Episode Description
On this episode of Our American Stories, since the company’s inception in 2005, Liquid Ass has been a popular product amongst pranksters across the world. The two-pack on Amazon currently has an unprecedented 36,000-plus reviews with a 4 1/2-star rating! [BTW: Read the ratings if you want a good laugh.] So who goes about creating such a spray? Well, a teenager, obviously. Here to tell the story are the co-founders of Liquid Assets, Andrew Masters and Allen Wittman.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
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
(00:33):
these two guys come up with their smelly product called liquid? Well,
I'm just going to say assets. Well, here's Andrew Masters
and Alan Whitman with the story.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Allan 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 managers who are not interested in building
a good product, but dealing with corporate politics and trying
to advance your own careers.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
You're never making.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Any decisions that might cost him a career choice. So,
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 both. 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
(01:31):
in high school and had used a great effect that
stone really bad and that he still had a little
bit left and he should.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Bring it in.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
And I guess at this point Alan should probably back
up to, you know, fifteen years previous as to the
story of the beginning of what became liquid.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
In his experience.
Speaker 4 (01:52):
All right, well this is Alan, and I actually came
up with this in high school completely by accident. Everybody
asked me, well, you know, how did how did you
create it?
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Well?
Speaker 4 (02:01):
I can't get into the details, but uh, 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 just happened to me one day
that I came across the stuff that was it just
it just was so nasty. I thought, man, what if
I what if I took this into school and played
around with it.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
A little bit? And uh so I did that, and
uh it.
Speaker 4 (02:24):
Was shocking, you know, with with the reaction of people
when you when you sprayed in a classroom, when everybody's
you know, going crazy, and everybody's staying at the the
restroom actually smells better than the classroom, those kind of things.
So I had a lot of fun with it there
and then all of my uh graduated, went to college,
became an electrical engineer, and uh had I didn't use
(02:48):
it all those years and uh and it wasn't until
I got hired into my electrical engineering job where Andrew
was or actually I was there first, he came later.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
But when he showed.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
Up the company was 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. Uh
probably we figured it would be about five years that
we had left, and uh so everybody was pretty upset.
So I was telling uh Andrew and a few other
friends that I had the stuff I used in high school,
(03:21):
that 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 he did whatever.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
You need to go to the okay on the on
the on the basketball game.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
So what I ended up doing was me and a
buddy of mine, we uh we grabbed a uh I
guess it was an Elmer 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
uh the bathroom in that hallway, the men's bathroom, and
they had those old, uh I guess, the radiator style heaters,
(03:57):
and I went in there and I dumped that entire
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, and we could
see through the doors into.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
The hallway, and it was about half an hour later.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
I looked down and I see somebody walking by their
with their shirts over their you know, people with shirts
over their faces, and 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 smell like and we were just we
(04:35):
were just having a great old time. People trying to
figure out what was going on. So I'm telling them
about this story, my coworkers and including Andrew, and I
think people had doubts. So I was like, all right, well,
I actually had some stuff that was at least fifteen
years old. That was in a baby food jar that
the lid had actually rusted on. So I carefully got
(04:56):
that off without breaking the jar, and sure enough the
stuff still smell like. So I'm like, all right, you know,
game on. So I grabbed a vizing bottle, reamed the
tip of it out and build that baby up and
I took it in and we actually had a let me, well,
let me go back.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
We need to back up, because.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
Well, I mean he had he had shared the smell
with us, and then what it really was shocking just
smelling the bottle. Next thing, I were 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 vizin and
(05:39):
is both hands like he's almost like he's peeing. That's
the that's the vision I had as far as remembering
turning around and seeing women putting full pressure on that
viazine bottle aim at right towards Stenson's office. And you know,
this is my first experience of li what's outside the bottle, you.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
Know, son.
Speaker 4 (06:00):
And by the way, they had set up a large
fan and an industrial fan. They were blowing that crap
around a ten thousand square foot design center in that
whole place smell like everybody had their shirts over their faces,
and it was it was shocking. I remember it worked well,
but it worked.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Really well out 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.
I mean, really, I don't even know if we did
what two operations it was.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
There was probably a few.
Speaker 4 (06:35):
But the problem was is 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.
Speaker 3 (06:47):
We're like, how can you not remember?
Speaker 2 (06:49):
And he goes, well, I know the basics, but there's
some there's some other neal like subtle the process.
Speaker 4 (06:54):
There's a process to making it, and if you don't
have that exactly right, it ain't gonna happen, that's all.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
So we were so we're all jones and for more
operations and uh, you know, trying to get daily updates
and finally one day Whenland comes in, he goes out,
I think it's ready. I think we got it and
we tested it and sure enough. So that's set off
a oh man, how long did we do?
