwaukee in a very rural zone, she worked at a Taco Bell and the only thing they had was a bean burrito. Um, and, uh, later, yeah, she loved that bean burrito, but later she found out that those, and especially in those 80s that they had meat beef lard and then it was she has uh never forgiven taco bell uh for that but so kitchari is uh is as a dish you guys may have known which is that rice and lentils um and that's probably the dish I eat most um in my diet um which I try to make every sunday i make like eight portions of kitchariand just mix a ton of vegetables um use ghee and just use the instapot and live off of kitchari. Yum, yum. So your parents, it was an arranged marriage. Are they still together? Yep, they're still together. Wow. 50 years. They just celebrated 50 years actually last month. And so can you explain to me like an arranged marriage, how does that work? Do the parents have to get together and kind of talk it through a little bit? Yeah, I mean, it's the arranged marriage.
[32:12] In the perception historically, Historically, like centuries ago was often, um, you know, no choice in the, in even modern being 50, 60, 70 years ago. And as has really changed is that the arranged marriage is still the kids have choice. They're seeing multiple people, but the parents have to approve and vet it. Um, and are, are setting up typically setting up the matches and the interviews. It's like basically like speed dating. Yeah. My parents spent 40 minutes together total before their marriage, 40 minutes of which 30 of them were alone, like on a walk. And they saw each other three times in ever. When my dad was living in America already, he went to grad school here in Texas. And he came back to – he saw her for 40 minutes, came back. They agreed. when he came back to America he found out they had agreed that they were going to get married and the next time he saw her was the wedding.
[33:15] So that's how it works 50 years later and you know we always you know we struggle to stay in a relationship for more than an hour here do you um, Do you feel like there is a good love there between them? It's a subject that I'm passionate about maybe for a different podcast, but there's a different conception of love in the Indian culture versus the Western view of love. We like to say that in Indian culture, love is a verb. In American culture, Western culture, love is a noun. It's this thing. It's this love. Love here is this thing. And I'm probably more, frankly, on the side of American culture, having been born and raised here. But I think there's something really special and important to learn that in Indian culture, love is meant to be learned. It's meant to develop. It's meant to grow. And yeah, of course, you didn't fall in love. They spent 40 minutes together. But they were writing love letters for a year, having spent 30 minutes together as if they were Shakespeare.
[34:23] And some of that's just psychological. It's just making that commitment to learning how to love. And as a single human, as a single man here, I probably haven't done a good job of learning from my parents here. So I think I've been on the side of American big love. And you are one of how many children? One of three boys. And so did you guys ask your parents a lot of questions about the arranged marriage? Yeah, I mean, we were pretty fascinated. Growing up in Wisconsin was challenging. First of all, it was challenging to be a vegetarian. So my parents really leaned into the Wisconsin diet for my two brothers. And my younger brother adopted vegetarianism very early at age eight. When he adopted vegetarianism, then we went to a meatless household. But when I was a kid, my mom was making burgers and meatloaf and, you know, it was processed food left and right in Wisconsin.
[35:22] And we ate a lot of dairy. And Indians are probably dairy intolerant from thousands of years of our relationship with cows.
[35:34] And the way that we consume dairy in India is usually with cumin and other things that counteract the lactose. So part of that is now I've been really investing in learning about my food challenges and going back to India and going back to the roots of where my biology is coming from.
[35:53] And the Ayurvedic doctors poo-poo our American views on things like dairy and say like, yeah, of course Indians are dairy intolerant. But we're not dairy intolerant when you put cumin and coriander in your yogurt. Yogurt and um and if you eat the yogurt with this and if you put ghee on the bread like this is why we adapted for a thousand years our diet adapted this way so that we would add these things and then you strip these things out in american culture and say you know I love when ayurvedic doctors like shit on um I don't know if I can say that but shit on uh on salad salad culture and you know the they're like you americans you eat this like salad do you even know if your body can can handle this salad like this is this this is not you're not supposed to eat this you're some people are but um but um these raw foods like you know they're like your your ancestors didn't have access to raw foods for the last 800 years in in this region of india um and so they're like why would your stomach be uh they're like this isn't this obvious that your stomach can't handle this um so anyways Idigress uh but I've been spending a lot of time reconnecting to my to my Indian origins in the last few years.
