Morgan Friedman: Hello, hello everyone. Welcome to the latest episode of Client Horror Stories. Very excited to have Paul Pape with me today. How are you doing, Paul?

Paul Pape: I’m doing great, Morgan. How are you?

Morgan Friedman: I am great. And as I just told you in our chat before I hit record, I love your background. I even thought it was a stock image, but this is real alcohol. You’re much cooler than me with my coffee and whiskey.

Paul Pape: No, this whole bar is real. I do a series on YouTube about gamified business, and I actually dress up as the barkeep and give lessons on how to be creative. So this is my background for that — because, you know, like in Dungeons & Dragons-type games, the barkeep is the guy who has all the information. You head into the tavern and you’re like, ‘Hey, I want to talk to that guy.’ So that’s my character that I play on the YouTube channel.

Morgan Friedman: Yeah, choosing to be an avatar — throw out your YouTube channel name for some self-promotion, then we can jump into the story.

Paul Pape: Yeah, that’s absolutely what I do. So the YouTube channel name — it’s just Paul Pape Design. That’s all it is. It’s the Gamify Business scene. You can check it out. It’s a lot of fun.

Morgan Friedman: Love it. Now I have my coffee with this — my Irish coffee in hand. What is your worst client horror story ever?

Paul Pape: Okay, so sit back, this is a doozy. Back when I was just getting out of undergrad, I had just gotten my first design degree. My mentor had given me this opportunity — he said, ‘Hey, I’ve got this great opportunity for you if you’re interested. It’s a new ad campaign for a grocery store chain here in the Midwest where I live.’ And I said, ‘Oh yeah, absolutely,’ and I jumped at this opportunity. I was 22 years old.

So I met with this guy — he owned something like 20 or 30 different grocery stores. I was like, ‘Okay, heading right into the big time, getting a great opportunity here.’ So I went and met with the man, walked into the back office of some grocery store, an old guy sitting there, and we’re chatting it up. Like I said, I was pretty green to the whole idea of working in a commercial industry.

I sat down and he’s like, ‘Hey, so let’s get this started. I’ve got this great idea for this ad campaign, and I need an artist who can help me with the design for newspapers and possibly some cartoons for online or commercials that would air locally.’ I said, ‘Awesome.’ So he’s like, ‘I’ve got this great idea — I’ve been thinking about it for a while. It’s called Major Savings.’ And his idea was that we could have a bear dressed as a marching band guy, and he would be Major Savings.

And I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s cute and all, but here I am, 22, I want to really make a name for myself.’ So I said, ‘Actually, I did some research before I met with you — who’s your main demographic for a grocery chain?’ Because you’re trying to appeal to the pain points. And I said, ‘Your main client is women — women do over 90% of the shopping for a household.’ So I said, ‘Look, instead of a marching bear that nobody can really relate to, how about instead you do an image of a lady, and she’s saying, “Hey, I can save my family this much money by shopping here.”’ I said, ‘Matter of fact, I’ve got this great image,’ and I was rifling through my portfolio, and I pulled out this illustration I’d done of my wife. I was like, ‘This is an image of my wife, red hair, very stylized, very much my look.’ And I said, ‘This person, I think, would be able to sell to a lot of people. This would be a great advertising campaign because it would relate to your main clientele, the over 90% of people who shop for you.’

And he’s looking at me, and he’s like, ‘Yeah, yeah, I think that’s a pretty good idea.’ And so we chatted for a good 20 minutes about all the details — how we would go about it and all that. And at the end of it, he shook my hand and said, ‘Hey, we’ll get back to you about this — I think it’s a great idea.’ I said, ‘Awesome, that’s wonderful.’ And so I thought I nailed it. I thought it was a home run — just nailed that sucker out of the park. And then I didn’t hear anything from him. I was like, ‘Oh, that’s a bummer, I thought I really did it.’

Morgan Friedman: By the way, I want to point out how much sales is like dating — you were ghosted.