Speaker 3 (07:15):
Two months? Yeah? Yeah, of basically.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Strategizing of how to create maximum chaos without drawing too
much attention where we would actually get caught and so good.
Speaker 4 (07:32):
So what would happen is that if I went into
the bathroom and uh, somebody had plugged up a toilet,
I'd call INDI visual to Andrew, which basically he had
some out in his car, and then he go out
in his car and I'd tell him we got a
visual and uh, you know stall number three, building one,
and uh he'd go get the stuff and then he
(07:53):
go ahead and it's the hell out of it. And
uh so so we could 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 possibly being there with the
plunger trying to get this down. Well, this overwhelming smell,
(08:16):
which is really not from the actual problem, you know,
it's actually our stuff. And that started being a fun thing. So,
you know, we we'd have times where I'd call in
a visual and he'd he'd Andrew to hammer it, and
we'd come back and they'd have crime scene tape, you know,
over the door, like this bathroom is closed.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
I was walking through the area and of course it's
you know, i'd 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, they and
the guy stopped and looked at Joe and he goes,
(08:55):
what is this?
Speaker 3 (08:56):
What is that smell?
Speaker 2 (08:58):
And Joe goes, I don't know, but it seems to
happen every Thursday.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
He was dead, all.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Right, And I went over to Wave with a book,
went over, hey, hey, hey, next next operations on Tuesday, and.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
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, and we
(09:39):
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
(10:00):
of their smelly and kind of funny story.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
That was three or four months full of fun there,
you know, turning.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
A job we really disliked into fun time. These were actually.
Speaker 4 (10:13):
Days that we did not have to set our alarm
for it, because we we'd have a specific day that
we would go do it and uh and it and
you almost couldn't sleep at night. You basically just got
up early and just went into work and and then
started having fun. And at the end of the day
your ribs would hurt you laughed so hard at the chaos.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Yeah, well, laughter is addictive, you know, it's you know,
so the fact that I know I'm gonna go into
work and just be laughing all day and I'm definitely
didn't need alarm on those days. I told what you know,
and I always liked doing pranks in college. I had
a fair amount of good ones that I did, and
uh and oddly enough one of them was fart spray,
(10:50):
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
of days and people forget about it and you'd press replay.
(11:11):
So I told the Whitman, I said, look, I said,
this is the best stuff I have ever used.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
I said, we can sell this. Yeah, and women's like, yeah,
realy good. You know.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
And now one of the problems was 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.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
So, you know, so there was there was.
Speaker 4 (11:36):
When you know that action, when you know the end
is near, you know, you start coming up with ideas,
you try to you try to figure something out. Because
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 so when
Andrew came up and decided that we needed to do this,
I said, all right, let's just do it. We'll go
fifty to fifty and we'll just see where it goes.
(11:57):
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. And
you know, and it did take quite a long time,
a lot longer than we thought, I.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
Guess, because there's a lot more to it.
Speaker 4 (12:12):
When you get in, 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 a bottle.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
What what material is the bottle made out of? What
kind of mystery you're going to use?
Speaker 4 (12:23):
You know, how many middle leaders is it going to
put out?
Speaker 3 (12:25):
You know? Where do we get a label? Yeah, we
put the label on. What's the artwork look like? And
what's the name? Yeah? So well the name is the
punny part. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
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 I've learned and doing my own
you know, and starting our own business here, I've learned.
One thing is that if you're a marketer, you you
change smoke and you have a ponytail.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
Yeah, so we don't do either. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
So I can remember walking into the kind reference room,
shutting the door, and woman was halfway sitting down, and
he goes, so what are we going to call it?
And I said, I don't know, what are you thinking?
And as he's sitting down, he goes, he was like liquid,
And I said, that's it.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
It's got a ring to it. Let's just go with it.
So we went out.
Speaker 4 (13:17):
We decided that we we'd find all the radio stations
in the country that that had crazy morning shows. We
decided to send them samples with a little note, and
there was.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
About four or five of those stations where he did
really well. Over we would get we got a surge
in sales, but then it would it would, 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's name is Bubba the Love Sponge.
And it was in the local Fort Wayne paper. Because
(13:49):
this guy was his hometown was two counties over, so
I was so I was reading the article about him,
and I looked up as Meilian address, and I remember
I remember packing that box. I can still remember this
day because I put six bottles in there and send
it to him and never heard anything from him until
all of a sudden Wopmen's like, hey, our web page
is down because we've got something's going on. We've got
(14:10):
so much traffic to shut our web page down. And
it comes to find out that bubb 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.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
Usually their cell phone will go off while they're on
the air.
