31: Gabe Whaley - Playing the Crowd & Outlasting the Hype

29:03And then if it still hits for us, then we will start committing resources to doing it. Maybe on that note, you guys have talked about you're sort of like playing with the meta of the present, but not what happened yesterday. Put another way, you've said mischief doesn't win as a first mover, maybe capturing part of that. Like how do you, how do you sort of operate in the conversation, but outside of the current thing. Because in many ways, it is a little paradoxical. No, totally. And then sometimes it becomes a current thing. And then we're, I don't even know what my stance is on that. But that's sort of an amazing case when it becomes the current thing.

29:42I always said like, and we've sort of had comparisons to Saturday Night Live, where people are like, oh, you must have this writer's room that meets every day to talk about what happened yesterday. But I say, if you look at actually the roster of projects and works that we've put out, none of them respond to a current event that happened. And typically, a lot of these things have some sense of not long-tail value, but long-tail comprehension, which is super important. And I think it's because it does use long-term narratives, long-term mechanisms, long-term tools that reflect generations is too long, and that doesn't apply anymore.

30:24But had mischief existed decades ago, it could have applied then. Now, because time is shrinking and the future is accelerated to the present and all of that, that window is a lot smaller. And I think the meta is moving a lot more quickly. So it's a tricky one. Are you deliberately anticipating? not on like a what's happening tomorrow or next week sort of thing but we we are spending a lot of time thinking about all right now that the meta is moving so quickly now right like what even is the meta right now yeah it's red cream like who who knows so we we actually have to do a lot of soul searching to figure out what is that proper middle ground between the thing that gets us excited creatively and artistically.

31:16Plus the thing that is pragmatic for us to be able to exist and maybe even thrive if we get it right. And that is extremely existential. And I would say mischief was kind of existential when I started experimenting 12 years ago. it got a little more existential in 2019 when we formally got going and then uh now it's just actually like the last year was insanely existential when you say existential you mean philosophically or you mean for the for the existence of mischief philosophically uh but that translates to the existence of mischief because you used and part of it was you know we used to celebrate um well not even really but like there was a time where we would go viral and it felt amazing right yeah and then believe it or not after enough times you feel nothing the good thing is we always celebrated before anything went out so that was like a good habit that we had celebrate the act of creation not the response but over time like your your excitement starts to wane, the novelty goes down, the addiction to that drug starts to wear off.

32:34And that's when you have to pull your head up and be like, well, where do I find that feeling again? And where did it truly come from? Did it come from going viral? Did it come from learning new formats? Did it come from collaborating with good people? Where was the actual source of that excitement that gave mischief the ability to exist from the beginning we have to rediscover that because the world is so different like everything's so everything's so different it's interesting too because i don't know there's lots of advice like it's like the classic work rubin thing it's like create for you not for the audience and i've heard you talk about that i'm sure you guys really do about it my experience of you is is very much like something close to an autotelic like i'm creating for we're creating for ourselves and yet for anyone but maybe especially you guys so much of what you create is as we'll talk about like not done when it's released yeah like it's actually in explicitly if not implicitly kind of in conversation and and so that's a really fascinating question yeah yeah it's uh it's a fascinating thing to have to ponder which is like what yeah what do you know what is this if we're if i'm not really getting the dopamine from the the external thing and the virality like but what what are we trying to say and also by the way it kind of needs to go viral to i don't know there's there's a there's a quote i found somewhere i think in mauricio catalan's like essay at the beginning of the book he was quoting sherry levine who i think was quoting roland barth but neither here are there uh a painting's meaning lies not in its origins but its destination.

34:12Yeah. Which is like, yes, it's about like, I love to paint, but also how do you hold these things? 100%. It is a total mindfuck. And look, we always saw virality as a means of distribution to achieve a critical mass that could carry certain types of concepts to completion, right? That's all it ever was. There was also a lot of value in how powerful it made us look. behind the black box. Yes. Right? Like people couldn't figure out, are they 200 people or is it like one guy? Yeah, it's a magician. Yeah, it was like that. We've been around long enough where I don't think the black box exists as much anymore, nor does it need to because nothing lasts forever.

34:57We are fluid just like the world is fluid. And so we are certainly evaluating like what do we want from the work that we put out now and what is the scale of the relationship with an audience that that work is going to have. I actually believe that it will be very cool to spend the next three, five, maybe even 10 years engaging with much smaller audiences. It's going to take a lot of discipline though, because we built this muscle for larger audiences and with that came revenue, came a business model, the ability to hire a team. but like we said earlier like the virality has lost its sheen yes it's not as interesting and the staying power of anything that goes viral is also like pretty rough i mean look at the little boo-boo guy now he's like his personal net worth is just tanked all of a sudden yeah no way he's like six billion dollars less rich now and no way investors are pissed because like the stock plummeted and i'm like damn i know exactly how that feels we did that with the big red boots except i sold all of mine and didn't one guy has to that one guy um and like i'm so not surprised right like that's that's just what's going to happen but you know when he when labubu thing was happening all the team and leadership investors were like okay how do we build disneyland for labubu and like how do you keep this going but like the world just doesn't like the staying power of these things it it's not as sticky anymore and i think you can only really get staying power if you focus on a relationship with a small group for as long as you can possibly hold on and then a little bit more and then maybe maybe you have a chance of something with like really significant staying power it's interesting to think about if you're playing the game of spectacle there's only sort of one path forward which is more or bigger yeah Yeah, yeah.

36:56And Mischief trapped ourselves in that own game. Like we've, we built the game, we designed a game. We want it because we're a player of one. And then we essentially are trapped by the game unless we reinvent ourselves out of it. But to do that, we have to break a lot of our own rules, which I'm at peace with now. And I think it's very exciting, but it was hard to get there. it's interesting to think about when we brought up elon like this this sort of having to sort of play to a bigger and bigger spectacle is is not only the case in the art and culture world either like yeah i think it's a sort of rat race that everybody falls into it's just the invisible hand man it's it's everywhere like mr beast has to keep doing it just the same way like exxon has to keep doing it like everyone has to keep growing and growing and growing but that's that's sort of the existential questions of mischief, which on one hand is certainly an artist, but on the other hand is absolutely a business.

37:59Do we want to grow broadly or do we want to go deep and go as deep as possible and sustain that as long as possible? That's sort of the question. But also, I think the opportunity. I think there's also just something, almost everything that actually reaches extreme staying power and scale, it has to sort of start small enough that it can actually have room to compound. Yeah, exactly. There's something that you are, the two people I know who are best at this are you and Peter McIndoe, who you recently met, who created Birds Aren't Real. Oh yeah, I never knew his last name. Oh, there you go. And when I say best at, I guess I mean, it's not quite this, but there's a interview with David Bowie in like the nineties where he's talking about the internet.

38:46And they're like, this is just another technology thing. And he's like, no, no, no, no. Like this is an alien life form. Like the creator and the consumer of the content are gonna be so into Patico. You guys have talked about this in different ways. You just use some of that language, the audience carrying across the finish line somewhere. There's some mantra somewhere like buckle up. This is no longer in our hands. Performance that makes the audience complete the work, not consume it and into the line of, or to the point of what we were just talking about, this can happen in really big scale or really small scale.

39:14In Peter's case, like, I think it started with like, I don't know, initially it was like taping up Barbies around Arkansas. And I'm like, so these things can start, but in many ways what I would call the skill is sort of like, can you create some kindling that is going to fan into flame? Yeah. And in many ways, it's sort of like the most internet native way to create something interesting. I'm curious, like what maybe I think you guys have used the kind of all encompassing language of like creating something the crowd can play. And so I'm curious, regardless of scale, what goes into creating those types of instruments that a person actually wants to sort of like take and run with and make their own versus just like consume and move on?

39:58Yeah, yeah, totally. A lot of it comes from a place of deception, which is kind of great. And for better or for worse, one of the early mantras of mischief was never fall into the trap of building for your community. because we like quickly got this big passionate kind of fan base and naturally a lot of the wisdom that's passed along from the business world is like listen to your audience listen to your fans cultivate your community and we're like you know what we're not going to do that because the first thing you'd have to do is start uh repeating things that worked well in the past right and we're like we're never going to do that in fact we're going to make things and you're either going to love it or if you hate it we're going to tell you to shut up love it and then you're going to love it even more yeah yeah and so that look it could be wrong i i think it's unique for different people in different groups but it was good for us and somehow the audience could feel the authenticity with that sentiment and they fucking loved it yeah like the first product that we put out with that kind of mentality was our blur collectible which is essentially this like brick shaped hunk of plastic rubber that looks like a stack of cash that's been blurred out with the blur tool on photoshop we thought it was really funny to put that on a website with the checkout button that says uh pay to reveal so it's like there's a 25 checkout button with a blurry stack of cash on it but what the end user doesn't realize is it is a perfect resolution photo of a real object.