Paul Pape: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely ghosted. So I went out to get the mail one day — this was probably about two months later. And I go out to the mail and I get a flyer for that grocery store chain, and believe it or not, staring right back up at me is an image of my wife — the cartoon version of my wife that I had drawn. And I was like, ‘Wait a minute — that’s 100% stolen IP.’ And everything we had talked about was there. I was like, ‘Okay, this is not a coincidence.’

Morgan Friedman: So, question — you said you showed it to him on your phone, but did you also email it to him?

Paul Pape: No, I had my portfolio with me, so it was a full paper portfolio. So I basically gave it to him like an idiot — I just gave it to him.

Morgan Friedman: This is how you learn.

Paul Pape: And so I was like, ‘Well, that’s a kick in the pants right there.’ But, you know, it’s print ads, it’s local — whatever, I’ll let it go. And then, I think it was a night or two later, I was watching TV with my wife, and she’s like, ‘Is that me?’ And I look, and it’s a commercial for this grocery store chain, and my wife’s cartoon image is now talking to us, telling us about all of these savings we’re going to get. And I was like, ‘Son of a gun, I cannot believe this guy just straight-up stole my idea, stole my IP, and it’s literally my wife — and she’s not even his.’

Morgan Friedman: Wow, okay. So let’s pause the story for a minute and analyze this before we get back to it. One of the interesting things about your story is that my instinct is that the best way to sell is to show off how good you are. Like, I want to sell myself to a client — okay, we have one hour of their time, and what better than ‘What’s your problem? Oh, we could do this and this and this,’ because that really builds credibility. So I’m listening to this and thinking, man, if I’m worried they’re going to steal my ideas, how do I sell?

Paul Pape: Exactly. And at 22 years old, my first big opportunity, I thought this is the way to sell something — impress them, wow them with your genius, right? Just pitch and be honest with them. And I think that’s what got me in trouble — I was being honest and thinking everyone else would be honest too.

Morgan Friedman: So I think we can riff for a moment for the younger versions of ourselves — the 22-year-old versions of Morgan and Paul listening to this — they’re hearing, ‘Oh my god, I sell by showing off how good I am, but now I’m scared it’ll just turn into a TV commercial by surprise. What do I do?’ A few tips come to mind — I’ll share the first ones, and Paul, you might have more afterward, and then we’ll get back to the story.

Paul Pape: Sure. 

Morgan Friedman:  The first thing I do — because I’m a creative guy, when someone comes to me with a marketing problem, I’ll have a whole bunch of really good ideas, and I’ll purposely give them what we could call my second-best idea — good enough, but not the amazing secret sauce. Partially because if they steal it, I don’t want them to steal the most amazing stuff, but also because I know if I am hired, they’ll expect me to do better and better work — so I need to keep things in the back pocket for later. That’s one idea.

A second thing I do — I’ve trained myself, because I used to have this same problem when I was 22 — to be really creative and iterate with them, and then force myself to stop before I want to. My instinct is I could spend six hours just having fun, brainstorming, creating. But I give myself hard limits — I’ll say, ‘Okay, I’ll give them 30 or 60 minutes of intense creative time.’ And even if we haven’t come up with a great idea or solved it, after 60 minutes of a creative session with someone, you know how they work and whether they’ll get there or not. So with these limits, I’ll do enough so they can see some of the process, but not too much.

A third strategy is to sign something beforehand — to say, ‘Hey, I have a policy of doing a one-hour free discovery session’ — fancy words for it. I’m happy to brainstorm and come up with ideas, but let’s sign this paper first. And my lawyer didn’t even write it — I just downloaded it from the internet so they don’t take it too seriously. Those are three different ways to help minimize that kind of risk.

Paul Pape: Yeah, that’s not bad advice at all. I’m going to counter some of that, though, from years of experience with this. I’ve actually done the paperwork thing — ‘Hey, would you guys mind signing this just to protect both of us? I’m not going to tell everybody what you’re doing, and you’re not going to take anything I talk to you about here.’ And I’ve actually had clients walk away from the table.

Morgan Friedman:  Interesting.

