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

Summary

Dialectic - Episode 31: Gabe Whaley – Playing the Crowd & Outlasting the Hype

Date: October 15, 2025
Host: Jackson Dahl
Guest: Gabe Whaley (CEO & Co-Founder, Mischief)

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Overview

This episode features an in-depth and candid conversation with Gabe Whaley, the founder and CEO of Mischief (MSCHF). Mischief has built a reputation as an enigmatic and wildly inventive creative studio, blending art, marketing, technology, and consumer culture into viral and provocative projects. Jackson and Gabe unpack Mischief’s unique philosophy, how the company navigates the changing tides of internet culture, the meaning of value and virality, evolving audience dynamics, Mischief’s creative process, and what comes next as the studio prepares to leave behind its famous bi-weekly drops in favor of deeper, more permanent work.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Legibility, Illegibility & The Black Box (04:08, 34:18)

• Mischief as a Black Box: Mischief deliberately cultivates a mystique by oscillating between being legible and illegible (transparent and opaque) to the outside world.

  "We're not transparent...it's because the mystery lends more to the imagination than reality ever could."
  – Gabe Whaley [04:08]

• Audience Participation: Part of the appeal is releasing just enough information for people to build their own theories and communities around MSCHF's work, which keeps both the spectacle and meaning alive beyond Mischief’s intentions.

2. Value, Speculation and Modern Culture (07:33, 08:18, 39:58)

• On Value: Mischief’s projects interrogate value systems, especially how value is constructed, manipulated, or gamified. The act of engaging with a drop often requires some “sacrifice” (time, money, reputation) from the audience.

  "We're actually taking objects and systems, twisting them, contorting them, and putting them back into the systems that we're critiquing."
  – Gabe Whaley [06:37]

• Speculation as a Cultural Force: Gabe notes how speculative, high-risk attitudes infuse consumer and internet culture, from sneaker bots to reselling. Projects like the “Sock Queen” and the “Hat Guy” exploit and comment on that dynamic:

  "We had this design of a mischief sock...we bundled them into a pallet of...a thousand socks for five grand. The idea was, whoever buys it first owns the supply. Let's see what they do."
  – Gabe [10:15]

3. The Internet: From Discovery to Performance (15:53, 16:03)

• Over the last decade, the internet has shifted from a place to discover and share genuinely interesting things to a platform for personal branding and attention.

  "Now, instead of me sharing a link to something that's cool, now I'll share a video of me talking about a link that's cool, and I'm not even going to include the link."
  – Gabe [15:52]

• Mischief leverages this attention economy, knowing that virality is now less about the novelty of the thing and more about how well it can be turned into content.

4. Viral Cycles & The Death of Novelty (19:59, 32:08, 35:51, 43:58)

• Evolving Virality: Going viral has become less thrilling and more expected – it’s now a numbers game, and the emotional reward for creators diminishes over time.

  "After enough times, you feel nothing...the addiction to that drug starts to wear off."
  – Gabe [32:08]

• Outlasting the Hype: MSCHF has reached a turning point, recognizing the limitations of chasing ever-greater spectacle. The next phase prioritizes longevity and building smaller, more intimate communities.

  "[The] staying power of anything that goes viral is...pretty rough. 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."
  – Gabe [36:47]

5. Audience – Not Just Consumers, but Co-Creators (39:58, 42:49, 43:11)

• “Playing the Crowd”: Mischief’s best work is designed to be unfinished until the crowd interacts with it, transforms it, and sometimes even subverts it, as seen with Blur Collectible and the Big Red Boots.

  "A lot of it comes from a place of deception...we're never going to do that. Because the first thing you'd have to do is start repeating things that worked well in the past. And we're like, we're never going to do that."
  – Gabe [39:58]

• Audience Completes the Work: Objects change meaning over time as different groups claim and transform them.

  "The meaning of the object changed...for the early stages, [the Big Red Boot] was a cool kids flex...then it became a tool for content creators."
  – Gabe [44:03]

6. Contemporary Culture: The Weird, Spicy Present (13:24, 14:47, 22:03)

• The "slow cancellation of the future": Cultural production seems stuck in hyper-speed, remixing and amplifying the present rather than inventing the future.

• Yet, there is hope: Gabe sees creativity persisting, and new forms will rise as people become bored of sameness.

  "Even though the algorithms are...driving towards one thing, I do have faith in human beings getting bored and being able to spot out a lot of sameness."
  – Gabe [21:29]

7. Craft, Creativity & Reorienting Purpose (47:30, 65:06, 66:06)

• The process and thrill of creation becomes the most sustainable source of motivation as virality wanes.

  “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.”
  – Gabe [46:48]

• Internal Process: Mischief treats creativity as a practice that can be trained with structure—daily brainstorms, curriculum-building, seeking new inputs.

  “It’s a constant hunt for new inputs. That’s really what it is... The ideas will come, but you need the inputs.”
  – Gabe [67:57]

8. Phase Shift: Ending The Drop Era (52:47, 56:37)

• Mischief is sunsetting their signature bi-weekly drop cycle.

  “Instead of putting out maybe 40 to 50 new things a year, we might do three, maybe five. And you might not even know they were us.”
  – Gabe [52:47]

• The future: More ambitious, high-stakes, and possibly anonymous projects. A new “theme parks division” is teased.

  “All I'll say is we have a theme parks division now. And that hopefully tells you nothing and everything at the same time.”
  – Gabe [57:29]

9. Real-World Presence & Permanence (59:42, 60:56)

• The team finds renewed meaning in in-person experiences, noting the emotional significance that comes from physical audience engagement over massive online reach.

  "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."
  – Gabe [59:42]

• Physical friction and exclusivity: Groups and scenes need friction – things should be a little difficult or secretive to truly matter and last.

10. Worldbuilding, Institutions & Authorship (64:01, 65:04, 76:03, 80:27)

• Worldbuilding as Subversion: Mischief accidentally created a world that monopolizes a feeling, rather than a unified aesthetic or message.

  "By doing that enough times, consistently enough...we were able to monopolize a feeling that I think Mischief actually owns."
  – Gabe [64:50]

• Collective Authorship: The lack of individual authorship in Mischief’s work protects against ego, fosters a unique team culture, and allows the brand to (potentially) live beyond any single person.

  "...it was actually unintentionally, almost like a protection agent to keep us intact from losing our own minds."
  – Gabe [75:20]

• Documenting and Sharing Process: The new book and move away from the “black box” signals a willingness to embrace transparency, help rewire culture, and inspire new creators.

  "The black box is basically just gone. Like, the doors are open...The book is a textbook. It’s a resource. It’s not a picture book."
  – Gabe [85:38]

11. Values, Anti-Sacredness & Creative Survival (88:45, 123:34)

• The only “sacred” principle for Mischief is that nothing is sacred. They aim to always maintain adaptability and the willingness to burn down even their own formulas and traditions.

