In high school and college, I brought a basic first aid kit (it contained bandages, triple antibiotic ointment, medical tape, some things to help friends with low-blood sugar) in my backpack every day to school. It wasn’t necessary: there were first aid kits scattered around the school, my friends who had certain conditions usually already carried the things they needed, and it wasn’t a violent school either. The only extent of its usage were a few self-inflicted cuts from peers and Halloween costumes that needed some (medical) tape to stick to someone’s body.

On the one hand I have the confidence of my dad to just wing it in low-risk or small time commitment situations; on the other hand, I also prepare a significant amount of time to the point of decision paralysis in the name of perfection. This personality type has led my mother and I to kind of be hoarders and bringing too many things just in case a situation happens.

After college, I dropped the first aid kit since statistically nothing happened and started carrying duct tape with me. I loved carrying my backpack everywhere. It wasn’t necessary in many situations, but it was like wearing a watch, which funnily enough I hate the feeling of a watch on my wrist, so I almost never wear one. Carrying the backpack meant I could carry other things. Recall, I used duct tape in high school and college that ended up mostly being used for Halloween costumes. Since that was pretty much the only thing that ended up getting used after 4 years of carrying that first aid kit around, I decided to focus on just a huge roll of tape.

And oh boy was that duct tape useful.

I’ve used that duct tape in so many situations over the last 4 years:

• Rolling up a mattress to carry across town (twice)
• More Halloween costumes
• As my best friend was shitting on me for carrying duct tape everywhere (mind you, he had no home, and all his life belongings including his passport, electronics, etc. were in this backpack), I noticed across the street a woman’s purse string broke. I screamed if she wanted tape, and she was happy to tape her purse up temporarily. As Jose said, “the best feeling is when you’re right” / vindicated
• Fixing my fridge
• My apartment window detached and fell onto my desk, so I taped the window to the sides to prevent it from falling. After 1.5 years, I took off the tape, and spent 15 minutes with a scrub daddy and all-purpose cleaning solution to get the remnant adhesive off.
• Not me, but at the Detroit airport on two separate occasions, I saw cars where the door or window was completely gone, and a ton of duct tape was used to fill the gap.
• At the Miami airport, my charger kept falling out of the outlet. Typically, you can flip it upside down, and it’d stay in, but I had to duct tape it to the wall. This has happened multiple times through the years, most recently at Capital One café like a week ago.
• At work I got awarded Duct Tape King after every offsite because teams would keep running into trouble and duct tape would always come to the rescue. I can’t remember every situation, but sometimes it was like hanging posters on a wall.

As a side note, I also love cardboard boxes. I have photos of my childhood that I look back on thinking ‘wow this certainly was an addiction’. I turned a box into a ship carrying pennies (which were soldiers in a battle simulation). I’d sit inside a box and pretend it was a ship. I’d use a box as a tank and my sibling would drag me everywhere in it. I turned a cardboard box into a rifle; well, you can make anything a rifle if it’s just a rectangular prism like a violin. Yes, that too was turned into a re-enactment.

But in my mature years, I had two desks in my studio apartment, but decided to use cardboard boxes as extra tables: for my dining room, I’d use a box to eat on and share with my girlfriend for family meals. If I was cooking a dish with multiple steps where I had to put something aside, I’d put it on a box. If I had a lot of shit like books or tools, but they wouldn’t stack correctly, I’d use a cardboard box. In my studio apartment, I think I had maybe 6 large cardboard boxes that could’ve easily been replaced by actual furniture. My girlfriend was pretty mad about it, but I relished in all the saved space and money. Granted, over time, since the boxes were formerly fruit boxes where it’s an open-ended box with one side being quite open, it’d bend over time, so I’d have to replace them.

In other words, I fixate to certain items for fun, especially if they have wide utility. From my backpack, to my first aid kit, to my duct tape, to cardboard boxes, in retrospect, they’re all fairly cheap items but so universally loved.

