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Enjoy a Coca-Cola for a pause that... refreshes. This is our American Stories and our next story, well, it's a little gross, it's a little silly, and involves two young men coming up with a smelly, smelly product. that ultimately has been put to use by the US military to actually prepare medics and other types of people involved in operations that would include horrible smells. How did these two guys come up with their smelly product called liquid?
Well, I'm just gonna say assets.
Well... Here's Andrew Masters and Alan Whitman. with the story. Alan and I met In an engineering department in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where we were doing electrical for automotive. And trucks.
And we're dealing with um managers who are Not interested in building a good product. But deal dealing with corporate politics and trying to advance their own careers. Uh you're never making any decisions that might cost them a A career choice, though you know, and women and I are We both have spines and we're more interested in you know, building a good product and using logic and Not really interested in a bunch of bullshit. And for that reason, we kind of gravitated toward each other and became pretty good friends. And women, kept talking about The stuff he had Back in high school, and had used a great effect, it stunk really bad.
And that he still had a little bit left, and he should bring it in. And I guess at this point, Alan should probably back up to 15 years previous as to. Uh The beginning of um what became liquid. Yeah, and his experience.
Alright, well this is Alan and I I actually came up with this in high school completely by accident. Everybody asked me, well, how did you create it?
Well, I can't get into the details, but I can say that my parents had bought me a chemistry set. And I was into sort of mixing things together and checking stuff out. And it just happened to be one day that uh I came at came across this stuff that was It just It just was so nasty. I thought, man, what if I took this in to school and played around with it a little bit? And so I did that.
And uh It was shocking. You know, with the reaction of people when you spray it in a classroom and everybody's going crazy and Everybody's saying that the restroom actually smells better than the classroom, those kind of things.
So, had a lot of fun with it there, and then all of my. Graduated, went to uh college, became an electrical engineer. And uh had I didn't use it All those years. And uh and it wasn't until Uh, I got hired into uh my electrical engineering job where Andrew was. Or actually, I was there first, he came later, but uh.
When he showed up, the uh the company was uh Most of the people in there were very disgruntled at the time because we were told basically that we were going to be laid off. Probably, we figured it would be about five years that we had left. And uh so Everybody is pretty upset, so I was telling uh Andrew and a few other uh friends that I had this stuff I use in high school that uh I even uh Cleared out a basketball game one time in high school, and they're just sort of looking at me like, Yeah, sure, you did, whatever. You need to go into the details of the basketball game.
Okay, on the basketball game.
So, what I ended up doing was. Me and a buddy of mine, we uh We grabbed a, I guess it was an old Elmer's glue bottle, so you know how big those are, right? That's a pretty nice-sized bottle. We filled. One of those up.
And right before the game started, we went into the bathroom in that hallway, the men's bathroom. And they had those old uh I guess the radiator style heaters. And I went in there and I dumped that entire bottle into that radiator, and you could hear it sizzling and steaming. And I took off.
So I went back up in the stands over there in the gym. We could see through the doors into the hallway. And uh it was about uh half an hour later. I look down there, I see somebody walking by with with their with their shirts over their people with shirts over their faces and they're they're waving their hands. And I looked at my buddy, I said, Oh man, I said it must be hitting good.
So we went back down there halftime. And they had both double doors open on both ends of the hallways. It was snowing outside, and that place completely smelled like. And we were just having a great old time. People trying to figure out what was going on.
So I'm telling them. about this story. Uh, my co-workers, including Andrew, and uh, and I think people had dials.
So I was like, All right, well, I actually had some stuff that was at least 15 years old that was in a baby food jar. That the lid had actually rusted on, so I carefully got that off without breaking the jar. And sure enough, The stuff still smelled like, so I'm like, all right, you know, game on.
So I grabbed a Visine bottle, rained the tip of it out. And uh filled that baby up and I took it in and um we actually had a um Let me go back. We need to back up because Well, I mean, he had shared the smell with us, and it really was shocking just smelling the bottle.
Next thing I we're walking by where his manager sits. It's a cubicle area. And I'm walking ahead of him.
Next thing I know, I hear Whitman go, cover me. And I'm like, I'm confused. I turn around. And he's got that, he's got that Visine in his both hands. Like he's almost like he's peeing.