[37:05] Well, at that Diwali celebration, it was, your parents were there, so it was really nice to meet them. I've got a little clip here that I wanna play, and this is just, this is you actually, I think after you gave kind of an introduction to what Diwali is. Basically, you talked about how it's the festival of light and symbolizes the victory of good over evil.
[37:30] Uh you then perform this wonderful dance oh man are you really dropping this on this podcast oh yeah I got to and I hey this is fun this is fun this is like but to me this this does a great job of capturing your spirit thank you so let's I see my father in the background i'm not sure he He approves with his arms crossed. Yeah. And I love the, love the jacket. There's John. There's John. Yeah.
Celebrating Community and Emotional Wellness
[38:10] I mean, that's some good stuff right there. I mean, to me, what I see in this video and you tell me is one of the beauties of Austin. First of all, is we just parked basically an art car, a VW bus with speakers on it and blocked the road and gathered the community, gathered neighbors, gathered my friends from the last couple of years because I knew three people when I moved here, and family and Indians and non-Indians, and we just learned and ate and danced, communed in connection. And you know what like sometimes maybe it's that simple as we yeah we ate like fairly healthy indian food but there was a lot of sweets a lot of indian sweets there and um we you know to me like joy is the missing part of our our diet that we um you know even for myself like I was too focused on work I lived in new york city I wanted to scale museum of ice cream and figure eight to 25 countries and take Disney on and become the next Disney.
[39:21] And have you changed? Yeah, I've changed a lot. I've changed a lot. I'm still intense. But I have found ways through, you know, you know, inspired by folks like you rip and, and the way that you live your life and eating better and understanding, listening to my body, listening to my spirit, listening to my emotions,
Men's Groups and Food System Innovations
[39:40] working on the emotional side of things. I think one of the cool things in Austin is this concept of men's group. I think it's been here for 30 years. You talk to old Austin guys, and they're like, man, people think Austin is woo and spiritual now. This town's been like this for a long time. You've been here a lot longer than I have. But emotional work is celebrated amongst men here.
[40:07] And then, of course, we have so many passionate people who are working on the food systems here. There's two guys in Austin, Justin Mayers and Jason Karp, who Justin is a founder of Perfect Keto and Kettle and Fire. And Jason is the founder of Hugh Chocolates and Hugh Kitchen and actually just bought an ice cream brand, Cosmic Bliss, which is great ice cream, FYI. It has a great vegan, all vegan ice creams. But they are taking on Kellogg's right now and cereal. And I say that because this is community. This is community that's driving folks to be better and for us to eat better.
Ice Cream Evolution and Industry Trends
[40:52] And at the same time with balance, right? What I always say about Museum of Ice Cream is that one of the things that I think is funny is that when we started eight years ago, I remember when we first, it was maybe five years ago, when we start first talk to investors and investors were like, you're going against the grain. Everyone wants to help invest in healthy things. And, um, and ice cream is bad for you. Dairy is bad for you. That was a big thing. Dairy is bad for you. I was like, well, that's what they're saying right now. Now, five years later, eight years later, some bad for some people. It's good for a lot of, a lot of people. Um, and yeah, is, is there bad ingredients and ice cream? There's certainly some, you know, we've gone down that rabbit hole, which I think is interesting that there was a lot of, in the last 10 years, a lot of healthy alternatives, low calorie ice cream, low carb ice creams. A lot of those ice creams didn't make it because at the end of the day, they were putting in other crappy ingredients and people were like, let me control how much I put in my stomach once a week, once a day, I don't care one scoop.
[41:57] If I'm going to indulge, I'm going to indulge in something that's, that I love that's pure. And, and I think that's, you know, that whole foods, those, you know, those real foods and, you know, that's why I, you know, when I eat ice cream, I want to eat real ice cream. Although I do love coconut ice cream and I do love cosmic bliss FYI.
The Origin of Museum of Ice Cream
[42:15] But I do love coconut based ice cream. That's a new, new, new passion place. Well, and that's what all the, all the plant-based ice creams that are out there, whether it's a haagen-dazs whether it's a ben and jerry's they use basically coconut as their as their base because it's got that creamy wonderful mouthfeel and it's just like uh just like cow's milk you you've got five different vegan flavors at at least at the austin yeah ice cream museum uh actually and so is there let me i'm going to come back to that but is there a reason why it's called museum of ice cream instead of ice cream museum so if people I don't know if there's like a real scientific idea around this but i you know when we've you know the museum of.