  "No, nothing is sacred. It's a mindset. It's a lifestyle."
  – Gabe [123:34]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On The Changing Meaning of Value:

"The only point of being a human is being able to eat, sleep, fuck, and flex on your neighbor. Which some people have counted me on. But I think it's pretty true. I think those are like, that's like a universal truth."
– Gabe [05:43]

On Creating for Themselves vs. The Audience:

"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."
– Gabe [32:14]

On What Makes Mischief Work:

"A good remix starts with good material...we use this term here, cultural, ready made, which is taking something that already exists and has a certain meaning in culture, you take it, you co-opt it, you appropriate it, you mix it up, turn it on its head and you put it right back."
– Gabe [26:50]

On Outlasting the Hype:

"We built the game, we designed a game, we won it because we're a player of one, and then we essentially are trapped by the game, unless we reinvent ourselves out of it."
– Gabe [36:55]

On Building Beyond Virality:

"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."
– Gabe [36:47]

On Process vs. The Magic of Inspiration:

"When I'm asked, what's the process? How do you come up with these ideas? And is there a framework?...it's actually 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."
– Gabe [66:06]

On the Power of Off-Platform Work:

"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."
– Gabe [120:27]

On The Importance of Death (Endings):

"The death thing is actually really interesting... 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 built in. Almost there was a death strategy."
– Gabe [106:50]

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Important Segments & Timestamps

• Legibility, Value, and The Black Box: [03:30] – [07:33]
• Speculation & Audience Gamification: [08:18] – [13:24]
• Viral Cycles, Changing Internet Culture: [15:53] – [19:59]
• Existential Reexamination & Shift Away from Virality: [32:08] – [36:47]
• Audience as Co-Creators, Performance: [39:58] – [44:11]
• Physical Events & The Meaning of Real-World Presence: [59:42] – [62:50]
• Creative Process & Inputs: [67:08] – [70:19]
• World Building, Authorship, and Culture: [64:01] – [76:06]
• Documenting Mischief – The Book & Transparency: [85:03] – [87:40]
• Values Rundown: [105:00] – [107:57]
• "Nothing is sacred": [123:34]

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Closing Thoughts

This episode offers a frank assessment of the joys and challenges of operating at the intersection of art, culture, and the internet’s game of attention. Mischief’s evolution reflects a broader story in creative culture: virality is fleeting, spectacle is self-defeating if endlessly repeated, and the only way forward is continual reinvention, deeper craft, and a return to meaningful experiences—often with smaller, more devoted audiences. Through it all: stay original, build the world you want to see, and, when necessary, burn it all down.

"Nothing is sacred. It's a mindset. It's a lifestyle. You have to just be ready to go anywhere."
– Gabe Whaley [123:34]

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For creators, artists, entrepreneurs, or simply fans of internet culture, Gabe Whaley’s perspective is a timely encouragement to resist comfort, embrace uncertainty, and keep playing—whether for an audience of one, one thousand, or the whole world.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to Dialectic Episode 31 with Gabe Whaley. Gabe is the CEO and co founder of Mischief. Mischief is hard to pin down. Depending on who you ask. It's a startup, a fashion brand, performance artist, cultural commentator, and a virality machine. There's probably a long list of other descriptions any given beholder might see them as, too. Over the years, they've become a category of their own, and people will often describe Mischief for X when talking about spectacle marketing or the viral drops they're known for. For nearly six years, they released a new drop every two weeks. A product, a website, an art piece, or something even weirder. You may have come across Mischief by way of some of their most famous releases. Stuff like the Big Red boots, the time they cut up a Damien Hirst print and sold it for parts, the time they created 999 forgeries of a Warhol drawing, mixed them all together and sold them all, and the Jesus shoes, the Nike Air Maxes they filled with holy water back in 2019 that were probably the first time Mischief went supernova on the Internet. I've known Gabe for years, and Mischief and he are at an interesting turning point. I think it made it a particularly interesting time to sit down with him and reflect on where they've been, what they've learned, how they do, what they do, and where they might be going. I think any creative person and anyone who's interested in how the Internet is changing us, our attention, and what we value, will find Gabe's philosophy, at the very least, thought provoking. He and the Mischief team are keen to say that nothing is sacred and. And they are definitely always finding new ways to be irreverent. And yet this conversation made it even more clear to me how much they deeply care about the act of creativity and making sure to find new ways to stoke that flame and begin anew. As always, if you enjoy this episode, please give it a rating and. Or share it with a friend. Here's Gabe Whaley. All right, Gabe Whaley. We made it or we are.

[B]

We live.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

All right. Let's rock.

[A]

Thanks for making time.

[B]

Anytime.

[A]

And hustling back from the dooms doomland of Tribeca.

[B]

I'm a menace on a city bike.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So it's the beautiful thing about three quarters of the year in New York.

[B]

Right? Right.

[A]

Winter comes and, like, everything is thrown off now.

[B]

I'll do it in the winter, too.

[A]

I'm. I'm not from the east coast, so I'm. It's a great struggle. Okay. We are going to start With a line from Sean Monahan in the Made by Mischief book describing you guys. He says, to the venture capitalist, mischief is a startup. To the sneaker head, mischief is a brand. To the collector, mischief produces art. Virality is the only mutually intelligible language understood by all three. Well, that and money. There's two things that this kind of brings to mind for me. One is the notion, and it kind of comes up in every time you guys have to talk about this, is that you're constantly playing with legibility and illegibility. And then the other is that maybe beyond spectacle, which is very obvious. I think the other thing that really stands out to me about you guys and your work is that you're playing with value. The idea of value and what we value and how we value the things we do. Something that itself can be kind of legible or illegible. And so my first question is, why? Why value? Why is that such an interesting substrate that kind of runs across all this stuff? And how do you think about legibility, both with regard to that idea and more broadly, this whole container, what this thing is.

[B]

Real quick, can you clarify a little bit what you mean on legibility? Illegibility?

[A]

Yeah, I. It's an idea that I've, I. I've thought about a lot. One of my friends even brought up in the context of this podcast, as I was pretty early on, and she's like, you know, you are currently kind of illegible, meaning, like, it's not totally clear what the thing's about and, like, who the guests are and, like, what the pattern is. And her point was, there will be a time for legibility, but right now, you're actually, like, kind of in the oven. And to me, there are a few things, few things at the level of scale and cultural impact as mischief that are constantly dipping in and out of legibility.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, okay, got it, got it. Okay. So the. I'll start with the legibility eligibility, and then we can talk about value. The. The way that we've internally described our practice with regards to being legible or not is at least it used to be the black box. Why did the black. Well, what is the black box? The black box is this idea of we're not transparent. We do not tell people how we do things or why we do things. Are we trying to hide anything? Not necessarily. It's because the mystery lends more to the imagination than reality ever could. The second part to that, which is less thrilling, is that maybe we're kind of lazy and it takes a Lot of work to document and tell a story when why not create enough of a spark and put it in front of enough people so that they tell the story for you? And then they have conflicting stories which will oppose one another. Some will create factions, different communities will form. And at the end of the day, you create this much larger spectacle that almost has nothing to do with the idea or mischief anymore. They have consumed the idea, they have become the idea. And I think in a lot of Mischief's best work, and most of the work that we've aspired to do, is how do you create this handoff to an audience and let them run with it and turn it into something else com something else that that is their own. So I think there's an element of this black box. There's also this element of giving up control so that the meaning can be defined by that end audience, which selfishly is also a thrill to watch. Now for the value part. I think when you look at a lot of our work, you see that we co opt objects or systems that either define or comment on most people's daily lives, their relationships with objects, their relationships with technology, their relationships with people via technology. One thing that we've constantly said here is the only point of being a human is being able to eat, sleep, fuck, and flex on your neighbor. Which some people have counted me on. But I think it's pretty true. I think those are like, that's like a universal truth. It's always been that and it always will be that. And that gives you a lot of good material, especially like the tail end of that statement. And you know, the funny thing about mischief, and this is kind of what Sean was getting out of, like, you know, we can put our tech startup hat on, we can put our footwear brand hat on, we can put our fine art hat on. We're really just a reflection of whatever is going on in any space at any given moment based on the project that we choose to do. And I think a lot of the work regarding this idea of value, it comes out because we're not creating paintings that live in a white wall gallery. We're actually taking objects and systems, twisting them, contorting them, and putting them back into the systems that we're critiquing. And so they are real, there are real interactions, and in order to interact, you must give up time or money or both. And so the value equation starts there, and then it sort of takes a life of its own.