That's the vision I had as far as remembering. Turning around and seeing Whitman. Button Full pressure on that Visine bottle, aim it right towards Stenson's office. And you know, this is my first experience of. liquids outside the bottle, you know, so.
And by the way, they had set up a large fan, an industrial fan. They were blowing that crap around a 10,000 square foot design center. And that whole place smelled like everybody had their shirts over their faces, and it was. It was shocking. I remember that it worked well, but uh It worked really well in the room.
So he just had a little bit left in that baby food jar, and I remember. Because we were running out, you added a little alcohol to it. Yeah, cause I mean really I don't even know if we did what Two operations? I don't know. There was probably a few, but the problem was that once we did it.
We had to have more because it was so addicting that we couldn't stop doing it. And then the problem was. is that I couldn't remember exactly how to make more. How can you not remember? And he goes, Well, I know the basics, but there's some other, you know, like subtle process.
There's a process to making it. And if you don't have that exactly right, It ain't gonna happen. That's all I can say. Yeah, so we're all jones in for more operations and uh. You know, trying to get daily updates, and finally, one day Wentland comes in, he goes, oh, I think it's ready, I think we got it.
And we tested it and sure enough, so that set off a Huh. Oh man, how long did we do? Two months? Yeah, a couple months. Three months?
Three, four months. Yeah. Of basically Um strategizing of how to create maximum chaos without drawing too much attention where we would actually get caught. Um and so good.
So What would happen is that if I went into the bathroom and somebody had plugged up a toilet. I'd call in a visual to Andrew, which basically he had some out in his car, and then he'd go out in his car, and I'd tell him we got a visual in, you know, stall number three, building one, and he'd go get the stuff, and then he'd go ahead and ass the hell out of it. And uh so So It was hard to get in trouble because, you know, there it is, right? There's the, you know, the block toilet. And there, you know, of course, the janitor would come in or whatever.
He'd be just, you know, losing his mind, going, I don't even understand how this is possible. He'd be in there with the plunger trying to get this down with this overwhelming smell, which is really not from the actual problem. You know, it's actually our stuff. That started being a fun thing.
So You know, we'd have times where I'd call an individual and he'd hammer Andrew to hammer it. And uh We'd come back and they'd have crime scene tape over the door, like, this bathroom is closed. I was walking through the area, and of course, it was a day I'd hit it hard. and a guy was walking in front of me. from another department and it was obviously he was very disturbed.
And our buddy Joe was walking out of his cubicle area and he intersected the guy, you know, and the guy stopped and looked at Joe and he goes. What is this what is that smell? And Joe goes, I don't know, but it seems to happen every Thursday. And he was dead all right. And so I went over to whip, and I cooked over and went, hey, hey, hey, I said, Next- next operations on Tuesday.
And you're listening to Andrew Masters and Alan Whitman. When we come back, more of these pranksters, these chemistry set experimenters. These funny guys here. on our American stories. Time for a sofa upgrade?
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Offers are subject to change. and certain restrictions may apply. I turned off news altogether. I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything. It's the rage bait.
It feels like it's trying to divide people. If we got clear facts, maybe we could calm down a little. NBC News brings you clear reporting. Let's meet at the facts. Let's move forward from there.
NBC News. reporting for America. Hear that? That's what it sounds like when you plant more trees than you harvest. Work done by thousands of working forest professionals, like Adam, a district forest manager who works to protect our forests from fires.
Keeping the forest fire resistant, synonymous with keeping a forest healthy. And we do that through planting more than we harvest and mitigate those risks through active management. It's a long-term commitment. Visit WorkingForestsInitiative.com to learn more. The Chase Inc.
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Free delivery on appliance purchases of $396 or more. Offer about $11.5-123, U.S. only. C-Store Online for details. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of a product called liquid.
Well, I'm calling it Liquid Assets. You use your imagination. And it all started again with a couple of teenage boys Well, just looking to make each other laugh in the end. We're talking about Andrew Masters and Alan Whitman. Let's return to them.
For the rest of their smelly. And kind of funny. Story That was three or four months full of uh of fun there, you know, turning a job we really disliked and to uh Fun time. These were actually days that we did not have to set our alarm for because we'd have a specific day that we would go do it. And you almost couldn't sleep at night.