Paul Pape:  Yeah — they just said, ‘No, I don’t feel comfortable doing that, that’s not what we’re here for.’ Now, don’t get me wrong — in retrospect, in that nice rearview mirror you get when you get older, those weren’t my ideal clients. Those people were out to get something for nothing. 

Morgan Friedman: By the way, let me put it a different way — I have a good friend, a very smart and successful tech entrepreneur, and he’s developed a brilliant strategy for getting legal advice. Whenever he has a legal problem, he’ll call up the top, most expensive lawyers who specialize in that area, and he’ll say, ‘Hey, I have this problem, I’d love to talk to you about it because I need to see if you’re a good fit to hire.’ And every single lawyer is like, ‘Oh yeah, of course.’ And he does this on purpose — half-hour calls with the seven top lawyers on the issue he’s dealing with. And all of them, of course, say, ‘Oh, you know, the way you should deal with this is…’ And he does it for all seven. He never hires any of them, but they give him this sort of creative, on-the-fly brainstorming, and with that he comes up with a really good strategy himself based on what they said, and then hires some super cheap lawyer to implement it.

So I’m pointing this out because, yes, people walked away, but the ones who walked away — in your language, they weren’t my ideal client. They wanted to take advantage, or in my language, they were like my friend who just wanted the free consulting, and when they realized they couldn’t get it, they left.

Paul Pape: Yep, and that’s true — that happens. And I would be the guy — I’d be the lawyer in this instance, and I’d be like, ‘Yeah, that’s just not my client.’ But that’s okay, because honestly, I’m not a gatekeeper of information, and I’m happy to share — my wife tells me I overshare, I give too much information away, and I’m okay with that because I genuinely want to help people. And I’m sure a bunch of your listeners are in the same boat, where they just want to be useful, not just brag about their genius, but actually be a useful, helpful person. And unfortunately, people with that mindset — myself included — project that onto other people too, and don’t accept the fact that there are people out there who are on the opposite side of that coin — self-serving, there to manipulate, there to take instead of being genuine and helpful.

So my advice on this one would be to walk in with a portfolio that’s close to the idea they’re talking about — but not the idea itself. And the reason this one   came up is because I was dealing with Disney, and Disney is one of those companies where, if you’re under contract with them, any IP you develop is theirs while you’re under contract. It’s written into the contract — if you come up with something brilliant, it’s because they helped you come up with it, so it’s theirs. So you have to be really guarded in that instance. When they come to talk to me, I say, ‘I’ve done similar things to what you’re working on — I’ve done this for this company, I’ve done this for that company,’ and so on. Granted, I was really green at 22 and hadn’t done any of that yet, so — again, the rearview mirror looks a lot better.

Morgan Friedman: I really like your advice too, which is: maybe you don’t brainstorm on the spot, but instead show them something similar enough that you’ve already done. And, by the way, a slightly more Machiavellian version of that — if you’re 22 and haven’t done anything yet, instead of brainstorming and solving their problem for them on the spot, you can ask, ‘What’s a different-enough but related-enough problem?’ and solve that yourself, and say, ‘Actually, I was just helping a friend with this other vaguely similar thing, and here’s what I came up with.’

Paul Pape: Yeah, I mean, it definitely falls into the ‘fake it till you make it’ category. When you’re starting out, that’s really what you have to do — it’s not like you just woke up one day and decided to be a creative designer. You’ve had years of buildup to it, you just might not be in that very specific situation you find yourself in when you’re trying to answer these questions.

Another thing I do — I like to protect myself and my IP, like you mentioned with the paperwork. I do agree with that one, and usually what I do is state that any ideas we come up with in this meeting are proprietary and will be withheld for the next 120 days. The reason I put 120 days in there is that it makes people feel like it’s not something you’re going to own forever or lord over them — eventually the clock runs out and they can go do what they want with it. And I find that’s actually pretty useful for keeping clients calm about it.

Morgan Friedman: That’s interesting — I’ve never heard of that one before. My instinct would’ve been that 120 days is too short — I know too many companies that are bureaucracies and move at one mile an hour. It wasn’t urgent — we hired someone to design this, we can just wait four months and then use it.