[A]

Yeah, it's interesting to think about a kind of almost sacrifice in the consumption of a mischief thing and sacrifice can mean a lot of different.

[B]

No, Totally. Hmm.

[A]

I interviewed Eugene Way, who I think you've met earlier on. On the show. And one of the things he talked about is how sort of speculation is increasingly becoming kind of, like, more and more entrenched in what culture is, especially for young, obviously in the case of sports betting and crypto and gambling. But even, like, dating apps or like, this sort of notion around living is like, why bother doing anything that's going to slowly compound? I should just sort of, like, put it all on black. And I'm curious if you've thought about that at all to the extent that sort of plays into. It's an interesting cut on value at the very least, in terms of how we value things.

[B]

Interesting cut on value or just interesting statement on, like, the desperation that everyone's facing and just kind of how not. Not even, like, bleak, because we're past that. It's just, like, truly nihilistic at this point. It's like, you know what? Who cares? It doesn't matter. Like, why not? And maybe some people are actually kind of having fun and getting some joy out of this and finding some community around it, which is kind of cool. Still bleak, but kind of cool. And, you know, I think we've even seen elements of this play out through a lot of the projects that we've done where different communities will form around this. And they are speculating, and they're like, this might be worth a lot on the resale market. And, I mean, I know there's a guy. There's a picture of a guy with a warehouse full of big red boots that he did not manage to unload. And I know, like, I had seen some of the screenshots of group chats prior to the big boots dropping, and people were like, oh, my God, like, I got my bots ready. I'm gonna, like, get all these out. And they didn't know that we were gonna unload a little bit. Um, and so some people really got left holding the bag. And then all of his friends turned on him and said, you dumbass. Which is so brutal. Um, but you guys.

[A]

I mean, you guys have literally played into this. Like, speaking of sort of, like, people gamifying that you have the. The sock queen into the hat guy.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. That was so bonkers. I mean, there was this time, a long time ago, where we were so full of ourselves, we said we would never make merch. And so we created a loophole for ourselves where we said, well, instead of Selling merch. We'll sell a monopoly to the merchants. Someone else can sell the merch, which tells you a lot about our personality, I guess. And so we had this design of a mischief sock, sort of in the style of Costco.

[A]

I would argue very in the style of Costco.

[B]

Extremely in the style of Costco, like straight up in the style of Costco. But instead of selling one pair of socks at a time, we bundled them into a pallet of. I think it was a thousand socks for five grand. And the idea was, whoever buys it first owns the supply. They control the market. Let's see what they do. This lady in Florida bought them actually before the drop release. Somehow she. I don't know, something went wrong. We were like doing a test.

[A]

Prematurely sold.

[B]

Yeah, it did.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

I think at like 2am the night before.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

Early days. Still had some kinks. Anyways, she got it and we were like, who is this person? And it turned for the next week, we started seeing this account show up on Twitter, on Reddit. The socks were showing up on eBay and StockX. This lady was not Internet native, but somehow she knew. And maybe it was from her son who was the one who told her to buy these. She knew enough to create a Reddit account, find the mischief subreddit, find other subreddits for like, collectibles or hype or resell or whatever. She was sending her kid to school with the socks to sell the socks, and she. She ended up something like 3Xing her money over the next couple of weeks.

[A]

It sort of seemed like it was actually like, you couldn't have drawn it up better.

[B]

Oh, it's freaking wild. And then she started sending us these crazy emails of the dream she had last night where she was like a queen on a bed of socks, and people were coming up to her to give her offerings and she was tossing socks to peasants. And that's when we were like, maybe we don't talk to her anymore. And then we actually found her and interviewed her for our magazine. So the whole thing is actually that

[A]

photo of her in the room with all the socks is pretty amazing.

[B]

So she was sending those to us unprompted. It was also quite uncomfortable because I don't know who lays on a bed of socks in that position. But yeah, and that's. That's the great thing about these projects is you don't know what's going to happen. Like the hat guy that you mentioned. So we did the same thing with

[A]

hats, but it was a little bit after right so he had.

[B]

It might have been like two years later. It was, it was. There was like a prior work on the hats. Prior work. There was lore, there was a result, There was documentation of the result, and the dude with the hats could not do it. And also you could just kind of tell, like a little bit they were both thirsty and desperate. But there's like different flavors of it where some you can kind of embrace and be like, all right, this is a little chaotic. And then there's some is just sort of like, sad. Like, you could tell she was having fun. Yeah, she was a nut. This guy was like, like, doing all the. I think he had a bot set up to, like, catch any tweet of mischief and reply to it saying, buy this hat.

[A]

There are sort of different ways to be authentically a sellout.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Or maybe just different ways to be a sellout.

[B]

There's an art to it, to be honest. And the guy did not nail it. He also wasn't being creative in the communities. I think he was just trying to, like, the equivalent of just standing outside seeing, will you buy this hat? Will you buy this hat? Will you buy this hat? Somehow the lady actually nailed it. Yeah. She has no idea how good she was.

[A]

Okay, we're going to talk more about a lot of that, but I want to talk a little bit about sort of just culture today before we dive into mischief's role. There's a line you guys have, I think, from Lucas in the book, where he says no one talks about the future anymore. Instead, everything accelerates the present to a fever pitch, intensifying and weirding, the horrid idiosyncrasies and dysfunctions of the current moment. There's a hole where the future used to be, and all that remains is the increasingly spicy present.

[B]

I have no idea what that means.

[A]

Well, there's. There's another line, I think Lucas said in some interview. He said the present is spiraling more concentratedly in on himself, on itself, and sort of this, like, recursion almost.

[B]

No, totally. I, I actually, I do. I do know where he's coming from.

[A]

Well, I guess my question is, obviously you guys have talked about this a lot. So have a lot of other people. Slow cancellation of the future is not a totally new idea. And I think, like, we all feel this. It's like, where is the new xyz? I guess my question for you is, how real is that really? And maybe to get specific, I'm curious for you to reflect on either 2014 ish when you really kind of first started the beginnings of what this was going to become with miscellaneous mischief, or maybe as another benchmark, 2019, when you guys formally started, like, you produced a lot of culture in the meantime. A lot has happened. But is the future really canceled?

[B]

I don't think so, but it's harder to see. And I think that's a big distinction.

[A]

Not as legible.