41:38And we're like, this is going to be so funny, but also we're going to get so many chargebacks. We're definitely going to get a lot of angry emails. And so we made sure we did this under a different LLC because we were going to get the chargebacks. So we didn't want that to affect mischief's ability as a merchant to handle. We did all the precautions knowing that this was probably going to fuck us, but it was going to be worth it because we had to lay down the law. guess what? It's one of the most highest performing collectibles on the secondary market. Like people, I think we made a thousand on that first run of the US dollar and people got it and they just ran with it.

42:13They started making so many different videos of conspiracy theories and some people like broke theirs open and there were drugs in it. Some people ate theirs live. Some people like they just came up with so much lore that we could have never predicted. Got zero chargebacks, like zero angry emails. And then that ended up becoming sort of like a franchise in and of itself. Ironically, with no more meaning though, because the gig was up. So then it just became an object that looked cool, which is interesting and totally fine by the way. Kind of the half-life of most mischief objects, I would presume.

42:52Like at least most of them that hit some kind of escape velocity. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's why this was interesting, because it hit at the beginning because of the gotcha, and then it carried itself on its own just because it was a cool-looking object, which is not really a business that mischief engages in. Interesting. But we ran with it, because I was like, all right, it kind of works. And that actually has been seen in a lot of the things that we've done, which is interesting. So the big red boot, for example, only made 300 pairs at the beginning. And when it really first started to pick up heat, it was in this sort of cool kids, avant-garde, like art design fashion crowd that very like, if you know, you know, right.

43:44And then it started to really pick up steam and it started showing up on celebrities. Then it started to show up on content creators. And by that point, we figured out how to make like 20 ,000 pairs. So we sold a bunch of them. Maybe atoning for the sins of the Jesus shoes. Yeah, exactly. So all these content creators realized, oh, wait, this is a tool to get me more views and engagement. So the meaning of the object changed. Wow. I can go viral if I wear these. Yeah, exactly. It became a tool, right? Versus for the, at the early stages, it was a cool kids flex. for the cool art kids, then it became a tool for the content creators.

44:22And so same object, completely different meaning, completely different value system. I guess that's a lot of fashion actually, ironically goes through that cycle. Actually. Or maybe culture in general. I think you're probably right. You know, we probably like compressed decades of fashion wisdom into one very hectic two week time span for myself. It's funny too, there's, all of these things are an invitation that the person willingly opts into, but you sort of subvert them on the way. You were kind of making fun of you. Right. But you still like it. That's okay. Maybe on the note, that note, and on the note of the boots, you make lots of objects, but you also make fashion objects and things people can wear, which not definitively, but to me at least feels a little different than something you can play or consume in part because yeah, of course there's going to be the, I can use this as a tool or status object, but like whether it's utility or like symbolism or even fantasy costume, like fashion is somewhat tied to identity.

45:27Yeah. 100%. I'm curious what, how, how your approach changes if at all for things that people can actually wear and kind of put on themselves. Yeah. Unfortunately it didn't change much. And so we, we didn't go into the mindset of, all right, there's an identity to design against, which in the industry they call it the lifestyle. And then you create content around that lifestyle to sell the things that you're depicting in that lifestyle. We totally did not do that. And you can see that in just the wide range of different types of footwear that we put out that clearly do not work for one specific lifestyle.

46:04So the way that I would describe that is one part conceptual practice, but many parts a design exercise, which is sort of this other part of mischief that people might not realize, but we are some of the best designers in the world, like full stop, just across the board from like graphic branding, but also object design, material design, packaging design, web design. And I think it gets lost how good we are at it because you're thinking about the concept and the response and everything. But when many of these concepts are so loud. Exactly. They're so built to jump off the screen. Yeah, exactly.

46:43Maybe that's something that's interesting that opens up and you can be more subtle if you're playing to a smaller audience. I think so too. And I think there's, you know, part of my existential crisis is coming down to this notion of the act of creation and craft as maybe the solution for the thing that we were always looking for. Maybe that was the source of that euphoric feeling we've had from the beginning because the virality and sort of being able to control so much attention, that wore off. But we still get the high from the act of creation with new formats that we haven't touched yet. We are also addicted to higher stakes and bigger ambition, so there is some risk there, but that's kind of what makes it fun.

47:27Hmm. Hmm. I'm going to get a little heady for a minute. Uh, so you have to forgive me. There is a essay that came up a bunch as I was doing research that I think particularly is influential to your two creative directors, but it's just a fascinating lens to look at mischief, um, which is this athletic aesthetics blog that our essay that Brad Tramiel wrote all the way back in 2013. I would recommend people go read it. It's amazing. I wanted to read a couple of excerpts. First, he says, artists using social media have transformed the notion of a work from a series of isolated projects to a constant broadcast of one's artistic identity as recognizable, unique brand.

48:08That is, what the artist once accomplished by making commodities that could stand independently from them is now accomplished through their ongoing self-commodification. And then, this has reversed the traditional recipe that you need to create art to have an audience. Today's artist on the internet needs to have an audience to create art. an asthete's audience once assembled becomes part of their medium the the sort of metaphor that came to mind reading this is so like traditional art or production or creativity is sort of like creating a a special meal and this is almost like an iv drip of just like steady nutrition yeah or something for sure two two other excerpts um to maintain the aerial view necessary for patterns to emerge one must cultivate a disposition of indifference to be indifferent is to believe that any one One thing is as important as any other.

48:58Social media anticipates and reinforces this attitude, presenting, say, news from Afghanistan and a former high school friend's lunch in the same format with the same gravity. Obviously, it's very 2013, but so representative. And then finally, caring too much about any one item to the exclusion of the others readily available now seems to jeopardize the viewer's ability to understand the whole. The fascinating thing about this piece that hopefully is captured in those quotes is like, Bischief almost perfectly straddles this with like one foot in and one foot out. Like you're sort of playing this really deliberately and very deliberately subverting it.

49:33I'm curious, like, I mean, so much of what you're just spending the last 30 minutes talking about, but it's like this hyper online, ephemeral, like nothing lasts. We ship new things every two weeks. Like you are the athlete, but then you're also playing with ideas that are way more substantial and permanent and maybe even where you're going now. That's kind of what we're trying to figure out is how do you not get trapped by your relationship with an audience? How do you maybe go to a place where the individual works can stand on their own? How do you go to a place where the individual works can stand on their own even if Mischief's name isn't on it the way we started?

50:09And I think that's actually the challenge that we've set forth for ourselves is don't fall into the trap now of what you might say Supreme did, which is now it's just put the name everywhere and instead of a good idea necessarily, just put the logo on something and call it a day, right? Whether you like their move or not, I think it's totally fine. But for us, I don't want us to fall in the trap of just writing on the name that we've cultivated over the last seven years. I would rather throw it away and create work that stands on its own. So how do we do that? Because then we're no longer trapped by the paradigm that Brad so accurately described and predicted like over 10 years ago because it totally exists.

50:55And maybe it's most apt for people who haven't read the piece. Like it's really describing the modern content creator. But in some ways it's sort of like, does Supreme even need the shirts? It's actually like drop the product entirely is the way things seem to be swinging. There's one other, line from the mischief book. When making things at high frequency, people remember the first thing they saw, the best thing they have seen, and the most recent thing they saw. Best and last both benefit from volume. How does, again, maybe you're moving away from it, but how does that articulation play into your strategy?

51:29Well, it was really useful the last, I mean, since 2019, because our business model was a cycle of reinvention. So we were always iterating the best and the last you know what i mean and yeah yeah yeah there was something always like we knew that just anecdotally we would meet a lot of people who discovered mischief through different points right so like they work in different industries or exist in different pockets or communities on the internet and they all had different entry points but then they would follow along and maybe realize that many things that they had seen on their feeds or in the news had also come from us.

