Oobah Butler outside the shed that he social engineered into being TripAdvisor's top-rated London... [+]
What happens when you combine social engineering with absurd stunts? Just ask writer and filmmaker Oobah Butler, known for his bizarre projects that include everything from sending a fake dream team to BBC quiz show “The Eggheads” to turning a garden shed into London’s top-rated restaurant on TripAdvisor. If it all sounds too strange to be true, that’s because Butler engineered it that way. Part entrepreneur and part prankster, Butler’s antics are so carefully orchestrated they’ve taken him to Paris Fashion Week and recently landed him a book deal for How to Bullsh*t Your Way to Number 1 which drops in March 2019 in North America.
“I’m always curious about the way that people interact in public with unusual things,” he says of his motivation for doing weird, seemingly impossible projects.
I recently talked to Butler over the phone to find out how he went from freelance writer to one of the poster children for weird internet fame. Here are a few lessons on how he made that jump:
1. Push the limits of implausibility as far as they’ll go.
“I think I’ve always been trying to push the limits and see how people react to strange things,” says Butler.
Take his trip to Paris Fashion Week (PFW) last fall. On paper, getting to the top of the world’s main fashion event with a fake clothing brand seems impossible. But that’s exactly what Butler did with his Georgio Peviani label.
Search the name online, and “Georgio Peviani” pulls up social media accounts, reviews, and even spots on Amazon for this high-end denim label. Except the company—not to mention the person—doesn’t actually exist. Butler faked the entire concept so successfully it got him carted from one exclusive party to the next at PFW, where the only thing people had a hard time believing was that he could possibly be Italian. (He’s from The Midlands, U.K.)
“Everyone in the world knows what a knock-off brand is, so it’s relatable,” he explains as one of the reasons people believed the hoax. That said, you can take it too far. Butler tells me that had he chosen to name the fake brand something like “Calvin Spine,” it would have been seen for the joke it really was immediately. By contrast, [‘Georgio Peviani’] just sounds like a random Italian name, which is why it’s more believable as a “real brand” than “Calvin Spine.”
2. Recognize which factors you can and can’t control.
Less successful in Butler’s eyes was the time he appeared on the BBC quiz show “Eggheads,” a show where a team of contestants goes up against a team of expert quizzers: the Eggheads.
The goal was to “bring chaos to a controlled, serious atmosphere.” To do that, Butler enlisted his brother James to appear on the show as a replica of Chris, one of the show’s regular Eggheads. “Sat opposite himself, Chris will surely crack under the absurdity of the situation,” Butler writes in his account of the project for Vice. They even bleached his brother’s hair to the point where James’s scalp bled, all for the sake of messing with the actual Chris once they were live.
Except Chris wasn’t even playing the show that day. Butler had failed to take into account elements he couldn’t control, like which Eggheads were scheduled for that show. “I don’t think I managed to create an interesting episode of the Eggheads which was my challenge,” he tells me.
Always stop and consider what’s in your control and what’s not. Are most of the important elements of a situation in your hands? Great. Proceed with your project. Are there a lot of unknowns that could hinder or derail progress? Maybe it’s time reconsider the steps you’re taking to achieve your overarching goal.
3. Let your weirdness lead your next move.
Or as Butler says, “Make yourself at one with the stupid things you do.” The Shed at Dulwich, one of his most famous projects, is a perfect example of this.
About a year ago, Butler wanted to see if it was possible to create a fake restaurant people would actually want to eat at. After conceptualizing a menu and photographing realistic-looking food (made from household goods like shaving cream), he was bombarded with booking requests for The Shed, named after the actual garden shed where Butler lived at the time. The restaurant eventually made it to the number one spot for London on TripAdvisor without ever existing.
Because he was getting so many booking requests, Butler decided to follow-through on his weirdness and opened The Shed for one night, parading £1 ready-made meals as fine dining to 10 guests. The end result: people left convinced they had eaten at the best restaurant in London and wanted to book a table again. As Butler says, “Dream the most ridiculous thing . . . will it into existence if you’re not trying to achieve anything truly awful.”
How to Bullsh*t Your Way to Number 1 is out March 19, 2019.