Paul Pape: And that’s exactly what happens. But honestly, when you’re doing ideation — unless you’re really coming up with a brand-new idea — you should never actually be giving out brand-new ideas, because when it comes down to it, ideas are where the money is. Anybody can implement — you can find somebody to do that. But ideas are where the money’s at. And especially when you’re young and hungry, you’ve got a lot more ideas floating around than people who’ve been doing the job for 20 or 30 years. So when they bring in some young person off the street and say, ‘Hey, hit me with your five best ideas’ — I’ve seen that before, like in writing competitions, art competitions, character design.

There’s a side story — I know you love tangents, so here’s one. When I was in eighth grade, I was in an art class. I was a huge fan of comic books, and I’d draw characters all the time. We had a class project, so we were drawing characters, and a buddy of mine and I were sitting there talking, looking at the back of one of these comic books, and it said they were having a contest for new characters — design a superhero, tell them the bio and background, all that. We both entered. I’d drawn this guy — black and white, big red dot on his chest, the whole nine yards — and we submitted it, and we never heard anything. Didn’t make finals, didn’t make anything, it was just gone.

About ten years later, I found this comic, and it’s been turned into a movie with Vin Diesel. It was my guy — black, white, red circle on the chest, the whole nine yards was there. And I was like, ‘Son of a gun, stole myself.’ But the thing was, when I submitted it, part of entering the contest transferred all rights to the company. So — even in eighth grade, I did the exact same thing. I was so excited to work with my idols, get a foot in the door, that even though it never came to fruition, the same thing happened.

Morgan Friedman: I love your story within the story — it first reminds me of Hamlet, where act five is the play within a play, so this episode of Client Horror Stories has some Hamletian overtones. Secondly, what’s interesting is I have this mathy side but also a more spiritual side, and my more spiritual side thinks the universe is trying to teach you the same lesson — like this happened to you in eighth grade…

Paul Pape: It did. I have two scars on my forehead, here in my eyebrows — two scars. The first time, I ran into a table when I was two years old and split open my eyebrow, and I have this nice scar from it. Three months later, I did it again on this side. I’m one of those people that needs the universe to do things more than once. 

Morgan Friedman: I’m not going to learn it the first time. So I want to point out how the bug is also the feature — how the yin is the yang. Because something I’ve found with really creative people — and I try to include myself in that category, let’s say it’s more aspirational, I hope to include myself in that category…

Yeah, I’m creative with writing and words, basically.

...with really creative people, they can’t stop themselves. It’s like a little bit of a magic power just to be bursting with ideas, creative overload — by dint of being this creative, obsessive maniac, you’re going to keep having the same problems caused by just being far too creative. And because, definitionally, it’s going to spill out everywhere, and when it spills out everywhere, here and there, people are going to find the tail ends of it and take it for themselves.

Paul Pape: There are always people picking up scraps.

Morgan Friedman: Yeah. So this really is a testament to your creativity — something I often tell writers is that a real writer can’t stop themselves from writing. People ask me, ‘Morgan, why did you write this book, and this book?’ My most recent one is on forgiveness, and everyone’s like, ‘Morgan, your book’s not about marketing or humor or anything, why did you write a book on forgiveness?’ And my answer is: I couldn’t stop myself. I’d been dealing with these emotions for decades and needed to process and get it out. So I locked myself away for a weekend and let it out. That’s the true spirit of the artist — you can’t stop yourself. So I’m going to turn the negative — that you’re not learning from your mistakes — into a positive: of course you don’t learn from the mistakes, because it’s just a natural consequence of this burst of creative energy within yourself that you can’t contain or control.

Paul Pape: Yeah, and it bites you in the butt, unfortunately. I love that spin — absolutely love that spin. But it is one of those things — hang on, I need to put some more whiskey in here. Honestly, speaking of the book-writing thing — I wrote this book, and this one here, and in the process of writing them — these are basically self-help books, non-fiction — the exact same thing happened to me. I had this idea come to me, and I wrote an entire book, over 100,000 words, horror fiction, I don’t know, I just had to. It’s with editors now. I just had this inkling that I had to do this other thing while writing these books that had nothing to do with what I was doing. It was very out of left field for me, and I’m not a writer — well, I guess I am now, since I can publish books, but I wouldn’t necessarily consider myself an artist. And it’s just weird that you have that pull, and if you don’t listen to the universe, it’ll keep smacking you over the head with it. What do they say — the feather, the brick, the truck?