52:10And some of those would be sort of like what they would rank as the best. And then, of course, now they're following us. So now they have a last, but we reinvent the last. And maybe we also reinvent the best. And so that's sort of how we looked at our relationship with our audience. We adopted a model where we're just constantly iterating on the best and the last, which was cool. That'll still apply to where we're going. is just going to be over a much longer time horizon. You've built this entire thing off of biweekly drops. Yeah. Is that, that's done? Done. Done. Wow. Instead of putting out maybe 40 to 50 new things a year, we might do three, maybe five.

52:54And you might not even know they were us. Like that's the truth. They will be a lot more high stakes and a lot more ambitious. Yeah. so ego death to reinvent I'm excited another topic that maybe maybe verges into that but maybe not first from Noah Smith a very viral tweet 15 years ago the internet was an escape from the real world now the real world is an escape from the internet you guys have obviously played in this realm Big Art Boots maybe being a quintessential example of sort of like the merging of the hyper real anime video game land And my friend Trevor McFedries, who made Lil Mikaela, you probably know Trevor, he talks about like New York City as like a soundstage for the internet today.

53:40And then finally, Sean Monahan again, thus is the rubric under which I understand mischief. They have mastered the art of taking the internet and making it into real life. Does the internet feel like internet culture? I almost wonder if it's like a redundant phrase. Yeah. But like, do things feel as built around internet culture anymore? or maybe part of what this new direction you're suggesting is like turning that off a little bit? Is internet culture even a helpful frame? Is it just everything? No, I mean, I think, you know, the internet, and I didn't come online until 2011, 2012. So this is kind of bonkers to even extrapolate on.

54:20But it seemed like the internet was this place where like real subcultures could kind of spring from nowhere, or you could find a subculture that worked for you and it was sort of like this beautiful secret that you had with strangers yeah yeah niche at scale in a way yeah yeah and now that doesn't exist online right all that exists or it's hard to find to do it in some weird discord or whatever yeah yeah exactly right so the the internet is yeah like what what what is internet culture now it's it's hard to tell but I think the advances in technology over the last 10 years gave almost way too much scale and access to these niche communities and that makes them a little bit less interesting and a little bit less cool right like you need some friction it needs to be a little bit hard to find a little bit hard to penetrate hard to stay in hard to be in but when you find it and when it's good it really matters.

55:19It's not really, is it an internet subculture or offline subculture? It's just like, can the subculture exist and can it last? And maybe does it have the time to kind of cultivate in the oven? I think that's the biggest thing, right? Like, can new subcultures actually arise and stick around, right? Like, there were the Dadaist movements and the punk movements, right? Like there used to be scenes. I don't know if scenes exist anymore. And if they do, they're probably not on the internet or at the very least, they're going to be really hard to find. Maybe they figured it out. Yeah. Maybe on that final note, you've said, uh, when you see the herd running so fast, it usually means they're running toward the end of a cliff.

56:03You've talked about kind of creating a game where you're the only player. And then more recently you said, what is the opportunity when everyone else is doing the same thing. And you suggested and sort of teased, I think the list was permanence, the real world, elevated craft, and secrets. Dang, I said all that? That's great. Again, going back to what we were just talking about, maybe the point is that you're not gonna share much, but can you tease us or can you at least talk about, maybe the best question would be, can you talk about what that might look like or a game of only one looks like in a world of abundance?

56:37Yeah, totally. i like practically speaking we're not going to like the most logical trap would be shelf life of virality has shortened attention spans are shorter increased drop production from once every two weeks to once a week you know what i mean like that that would have been the natural move right and also build a clipping team to create uh to bring in a content creator who makes a video of thing that you do and then clip it up and then push it out via dark social. That's what the practical move would have been, and I reject that move. So instead, all I'll say is we have a theme parks division now.

57:22And that hopefully tells you nothing and everything at the same time. I wonder if, it's funny, I have a question somewhere in here about me, honestly, the next thing I want to talk about around worldbuilding. and when I think about world building, maybe most quintessentially, I think about Disney. And I almost wonder like, well, like for Walt, it was literally, Walt's world building was quite literally, I'm going to take this thing that I have created across this constellation of stuff and make a physical place that you can visit. Yeah, I almost wonder if like, here we are lamenting where everything's going.

58:01It's just the pendulum's just swings. Oh, it totally is, right? It's the kids are going to party again and people are going to hang out and, I don't know, seek physical thrills. What makes place special to you? Still trying to figure that out. But I'll tell you where I had that realization that it was important. Earlier, I think it was this year, we had a gallery exhibition in Tokyo. Which, cool, Mom, we're in Tokyo. That's great. and we had this opening uh where all like the locals were invited so the cool tokyo art kids the scenesters all of that two observations at the opening great crowd like thousands of people there was a line whatever all that stuff what i really love about the crowd that i've seen at any mischief in person event is you have such a range of people actually so pretty even split across guys and girls.

59:03You've got some cool kids. You've got some nerds. You've got the tech guys. You've got law professors. You have families. You have the kids who stand outside of Supreme and are looking to resell stuff. You've got everyone, but actually the vibe is still amazing because it's clear that the common thread through all of those people is that they all esteem this idea of creativity as a personal value to aspire for. That is the common thread, right? And so, even if max that event - How about something to believe in, by the way, go back to the top of the conversation. There you go. Yeah, exactly. Creativity as a value to aspire towards, I think, is a real thing and will continue to be a real thing.

59:49So, let's say maybe we had two, three, even if max 5 ,000 people, that's nothing on the internet, right yes but it felt very significant funny thing from the same show there was a video on tiktok of one of the pieces that ended up getting 30 million views and someone said that to me it's like holy shit you're viral and i felt nothing and i can't really tell you why but the crowd of whatever 2 000 3 000 people felt so much more significant than a video of my piece getting 30 million views, like who cares? In a way, it would be better if it never even made it on social media. Like, just let these 3 ,000 people cherish this forever.

1:00:31That would be great. And I think that's what we've been working on, rewiring ourselves here internally to reflect on our own work and our own path forward. I also have to admit, or I would observe, whether you like it or not, there is something kind of beautiful in the notion that I have to imagine part of what made that thing go viral was that it came out of something actually real. Yeah, for sure. It absolutely did. And it was literally just a video. We had this cubicle, like an office cubicle that you would see in a typical corporate building, complete with a desk, Windows XP, computer, printers, stuff all over the desk.

1:01:15But above the cubicle where you'd typically have fluorescent lights, more fluorescent lights, but also a shower that was the size of the cubicle so that it's just constantly raining on the cubicle. At the bottom of the cubicle, we're collecting the water and pumping it back into the system. So it's a perpetual rain cubicle. and uh yeah it did make a good image that would perform on social media and it sort of ended up becoming a meme where people are like this is me today at work or something like that which was not what we had in mind we just like the visual uh and the artistry of it but yeah good things will continue to help people get the views online and it wasn't even our tiktok account right yeah the other thing it calls to mind is just like i always say um the best parties like that a party sort of is inversely correlated with like the quality with how hard it is to get there or it's correlated i should say like the reason burning man works is just super hard to get yeah yeah the friction is valuable yes yeah yes it's really valuable and self-selecting and then the other thing is i i love this example this is this guy ct anyway and then he talked is a bit a paper from a few years ago called how twitter gamifies communication and one of the things he observes is when you post a tweet and it gets a hundred likes, you have no idea what each of those likes contains.

1:02:37It could mean a hundred people thought it was like incrementally interesting. It can mean a hundred people loved it. And you compare that to a teacher in front of a classroom who says something and 29 students' eyes glaze over and one student's eyes light up. And all that's contained in that, it's the equivalent of your 30 million versus the 5 ,000. Yeah, yeah, totally. I would go to bed for that one kid any day now. Yeah, I mean, perhaps what we needed to, maybe the less cynical take was we need to like burn ourselves out on the like dopamine that comes from the hyper real to sort of realize what we had in front of us.

1:03:11And I think it will happen. I have faith. One last note, at least adjacent to this would be, I brought up world building. Like I think all of, so many of the things I love, I would put in that bucket of world building, whether they're brands or IP or even people. Like I would argue maybe the thing that is most impressive about Taylor Swift is her world building and the way that it's something sort of to participate in. And part of that's the physical part of it. Part of it's she's so present and like whether you wanna be cynical about that or not, you think about the Disney example, the classic Disney, like the diagram Walt drew.