Influencer Era

I’ve been encouraged by folks who know my love for duct tape to start making a channel based on that passion. So I’ll just detail my thesis:

I watched Conan O’Brien reaction of his Hot Ones episode and realized I have absurdist humor. I have this belief that duct tape is the most universally useful tool that everyone should bring everywhere, not just the zombie apocalypse. ChatGPT had to remind me of the hyperbolic idiom that “duct tape can fix everything”. I’m such an idiot for not thinking of that.

So I’ll think of not just scenarios that actually happened like my friend bashing me then 3 minutes later I fixed someone’s purse. But like situations that don’t even need duct tape to fix or is not ideal to use and potentially increasing the absurdity through the video.

For example, fixing my relationship with duct tape. Thinking about this video some more, I think it’s the escalation. So I might just have a video that escalates by taping, then showing it failed, then taping an extreme amount. My fridge’s door cubby holder is no longer attached to the fridge and keeps falling. I taped it back on, but it keeps falling. I tape more and more and just keep retape. Until by the end, it’s so well taped, during testing, I’m thrusting the fridge over and over, opening and closing the fridge door to see if the tape falls, until everything else falls out… but the duct tape works.

The partial inspiration is I have a perfectionist issue (as do many people who start influencing worrying they won’t get any views) and public anxiety/reputational damage control worries. The other issue is consistency and building habits. I feel like I’ve been developing habits consistently, and this marketing things is my next step. Because I’m also a B2B2C startup founder, just making videos can likely help me figure out how to make good videos for my startup as well. I’ve always struggled with marketing unlike cold-email sales in B2B SaaS. Marketing is pure consistency but also creativity (and also money). This duct tape channel is just the beginning of me practicing marketing while also spreading the gospel of duct tape.

I might even write a book on duct tape for fun.

Addendum

On my absurdist humor, I can give a little more depth. On reflection, it seems like the humor I conduct is:

• Continual absurdity. In the Conan podcast, he continues making up stories like going to the construction site. I had two good friends from high school who I loved collaboratively making up stories as we went along. Unfortunately, as I’ve moved to different places, I haven’t had anyone come close to recreating it.
• Another aspect of absurd humor is game physics. There’s a great subreddit on just ludicrous game physics, but I think two channels that resemble this a lot are DougDoug and Let’s game it out.
• Physical humor. Conan’s physical humor is indescribable. I’d say it’s less slap-stick, Jackie Chan humor and more hyperbolic expressions of his verbal jokes.
• Lastly, I think a lot of humor is around making fun of folks. I think I enjoy watching comedians in comfortable settings like Akash Singh, but I don’t really do it myself. If I do, of course it comes off rude, and honestly it isn’t intended to be funny; it’s to taunt, obviously.

As I said before, it’s really hard finding people who resemble my humor, though I notice whenever I find something funny, my sibling does too. Unfortunately, we’re not good at collaborative continual absurdity, but we do find a lot of absurd situations funny. It might be genetically linked to my mom. For example, I retold a story of my former boss walking in a WeWork and slamming his face into the wall. His WeWork office had a lot of glass walls, and the doors were glass too, so he was walking too quickly and ended up with a nose bleed. I laughed, but then my manager told me that this isn’t funny. But when I retell the story to my sibling and my mom, we laughed. I get it’s mean, and maybe I’m very self-deprecating, or maybe I’m humble (I used to think I had shallow modesty, but I genuinely do think I’m just not that smart. Just lucky to stumble into information and think a lot that allows me to be competitive knowledge wise, maybe not intellect), so I just know to laugh at myself, and thus I also laugh at others because shit happens. Laugh it off.

I think Conan O’Brien put my view of myself succinctly in terms of Abraham Lincoln’s personality: Conan has been a lifelong, self-described obsessive fan of Abraham Lincoln. From a mature perspective, Conan found Lincoln to be self-deprecating like making fun of his own looks. Lincoln used his humor to disarm political enemes thhrough humility rather than infallibility.

Though I’ve never held a significant position for people to even view me as smart, whether that’s a club president, a student that raises their hand a lot, or an actual high office position, Conan has also mentioned that the burden of the office is one of perfection with grand plans. But the reality is that of uncertainty. Lincoln was just a “human being feeling his way through total darkness.”