[B]

It's definitely not as legible. And you won't see it unless you go looking for it. Because we're at a time where you're just surrounded by the wrong incentive structures and the wrong formats that are going to immediately blind you to seeing beyond your own. The palm of your hand, unfortunately. So back in 2014, that was a time where the news moved a lot less quickly. And that was also the tail end of an era of the Internet, where the Internet had been around just long enough for mass adoption, but it wasn't so mainstream yet. So it was still an era where people shared things because they were actually interesting. Over the last 10 years, the incentives have flipped where people don't share things because they're interesting anymore. They share things to fuel their vanity. So instead of me sharing a link to something that's cool now, I'll share a video of me talking about a link that's cool now, and I'm not even going to link. Include the link. You know what I mean?

[A]

It's co opted. You know, it's funny is I. You're. You're talking about the. I think the first project. Maybe the first project was the chat bubbles, but the Twitter thing you did, maybe it wasn't even a mischief project where you were giving bad advice intentionally.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. That was even before the iPhone bubbles. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

And there was. I don't know how intentional was, but you even. You were describing it and you said people started to comment on the product rather than engaging with it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Which is like the seed of this idea.

[B]

No, it was starting to happen. Right. And. And we also picked up on those incentive structures and we're like, okay, if you design an idea in a way, the media is likely to write an article about it. And then pretty quickly we found out that clickbait was an emerging format. So it's all. It was a match made in heaven. It was like media companies are incentivized to create clickbait. We can create projects that have an amazing clickbait layer. Even if we will defend ourselves to the end saying that there are more layers to most of our projects, if not all of them. But there always is definitely like that sort of vanity driven clickbait line. Right. You feed the beast and we, we co opt media companies as a primary layer of distribution. And then as you get to 2019, 2020, media's really lost a lot of steam. But that's sort of the rise of the influencer and the content creator. And that's when you start to realize those groups are the new media companies. They have very similar incentive structures. But also video is the prevailing format now and it's quick and that lends itself really well to physical objects. And, and that opened up this whole Pandora's box of where you can go with physical objects. And that's why like literally behind you there's cereal, there's electronic devices, there are collectibles, there are shoes, there are swords.

[A]

Like very specifically two objects that are amazing in person. Back to the, the sort of their layers thing, but also jump off a screen.

[B]

Totally. And even down to how it's packaged, how it's unboxed, how much people have about it, what they can tell about it, how unique it is to them. So they can tell a story or a lie about it. That creates some friction. I don't remember what the original question was, but the way that information is discovered and shared has evolved so much over the past decade. And I think the unfortunate incentives of the time that we live in, which is you are, you are competing with everyone on the planet to create more and more content, to drive more and more views and get more and more engagement and get more and more followers that we're all stuck looking at our own faces now. And that makes it really hard to see what's next or even to care about what's next. But I think that is a golden opportunity because everyone is stuck looking two inches ahead of them. A few people will have the discipline to look 10 years away from now. And I think that is like, that's the magic opportunity now. Whereas I think Mischief's magic opportunity 10 years ago was we kind of understood how to work the organic distribution levers of the Internet when no one else did.

[A]

But now that's table stakes, that doesn't matter.

[B]

And the value of it is increasingly just gross.

[A]

Yeah, I think you said this somewhere else. Like virality used to be a skill and now it's just shots on goal.

[B]

Yeah, it's a, it's a numbers game. And that's kind of cool too, right? Like there, there is good content that just comes out of nowhere. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

TikTok in many ways is kind of the perfect version of this. It's like the. The true global talent show.

[B]

Totally, totally. And, you know, kids are being creative. I think that's cool. And creativity is democratized, and for folks like us, it forces us to have to reevaluate ourselves and also change our own game or. Or just call it quits and be like, well, that was a cool era, right? It's. The world changes. You got to change with it.

[A]

Maybe on a related note, you said people create what their gods are telling them to create.

[B]

Damn. I said that?

[A]

Yeah, I believe so.

[B]

Oh, that's pretty cool.

[A]

I. I think that's a really interesting idea in a broad sense. I think you were specifically talking about TikTok and Instagram, but I guess my question would be to. To go back to the maybe broader idea, like, are there other gods in this context? Is it really just, like, a few algorithms?

[B]

Yeah. Yeah, good question.

[A]

Hmm.

[B]

I think the algorithms are a very prevalent part of this. I think you are what you see, you are what you want to become. And unfortunately, I think there aren't many. There's not a good diversity of things to look at now. And that. That, I think is not great. The other interesting thing, too, and this is something that I haven't fully fleshed out, but there are content creators across so many different disciplines. Like, I was at a thing in LA this weekend for content creators somehow, and there was an electrician in the room who was a content creator, and that sort of, kind of maybe pulled me out of my own ass a little bit, because he was looking at content creation as a compliment to his, like, primary trade, which is super interesting. And so, you know, I think we've all heard this thing about, like, kids used to grow up wanting to be, like, astronauts or firefighters or policemen or whatever, and now they just want to be content creators. But maybe there is, like, another layer of abstraction that could be coming where it's a way to document a skill or a trade, because hopefully the kids are going to want something that's unique and novel and interesting versus everything looking so the same. So I kind of believe it's going to balance out. And even though the algorithms are sort of, like, driving towards one thing, I do have faith in human beings getting bored and being able to spot out a lot of sameness. And so, in that sense, I'm cautiously optimistic.

[A]

Yeah, it's interesting there. There's almost a notion, like, going back to what we were just talking about, like, the virus, the viral era is kind of over. Like, it is also worth remembering. Like, we're like 20 years into this and really like 10 years into this and it's still really new.

[B]

It's so new. It's so new. Every. Everything is. It's like beginning stages. Right. But it all comes down to the. Some of the things that I said earlier, which is it's all about eating, sleeping, fucking and flexing on your neighbor. It's also like human beings will always find ways to discover and share stories that resonate with them. Yeah, like absolute truth like that. That will always be the case. So now the question is what are the formats? What are the distribution mechanisms? I think an opportunity that more people should think about are the. We now have this opportunity to sort of zig while everyone else is zagging. If everyone is running towards quick, short form vertical videos, what can you do that's permanent, that's in the real world, that's like more tactile.

[A]

Or you can at least do a long two hour podcast with no video.

[B]

Or you can. Amazing. That's so counterculture. It's great. We had this riff of an idea earlier of using. We were going to bring back vine and use AI to extend the six second videos into long form, 30 minute video, which is. You're already on that wavelength. So.

[A]

Yeah, maybe one last thing on this that I was thinking about while you're talking is I can't help but compare the. The sort of people create what their gods are telling them to and the like eat, sleep, what, whatever your line is. Michelangelo like made the Sistine Chapel because of God. Theoretically, maybe it was also flexing and. Yeah, whatever. I, I have to wonder if like, if. If maybe that kind of like nihilism is. Is one reason not to get like too meta about what motivates you guys. But like there is something. It feels like there's something sort of like bigger or more meaningful that you're. You're pursuing or like underpinning what you're pursuing. It seems to me that the people who. Maybe a ridiculous example, but I always, I always talk about. If you compare Zuckerberg and Elon, say what you want about both. Lots of criticism, lots of praise, whatever. I'm not sure what Zuck believes in, even though I think he's like much more responsible about a whole bunch of things. Elon, criticize him all you want. Definitely really believes in something, I would argue bigger than eating, sleeping. And so yeah, maybe whether it be capital G, God or otherwise, that is one of the things missing.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. I mean we see that in Elon because of his swiftness to make irresponsible decisions. Right. And unashamedly so. Right. The man has convictions in something that maybe don't quite comprehend yet, but it's there. Yeah. And I, I hope there's more of that actually. Again, say what do you will about Elon? And I'm not picking aside on that. I'm just saying to create art, I think is a very inherently like very selfish act. And I think it's an amazing thing if people can embrace that and lean into it a little bit more.