1:03:46And I think people conflate that often with like branding and marketing and storytelling. Obviously the physical part of it is one part of it, but I'm curious, and maybe you don't, You guys don't even think about it this way, but I'm curious to what extent you have anything in your mind when you think about world building and what goes into trying to do that well. I think we accidentally started doing it. And retroactively, I'll say, our approach was in opposition to the folks who were like, you know, branding, marketing, like, you know, create your campaign, do your out of home, show up on social, whatever, world building.

1:04:19Like, that's totally a style of world building. What we ended up doing in hindsight was we just relentlessly created new cultural output that was valuable to people, whether they spent their time on it or they spent money on it. And by doing that enough times consistently enough across enough categories, we were able to monopolize a feeling that I think mischief actually owns. And that's the world that we have. That's the world that we created. But we totally did not mean to do that. Well, I was going to say, one of the things you have in the book is like all these values. And one of them is like almost like deliberately avoiding being cohesive.

1:04:58And we're not a brand. We're just making. And yet there is some through line. There's some I know it when I see it. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Or I feel it when I see it. And that only came from just being really relentlessly consistent over a long period of time. Consistent in what way? Consistent in like every couple of weeks, there's something new. Oh, just literally consistent. Yeah, literally consistent. Right. And, you know, the output not on some mood board no no it just it just had to be you know consistent in a timely manner and fortunately most things that we put out had the same sort of emotional quality yes i wouldn't say everything did but like most of it did yes in the same way perhaps to extrapolate content that comes out of a physical thing or physical experience that people really resonate with i have to imagine contains whether it's something sort of trivial or or utilitarian or it's something more mystical it's the christopher alexander it's the quality without a name like whatever that is yeah it is sort of it's it's it's run off right from from and in in the case of mischief's creativity like is it possible that the feeling is just something that happens in this room in this building that like gets packaged in there yeah totally i think so actually because I've often described to people when I'm asked, what's the process?

1:06:17How do you come up with these ideas? And is there a framework? What's the magic bullet here? And I tell people it's actually like an internal shared language, not too dissimilar from, let's say you go to a jazz club and at the end of the show, anybody can go up and just start jamming together. And so you get a bass player, a pianist, a saxophonist, and a drummer who have never met before, but they're starting to play, and it sounds good, right? They have a shared language, and they have mediums that they know how to make work together, and we're the same. It's not an incredibly new thing or a novel approach.

1:06:58We just happen to have a group of people who speak the same language. And have access to resources. Which goes a long way. Makes to get lots of slaving away by game. Yeah, yeah. You mentioned process. You guys have talked about this in a few different places where you have like, maybe in a way that would surprise people, a very rigorous and sort of almost boring process around creativity and like weekly, or excuse me, daily, I think, scheduled brainstorms. It rhymes with so many creative people, maybe especially Jerry Seinfeld. He talks about like, you lock yourself in the room like every day.

1:07:31It's a total drag. Yeah, yeah. It's like Jerry even says, he says, find the struggle you can tolerate. Yeah, we call it the dark place. You gotta go there. Well, maybe a slightly more optimistic question, but maybe that's part of the answer is, what has it been like maybe personally for you to train the creative muscle, to like actually feel that muscle? And maybe it's in the context of brainstorming, maybe it's more broad, but what does that feel like? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a constant hunt for new inputs. Yeah, that's really what it is. It's new inputs, new insights. And then we have this shared language that we speak here.

1:08:10So the ideas will come, but you need the inputs. So that is probably the most dynamic part of mischief, actually, which is there is someone whose full-time job is to essentially create the equivalent of a collegiate curriculum. they curate all these topics those are the inputs in fact these are all that's behind us is a board of just like a bunch of random words on a whiteboard that's from the topic mining that was happening a couple weeks ago curriculum building you said topic mining yeah so it's just like and you know a lot of them have nothing to do with one another there's toilets there's eva frank Eva and Franco Matz, which are some interesting artists in Canada that it seems like we have a lot in common with.

1:08:59There's large-scale land-based. Like, it can really go anywhere. The inputs are super important. Part of the value of being in New York is the inputs are very diverse, too. A big thing here is we love public transportation. It's really important that people ride the subway because free inputs. It's so important. it's a demanded or it's a required conflict with the other it's it's so critical like it creates tension and out of that tension comes like new ideas new perspectives and then there's a little bit of work and training into how do you take that big vision and mold it into something that can be real and then how do you create the strategy to put it out into the real world and we built a process around that too but i'd say it comes a lot down to the inputs for this group that has that shared sort of spoken subversive language.

1:09:55Probably doesn't apply to most of the group, if I have to imagine. You perhaps uniquely grew up without a lot of inputs. Has that, talk about building a muscle, like maybe it helps to have a smart person here who brings you inputs, but has there been anything active around how you immerse yourself, how you find things, where you find interesting inputs? I mean, that's why I love being in New York, because I have access to so many different worlds. And you can sort of match the categories that mischief has a presence in to my own sort of thirst to acclimate to the world that I've entered. And that's why we entered the footwear space and the fashion space and the fine art space and the tech space and raise venture capital.

1:10:44We took a a very sort of flatline approach to every element of culture. And now that we've exposed ourselves to those worlds and we've kind of co-opted them and maybe even infiltrated them, we're looking at other worlds that we haven't touched yet. We have done nothing in the world of real estate, hospitality, we have done no TV or video. We have not touched AI in recent, like the last four years. We've never done anything in crypto. Maybe now's a good time to do something in crypto because the herd already ran off the cliff. And there's another, I think there's another, we'll see. Good to know.

1:11:22The current administration really loves crypto, so we'll see if that's the peak. I'll go back and focus on real estate or something. You're aging into a few of those, which is fun. Yeah, yeah. And probably with your audience. Yep. Maybe it relates to what you just said. We talked about using time as a filter. There's a classic idea that focus isn't saying no to bad ideas, it's saying no to good ideas. yeah how do you how do you do that especially in a i don't know if it's decision by committee but it's certainly idea by committee well yeah yeah it there's no crystal clear concrete answer to that to be honest it's kind of time and place like what makes sense right now but also what do i anticipate will make sense uh in the long term and i think a lot of it got a lot simpler as soon as we narrowed in on what still gives us that feeling of euphoria.

1:12:15And not having you do something every two weeks probably helps too. That also helps. That was a beast. I mean, it worked, but that was brutal. It is funny just picking up on it worked. I really think doing something every day or every week or whatever for a while is almost a guaranteed way for something to happen. Which is, it's such a sorry truth, but it works. We were sort of hedging our bets. We know mischief back in 2019. We know mischief is something that's really hard to define and put in words. We know the output is also really hard to describe. And it's difficult for people to comprehend.

1:12:53We're going to brute force this new category and maybe shift this Overton window to a new type of subversive, interactive, experiential storytelling that's fueled by capitalistic mechanisms. and the way people discover and share information online. No one still succinctly defined a category for our type of output, but it totally does kind of exist. And there are examples of other players trying to use some of these moves. And that's cool. It would be cool if more people did. The drops thing, maybe it came and went, but that was, you totally... That was us accelerating what was already starting to happen.

1:13:34But what we picked up on, that was sort of an emerging meta. and we're like, okay, if we can take that move and co-opt it and use it on other categories, that'll be pretty groundbreaking. Like that'll be kind of, people will stop and they'll just be like, what? And now everybody, like everybody wants to do a drop. Have you given up on the meta? Or is the new stuff a different kind of meta? I just don't really know what it is. Don't really know what it is. And maybe it doesn't matter anymore. You know, maybe you have to see past it. Yeah, if things are moving fast enough, maybe there's just a, it's hard to tell.

1:14:09we live in the age of the individual. We talked about that a bit. There are very, very few collectives or brands or things. You've even compared Mischief to a band. There are very few bands, lots of solo artists. Mauricio Cattalan in that essay I referenced earlier, he talks about Mischief's lack of authorship as lack of definite paternity, which is an amazing line. It's hilarious. There are examples of this, certainly, but even most bands Lennon McCartney was rare and something even more zoomed out is just everything was done by mischief is even rarer how does that or how has that changed your relationship to the work the great thing about being the what did Maurizio say the indeterminate parent lack of definite paternity yeah yeah so you know the great thing about by the way this is the banana guy I know like for the yeah I know you know oh yeah yeah this is the artist who taped the banana.