Morgan Friedman: Wait, I’ve never heard that before — you mean you’re smacked first lightly, then more intensely, and then…

Paul Pape: Exactly. The feather, the brick, the truck. So the universe is going to let you know, and you either catch on quick or you get hit with a truck. I’ve gotten to the point in my life where I’m like, let’s avoid the truck. I get the brick very often — I’ll be the first to admit that one. Definitely the brick. But if you just listen to what the universe is telling you — and I can put this into the real world too, because if you look at movies, you’ll notice random movies come out in pairs. Armageddon came out at the same time as Deep Impact, and then there was The Matrix, which came out at the same time as Dark City.

Morgan Friedman: Exactly — see, things come out in pairs, and that’s the feather, the brick, and the truck in action. It’s not that somebody pitched to two different studios — what happened is that idea was born in the universe, two people grabbed it, and two people ran with it. And if you sit on those ideas, someone else is going to pick them up and it’ll be done worse — or you’ll have that regret that we say we don’t ever have, but you will. You’ll have that regret that it passed you by, thinking, ‘Damn it, that was my idea, I should have.’ Don’t ever do the ‘should have.’ Put it out there — what’s the worst that can happen?

But, by the way, I hadn’t really thought about it — I only discovered Dark City a few years ago. You know that movie?

Paul Pape: Oh, yeah.

Morgan Friedman: They came out right around the same day, or within weeks, of The Matrix, with very similar concepts. I hadn’t thought about it in terms of other movies before. But I make that same argument with patent filings — I don’t know if you’ve read about this, but when Alexander Graham Bell filed a patent for the phone, someone else filed a patent for the exact same thing, like one day apart. It was literally a one-day difference.

Paul Pape: That’s crazy.

Morgan Friedman: And it was similar with Edison and the light bulb — someone else had a very similar patent within days. Another example of these things happening at the same time — since I was a math nerd as a kid, my math side always remembers that calculus was invented by two different people: Isaac Newton in England, and — what’s his name, the German guy — some famous German mathematician. I’m going to feel so stupid — it’s…

Paul Pape: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz?

Morgan Friedman: Leibniz, of course — I knew that. If Client Horror Stories tries to be advice for younger versions of ourselves, then if a younger version of myself in high school, when I was the pretentious, overintellectual math-and-philosophy nerd, were watching this in the future, I’d be embarrassed. ‘Morgan, how could you forget Leibniz?’

Paul Pape: Yeah, sorry — that’s because you have so much other knowledge occupying that brain. That’s what that is, always.

Morgan Friedman: That’s right, that’s right. Okay, so this is super interesting, but I have this burning question — what happened after your wife saw herself on TV?

Paul Pape: Well, we found a lawyer, is what we did. I sued, because I was like, ‘You actually stole my IP. I gave you this on the promise that you would hire me, and the reality is you stole my idea.’ So I filed a complaint for copyright infringement, theft of IP. I found a lawyer who was willing to take my case, and we sued the company. I had timestamps, because the drawing I’d done had been adjusted in Photoshop, so I had timestamped images showing when I’d created it — it was at least a year before I’d even had a meeting with this guy. So we had a lot of information there, and my lawyer thought we definitely had a case. He said, ‘You probably won’t win a windfall, they won’t take it down — they’ll just have to pay you what you would have asked for had you gotten the job.’ I said, ‘I don’t care, that’s fine, I just want compensation for my IP.’

So the court date arrived, we showed up in front of the judge, my lawyer was great — he presented the case as best he could, presented all the facts, and the facts were definitely on my side. Unfortunately, the judge did not side with me — he sided with the other guy. And the judge told me, ‘Well, okay, Mr. Pape, did you invent women?’ I said, ‘No.’ He goes, ‘Exactly — you can’t file an IP on women, it’s too well known, it’s something everybody has. It just happens that they came up with this brilliant idea right after you gave it to them, but they came up with it on their own. Now, that’s not the kicker.