[A]

Yeah, believe in something.

[B]

Well, you got to believe in something. Right? And that is not, that's not a thing that's talked about so much anymore because a lot of it is sort of audience driven, community driven. Like what are you making for other people? Have you verified it with data? Have you done like user interviews or whatever? Right. But to really make art, don't let the crowd drag your vision down to like the lowest mean. You know what I mean? Like take the chance and it could be shit, but it could be great. And that is, I think, always worth it.

[A]

Yeah, you guys make a lot of decisions by data. Here at Mischief, I'm sure there's actually a huge data wall that, you know, we just plug your brain into that.

[B]

We, we, we have data, we'll look at it and then we'll be like,

[A]

nah, there's, I think it's from Steve Jobs. There's some old line where he's talking about Google and he's just like, yeah, you can explain the difference between us and Google because they a B test 30 shades of blue.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[A]

Let's talk about Mischief a bit. In many ways you are in this perpetual conversation with culture, which is why I think it was important to set that backdrop. And in many ways it's sort of like, to use almost like a religious term, it's sort of like being in the world but not of the world. Like you're, you're sort of able to see the water, but you're also like, you'll come down from the hill and like play in the mud with everybody. Which is a really interesting tension. Lucas said I a couple of lines I liked absurd amplification of the present and reflecting back our time and just turning it up slightly open ended. What makes a good remix?

[B]

A good remix starts with good material, so you need a good starting point. And we, we use this term here, cultural, ready made, which is taking something that already exists and has a certain meaning and culture, you take it, you co opt it, you appropriate it, you Mix it up, turn it on its head and you put it right back to break it down into very pragmatic moves. Though. I think one of the interesting frameworks that have worked really well at Mischief is taking a move from a certain industry or a certain category and then applying it in a different one. And it just works so well because you solve that like, dose of novelty that everyone needs to have that sort of eureka moment. And then they talk about it and then they share it and they engage with it. And typically like we, we will co op moves from worlds that don't really talk to one another. Like one great example is we made a TurboTax competitor in the form of an anime dating simulator. And I don't know if it was the most viral thing, but it was the number one game on Steam for two weeks.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

And 20,000 people did use it to file their taxes in the 2024 filing year.

[A]

How many number one Steam games have you? Because I think the Chair Sim was also number one.

[B]

The two games that we've done have hit top of Steam for like a week or two. Okay, whatever that means. I don't understand Steam at all. But that that tax 7 3,000 was a great example of taking a move from one space and applying it to another one and creating something that when you see it exist, you're like, it kind of makes sense.

[A]

Yeah, it's sort of intuitive or obvious.

[B]

Yeah. Like I kind of get why this should exist. It makes sense, Right? It's a free TurboTax competitor in the form of an anime dating simulator. Because when you do your taxes on TurboTax, you're essentially going through a questionnaire that mirrors questions that you would get on a first date.

[A]

Anyways, it's was that idea? Or I guess maybe are most of the ideas kind of like that, where it's like, presumably that idea when you see it on paper, maybe not, but when you see it on paper, you're

[B]

like, oh yeah, the good ones tend to be that way. And then there are totally other ideas where you're like, let's sit on it for a bit. Like we're not sure. And typically the process is when you have an idea and we feel like it's good, we stow it away for many months and then we revisit it later. And then if it still hits for us, then we will start committing resources to doing it.

[A]

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. How do you sort of operate in the conversation, but outside of the current thing? Because in many ways it is a little paradoxical.

[B]

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. I always said, 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. But 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, it's a tricky one.

[A]

Are you deliberately anticipating.

[B]

Not on like 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?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, it's red cream rice.

[B]

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, plus 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 now it's just actually like the last year was insanely existential.

[A]

When you say existential, you mean philosophically or you mean for the, for the existence of mischief?

[B]

Philosophically, but that translates to the existence of mischief because you. And part of it was, you know, we used to celebrate. Well, not even really, but like there was a time where we would go viral and it felt amazing, right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

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, you're. Your excitement starts to wane. The novelty goes down. Like the addiction to that drug starts to wear off. And 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? Like, 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.

[A]

It's interesting too, because, I don't know, there's lots of advice. Like, it's like the classic recurring 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 embody it. My experience of you is. 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.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like, it's actually explicitly, if not implicitly, kind of in conversation. And. And. And so that's a really fascinating question.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, it's.

[A]

It's a fascinating thing to have to ponder, which is like, what. Yeah, what do. Yeah, what is this? If we're. Not. If I'm not really getting the dopamine from the. The. The external thing, 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 nor there. A painting's meaning lies not in its origins, but its destination.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Which is like.

[B]

Yes, it's.

[A]

It's about, like, I love to paint, but also, like, how do you hold these things?

[B]

100%. It's. It a total mind 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. That's all it ever was. There was also a lot of value in how powerful it made us look. Ah, behind the black box.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Right. Like people couldn't figure out, are they 200 people, or is it, like, one guy?

[A]

Yeah, it's a magician.

[B]

Yeah, it was like that. But 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. We are fluid, just like the world is fluid. And so we are certainly evaluating 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, the virality has lost its sheen. It's not as interesting. And. And the staying power of anything that goes viral is also, like, pretty rough. I mean, look at the Labubu guy now. He's like, his personal net worth is just tanked all of a sudden.

[A]

Did it?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

No way.

[B]

Yeah, he's like $6 billion less rich now. And 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

[A]

and didn't one guy has a warehouse

[B]

to that one guy. 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'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.

[A]

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.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And mischief trapped ourselves in that own game. Like, we've. We built the game, we designed a game, we won 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.

[A]

It's interesting to think about when we brought up Elon like this. Having to play to a bigger and bigger spectacle is not only the case in the art and culture world either. I think it's a sort of rat race that everybody falls into.

[B]

It's just the Invisible Hand, man. It's everywhere. Mr. Beast has to keep doing it, just the same way Exxon has to keep doing it. Everyone has to keep growing and growing and growing. But that's sort of one of the existential questions of mischief, which on one hand is certainly an artist, but on the other hand is absolutely a business. Do we want to grow broadly or do we want to go deep?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And go as deep as possible and sustain that as long as possible. That's. That's sort of the question. But also, I think, the opportunity.

[A]

I think there's also just something, almost everything that actually reaches extreme staying power and scale. It has to sort of imp. Like start small enough that it can actually have room to compound.

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[A]

There's a. Something that you are. The only. The two people I know who are best at this are you and Peter McIndo, who you recently met, who created Birds, aren't real.

[B]

Oh, yeah. I never knew his last name. Oh, there you go.