1:15:07I should have said that earlier. Who actually has an incredibly long and rich track record of making really good subversive art pieces. One of his earlier pieces, I believe, was that he taped a person to a wall. Probably. I think, anyway. The great thing about Mischief being the owner of the works and not like me as an individual or anyone else here individual is you remove a lot of ego from this whole process. and it keeps the culture here intact that it can survive much longer than most places probably should have when you start to get the amount of attention that you're getting like us. So it was actually unintentionally almost like a protection agent to keep us intact from losing our own minds versus the alternative is you start to get high on your own fame, right?

1:16:03Right. This one really blew up. It was created by so-and-so. And you get, you get, you get high on the access you get, right? Like what happens in any band when they become really hot? All of a sudden you're like turning on your family, you break up with your girlfriend, like go chase someone who was like a groupie. You start being bad with your money. Like all of these things totally could have happened. And they break up. The team breaks up. And then the team breaks up, right? So mischief being this sort of kind of faceless, maybe not so faceless anymore entity, protected us from that. And in our heads, and maybe we're kind of full of ourselves, we like to think that maybe the mischief experiment can survive beyond any of us.

1:16:47And that is kind of the dream, right? That maybe one day I'm no longer part of it, or I die, right? That's the natural course of things. Could it still exist? And that's cool. That's pretty cool. The other answer to this question is, by not having an individual be any author of this, I don't have to do all the press interviews. Again, laziness is the root of a lot of our inspiration. Years ago, we had dinner. This was a while ago. It was probably four years ago, three, four years ago. And I think you were in a particularly tired or cynical period, perhaps, but you admitted that you were spending a lot less time on the creative side, if any at all, at least at that time.

1:17:34And you talked about how sort of your main or singular goal is creating this like space for creative people that like would preserve that, preserve the earnestness almost, and optimism and hope and all these things. You guys have also used language in several places around play as a sort of underpinning of what happens here. How does that get fostered? you're several years later you've continued to make it happen i know i know i had to work on my my resting bitch face i mean and when we had dinner that must have been endemic or maybe tail end probably 2021 2022 yeah yeah yeah at that point it was sort of like on one hand you are like the current thing but on the other hand it's a fight for resources things are going wrong banks are shutting down uh our ships with our cargo from china are getting fired on by rebels in yemen like what the fuck is going on nothing we just want to make a stupid turbo tax anime dating simulator right um yeah it's there is sort of this uh i guess internal like Jekyll Hyde thing that I still deal with, which is on one hand, relentlessly and ruthlessly fight for resources for the group here and then protect them from all of that bullshit.

1:19:01But then the other part is, you know, how do you continue to curate the right people to think about the world and the way that works for this group? How do you keep bringing on the right inputs? How do you keep it from being stale? How do you find the thing that can give us that eureka feeling again? Because a lot of the folks here have been here for years now. And... You've been around the virality block, probably. Totally wore off, right? So how do you reinvent that? So I think a big part of it is just, and this doesn't sound so humble to say, but like a massive dose of humility and being like, it's okay to change, right?

1:19:42Just because this worked so well for a moment in time doesn't mean that it should continue working. And rationally speaking, that makes a lot of sense, but it's harder to do when you built it. And it is sort of who you are and it's everything that you've got. So it continues to be tricky, but I've also found that personally, I love, like maybe my art is the business side. which is carving out hidden opportunities and like unforeseen resources to combine in novel ways to then give this group the opportunity to make something completely unprecedented. And that part, uh, I'm starting to lean in on a lot more, which is actually pretty fun.

1:20:28Also just the opportunity to give a creative person like runway. Yeah. Or open pasture to say. Let them rip, you know? Yeah. And, uh, you know, I have a board meeting tomorrow. I'll get chewed out for like an hour and these guys will have you're the meme of the guy with the arrows yeah exactly they'll have no idea no one here knows I have a board meeting tomorrow and it's gonna be fine it's interesting you you were talking with Scott Norton on an interview and you brought up how doing that museum project in Korea talking about new inspirations like I think you had reflected that maybe especially in contrast to New York which is like the most cynical place ever like new york is woody allen whatever um they both in that event and maybe culturally in korea they have more earnestness around commerce and creativity mixing that's crazy and it's interesting how even something like that can kind of rejuvenate this the or heal some of the cynicism oh it totally did right because you know prior to that it's like oh you're gonna sell out by making too much inventory or you're gonna do this collab like a sellout or like you're doing too much stuff.

1:21:34You made a shoot with Jimmy Fallon. Yeah, exactly. Like you're a sellout. I'm like, oh fuck, you're probably right. Why did I do that? He called, of course we're going to do it. But then you go to Korea and it's just a, like unbridled enthusiasm for creativity in whatever form. And I was like, oh, that feels pretty good. Okay. I remember that feeling. Let me go back to that. And ironically, it's, it's the kids who like brought that back to me and reminded me about that. So I came back from Korea thinking, all right, let's channel that again. Let's not think so hard and let's just make the things that we want to make.

1:22:12Let's not listen to the critics or whoever, the original fans who say we have turned on them or whatever. The first time that's ever happened. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So that was very eye-opening. I'm really glad that happened. what does trust mean in the context of mischief in your audience if at all good question uh i don't know we're we're probably reinventing that as we speak i think there was definitely a case of most people knew that when we put something out it would be generally worth their time and or money there's definitely a group of people who definitely trusted that it would make them money.

1:22:58Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And for a while, we listened to that a lot because the secondary market is a drug. And when you don't - We had this in 100th, same thing. Yeah. And the thing is, we didn't know about that world. Like we fell into that world by accident. It's like, wait, what is going on? What are these discord groups? And what's a cook group? And what are these bots? Like what, how, what is all of that? really interesting canvas for all of the second order interesting audience stuff you guys like to do anyway so we quickly like learned about these mechanisms playing that how do we play with that which was also very fun but yeah maybe at the end of the day my my answer would be uh it doesn't matter if there's trust or not because because we're going to go in a direction where the work has to just speak for itself, whether our name is on it or not.

1:23:49So it's kind of a big reinvention. Not something we haven't talked about at all, but you just did this made by mischief book. And I think a lot of what we've been discussing is sort of like retrospective and reflecting on this. Actually, there's one more Tramiel quote from that athletic piece. He says, athletes self-editing is now outsourced to the audience who carefully pick over the barrage of content with unprecedented zeal. Their eagerness to assess and evaluate artists' work lies somewhere between being volunteer market researchers and a wish to bend artists to their will and democratize their art.

1:24:26Again, so much of this is, I think, less relevant as you move into a new phase, but you also have done a, you're with Periton, you've done multiple galleries, you've done the museum installation, now the book. To some degree, you're clearly interested in looking back and not only um and narrativizing it to some degree um yeah i'm i'm curious how you like is that like we'll do this every once in a while and otherwise sort of not bother like clearly some of it is up to the audience to interpret it but yeah i'm curious what it what your current relationship to sort of that yeah yeah context adding and reverse it also started in korea which was you know the kids came up and they were excited and the reason they were excited is because they could now see a vision of the future for someone like them, where creativity can maybe lead to a lifestyle or a career path that isn't restrained by the current jobs that exist in industry.

1:25:31And that was a very interesting feeling. And also, it's not in some black box as much. No, exactly. And so actually from Korea, we shed the black box and that's where the book came from. That's where we have school groups come through here all the time. We're teaching a course at SCAD now. Wow. We do more community events now. The other part is like, a black box is not that interesting forever. Yeah. Look at Banksy. Eventually, it becomes a meme unless you evolve it, right? Mm-hmm. And part of it is just acknowledging we've been around for a minute, over half a decade, and perhaps the most defining half decade of our lives.

1:26:17also like we're not these punk rock kids anymore i'm 35 right my ceo just had a kid right we were all in our 20s with no money and nothing to lose when we started this and now it's like okay acknowledge our context acknowledge our place within our context and also just we don't have to be so precious about the way that things used to be we can take a more fluid approach to this. And so the black box is basically just gone. The doors are open, you send us a message, and if it's good, we respond. It's all open, right? The book is a textbook. It's a resource, right? It's not a picture book. It's a, here is how we did this down to the science, right?