You basically just got up early and just went in to work and then started having fun. And at the end of the day, your ribs would hurt. You'd laugh so hard at the chaos. Yeah, well laughter's addictive, you know. It's uh you know, so the fact that I know I'm gonna go into work and just be laughing all day, and I'm definitely uh didn't need alarm on those days.
I told, you know, and I always liked doing pranks in college. I had a fair amount of good ones that I did. And oddly enough, one of them was fart spray, which didn't work to my satisfaction, so I threw it away. But after, you know, several months of all this fun, I was like, this is like the best stuff ever. You know, it's like, look at this, you know, it works good.
It stinks really bad, you get a lot of laughs. And then you'd lay off for a couple days, and people forget about it, and you'd press replay.
So I told Whitman, I said, Look, I said, this is the best stuff I have ever used. I said, we can sell this. Yeah, and Whitman's like, Yeah, I probably could, you know and uh now the the one of the problems was is uh we were both looking at getting out of engineering. I was working on a master's degree in math to get into teaching college math and Whitman was looking at starting a car wash. his own business.
So there was when you know the end is near, you know, you start coming up with ideas, you try to figure something out because. Uh, there was nothing else in the town that we were in, so we were all going to have to move one way or another.
Something was gonna change.
So when Andrew came up and decided that uh we needed to do this, I said, All right. Let's just do it. We'll go 50-50 and we'll just see where it goes in parallel with other things. that I was doing and then he was doing, we just decided we'll just sort of We'll sort of see how that plays out. You know, and it did take quite quite a long time, a lot longer than we thought, I guess, because There's a lot more to it when you get in and it seems like, well, I'm just putting liquid in a bottle.
But then you got to figure out what kind of bottle, what shape of bottle, what material is the bottle made out of, what kind of mist are you going to use? You know, how many milliliters is it going to put out? Where do we get a label? Yeah, how do we put the label on? What's the artwork look like?
And what's the name? Yeah. So.
Well, the the name is a funny part. Yeah, the name was probably one of the easiest things we did. You know, it was a big mystery as far as, well, how do you pick a good name? You know, we're not. You know, I've learned in doing my own.
You know and starting our own business here. I've learned one thing is that If you're a marketer, You chain smoke and you have a ponytail. We don't do either. Yeah. So I can remember walking into the conference room, shutting the door, And Whitman was halfway sitting down and he goes, So what are we going to call it?
And I said, I don't know, what do you think? And as he's sitting down, he goes, Happened he goes like liquids and I said that's it It's got a ring to it. Let's just go with it.
So.
We went out, we decided that we'd We'd find all the radio stations in the country that had crazy morning shows. We decided to send them samples with a little note. And there was about four or five of those stations where we did really well over We would get we got a surge in sales. Uh but then I would it would s sl you know, die off again to practically zero. Until one day I was reading an article about A guy named, well, he goes by his radio, his name is Bubba the Love Sponge, and it was in the local Fort Wayne paper because.
This guy was. Uh his hometown was two counties over.
So I was reading the article about him and I looked up his mailing address and I remember packing that box. I can still remember it to this day because I put six bottles in there and sent it to him. And never heard anything from him until all of a sudden Whitman's like, hey, our web page is down because we've got something's going on. We've got so much traffic that shut our web page down. And it comes to find out that Bub love sponge.
and I can't remember his real name. But he was actually using it on a show as a punishment for someone who did something stupid. Usually their cell phone would go off while they're on the air. What they would do is if somebody, if somebody screwed up, On the air, cell phone went off or did something else stupid they weren't supposed to do. They went on Liquids Alert.
And once they were on liquid slurred, if they screwed up one more time, then they would take them in the room and in the studio there and they would the hell out of them. And of course, This was on Siri satellite and it comes on right before Howard Stern. It was on Howard 101 channel.
So it went nationwide. And these guys did us a real favor by basically, you know, using this. Probably for three or four months advertising. Yeah, three or four months. Three or four months advertising and uh.
Have to thank Old Bubba. He got us on the map. That put us over the top where we actually were making enough that.
Well, we don't need a day job anymore. It'd be ra you know, it'd be tight, but we would make it. We spent two years and didn't, we couldn't really get out of just doing an interview and having 20 orders and then it go back to zero within a week. We just couldn't get the thing to stick for whatever reason, but once Bubba started. Talking about it on a daily basis.