[A]

And. And when I say best dad, I guess I mean, it's not quite this, but there's a interview with David Bowie in, like, the 90s where he's talking about the Internet and they're like, this is just another technology thing. And he's like, no, no, no. Like, this is an early life form. Like, the. The creator and the consumer of the content are going to 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. In Peter's case, like, I think it started with, like, I don't know, initially it was like taping up Barbies around Arkansas. So the. 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.

[B]

Yeah, yep.

[A]

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.

[B]

Yeah, 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 were like, you know what, we're not going to do that. Because the first thing you'd have to do is start 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 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. And so that, look, it could be wrong. 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. 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 cache 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 pay to reveal. And so it's like there's a $25 checkout button with a blurry stack of cash on it, but with what the user end user doesn't realize is it is a perfect resolution photo of a real object. And 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 like made sure we did this under a different LLC because we were going to get the charge back. So we didn't want that to affect Mischief's Ability as a merchant to handle like 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. I think we made a thousand on that first run of the US dollar. And people got it and they just ran with it. They started making so many different videos of conspiracy theories. And some people broke theirs open and there were drugs in it. Some people ate theirs live. Some people, 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, the, the gig was up.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So then it just became an object that looked cool, which is interesting. And totally fine, by the way.

[A]

Kind of the half life of most mischief objects, I would presume. Like at least most of them that hit some kind of escape velocity.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's why this was interesting because hit for it hit at the beginning because of the. 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.

[A]

Interesting.

[B]

But we ran with it 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. And 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.

[A]

Maybe atoning for the sins of the Jesus shoes.

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[A]

No pun intended.

[B]

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.

[A]

Wow. From like, I can go viral if I wear this.

[B]

Exactly. It became a tool. Right. Versus for the, the early stage stages, it was a cool kids flex for the like cool art kids. Then it became a tool for the content creators. And so same object, completely different meaning, completely different value system.

[A]

A lot of fashion actually, ironically goes

[B]

through that cycle, actually.

[A]

Or maybe culture in general.

[B]

I think you're probably right. Yeah, we probably like compressed decades of fashion wisdom into one very hectic two week time span for myself.

[A]

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.

[B]

We're kind of making fun of you.

[A]

Right.

[B]

But you still like it. That's okay.

[A]

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, 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.

[B]

Yeah, 100%.

[A]

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.

[B]

Yeah, unfortunately it didn't change much. And so we, we didn't go into the, the mindset of. All right, there's an identity to design against which in the industry they call it the lifestyle.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

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. So 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 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.

[A]

Well, and many of these concepts are so loud.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

They're so built to jump off the screen.

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[A]

Maybe that's something that's interesting that opens up and you can be more subtle if you're playing to a smaller audience.

[B]

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. Like 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, like 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.

[A]

I'm gonna get a little heady for a minute, so you have to forgive me.

[B]

Let's do it.

[A]

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, which is this athletic aesthetics blog that or essay that Brad Tramell 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. That 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 aesthetes audience, once assembled, becomes part of their medium. The sort of metaphor that came to mind. Reading this is sort of like traditional art or production or creativity is sort of like creating a special meal. And this is almost like an IV drip of just like steady nutrition or something for sure. Two other excerpts. 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 thing is as important as any other. Social 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 Mischief 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. Yeah, I'm curious like, I mean so much of what you just spent 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

[B]

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, And I think that's actually like, 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.

[A]

And maybe it's most app 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? Yeah, it's actually like, drop the product entirely is the way things seem to be swinging.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

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?

[B]

Well, it was really useful the last, I mean, since 2019, because our business model was a cycle of reinvention, Right. So we were always iterating the best and the last. You know what I mean?

[A]

And yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

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. And 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. So that'll still apply to where we're going. It's just going to be over a much longer time horizon.

[A]

You've built this entire thing off of bi weekly drops.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Is that. That's done?

[B]

Done, done.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

Instead of putting out maybe 40 to 50 new things a year, we might do three, maybe five. And you might not even know they were us. Like, that's. That's the truth. They will be a lot more high stakes and a lot more ambitious. Yeah. So ego, death to reinvent.

[A]

I'm excited. Another topic that maybe, maybe verges into that, but maybe not. First from Noah Smith, a very viral tweet. Fifteen 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. My friend Trevor McFedries, who made lil Michaela, you probably know Trevor, he talks about like the New York City as like a sound stage for the Internet today. And 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, like, Internet culture? I almost wonder if it's like a redundant phrase.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

But like, do things feel as built around Internet culture anymore? Or maybe. 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?

[B]

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, but 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.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. Niche at scale, in a way.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And now that doesn't exist online. Right. All that exists or it's hard to

[A]

find, to do some weird discord or whatever.

[B]

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. It's not really, is it an Internet subculture or offline subculture? It's just like, can the subculture exist and can it last?

[A]

And maybe does it have the time to kind of cultivate in the oven?

[B]

I think that's the biggest thing, right? Like, can new subcultures actually arise and stick around? Right. Like, like there were the Dadas movements and the punk movements. Right. Like there used to be scenes. I don't know if scenes exist anymore.

[A]

And if they do, they're probably not on the Internet, or at the very least, they're gonna be really hard to find.

[B]

Maybe they figured it out. Yeah, maybe.

[A]

On that final note, you've said when you see the herd running so fast, it usually means they're running toward the end of a cliff. You'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.

[B]

Dang, I said all that. That's great.

[A]

Again, going back to what we were just talking about. Maybe the point is that you're not going to 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?

[B]

Yeah, totally. 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 would have been the natural move, right? And also build a. A clipping team to create, to bring in a content creator who makes a video of the thing that you do and then clip it up and then push it out via like dark social. Right? That's. 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. And that hopefully tells you nothing and everything at the same time.

[A]

I wonder if it's funny. I have a question somewhere in here about. Honestly, the next thing I want to talk about around World building. And when I think about world building, maybe most quintessentially I think about Disney and I almost wonder, 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. It's just the pendulums just swings.

[B]

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.

[A]

You know what makes place special to you?

[B]

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. Like we're at Tokyo. That's great. And we had this opening where all 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. You'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.

[A]

How about something to believe in, by the way? Go back to the topic.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. Like creativity as a value to aspire towards, I think is a real thing and will continue to be a real thing. So let's say, you know, 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 sent that to me and 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. That 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.

[A]

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.

[B]

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, a printer, stuff all over the desk. But above the cubicle where you'd typically have fluorescent lights, were 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 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 liked the visual 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.

[A]

Right. Yeah. The other thing that calls to mind is just like I always say, the best parties, like the best 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. It's like the reason Burning man works is just super hard to get there.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. The friction is valuable. Yes, yeah, yes. It's really valuable and self selecting.

[A]

And then the other thing is, I love this example. This is this guy ct. Anyway, and he talked. He has 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. It could mean a hundred people thought it was like incrementally interesting. It could 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.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And all that's contained in that, it's, it's. It's the equivalent of your 30 million versus the 5,000.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah, totally. I would, I would go to bed for that one kid any day now.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, perhaps what we needed to. Maybe the less cynical take was we, 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.

[B]

And I think, I think it will happen. I. I have faith.

[A]

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 in 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 want to be cynical about that or not, you think about the Disney example, the classic Disney, like the, the diagram Walt drew. And I think people conflate that often with like branding and marketing and storytelling. Obviously the physical part of it is, is one part of it. But I'm curious and maybe you don't have. 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.