Morgan Friedman: No, this is getting exciting. But before we get to the kicker, let’s discuss the judge for a minute. I’m not a lawyer, I don’t know anything about these things, but I want to share my instinct just based on my experience — which is, a huge part of convincing anyone of anything is framing it in a particular way. You have to define the audience and define how you frame it — you need the target for your game. This is like really good marketing isn’t just making a good ad, it’s much bigger — who do we want to talk to, how do we want to frame it? Thinking about this as my approach to convincing people of things, what I’m realizing in real time in this conversation is, if I were a lawyer, I would think long and hard about questions like: what jurisdiction do we want to sue them in? Are there ways to know which judge is more likely to be favorable? Because the problem is, based on what you said, based on the judge’s personality, there’s no way you could have ever won.

Paul Pape: No. So, there’s a tidbit of information on that one as well — how I would have never won either — I later found out that the judge was friends with the guy who owned the grocery store chain.

Morgan Friedman: No. Oh no.

Paul Pape:So that deck was stacked before I even walked in the room. Yeah, but that’s not the kicker– that’s salt on the wound.

Morgan Friedman: Wait. So, we’ll get to the kicker, but just to pour more salt on for a second — you know how all contracts have that bottom line, like, ‘This contract is legal under the laws of San Francisco, California’? I’d never really thought about jurisdiction, and it always felt kind of arbitrary to me. But it kind of makes sense — this tells me, for example, you might want to always choose a jurisdiction for your contracts that is not the jurisdiction of the person you’re suing, because the person you’re suing is more likely to be friends with a judge and more likely to have influence.

Paul Pape: The thing is, we were both in the same city, and I was 22, so I don’t think there was even an opportunity to pull that move. Nowadays, absolutely. But I think the bigger takeaway is, a millionaire deals with a judge, they’re just hobnobbing with people — they’re up there, and you’re down here.

Morgan Friedman: Yeah. Oh yeah — by the way, these ideas about choosing the jurisdiction to sue them in, and for the contracts, are uber, uber sophisticated. You at 22 wouldn’t have even dreamed of anything that could be relevant. I just want to point out for the record, because it’s interesting, and for our listeners — this thought process leads me to note that you want to work in a jurisdiction where the other person is less likely to have influence. Note that that’s the opposite of a piece of advice I once heard from a different lawyer of mine, in a very different context — one lawyer of mine once told me, ‘You always want to sue people in the jurisdiction where they have their assets.’ Because, all the time, what happens with these rich people is: they just have a house in the city, but their money’s in some bank account in Gibraltar. So if you sue them for a gazillion dollars in the US, all you get is the house — nothing else — even though they have a gazillion dollars in Jibralta. So you’d actually want to sue them in Jibralta. So, that piece of advice from a lawyer is the opposite of this one, because the jurisdiction where you have all your assets is also where you’re likely to have influence. So, pick your poison.

Paul Pape: Right. Yeah, I think in this regard, what I was out was maybe $1,500 or $2,000. I wasn’t — you know, it’s pocket change now, but at 22, that was a huge deal. Nowadays, it’s what it is.

Morgan Friedman: So — were you going to say something?

Paul Pape: No, no.

Morgan Friedman: So, you’ve hinted that this isn’t even the kicker of the story. So what happens next, after the judge says, “You can’t copyright women”

Paul Pape: Yeah, ‘Did you invent women?’ No. Really, when we were leaving the courtroom — because, you know, they dismissed the case and all that, and you walked out — what sucked is I had to pay my lawyer, and he obviously kept the money. I was out everything. But as we were walking out, the guy who owned the grocery chain walked up to me and patted me on the back and said, ‘Next time, before you give out any ideas, keep your damn mouth shut until you sign something.’ And I’m like, ‘I guess, thanks for the advice, jerk’ — but read the room. I don’t know, it was just one of those situations where he knew he had me from the very beginning, most likely because he’d done this before. That would be my guess. But it’s not bad advice — unfortunately, with that advice comes the possibility that your clients will walk, or that you’ll hamstring yourself when you’re trying to meet with other people. So what I took away from that is: just don’t give them any ideas — because again, ideas are where the money is — but work around it. Show off all of your genius around it. Don’t go down the drain, circle it. That’s the best advice I’d take away from that one.