[43:06] Was when we first started we didn't know this was going to work we didn't know this was going to be a business we you know frankly this is two insane people in new york who are fundamentally just wanting to get a sprinkle pool built. And, and we actually had the idea of just building the sprinkle pool in my apartment on my balcony. And thank God it ended up being like 2000 pounds. It might've like collapsed that old crappy balcony in my house. But the museum of was always the name, not the ice cream museum, because the museum of we first in our first deck for, for brand sponsorships, we put parentheses museum of parentheses, ice cream, close parentheses. Cause we're like, Like it doesn't matter that it's ice cream. It could be anything. The ice cream is just our tool. It's just my paintbrush to get people to break the ice.
[44:01] To unify on something that everyone can agree on. I always pull a room when I give a speech. I just spoke at this conference a couple of days ago, and I always ask, how many people here love ice cream, and how many people don't? There's always like one to three people in a room of 300 people. And there's some trauma there or something. I'm just kidding. But we're talking about 1% to 3% of the population, maybe. It's really like 99.9% of the people love this one thing. There's nothing we can agree on in this country and any other subject. I can't find another thing that we all agree on in this country in a very polarized state that we're in. So that's what it's about, is ice cream is just our unifier.
[44:46] We can celebrate candy. We can celebrate cotton candy. We can celebrate chocolate. We can celebrate vanilla. We can celebrate bananas.
[44:54] You know, I go, I love going bananas. We always have a banana room in the museum. It's one of my favorite rooms. Since you just mentioned that, let me just pull up. We should pull up and show people some of your photos here. Yeah. So, you know, and I want you to know that I actually went through the whole thing. Yeah. And then I went back and took the photos. I like it. Because I wanted to be absolutely immersed in the experience. And to that, we've tested people going, giving them free tickets if they put their phones down for the whole experience. We get 30 to 40% higher NPS scores and experience ratings and reviews from those people who put their phones away. Because you're 100% present. And I want you to know that was,
[45:36] so we were waiting in line. We had a three o'clock appointment. Yeah. And we met Bubbly. She was one of the workers there. and we talked to her for a good five, 10 minutes.
[45:50] As you said, I want you to know that the, I don't know if you call them team members, if you call them employees. We call them guides, guest experience specialists. Okay. Okay. They were all fantastic. Thank you. I mean, really fantastic.
[46:01] That makes me so happy. So this was the first room that we walked into after the first, actually the kind of lobby area. And I need to let people know from the outside looking in, it is just this big, pink, incredible building. Why the pink? And when did that start? Okay. The pink was very purposeful design. Choice by my partner who's obviously an incredible designer mary ellis is you know is is a visionary designer for sure and um but if you remember i think it was in the 1970s was a book called drunk tank pink and this pantone is our specific pantone uh that we're very passionate about but pink is a color of obviously strawberry and lots of different you know fun things around ice cream but is calming is peaceful and there's all this that's a great book about the study of using pink as a in prisons and in football uh in football locker rooms as a as a way to pacify people um but I think it's just for us became our signature right away um as you know a representation of strawberry which is not a top five popular flavor we always think of chocolate vanilla and strawberry is strawberry is a distant, like number nine flavor. Uh, I don't know why, but strawberries really gone out of style. It might've been more popular back in the fifties and sixties, but, um, so it's not because of the strawberry.
[47:22] Uh, well, in your, in your first pop up in New York, did you guys go with pink? Yeah. It's been pink from day one. Day one. So you guys knew that. Yeah. That's pretty cool. And then this is the, the kind of the first room we went into and you walk in and you can get your cocktail and creams. And so we each ordered the, from the soft serve, it was the cherry vegan ice cream. Yeah. Delicious lights out incredible and and that's the beauty of like we change out the flavors all the time um and there's a vegan alternative um vegan soft serve I will say the dairy um the dairy full soft serve that we can get in texas is something you can't get in almost every any state the percentage of milk fat that we are able to get so obviously the higher the fat the the richer the ice cream. But I think typically on soft serve, you might be getting like 8% to 10% at max, even 7% milk fat. We get 13% in Texas. And that was a shock. That's like custard level. And so I know we're going to celebrate the plant-based.