[B]

Well, I think we accidentally started doing it and retroactively, I'll say our approach was in opposition to the folks who are like, you know, branding, marketing, like, you know, create your campaign, do your out of home, show up on social, whatever, world building, like, 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.

[A]

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 almost like deliberately avoiding being cohesive. 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.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Or I feel it when I see it.

[B]

And that only came from just being really relentlessly consistent over a long period of time.

[A]

Consistent in what way?

[B]

Consistent in, like, every couple weeks there's something new.

[A]

Just literally consistent.

[B]

Yeah, literally consistent. Right. And, you know, the.

[A]

The output not on some mood board consistent.

[B]

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.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

I wouldn't say everything did, but, like, most of it did.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

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 Alexa. It's the quality without a name, like, whatever that is. It is sort of. It's. It's. It's run off.

[B]

Right.

[A]

From the. From. And 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?

[B]

Yeah, I think so, actually, because I've often described to people, when I'm asked, what's the process? How 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 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. We just happen to have a group of people who speak the same language and have access to resources, which goes a long way.

[A]

Slaving away by games. Yeah, yeah, you mentioned process. You've. 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. Right. Jerry Seinfeld, he talks about like you lock yourself in the room like every day.

[B]

It's a total drag.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. It's like Jerry even says, he says, find the struggle you can tolerate.

[B]

Yeah, we, we call it the dark place. You gotta go there.

[A]

Well, maybe, 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, in the context of brainstorming, maybe it's more broad, but what does that feel like?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's a constant hunt for new inputs. Yeah, like that, that's really what it is. It's, it's new inputs, new insights. And then you know, we have this shared language that we speak here. So the ideas will come, but you need the inputs. So that, 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 of 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.

[A]

Curriculum building, you said topic mining.

[B]

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 and Franco mats, which are some interesting artists in Canada that it seems like we have a lot in common with. There's large scale land based. 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 you free inputs. It's so important.

[A]

It's a demanded or it's a required conflict with the other.

[B]

It's so critical, it creates tension. And out of that tension comes 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.

[A]

Probably 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. And maybe it helps to have a smart person here who brings you inputs. But has, has there been anything active around your. How you immerse yourself, how you find things, where you find interesting inputs.

[B]

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.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

And that's why, you know, we, we entered the footwear space and the fashion space and the fine arts space and the tech space and raised venture capital. We took a very sort of flatline approach to every element of culture. And now that we've exposed ourselves to those worlds and we'd 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 crypto because the, the herd already ran off the cliff.

[A]

And there's another. I think there's another. We'll see.

[B]

Good to know.

[A]

The current administration really loves crypto. So we'll see.

[B]

We'll see if that's the beat on real estate or something.

[A]

You're aging into a few of those, which is fun.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

And probably with your audience. Yep. Maybe it relates to what you just said. You. We talked about using time as a filter. There's a classic idea that like focus isn't saying no to bad ideas and 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 world.

[B]

Yep. 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 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.

[A]

Well, and not having view something every two weeks probably helps too.

[B]

That also helps. That was a beast. I mean it worked. But that was, that was brutal.

[A]

It is funny. Just picking up on it worked like, like 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.

[B]

We were sort of hedging our bets. We were like, 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. We're going to brute force, just keep knocking on the door 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, I mean,

[A]

the drops thing, like, maybe it came and went, but like, that was you totally.

[B]

That was us accelerating what was already starting to happen. But. Well, we picked up on like, that was sort of an emerging meta.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

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 job.

[A]

Have you given up on the meta? Or is the new stuff just.

[B]

I don't really know what it is. Don't really know what it is. And maybe. Maybe it doesn't matter anymore. You know, maybe you have to see past it.

[A]

Yeah. If things are moving fast enough, maybe there is. There's just a.

[B]

It's hard to tell.

[A]

We live in the age of the individual. We talked about that a bit. There are very, very few collectives or brands or things. You. You've even compared Mischief to a band. There are very few bands, lots of. Of solo artists. Mauricio Catalan, in that. That essay I referenced earlier, he talks about Mischief's lack of authorship as lack of definite paternity, which is an amazing, amazing line.

[B]

Hilarious.

[A]

There are examples of this, certainly, but even most bands. Lennon McCartney was rare and. 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?

[B]

The great thing about being the. What emerges. You say that. An indeterminate parent, lack of definite paternity. Yeah, yeah. So you know the. The great thing about by the way,

[A]

this is the banana guy.

[B]

I know, like, for the.

[A]

Yeah, I know. You know.

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

So this is the artist who paid to tape the banana. I should have said that earlier.

[B]

It actually has an incredibly long and rich track record of making really good subversive art pieces.

[A]

One of his earlier pieces, I believe, was that he taped a person to a wall, probably.

[B]

I think, anyway, the great thing about mischief being the. The owner of the. The works and not like me as an individual or anyone else here, individual is we. 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?

[A]

This one really blew up. It was created by so and so.

[B]

And you get high on the access you get, right? 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, go chase someone who is a groupie. You start being bad with your money. All of these things totally could have happened.

[A]

And they break up. The team breaks up, and then the

[B]

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. And that is kind of the dream, right? That maybe one day I'm no longer part of it, or I, like, I die, right? Like, 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.

[A]

Years ago, we had dinner. This was a while ago. It's probably four years ago, three, four years ago. And I think you were in a particularly, like, 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. And you talked about how sort of your. 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, 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.

[B]

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 pandemic or maybe tail end.

[A]

Probably 2021 or 2022.

[B]

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 sh. Our ships with our cargo from China are getting fired on by rebels in Yemen. Like, what the is going on? Nothing, we just want to make a stupid turbo tax anime dating simulator.

[A]

Right?

[B]

Yeah, it's. There is sort of this, I guess, internal like Jekyll Hyde thing that I, 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. But then the other part is 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 been around.

[A]

The virality block probably totally wore off.

[B]

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. Just because this worked so well for a moment in time doesn't mean that it should continue working. And, 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, maybe my art is the business side, which is carving out hidden opportunities and unforeseen resources to combine in novel ways to then give this group the opportunity to make something completely unprecedented. And that part I'm starting to lean in on a lot more, which is actually pretty fun.

[A]

Also just the opportunity to give a creative person like Runway.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Or open pasture to say, let them rip. Yeah.

[B]

You know, and you know, I have a board meeting tomorrow. I'll get chewed out for like an hour. And these guys will have.

[A]

You're the meme of the guy with the arrow.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. They'll have no idea. Yeah. No one here knows. I have a board meeting tomorrow, and it's going to be fine.

[A]

It's interesting. You were talking with Scott Norton on an interview, and you brought up how doing that museum project in Korea, talking about new inspirations. I think you had reflected that, maybe especially in contrast to New York, which is the most cynical place ever. New York is Woody Allen. Whatever. Both in that event and maybe culturally in Korea, they have more earnestness around commerce and creativity mixing.

[B]

That's crazy. Crazy.

[A]

And it's interesting how even something like that can kind of rejuvenate this the. Or heal some of the cynicism.

[B]

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.

[A]

You made a shoe with Jimmy Fallon.