Morgan Friedman: Wow. So a few things — the advice we were brainstorming earlier in the episode: stand strong. Also, let’s discuss for a few minutes him actually patting you on the back and saying, ‘Son, next time, sign a contract before you give away your ideas.’ So, a few things — first, I fully agree with your interpretation: the fact that he would say that means this is part of his modus operandi, this is just what he does. And he probably hires really young people, because very young people are too inexperienced and unsophisticated to have noticed these patterns. What I also find incredibly interesting about him saying that is, by saying it, he’s effectively acknowledging what he’s doing.

Paul Pape: Absolutely. Yeah, he admitted it. Yeah, he admitted fault. Yeah, I mean 100%. He knew he did it, and he got away with it — and that’s the thing that gets you.

Morgan Friedman: Yeah. So it’s interesting — in Client Horror Stories, most client horror stories on this podcast — I’m almost at episode 100 — most episodes deal with someone where the client is crazy, or you fucked up and it escalated, or there’s a whole series of miscommunications, or there’s an interloper in the middle who gave up broken telephone. And it turns out that the true asshole who plans to take advantage of you is few and far between. So what’s one of the incredible things about this story is not only was he a known asshole — this was his whole plan — but he comes up and admits it at the end.

Paul Pape: Yeah, I mean, it is truly a horror story. Now, don’t get me wrong — it stung. It stung so much. My lawyer actually gave me money back. It was a $1,000 retainer, and he said, ‘I’ll give you $500 back,’ because he saw I had no money — I was a broke artist straight out of school. He recognized that and so I appreciated the lawyer for that — day and night, I was very appreciative. But, you know — yeah, you’re right. Absolutely — I got taken advantage of by a guy who’s a serial taker-advantager, but you’ve got to take it. If I’d gotten hung up on that, it could have been a career-ender for me. I could have really sunk into it and been like, ‘I don’t trust anybody anymore,’ and seen it as a hard stop. Instead, I looked at it as a lesson to learn — just like running into a coffee table twice, I learned it the hard way.

Morgan Friedman: You didn’t learn it the first time, in eighth grade.

Paul Pape: I did not, I did not — so I had to learn it again at 22. And lose some money in the process — actual money, not just the fictional money I could have gotten from the design, but I had to pay the lawyer, so I actually lost money in that regard too.

Yeah, but I mean, that’s okay — I think what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and as long as you’re willing to learn from those types of situations, you end up better for it, and you protect yourself going forward. I think that’s a great takeaway — a silver lining, and all.

Morgan Friedman: Yeah, I think that’s a great silver lining, great learning, and it’s powerful to remember that there are people out there who, on purpose, take advantage of people. So it’s a very powerful reminder — because I try to interpret bad behavior in the most positive way possible. ‘No, it’s a misunderstanding’ — that’s my instinct. So it’s very powerful for me when he just openly admits it — ‘Ha, I won, I did it on purpose.’ 

Paul Pape: And I laugh at it now — it’s been well over 22 years since that happened to me. So I can laugh at it now, but when I was a professor teaching, this was one of the classic buyer-beware type stories. This is one of the best versions of this that I can tell somebody, because it wasn’t only a personal story I could literally relate to, it’s also universal. You said it’s rare to hear it on your podcast, but unfortunately, those companies are out there — I’ve worked and I have similar tales. I don’t know if you want to tangent off into a similar tale, but if you’ve got a minute, I’ll tell you another juicy version that’s very similar to this.

Morgan Friedman: Episodes are usually 45 minutes, so we have about five minutes until we hit the average mark. I’d love to hear the similar, shorter one.