[48:34] But so you had the cherry. And then later on, we had strawberry. We had chocolate mango mango and lemon mango sorbet the lemon yeah um and then we typically we have partnered with amy's ice cream which is a which is a great um she's a great entrepreneur and local legend here and we have had amy's ice cream in the museum since we launched in austin and they have typically one or two really great vegan flavors on their on their menu and then And Bluebell as well is an old classic, you know, now national brand. And so we do rotate them out, and then we'll work with, like, local players as well. So do I see –, Do you guys have a retail ice cream? I mean, ice cream that's in retail grocery stores or not? Yeah, so we did in the past. We did a partnership with Target a few years back, and we're in all 1,400 stores at Target and did seven flavors. And as importantly, we did a kid's collection of some of the most fun merch you've seen. And it sold out in like 90 days. So we had kids' skateboards and backpacks and clothing, And that was one of the most fun partnerships we've ever done.
[49:50] But we sold out every item in less than 100 days, which was pretty exciting. So there's still a museum. So we stopped doing the ice cream. And we've realized that for all you food entrepreneurs who've been doing this for a long time, that this is a hard business that is a completely different expertise and experience to stay on grocery shelves. And we realized that what we're good at is we design experiences around joy and the physical space. And I know nothing about shelf space and freezer space. Yeah, keep it that way. Yeah, we actually do have a partnership in Japan and are in 14,000 stores with some of the most playful single-serve ice cream. They're like crazy bars. Like as you can imagine, Japanese, like uh harajuku type culture like it's wild it's poppy and it's one of the most social media food items and it's just this weird thing we don't have a museum there but we have like one of the most popular ice creams in uh in japan so uh it's this crazy thing where we like don't serve ice cream anywhere outside of our museums except for 14 000 stores in japan.
[51:06] And so you also have a jukebox. I mean, this goes into my heart, right? We got my favorite pun is Michael Jackson, chiller instead of thriller. So that's one of the greatest single of all time, maybe. We actually went to go play a song, and I think we were like 20 down to the cue. 25th in the queue. You were going to have to wait for 45 minutes. So we weren't going to wait. Exactly. Yeah, you'll occasionally see somebody rolling in roller skates in that diner. before we go to one of our favorite classic exhibits, the banana room. And so tell me, what's behind the banana room? Okay, so for those who are just listening, the key to the banana room is it's designed around the banana split. The banana split. So you'll see the split in the color. This is an abstract piece of art. But I think the most important thing when you experience the museum, again, thinking about how you choose to participate. There is two choices a human can make when they walk in this room. One, see this and say, there are bananas hanging on the wall. There are bananas hanging everywhere.
[52:18] Or what I hope you choose to do is say, there are bananas, and I'm going to go bananas. And I'm going to run through them. I'm going to pretend like the banana is a phone. I'm going to make a human pyramid. I'm going to just do what every kid who walks in that room does, which is they start imagining what a world would be if the world was split as a banana split between pinks and yellows. And I could walk through here and I can make 50 games. I could spend an entire day playing in this room.
[52:53] And guess what? Every single kid can do and every single adult can do the same thing. we can go into this room and we can make our fun and we can make our joy. And that's ultimately what this museum is about is that we do talk about history and you you'll talk, we'll have these little sprinkle things with there's incredible innovation in history. And we're going to, I think, talk about.
[53:15] The amount of creativity over thousands of years of the evolution of ice cream is that in every city, in Austin alone, there are hundreds of flavors that have been invented here, different types of way people are eating ice cream, different mixes of ice cream. It's an incredible amount of creativity.
[53:30] But at the end of the day, we can tell you that, or we can teach you how to be a kid again. And I think that's going to be the thing that really is our legacy in this business and And how we've influenced this industry around experiential play is getting adults to play like kids, to me, is my contribution to what I think is the health, one of the biggest health issues in America. Well, I think you're exactly right. And I can tell you, you know, I've been putting on these week-long retreats for adults for almost 12 years now. We do them twice a year. Each one has between 90 and 100 people. and what we discover is that most adults have forgotten how to play how to laugh how to completely like lose their inhibitions and kind of get lost in where they are and it's so incredible to see then they're the first day with all their walls up and like i am just gonna stay safe right And by the end,
[54:35] they're singing, they're dancing. There's just like the decibel level is up 50, 100%. It's just everything you've talked about. I think you're showing this. It's not that we're not blaming anyone.