Speaker 4 (14:25):
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 liquid It's Alert, and once they were on liquid Salert,
if they screwed up one more time, then they would
take him in the room and you know, in the
studio there and they would the hell out of them.
And of course this was on Serious Satellite and it
(14:46):
comes on right before Howard Stern it was on Howard
one on one channel, so it went nationwide and these
guys did It's a real favor by basically you know,
using this.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
Probably for three or four months, three four months, three
or four months advertising.
Speaker 4 (15:01):
And I have to thank Old Bubba he got us
on the map because that.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Put us over the top where we actually were making
enough that well, we don't need a day job anymore.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
It'd be raw, you know, it'd be tight, but we
would make it.
Speaker 4 (15:14):
We spent two years and then we couldn't really get
out of just doing an interview and having twenty orders
and then it go back to zero within a week.
We we just couldn't get the thing to stick for
whatever reason. But once Bubba started talking about it on
a daily basis and I started, that started a floor
where we actually had something and it it didn't go away,
and it started growing slowly.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Yeah, you know, and then I think the next year
was when Amazon picked us up, and then we did
definitely need a day job. That worked out great, because
that's about you know a few months after that when
we got laid off. I remember telling with him and
I said, I just can't stop smiling. I just I'm
like I just can't stop smiling, you know when 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.
Speaker 4 (15:57):
By the way, Yeah, I guess we can start talking
about our customers.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
Now. There's some customer stories. Yeah we can.
Speaker 4 (16:05):
Uh, yeah, there's there's quite a few customer stores, and
we've we've had people that uh that actually used it
in their bubble juice, like for a for a wedding,
you know when he blow bubbles.
Speaker 3 (16:15):
You know, they mixed the bubble.
Speaker 4 (16:18):
Juice with the liquids and 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 sort of clever.
People are putting in, putting it in balloons and blowing
the balloons up so when they pop it smells like.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
This.
Speaker 4 (16:33):
This is one that was in particular sort of strange
and this was sort of early on, so uh, we
were we were probably only selling it for maybe a
couple of years at that point. This guy calls me
up and he wants to order. Man, 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,
(16:54):
so it sounds like you've used the product before.
Speaker 3 (16:57):
He says, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, because.
Speaker 4 (16:58):
I use it because I and I goes, I need
I need more, but I need it real, real soon
here or whatever, you know, And it's like, well, I said, so,
apparently he had some success with us.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
What did you do?
Speaker 4 (17:08):
And he was sort of hesitant to tell me, And
he's like, all right, I'll tell you, and he starts
the story off.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
He had bought our.
Speaker 4 (17:16):
Product and he had it laying around and he was
in the process of moving to a new 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
into the box to turn the power on. So he
turns the power on himself. Well, he autimally gets a
(17:38):
the next day, the power company actually shows up to
see that it's turned off or turned on, and he
ends up getting it bye from the power company because
he had he 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 going to pay this bill,
and I'm pissed off because you know, they should have
done this for me anyways, sooner. So he takes he
(18:00):
writes a check and he coats it with liquids and
he sort of lets it dry. So he goes over
to what sort of looks like a bank teller set
up with that vacuum tube and they leave.
Speaker 3 (18:12):
So they take off.
Speaker 4 (18:13):
Well, the following day, the police, the police call him
up and the cop when he goes into the office,
the cops got like an evidence baggie and it's got
his check in it, and they're claiming that this that
this bank or went out the bank with this, the
co op or whatever has now shut the entire system down,
shut the entire building down. They've got tape all the
(18:35):
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.
You can't make this up. So cops like, well, he goes,
(18:55):
here's the deal. He goes, we're going to send this
in for analysis and it's got feces. You're going to jail.
You're in trouble or whatever. He's like, well, you go
in and test it all you want, because I didn't
do that all. Only what happened was is that they
came back clean. They couldn't do anything about it. And
at the end of the day, he said, what what
could I have done? They would have you know, got
them back. And I said, now I looked at it.
(19:16):
I guess and I said, well, now now you're ordering more.
He's like, yeah, because I got some other business take
care of. I said, all right, we'll send you a
couple of extra bottles. Have a good day, you know,
and we recommend you know, it's a prank product that
it's not to uh to go out there and destroy people.
But every once in a while, I guess that happens.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
You know.
Speaker 4 (19:35):
We we like to say that we make the gun,
we don't shoot it, so you know, at your 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, and we started making
a few YouTube videos until the YouTubers outdid us and
so now our customers are doing you know, better videos
(19:55):
than we could even dream of. So uh, if you
ever go out there, you go out there and look
at YouTube and type liquid so you'll see really good
stuff out there.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Andrew Masters story, Alan Whitman's story, Liquid Assets story here
on our American Stories