And that started a floor where we actually had something and it didn't go away and it started growing slowly from that. Yeah, you know, and then I think the next year was when Amazon picked us up. And then we didn't definitely need a day job, and that worked out great because that's about a few months after that, it's when we got laid off. I remember telling Woodman, I said, I just can't stop smiling. I just can't stop smiling, you know, when Amazon picked us up and we got another boost to the point where I was almost making the same as my engineering salary.
Doing a quarter of the work, by the way. I guess we can start talking about our customers now. There's some customer stories, yeah. We can, uh, yeah, there's quite a few customer stories, and we've we've had people that uh They'd actually used it in their bubble juice, like for a for a wedding. You know when they blow bubbles?
You know. They mix the bubble juice with the liquid.
So they're they're blowing bubbles as the bride and groom come down the aisle, you know, with this juice, which I thought that was sorta clever. People are putting in uh putting it in balloons and blowing the balloons up so when they pop it smells like This is one that was in particular sort of strange, and this was sort of early on, so. We were probably only selling it for maybe a couple years at that point. This guy calls me up. And he wants to order.
And okay, that's cool. But it's obvious that he used it before. And at that point, we hadn't, you know, we didn't have tons of customers.
So I said, so I just asked him.
So it sounds like you've used the product before. He says, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He goes, I use it. He goes, man, he goes, I need more, but I need it real soon here, whatever, you know, and that's like.
Well I said so Apparently, he had some success with this. What did you do? And he was sort of hesitant to tell me. And he's like, all right, I'll tell you. And he starts this story off He had bought our product and he had it laying around, and he was in the process of moving to a new city.
He had to get his utility set up. He calls up, and it had been like two or three weeks. His wife is complaining that they don't have the power on yet.
Well, he's a contractor and he has one of the special keys. He's got a way to get in to the box to turn the power on.
So he turns the power on himself.
Well, he automatically gets a the next day, the power company actually shows up. They see that it's turned off or turned on, and he ends up getting a fine from the power company because he had. Had screwed around with the box, and that's illegal, and he's not allowed to do that.
So he's like, All right, well, I'm gonna pay this bill, and I'm pissed off because. Yeah, they should have done this for me anyways sooner, so. He takes, he gets he writes a check and he coats it with liquid and he sort of lets it dry.
So he goes over to what sort of looks like a bank teller setup with that vacuum tube, and they leave.
So they take off.
Well, the following day, the police call them up. And the the cop When he goes into the office, the cop's got like an evidence baggie and it's got his check in it. And they're claiming That this bank, or well not the bank, but this the co-op or whatever, has now shut the entire system down, shut the entire building down. They've got tape all the way around the building or whatever. It looks like a crime scene.
And they can't open it up because the whole freaking building smells like And the teller apparently is claiming that she's quitting because she claims that she's handled feces. Yeah. And you can't make this up, so. Cop's like, well, he goes, here's the deal. He goes, we're going to send this in for analysis.
If it's got feces, you're going to jail, you're in trouble, or whatever. He's like, well, you go ahead and test it all you want because I didn't do that. Ultimately, what happened was that it came back clean. They couldn't do anything about it. And at the end of the day, he said, What could I have done that would have got them back?
And I said, I looked at it, I asked him, I said, well, now you're ordering more? He's like, yeah, he goes, I got some other business to take care of. I said, all right, we'll send you a couple extra bottles. Have a good day, you know. And we recommend, you know, it's a prank product.
It's not to go out there and destroy people, but. Uh every once in a while, I guess that happens. You know, we like to say that we make the gun, we don't shoot it.
So You know, at your own risk, I guess. But most of the time, people are just having fun with it. And, God, there's tons of YouTube videos out there. We started making a few YouTube videos until the YouTubers outdid us. And so now our customers are doing better videos than we could even dream of.
If you ever go out there, you go out there and look at YouTube and type liquids, you'll see really good stuff out there. Andrew Masters story, Alan Whitman's story, liquid assets story here on Our American Stories. The day begins at the Chase Sapphire Lounge by the club at Boston Logan Airport. You get the clam chowder. In San Diego, it's tostadas.
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