[54:50] We have our lives and it's hard, but we're all capable of doing it. And we need the spaciousness. We need the permissions often. We need the approval. We need to get over all the learned behaviors from childhood to now. And there's a couple stats where from 1950 till now, we've doubled in real income, like how much income we have. It's been more than 2x. We are living 16% longer than we did from 1950. We are either flat or down on happiness, though it's harder and more, obviously. Let me caveat that it's subjective to study happiness, you know, apples to apples here. But there is a view that we are less happy as humans. We're living longer. We have more income. We're less happy. But is that surprising to you or me? I think nobody on this call is surprised that we are living it. And so then when technologists, when Silicon Valley is like, look at how much technology has made our lives better. based on what if we're less happy if we're less connected if we're less tethered to community.
[56:06] Why is our happiness better? I can tell you some of the best times that I have with my family, our little family of five, is when we're sitting around the lazy Susan table.
[56:20] Nobody has any of their electronics on, and we're just going around talking about how was your day, right? Rosebud and thorn, right? What was something great that happened? What was kind of tough? And then what are you looking forward to? And that and it takes 30 minutes and it's a blast beautiful yeah yeah going to the boundary waters going canoeing I mean you have to actually in some ways make an effort to kind of rid yourself of all the trappings that we have in in this culture these days but this is a great this is great and then you've gotten so much incredible press uh and you've also gotten people like beyonce and Kim Kardashian. What's her last name? Kim Kardashian.
[57:06] Kardashian. When she came into the museum, we hadn't realized that we had this Hollywood walk of scoops on the floor and that we had called her Kim Carbdashian. And I was like, oh, my God, is she going to be offended? Is she going to walk right out? Is she going to stop filming? Blah, blah, blah. And we didn't point it out. I was hoping she would not find it. And I was standing over on the side, and she saw Kim Kardashian. She told all of her sisters to come over, and she was like, I'm on the wall. I'm on the star. I was like, okay, I'm good. I'm good. Were you there for it? I was. I was. It was not my shining moment to be on. It wasn't one of my life goals to be on Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Was that in – what city was that in? That was in Los Angeles.
[57:51] What's amazing about these celebrities – Katy Perry is a great example. Who's one probably my favorite guest of all time. And she has come back multiple times unannounced with Orlando Bloom recently. They just showed up in New York. And our team is like, they don't message anyone. They bought tickets. And she went around and recorded every single guide in our museum and just was like, you're so talented. You're so talented. You're so talented. And just that, you know, just seeing a human act like that of such a great performer. But I think we've had 10 out of the 20 biggest influencers in the world and surprising ones. David Beckham brought his son, just the two of them.
[58:35] Our halftime performer, Usher, documented himself singing ice cream tunes all the way to the museum. People have great memories around ice cream. And I say we're really fortunate that at the end of the day, what we're delivering for the people who actually go and suspend belief that this exists is –.
[58:59] A place where you can it's that simple it's where adults act like kids it's it's a great concept it's such a great concept and then this let me uh let me escape here just for a sec but we of course you can get as into this as you want or not and of course we stayed here for a while and did all the I love that all the spins and had a great time with that my favorite ice cream memory we were playing we were doing putt-putt golf this is back when I was probably eight or nine they had ice cream cones with the soft serve you know with a half vanilla half chocolate and up to this point in my life I never have somebody come up to me and say hey does your ice cream smell as funny as mine does i'm like I don't know and then shove it into your nose so next thing I know we're all shoving ice cream in each other's faces and I think it was hole number eight there was just ice cream everywhere but that was fun that's awesome yeah yeah this is one of my favorite activities in the museum yeah yeah and then um here we go let's see uh so yeah the whack-a-mole had a blast doing the whack-a-mole and of course we're all pretty athletic so we were able to win the prize and I think my son and two daughters both had some of this right here cotton candy With a little bit of magic dust on top.
[1:00:27] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then...
[1:00:31] Let's see. Now the sprinkles. So I was told here, when you go to the sprinkle room, if you can find the golden sprinkle, come back and we're going to give you a prize. Yeah. Did you find it? I spent at least 30 minutes. Because normally- It's in there. Normally I'm like, I feel like I get lucky with stuff like that. I couldn't do it. It's amazing. This sprinkle pool is a- How many are there? Just one? There is typically just one. Wow. Um, some days I think they get, they get excited and put a couple in there, but, but, but we keep putting, once somebody finds that we put it back in, but, uh, it's a lot of fun. Well, and, and also the way the lighting was every once in a while, you think you thought you saw, you found it because the lighting's a little bit, you know, exciting. And then I love this, right. That, you know, what are you celebrating and you can play with all the letters on the wall there and where are you from? Um, look at that. Yeah. People are coming from all over the world here. You're seeing Mexico from Germany.