1:27:05And then here's what happened. It's almost case studies. They are case studies. They are just case studies. And then there's an index of every single thing that we've ever done, organized by different categories and other criteria. So the Korea trip was a pivotal moment that lent itself to the book, that lent itself to opening up the doors more. And I think, again, that puts us in a place where we have no choice but to let the work speak for itself, because the black box is not going to do us any favors anymore. It's really putting our money where our mouth is. No more tricks. right yeah yeah no more games the work just will have to be so good oh wow and we'll die on that sword like if it's not good that's not good i also have to admit or or i should say point out a great magician tactic is to put everything in plain sight wink wink there you go maybe this is just part of a highly calculated pr tour uh on a super broad philosophical level you talked about kind of a halfway mark when you left west point choosing this sort of undefined path maybe in especially stark contrast to a group of people who are quite literally choosing war over uncertainty another line from you i think uh comfort and predictability are antithetical to everything we do and believe in oh interesting yeah maybe layered on what we were just talking about you've had a lot of opportunity to get comfortable um and maybe you have in certain ways and that's fine but how do you how do you stay original well the great thing is the the world keeps changing and making us more uncomfortable so it's kind of working out for us but i i think the other part is not choosing to go out of our way to seek comfort, right?

1:29:00Like making sure our incentives aren't set up in a way where we're just seeking predictability, dependability, rinsing and repeating. And we, by the way, we've made all these mistakes. Like we've kind of fallen in these traps, but now it's like, all right, heads up, like eyes are clear. Let's do things that we don't know what the outcome is. Let's do things that we don't know. Yeah, honestly, maybe the two weeks drops was comfortable in some weird, insane sense. It didn't become comfortable. It started super uncomfortable, right? But then it became comfortable for us. It also probably became comfortable for other people, right?

1:29:38Like there was a novelty in just how relentlessly consistent we are, but then it's in the word. It was just consistent, right? So that also in hindsight was not destined to last forever. Yeah. Do you ever get tired of novelty? No. No. And we're constantly still looking for it. But it's just manifesting more in bigger formats, like different challenges. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Which I think is normal, right? Like I think anyone in any line of work or lifestyle is looking for things that stimulate them. that's like why you get up in the morning theoretically where we're doing the same thing just in our own way yeah it's funny how novelty what novelty means can change a lot yeah also that almost definitionally it's easy to forget that exactly you guys launched applied mischief or at least announced it yep which i think is sort of obviously on some level like a revenue driver and a consulting thing but also an opportunity for maybe more scale or media or whatever.

1:30:48I think you talked about it a little bit earlier this year, but anything to talk about or share on that note, or is it still under wraps? It's honestly nothing crazy. And it kind of falls in line with the thinking behind the book and teaching the class. It's just like doors are open. There's a team here that's really good at a particular thing that I think a lot of people want. So for the right people, we will do work with them. What's the right people mean? So it's definitely not category specific. It could really be any category. I think it's just people with a very similar sensibility who might already speak the same language we do or have the ability to learn how to speak the language that we do.

1:31:28and i i would also say applied mischief solves a few internal not not problems but it it does a couple of things for me one is it there was such a robust operation built around that two-week release cycle here that can now be reapplied to external partners the other part is by opening up the doors to external partners, we're given more material that maybe we couldn't have as efficiently gotten on our own. Or legally. Or legally. And now we have enough clout and leverage and name and track record to be able to maybe push boundaries with permission, which is cool, right? A lot of people think mischief was always about sticking it to the man and punching at all corporations, good or bad.

1:32:26But it wasn't. It was about using them as material to make new output. That's the most important takeaway here. Adversarial, it's a mechanism, but that wasn't our reason for being. And so applied mischief, again, it creates the opportunity to give new inputs and new material to the team. And that's a good thing. While they also can, like that applied mischief team can service the internal other enterprises that we're running, like the theme parks division that I'm being so cagey about. You've sort of concretized a number of like more coherent and legible product verticals, shoes, handbags, stuff like that.

1:33:15And I don't know if you've used this language, but there are aspects of this that resemble like the the the sort of like european fashion house idea um i'm curious to what extent that's resonant if at all with parts of the business yeah yeah it it is starting to feel like that it's starting to feel like a house of creative enterprises with a shared back office that is not just you know finance hr legal but also a creative back office, which is applied mischief. And so that is now a back office that's also revenue generating, which is very useful. And that gives us the opportunity to double down on categories that we've gone deep in that are meaningful.

1:33:55So we do have a successful handbag business. We do have a fine art practice with the blue chip gallery. And we have a few other sort of verticals that I can't talk too much about yet. But when you zoom out maybe in like three or five years, it actually will look more just like a house, which is cool. It'll look like house and still different from house based on the outputs. But yeah. What have you learned from Sarah Andelman? Wow, that is a great question. It's funny because she is such an amazing person. and I'm not usually so sincere. But the thing about Sarah is, and I never knew about Colette, by the way.

1:34:42Never heard of it until I was introduced to her. And then they were like, oh, she's a legend. You got it. She was Colette. And I'm like, what's that? Which is so embarrassing. But you were probably like, maybe you were out of West Point, but you were - Yeah, there's no way I could have known. Like, why would I know? It's kind of a deep cut. Yeah, it definitely is. So I met her and she's like this cute French lady who kind of dresses kind of quirky and seems to know everyone and everyone seems to know her and adore her. but she is so excited by sort of like our brand of novelty like objects and you know creative experiences and creative takes on not just the fashion space but like any space in general and uh it's actually so inspiring because she was the top of the game for who knows like decades probably.

1:35:46It was her and her mom, right? It was her and her mom. And then shut it down, moved on, but continues to engage and be excited. And I think actually I draw a lot of inspiration and parallels to that moment of me in Korea sort of acknowledging like, all right, I want to continue to engage and maybe like go deeper in a community and still be a part of this and like give back to it. Sarah Andelman changed Mischief's whole trajectory by being the person who introduced us to Emanuel Periton. Prior to that, she had only ever made one introduction between an artist and Emanuel Periton before. That was two decades prior.

1:36:26That artist was Brian Donnelly. That's cause. Oh my gosh. And the reason that she did it was because I came to her and I said, we have this idea for an ATM machine with a leaderboard that ranks people based on how much money is in their bank account, but we really want to get it into Art Basel. I keep calling them. No, I was like, I keep calling them and they keep saying, you need to be part of a gallery. And she was like, maybe you should meet Emmanuel. It was pretty like, I don't know that world well, and I suspect most listeners don't either, but he's pretty serious. Top five. Okay. Probably number five.

1:37:05of the top five, but he's up there. I'm still learning about this world too, but basically since, I don't know, 60s, 70s, there are a handful of art world power brokers who controlled the movement of money between the ultra wealthy into this asset class of like a Coons or a Hearst or or whatever. Emmanuel is one of those people. Talk about different layers and metas and oh my gosh. There's so much to unpack with that world. But Emmanuel is one of those people, but as big and powerful as Emmanuel is, it's like a global gallery with spaces all over the world and Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and also the United States.

1:37:49He, kind of like Sarah, continues to be excited. And that's why it worked out so well. He was like, yeah, I'll do the ATM machine and let's do a group show or let's do a solo show. And then we did another solo show and now our work is starting to show up in museums, which is amazing because that's permanent. So all of Mischief up until now was built on ephemerality, but now some of it's going to be part of a permanent collection in very reputable museums. And in the past that might have been seen as like selling out like now you're a part of the institutions but i think uh permanent documentation of things that we've done in the past that other people can access is very cool so we are pro all of that happening it's cool to notice this pattern across both the people and just broadly of people who are still excited yeah i always tell the story eldon john came to USC when I was in school and like, it was cool.

1:38:53He performed whatever. He's kind of old, but it was still cool to see him. And, but the highlight of the whole thing was he was talking about Lord and this is like 2012. And he's like, guys, it's amazing. There's this young artist and she sings about getting on a plane for the first time. And he was, it was, that was the part that he got most excited about. That, that is incredible. And I think what I take away from that, and I've started to realize a lot more about this in the last like 18 months is that now that I'm 35 and we're entering the second half of the decade, I'm thinking more in 10-year, 20-year increments.

1:39:24Up until this point, I was really thinking year by year. But now, I've been in New York City for a decade. I've been doing mischief for over a decade. Now I'm really acknowledging that it is a long-term game. This is a long haul. And I'm really inspired by people who have already had success multiple scales larger than my own and they're still excited. That's amazing, right? And so I hope to be entering my 40s and my 50s still excited and not like too high on my own supply, if that makes sense. It's a sort of, there's a lightness to it, but there's also a sort of settling into yourself. Yeah, for sure.

