Gabe Whaley

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143 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2025 last heard 30 Sep

Gabe Whaley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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TED Talks Daily · This TED Talk is full of bad ideas | Gabe Whaley · 30 Sep 2025 podcast

Handbags.

Handbags are really expensive, and incredibly, the smaller they get, the more expensive they become.

LAUGHTER

So a few summers ago, we actually endeavored to make the world's smallest handbag, microscopic in fact, and somehow it ended up selling at auction for $63,000, incidentally making it the world's most expensive handbag per volume.

Here's another one.

You've probably seen those Boston Dynamics spot dog robots that do TikTok dances with K-pop stars on YouTube.

Well, we managed to get one.

Instead of making it dance, we strapped a paintball gun to it, and we connected it remotely to a website where people could take turns driving it and firing it in an art gallery that we constructed.

Boston Dynamics did not like that one very much.

So you've probably figured out by now that I'm not actually here to sell you keys to a car.

Today I'm here to talk to you about bad ideas, the kind of ideas that typically die on the vine because reason or work colleagues get in the way.

But to me, these are the most exciting ideas because you just never know what might happen.

Take these crazy-looking shoes, for example.

I think it was like the spring of 2023.

My colleagues and I were sketching out the initial prototypes of the Big Red Boot.

I remember us being equal parts terrified because, of course, like, who's going to wear these, much less spend money on them?

But at the same time, the moment that we put on the initial prototypes ourselves ...

We were filled with such a chaotic sense of glee that we were like, you know what, we just got to do it.

So we committed to making a couple hundred pairs.

We priced them at $350, and we just prayed that there would be a few hundred people out there in the world who would spend money on these crazy-looking things.

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