[1:01:31] And just simple, like you're seeing kids playing next to, you know, two adults over there. And it's a simple thing. It's a magnet. You have magnets on your fridge. But how often are you stopping and being like, hey, I'm going to send a message to my husband or wife on the fridge? Fridge not enough uh yeah and then these are these are little like every one of us was like okay when was I born and then you get to grab one of these and take it with you yeah this is your your horoscope and ice creamified sweet scope uh very fitting for austin you know we're really sun and moon focused here no no doubt and then just a little little history there this I must Must've spent a good, I don't know, 15 minutes. And this, these are just different ice creams kind of from around the world. And I had a lot of fun with this and I'll just share, let's just share maybe two with the listeners right now. And we always try to, we tell you if you can get eight of these, that means you're a true ice cream expert. So if you can guess which country these items are. And then here's the mochi. You said you have a cool story around that. So mochi, ice cream, Japanese, you've probably tried it now at this point, but rice-covered, that kind of gooey, sweet rice treat. Actually, mochi ice cream, the answer is yes. Mochi is from Japan, but mochi ice cream was an invention in California.
[1:03:00] We like to say a lot of innovation has happened in America over the last 150 years in many categories of innovation, but ice cream is one of those places where we have taken ideas from other places and made it our own mochi. Ice cream is uniquely American. Yeah. And then cookie dough. Yup. I mean, that was Ben and Jerry's, huh? Yup. How about that? I, uh, the fact that Ben and Jerry's is now over 50 years old is, you know, it's crazy. And they just announced that it looks like Unilever might put them back up for sale. So they haven't been, you know, privately owned now for, I think, 20 years, but I just read that as well. And it sounds like, because there are almost too much of a premium. Yeah, I don't, I don't, I think the ice cream industry is still strong and it's one of the strongest verticals for, for Unilever, but, but it's expensive and there's very little, little freezer space and not expanding in groceries. So, and it's hard to do direct to consumer. It's hard to deliver. So it's one of those areas that, but ice cream consumption is continuous to go up and the industry is like stronger than ever. Yeah.
[1:04:10] This caught me because also known as ABC air, but to come poor, it's a shaved ice dessert, infusing red beans. Beans my audience loves beans yeah I am I assume that's not jelly beans uh no okay but we can add some jelly beans red beans sweet syrup and and jelly and then i'm just gonna go down here i literally we could Icould spend an hour with you just talking about all these different ones uh what's this uh oh I don't have the do I have it there that's halva halva yeah halva is amazing because it's um you can't pinpoint it to a specific country there's different versions of it slightly different but you know you'll throughout the middle east you'll see versions of of halva um and it's made with tahini a little pistachio yeah um and I love that they compare to to candy to snickers um but uh even like indians uh sometimes claim halva as their own but it definitely is rooted in the middle east right right and then you talked about like this This is the room with the slides and there's basketball and ladders and all kinds of fun stuff here. We all, I even went down the slide. Yeah, I like it. We have the largest slide in New York City and in our New York Museum. It's three stories high. Wow.
[1:05:36] But yeah, slide is a simple thing that you went down a hundred times a day sometimes as a kid. and then we can go 20 years before getting on a slide again. And is that the pink shag carpet? Yeah, we know. That's also where we have our dance parties. So when you come back for adult night, we do have a full bar in the museum. Well, you know, you guys, have you thought about trying to do any kind of a.
[1:06:03] A partnership or something with, uh, with Barbie? Um, we did do a partnership with Barbie and man, they were, that was the best marketing I've ever seen in the last 20 years. Uh, they were omnipresent, but, uh, we have, we've done a couple of things with Barbie. Um, there was, there was a Barbie shoot in the sprinkle pool, sprinkle pool and the sprinkle pool. This is our iconic signature experience and again it's another place where it is our goal is by the time you end in the sprinkle pool in any of our museums it's that you are choosing to jump in that I don't need to encourage and it definitely don't need to encourage rip to jump into anything because that's the kind of guy you are but but are you going to do a snow angel are you going to have a burying contest? Are you going to find that golden sprinkle? Are you going to try to have a sprinkle fight in the pool? And that's what we're trying to encourage here, you know, and, and, and, and when I, you know, any of the visitors, any of your listeners who are coming, it's, you know, just letting go for that, for that 10 minutes and that sprinkle bowl is enough to, to me, that's, that's our therapy. Well, I love the pink diving board and it was so much more comfortable than I ever imagined being in there, having just be, be surrounded and getting all these little hugs from all these sprinkles. Oh my God.