1:40:10Which also is sort of like why you see the most disruption coming from young people because they're not settled yet they're angsty and they're uh willing to experiment and take risks they have nothing to lose but it's also rare that they do things that are as substantial also true like um yeah man it's it it is really interesting to think about like the the longest time horizon you even hear people talking about is five or 10 years. And like, what could you do if you, I was just up near Woodstock in New York and I went to this like quarry that this guy made. It's called Opus 40, I think. And he spent 40 years like digging out this limestone quarry and you're just like, like what even opens up when you, even if you just say like, let's not think on a one-year-time horizon, let's think on a five-year-time horizon.

1:40:59Like what now is in play? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it changes the whole game, right? It changes the type of relationships you choose to have. It changes the way you invest your time and your resources now. Are you working on the current thing or are you working on the next thing? It changes a lot for me. It also gives me a sense of security because now I invest in relationships that I count on having for the next two decades, if not more, which is comforting. But then I also - And also a little, there's a little bit of freedom through that kind of commitment. There is, right? It's, you know, it makes your world bigger, right?

1:41:41And now I'm in the headspace of how can I do things now that make my world bigger? And there's a sense of longevity in that statement as well. It's really cool. One other miscellaneous question I had that is hilarious to ask and follow up to that is, I think our mutual friend, Blake Robbins, he said, you have this take on BuzzFeed that it was actually like the right strategy and that it was like in the wrong economic environment. Maybe, maybe I miss misunderstood him. Oh, interesting. Interesting. Or maybe you have a separate reaction, but I'm curious for either of them. Oh man. How long did you work there by the way?

1:42:17I was an intern for a year. Okay. Yeah. While secretly doing Mr. Projects. Yes, exactly. Um, uh, I mean, I, I, I don't remember saying that necessarily, but I know that if you look back at Jonah Peretti's history, he actually is one of our predecessors. I saw the Nike email. Yeah, yeah. He was doing very interesting sort of culture jamming objects or moments that could be distributed through virality, but true virality back then, like shares, not real. Back then it had to be so good that you couldn't help but share it with five to 10 other people. And that's when real viral, actual viral things happened.

1:43:05And so I understand what he was going for, which was, how can you create a platform for this? How can you build a business around this, which essentially is taking this notion of a mechanism of how people discover and consume content, and then also take advantage of the ways that people also share it. And that led to you know the listicles right amazing format that yeah the medium is the message just like recursively yeah it was so easy to create and so natural to share yeah but what happens when there's too many listicles it doesn't matter anymore and then also like you lose control of your distribution with all the platform like all of these things i totally understand because we experienced on probably a smaller scale but we totally experienced them he's doing now he's still running it really BuzzFeed still exists uh and I hope he figures it out I really do because he's done the long like he's he's dug in right you know what I mean maybe there's a collaboration there someday I would be so jazzed to work with him personally I don't think mischief and BuzzFeed makes sense but uh it it's also the thing of he chose the business model of the day which was media and advertising and we just never chose a business model so we are not stuck doesn't mean we're secure but we're not stuck you know what i mean like we still have options you can't pin me down i will never right right okay as we wrap up i have a list of things i pulled out of the in the beginning of the the mischief book you have like and i don't know if they're even in the handbook, but you have all these like one-liners and ideas that I think Lucas and the other Kevin wrote down.

1:44:56And I would love to like speed run just like if you don't have a reaction, you don't have a reaction. These are probably from our employee handbook. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But it's my favorite thing in the book. And it's just accompanied with some amazing visuals. Importance of an adversary. We talked about this a little bit, but if you don't have an antagonist, do you have a point and always punch something, never punch down. Yeah. Yeah. Continues to be true to this day. Super important. I love that always punch something, never punch down is a really good framework. But sometimes punch sideways.

1:45:23Like, it can happen. That's okay. That's where you learn. That's where you uncover new territory. Have you ever punched sideways and then realized after you were totally punching down? I mean, probably. I don't remember. It's okay. You live and learn. Mischief ensures its ideas are not pre-constrained by execution. Yeah, yeah, true. Yeah. Continues to be true. And we have to do a lot of work when we have an idea to make sure that the production mindset doesn't get in the way. Because honestly, what we've learned is if you want it bad enough, there is a way to make it happen. There just is, right?

1:46:05Now, eventually you have to figure out, am I going to cross that line? But there is a way. And good ideas are often limited before they're fully even formed by the production saying no, right? Like, give yourself the chance to, like, break some eggs and make some people uncomfortable because the idea is fluid. Like, the ideas are never done until they're out the door. At least give yourself the chance to, like, let them see what happens. Yeah. Death is just as important as birth. And then mischief has a plan to burn it all down. If you don't feel the liberty to burn it all down, are you really free?

1:46:40And finally, my favorite, we can't cease what we're no longer doing. We can't desist from nothing.

1:46:49Oh my God. These are so great. And they continue to be true. They continue to be incredibly valuable. You know, the death thing is actually really interesting because on one hand, typically when we're thinking about an idea, and when anyone thinks about an idea, they're like, okay, what is it? What is its form factor? And how does it enter the world? but no one ever talks about how does it exit the world. And for a lot of ideas that we've put out, there usually was a exit strategy. There was a death strategy, right? The most obvious one being like a lawsuit, right? But there are other ones too, like our PT cruiser with the 5 ,000 keys, the death strategy actually is just the crowd will figure it out, right?

1:47:36And it gets towed nine months later in Truckee, California, whatever. But on a more like macro existential level is what is the depth of mischief and how do we make sure we're not afraid to go there? Whether we go there or not, the courage to go there actually allows us to go into this next phase. You know what I mean? Being okay with it, all going away. Honestly, the coolest thing that mischief could do right now is just disappear for 10 years and then come back. That would be amazing. I can't afford to do that. Yeah, that's too comfortable. Don't make future trash. We said that. That's in the book.

1:48:18Fuck, we have made so much trash. Interesting. Don't make future trash. I don't even know what that means. Maybe something to come back to. Not a pithy line, but I love this. Mischief as a practice and as an entity manifests the ambition for creative work slash a creative entity to wield tangible communication power, competitive with the cultural power held by global companies, celebrities, and media entities. Yeah, that is the whole reason that mischief exists. We realize that because of the internet and because of the distribution mechanisms allowed to us, that an idea can have the same competing power as Kim Kardashian or the United States government or Lockheed Martin, right?

1:49:07Like we live at a time where that sort of access and inflate. Exactly, right? And you see that with like content creators and cable news network, right? Same thing, the playing field is level. So it's such an opportunity to be able to apply all of those tools that are typically only afforded to global corporations and celebrities to ideas. And just for the sake of the idea too, no other ulterior motive. like maybe sure it makes money but like not enough to be significant it's just you know making the money for a lot of these concepts is just the culmination of the concept coming to life and uh yeah we're still just kids playing with tools that we don't quite know how they work it it captures something interesting though which is you're sort of both taking yourself seriously enough for this to be possible and not taking yourself too seriously yeah that part's really fucked up again it's that like jekyll hyde thing of like you know i have to wake up and have a board meeting tomorrow but then come in and brainstorm whoever knows like whatever we're going to the dark place is that what you called it that's hilarious that that is you don't go there often but uh you know when you're when you're like working on a problem you have to like really kind of go there yeah uh which is rough but it works we are not pranksters we are not making stunts.

1:50:29A stunt has attention as its end goal, while a prank has no goal beyond fooling someone else. And then humor is a tool to get people to engage with a point of view. Yeah. I mean, humor, humor is such an amazing tool because our brand of humor is really, uh, it's in the eye of the beholder and that creates attention because some people might not find it so funny, right? Like the Jesus shoes, a lot of people found funny. A lot of people were brutally offended. Probably a lot of people liked the Jesus shoes and really didn't like the Satan shoes, by the way. Also true, right? And so humor was the wedge that created the opportunity for those things to exist, but obviously it's so subjective and that created a really valuable tension that ended up being additional layers of distribution for us, which is great.

1:51:20For pranks and stunts, yeah, those... My take on that, whenever we qualify an idea at mischief, we say it's got to slap in one sentence, it's got to slap harder in three. Pranks and stunts are typically one. Ours are usually three, if not two. Very rarely one, if ever. Are there any that are five or ten? That only happens when the crowd takes it and turns it into something else. The big red boot ended up becoming that. Even though for us, we're like, you can't write a manifesto around this it's just like a cool looking thing yeah it might even be one yeah no honestly right we're like it's an interesting looking thing but then it just became so many other layers like that one is a five-liner if you really really dive into it it's interesting i mean i wonder if there's a lesson there that like can the modern world even tolerate a multi-order thing or like if you're really going to have it go the distance, it sort of needs to be intrinsically pretty simple.