Paul Pape: Okay. So, I’m a big fan, I love games — I’m a big gamer, obviously, gamify business and all that. And one of the games I love to play is a card game called Munchkin. I was playing this game — really simple game — with my friends, but I noticed it could be made better with a board-game attachment, since it’s just cards but you have to keep track of everything. So I thought, we should have little figures and stuff. I actually made this, because I’m a product designer, and I sent it off to the company, which got me on their radar. They said, ‘We don’t take solicitations,’ or whatever, but eventually they contacted me and said, ‘Hey, this is the 30th anniversary of Munchkin, and since you submitted this awesome thing, we’d like to hire you to design bobbleheads to go with these figures.’

I said, ‘Okay, cool.’ So I went and designed the bobblehead, and I said, ‘I can’t make millions of pieces, which is what they wanted — I’ll design it, and we’ll send it off to a bobblehead maker in China.’ They said, ‘Yeah, that’s fine.’ So I said, ‘I’ll broker it all, I’ll handle that,’ and they said, ‘Okay, cool.’ So I found a broker who handled communication between the Chinese manufacturer and the United States, and I submitted my digital design — they had the whole thing. And then I got a call from Steve Jackson Games, who owns Munchkin, and they said, ‘We’re cutting you out, because the company I submitted my design to redesigned it, so now it’s theirs, and it saves us three cents a bobblehead to not have to pay you.’

So that’s the third coffee table, by the way — because I was under contract to design this thing with them, and they still cut me out, because the manufacturer recognized the IP and went straight to the company and said, ‘I can do it for cheaper,’ and the company said, ‘We’ll take cheaper over a moral decision,’ and cut me out of that one too.

Morgan Friedman: Wow. People are such assholes sometimes.

Paul Pape: Sometimes they are — big business, I find, is the asshole, because instead of just removing an olive from a jar to make a million dollars, they take the heart out of the people who are helping them the most. Someone who has a genuine desire to help them — it’s like meeting your idols, you don’t want to do that, because when it comes down to it, they don’t care about you and your feelings, they care about the bottom line. So, unfortunately, you’ve got to grow a thick enough skin to accept that that might happen, or to not allow it to happen in the first place.

Morgan Friedman: Wow, I think these are powerful lessons and stories to end the episode on. I’m still reeling from both the first asshole admitting it, and then your idol cutting you out to save two cents.

Yeah, I know — I like your framing of it, never meet your idols. Actually, by the way, there’s another lesson from that mini-final story — be careful, not just with idols, but when you go outside your area of specialization. Like, you’re a designer, not a China-broker manufacturing guy. I did a lot of work and really grew a company that made all their products in China, and the factory foreman literally took the designs, opened up another factory across the street making the exact same thing with the exact same molds, and contacted all the distributors in the US, selling it. And part of it is, my friend and client was the marketing-growth guy for the company — he was the genius-inventor type who built something and hit it big, but he wasn’t the ‘build it safely in China’ guy. So — step out of your specialization with care.

Paul Pape: Yes — and find support, find people who are experts in the fields you need, people you trust to help you when you need it. You can’t know everything, you only know what you know. You can guess your way through things, but you’ll get bit. 

Morgan Friedman: There’s a popular saying in Brazil: ‘Brazil isn’t for beginners.’ And it means this kind of thing — you try to do business, try to do something in Brazil, it’s going to come at you from all sides, you never expect it. If Brazil isn’t for beginners, then China is for everyone except the most advanced, amazing people.

Paul Pape: Absolutely. Yep, yep.

Morgan Friedman: And with this, Paul, it’s been super interesting getting to know you — incredible stories. I love your creative energy and how it comes out, and I love the fact that, like we were saying before, you’re clearly a true artist, and you just can’t stop the good energy and getting your creativity out there. That is the path of the artist, and I admire that — I see myself on the same path as well.

Paul Pape: Excellent, thank you so much. This has been great, this has been a lot of fun — I haven’t laughed this hard on a podcast in a long time. So, thank you, I appreciate it.

Morgan Friedman: And to everyone watching — we hope you’ve stayed to the end, and we hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as we have. Until next time.