[1:07:29] That, that looks like childhood joy. Yeah. That face is, but I will say rep, you have, you have the same energy that I think I see. I hope that you see in me, which is just a playfulness and a, and for, for such an accomplished man who's done so much, Like to see you smile like that is not at all surprising.
[1:07:54] I am going to back out of that and tell me this. So I know that the next, your next venture is home court.
[1:08:08] Can you tell me like a little bit about that whole concept? Cause I mean, I love that concept too. So I think we were inspired by a little bit inspired by pickleball, but we had been developing concepts and we were launching a concept before COVID happened around the adult experience around re-examining your relationship to other adults and to technology. And, you know, fundamentally, it's about play. And I'm really interested in the future about thinking about how we like restaurants and nightlife and bars and that model hasn't changed.
[1:08:50] A little bit of adjustment here and there. And, um, and we're looking at, you know, your home away from home is not Starbucks. It's not your local pub and drinking as alcohol consumption, I think is, you know, one of those trends that I think is going down for probably the better. Um, and so how do we have fun at night? There's still like, you know, on a Friday night, you're just like, what else do we do? There's still just a bar. And, um, and, and of Of course, there's gaming bars. And so that's our take is about creating spaces that are really designed for connection and social, what we call social sporting. It's not a bar with pickleball, a bar with bocce, a bar with pool. Those places still force you to initiate the playing. You have to choose or you're playing with your friends. but ultimately in disconnection, all the challenges that are people having that is technology really solving dating or are people getting married more because of technology? I don't think so. I think the numbers are worse than ever.
[1:09:51] Are we, do we have more friends? We're so connected. I have thousands of friends. You have thousands of followers on social media. Do you have more friends? Does the average person have more friends today than they did 10, 20, 50 years ago? The answer is definitively no, that our number of friends have gone down. So ultimately, at HomeCourt, these new concepts that we're thinking about, even the way that we're approaching night at the museum, which is like adult nights and adult programming, is about we're going to force you in some form to connect, what we call connect. We love puns. Put the cone in connection. We're going to force you to play games. We're going to have emcees and the way that we do guides and costumes and just get weird. And, you know, and frankly, like, what if we experienced nightlife like we were kids again, the way you experienced the sleepover, the way you experienced when you were playing at camp. And that's what we're trying to build, not only in the museums, but in like new concepts like home court. And with home court, is it true that there's going to be a pickle dunk tank? Yeah. You're giving away some secret sauce here. But yeah, you know, I think the pickle shot is not only going to be something you consume, but hopefully when this goes live, something that I would dunk you in for losing the last point of our game, you know, and that playoff game that we lost.
[1:11:20] You get dunked in a pickle dunk tank. And is there truth to the fact that there potentially will be a pickle-flavored ice cream? That's definitely true. And if you go to the Chicago Museum already, we have a hot dog-flavored ice cream for the Chicago Dog. And we have a real pickled relish and mustard that you add onto the ice cream. And it's very controversial because some people absolutely hate it and are disgusted before they even try it. but some people love this. It's on a real hot dog bun. So yeah, so we definitely have tried the pickled soft serve. I think it's quite delicious and refreshing, but it won't be for everyone.
[1:12:03] Well, Manish, this has been great. Yeah. And I'll just circle back to where I started. I feel so fortunate that I was able to get to play pickleball with you, get to enjoy your spirit, your sense of fun, and our blossoming friendship. So thank you for being on the PLANTSTRONG podcast. Bam. PLANTSTRONG, scoop, scoop. All right. See you. All right. I loved hearing about Manisha's ideas and innovations for putting more joy into our lives and fostering true connection. And that's what I want to leave all of you with today. Keep it fun, keep it playful, and of course, always, always keep it PLANTSTRONG.
[1:13:00] The PLANTSTRONG podcast team includes Carrie Barrett, Laurie Kordowich and ami Mackey. If you like what you hear do us a favor and share the show with your friends and loved ones you can always leave a five-star rating and review on apple podcasts or spotify and while you're there make sure to hit that follow button so that you never miss an episode. As always, this and every episode is dedicated to my parents, Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr. and Anne Crile Esselstyn. Thanks so much for listening.