1:52:27Yes, for any sense of meaningful scale. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unfortunately. If you are 100 % credulous, everything ever made is art. If you are 100 % cynical, everything ever made is advertising. That's a banger. And my response is yes. All the above. This is hilarious. is mischief attacks golf as a way to attack all the nebulous concepts attached to it and then sample the thing that signifies culture larger than itself for example golf and then there's a whole bunch of other stuff just about how much you guys hate golf oh my gosh it's so so look there's definitely a three-line explanation to the golf but i actually prefer to live in the world of the one-line explanation which is just golf sucks and i leave it at that and it's so it's so much funnier to me that way.

1:53:18Sure, it's like a waste of natural resources. It takes up space. It's an activity reserved for the elite, whatever. All of those things are true, but it's just way funnier to just dunk on golf for no apparent reason. Well, because a lot of people really love it. A lot of different types of people. I know. This is just, this is our nerdy revenge from being shoved in the lockers in high school. Yeah, you Brooklyn losers would hate golf. Now we're going to pick on golf. Pickleball will be next. I think pickleball is plenty picked on. If you build it, they will come bad versus build it where they are good.

1:53:53And then a sub point of this is using quote unquote real infrastructure steals authenticity, authority, and credibility. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the simplest way to look at that is in the early days, we rejected this idea of creating art that should only live in a white wall gallery because one, the context there doesn't really exist. And it's this other notion of like you're assuming that people will just come to you when the opportunity is to like go to them. we are so obsessed with this sort of Trojan horse practice of hiding in disguise of the cultural ready-mades and then reinserting them back into the systems that we are critiquing from the start.

1:54:37Yes, yes. And the people who are buying it are probably part of, they're sort of the butt of the joke. I wouldn't say butt of the joke, but they are part of the performance, right? And whether they're the butt of the joke or not is actually up to them, right? Talking to one another. For us, we are an indifferent arbiter, right? Like you are what you are. Sometimes it goes the other way. I was reading about the baby shoes, like, which were clearly, yeah, just trying to do one thing. And then they were like beloved by this like adult baby fetish. Oh yeah, that was so weird. So that was like a design exercise and playing with this idea of scale.

1:55:16Like baby shoes are sort of like weird proportions. What if you make it bigger? How how weird does that look in photos? So we're like, let's make sort of like this playful kid's shoe. And man, we have a very passionate - The internet is big. Fan base of furries and adult diapers. That's another version of the second order not being designed. No, totally. And also fantastic. It's great. Like the fact that the people in the theoretical mischief house party or the mischief high school cafeteria. Right. Really has. Yeah, world building, by the way. Everyone, right? Mm. We don't, quote, we don't make fiction.

1:55:59Getting people to act on quote unquote real systems is more powerful than getting them to act on constructed ones. Yeah. I mean, that simply just lends itself to us making real things, right? It's one thing to create, and I'm not talking ill of any of these formats, But a lot of art or storytelling comes through the formats of a painting or a song or a poem or a film or a television show or whatever. These are one-dimensional communication pathways. Also, I have an idea in my head about what a film is supposed to be. Yeah, exactly. And also the context is missing from those experiences. those are all great formats and people have done really good jobs with them the opportunity that we saw was let's just do the thing.

1:56:54Let's just make it real. Let's seize the means of production and put it into the market and see what happens. There's some lines on this. Make work that doesn't wink and doesn't blink. Don't give people an easy out to take it less seriously. Soylent could have been a speculative artwork. Instead, it's real. Oh my gosh. Yeah, and you know what? It took me so long to come around on that Soylent line because the guys had been saying that for years ever since I first met them. They're right. You could have done it a small batch, or an artist could have lived off of it as a performance for 20 years and documented everything and had a video and then done a gallery show of, I lived off of this powder.

1:57:35Instead, they just made it, and they sold it. Instead, it was a business. It was a company. They put it out into the real world, and that's kind of rad. That's cool. Regardless of whether or not it was successful, they did the thing. and that's an aspiration that we continue to harness in a big way like do the thing soft bank we work even to slide is speculative fiction same thread obviously it's just a great slide it comes up so much around here i don't know why but part of it is also just like if that's how the rest of the world operates we're not even being crazy wow wow you know yeah yeah the bar is so high masa i know the goat just a couple more knockoffs are reposted by the market real and fake are made in the same factory yeah kind of self-explanatory i mean all true right and so we we think knockoffs are cool uh as long as this acknowledged as a knockoff if if it's someone taking something that we've done and then claiming that it's an original from them not so much this is why actually we had to be okay with the idea of people creating nfts of our works and making money off of them because they weren't trying to pass it off as an original they were just creating nfts they were remixing the format that we did and in that sense uh it was kosher well yeah and in many ways the hirsch thing is like as close as you can get to learning that line anyway yeah exactly and then the real and faker made in the same factors it's just a true insight which is very funny and so instead of like fighting these dynamics maybe you can use them as material and that's that's another place that we got a lot of excitement from don't invent constraints for yourself when you don't need to damn i feel like we're in a position where we need to so i i am inventing that but it kind of goes back to the production question earlier like how can you avoid creating unnecessary roadblocks for yourself to see where an idea might go.

1:59:42Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because everything is so fluid and so dynamic. Yes. I talk about this in a much lower stakes, but like plant the seed. Don't like look at the seed in your hand. Yeah, exactly. Right. And you don't know what kind of seed it is. It could become so many different things. So you just gotta let it ride. Mischief doesn't make content. Mischief operates off platform. Yeah. I mean, it continues to be true. We never invested in making content for the platforms. Like we do have an Instagram. We rarely post on it. And it took a while. And it took a long time to even get to that point.

2:00:23I think we have the TikTok handle, but I don't know. I don't even have TikTok on my phone. Maybe that's the novelty. Maybe it's Gabe's TikTok. I know, I know. We have a Twitter account. We don't really use it. I don't think we even have an audience on Twitter, not at least on our handle. So, but it was important for us to not fall in the trap, kind of what Brad Trammell was talking about, which is all of a sudden it's not about like the individual works you're putting out. It's about the relationship between the audience and the content that you make about your works. And we were like, let's never fall into that trap.

2:00:55Because when you fall into that trap, you're going to start changing the works to like better fit the format. And that's not going to go anywhere. So we continue to make things that are very explicitly off platform. The great thing is because of the world that we live in and the internet ecosystem that we're a part of, other people make the content for us. So it works out. Maybe there's a real world lesson in the fact that the real world is definitively off platform. Yes. One last one, make it shitty. Aesthetic populism communicates effectively. Funny to think about it in the context of the conversation earlier about craft, but I don't think they're mutually exclusive necessarily.

2:01:31Yeah, yeah. It's funny because when Kevin and Lucas first started building the design team here, somehow we stumbled across amazingly talented, just truly brilliant designers. Not many of them. There's just like a small handful of them here. But I remember in some of their first work at Mischief, they were so confused and even frustrated with Kevin and Lucas because Kevin and Lucas would say, it's really good, make it shittier. Like good design will forever just be good design and no one will remember it but shitty design maybe people actually remember that so it comes down to this thing that we talked a bit about earlier too which is that herd might be running and maybe they are running towards the end of a cliff maybe they're not but there could be value in just going in the opposite direction and then maybe that herd will like look up and be like where is that and then they're going to start following you right and then you like run with them a little bit, see what they're doing, and then you reverse directions again.

2:02:36They're just following you around. I mean, yeah, in a way, this whole mischief experiment is an incredibly Sisyphean struggle of just like zigzagging around. Yeah, you can't catch me. And at a certain point, you have to ask like, is there her chasing me or am I chasing me? Ah, there you go. One last question. Those ideas I just listed, many of them are in some way like mischief values. Totally. You guys are also very pragmatic. I think you're very opportunistic. You have, it's hard to pin down. It's not super legible, but you are principled in some set of ways. And in many ways, those values, like, are this flexible frame for the people here, past and future to like look through and work with.

2:03:18You also say nothing is sacred. That's like one of the big values in the book. And then one of the other phrases in that book is change anything that stops being helpful. So my question is, is anything sacred?

2:03:35No, nothing is sacred. It's a mindset. It's a lifestyle. You have to just be ready to go anywhere. Pull yourself back if you go too far, but be prepared to go there. Safe space. Thanks, Gabe. This was great. Awesome.