[B]

Screw you. Exactly. Like you're a sellout. I'm like, oh, you're probably right. Why did I do that? He called. Of course we were gonna do it. It. But then you go to Korea and it's just like, unbridled enthusiasm for creativity in whatever form. And I was like, oh, that. That feels pretty good. Okay. I remember that feeling. Ah, 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, like, let's. Let's channel that again. Let's not think so hard, and let's just make the things that we want to make. Like, let's not listen to the critics or whoever. The original fans who say we have turned on them or whatever.

[A]

The first time that's ever happened.

[B]

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So that was very eye opening. I'm really glad that happened. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

What does trust mean in the context of mischief in your audience, if at all?

[B]

Good question. I don't know. 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.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, right.

[B]

And for a while, we listened to that a lot because the secondary market is a drug. And when you don't.

[A]

We had this in Hundred Thieves. Same thing.

[B]

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. What's a cook group? And what are these bots? Like what, what, how.

[A]

Well, and it's really interesting canvas for all of the second order interesting audience stuff you guys like to do.

[B]

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 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. So it's kind of a. Yeah. Big reinvention.

[A]

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 did discussing is sort of like retrospective and reflecting on this. Actually there's. There's one more dramel quote from the. 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 again. So much of this is I think less relevant as you move into a new phase. But you also have done a. You, you're with Peroton, 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. And narrativizing it to some degree. Yeah. I'm curious how you like. Is that like a. We'll do this every once in a while and otherwise sort of 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.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Context, adding and reversal.

[B]

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.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And that was a very interesting feeling.

[A]

And also it's not in some black box as much.

[B]

No, exactly. And so actually from Korea we, 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.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

We do more community events now. The other part is, like, a black box is not that interesting. Forever. Like a Banksy. Eventually it becomes a meme, unless you evolve it. Right. 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. Also, we're not these punk rock kids anymore. I'm 35. Right. My COO just had a kid. 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. Like, 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.

[A]

Right.

[B]

It's not a picture book. It's a. Here is how we did this down to the science. Right?

[A]

And then here's like, it's almost case studies.

[B]

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.

[A]

Right?

[B]

No more games. Work just will have to be so good.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

And we'll die on that sword. Like, if it. If it's not good, that's not good.

[A]

I also have to admit. Or. Or. Or I should say point out, a great magician tactic is to put everything in plain sight.

[B]

Wink, wink, there you go. Maybe this is just part of a highly calculated PR tour

[A]

on an aso super broad philosophical level. You talked about kind of the halfway mark when you left West Point, choosing this sort of undefined path. Maybe an especially stark contrast to a group of people who are quite literally choosing war over uncertainty. Another line from you. I think comfort and predictability are antithetical to everything we do and believe in.

[B]

Oh, interesting.

[A]

Yeah. Maybe layered on what we were just Talking about, you've had a lot of opportunity to get comfortable, and maybe you have in certain ways, and that's fine. But how do you. How do you stay original?

[B]

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. Like, making sure our incentives aren't. 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.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Maybe.

[A]

Honestly, maybe the two weeks drops was comfortable in some weird.

[B]

Become comfortable. It started super uncomfortable. Right. But then it became comfortable for us. It also probably became comfortable for other people. Right. Like there was a novelty and 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.

[A]

Do you ever get tired of novelty?

[B]

No. No. And we. We're. We're. We're constantly still looking for it, but it's. It's just manifesting more in bigger formats, like different challenges.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Right. Yeah. Which I think is normal. Right. Like, I. 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.

[A]

Yeah. It's funny how novelty, what novelty means, can change a lot over time. Also that almost definitionally, it's easy to forget that.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

You guys launched Applied Mischief, or at least announced it.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

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 I think you talked about a little bit earlier this year. But anything to talk about or share on that note, or is it still under wraps?

[B]

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.

[A]

What's the right people Meaning mean.

[B]

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. And I would also say Applied Mischief solves a few internal not problems, but it does a couple of things for me. One is 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 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 sort of title. But the name, but it wasn't, it was about using them as material to make new output. That's the most important takeaway here. Adversarial can be. It's a mechanism. But that wasn't like our reason for being. And so Applied Mischief again, it creates the opportunity to give new material, 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,

[A]

you've sort of concretized a number of like more coherent and legible product verticals, shoes, handbags, stuff like that. And 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. I'm curious to what extent that's resonant, if at all with parts of the business.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, it, it is starting to feel like that, 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. So 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. 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.

[A]

What have you learned from Sarah Andelman?

[B]

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. Okay. Never heard of it until I was introduced to her. Then they were like, oh, she's a legend. You got it. And I'm like, what's that? Which is so embarrassing.

[A]

But you were probably like, maybe you were out of West Point, but you were.

[B]

Yeah, there's no way I could have known. Like, why would I know?

[A]

It's kind of a deep cut.

[B]

Yeah, it's. It's. It definitely is. So I met her, and she's, like, this cute French lady who, like, 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 creative experiences and creative takes on not just the fashion space, but, like, any space in general. And it's actually so inspiring because she was the top of the game for, who knows, like, decades, probably.

[A]

It was her and her mom. Right?

[B]

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 Endelman changed Mischief's whole trajectory by being the person who introduced us to Emmanuel Perotin. Ah. Prior to that, she had only ever made one introduction between an artist and Emmanuel Perrotin. Before that was two decades prior. That artist was Brian Donnelly. That's. Cause.

[A]

Oh, my gosh.

[B]

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 baseline. 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.

[A]

It was a pretty, Like, I don't know that world well. And I suppose spec. Most listeners don't either, but he's Pretty serious.

[B]

Top five, okay. Probably number five of the top five. But he's up there. He. I'm still learning about this world too, but. 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 Kunz or a Hearst or whatever. Emmanuel is one of those talk about

[A]

different layers and metas and oh my

[B]

gosh, there's so much to unpack with that world. But Emmanuel is one of those people who. But as big and powerful as Emmanuel is, it's like a global gallery with spaces all over the world in Asia, the Middle East, Europe now, and also the United States. He 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 like a solo show. And then we did another solo show. And now our work is starting to show up in the and 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 and very reputable museums. And in the past that might have been seen as selling out. Now you're a part of the institutions. But I think 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.

[A]

It's cool to notice this pattern across both of the people and just broadly of people who are still excited. Yeah, I always tell the story. Elton John came to USC when I was in school and like, it was cool. He 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.

[B]

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. Up until this point, I was really thinking year by year. But now, like, 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, not like too high on my own supply, if that makes sense.

[A]

It's a sort of. There's a lightness to it, but there's also a sort of settling into yourself or the thing.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. For sure. Which 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 willing to experiment and take risks. They have nothing to lose.

[A]

But it's also rare that they do things that are as substantial.

[B]

Also true.

[A]

Like. 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.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And like, what could you do if you. I was just up, 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 said 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 or listening on a five year time horizon, like, what, what now is in play?

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean it changes the whole game. Right. Like changes the type of relationships you choose to have. It changes the way you invest your time and your resources now. Like, are you working on the current thing or are you working on the next thing? Right. It changes a lot for me.

[A]

Me.

[B]

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.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Which is comforting. But then I also.

[A]

And also a little. There's a little bit of freedom through that kind of commitment.

[B]

There is. Right. It's, you know, there. It makes your world bigger. Right. And now I'm in the headspace of how can I do things now that make my world, world bigger? And there's a sense of longevity in that statement as well.

[A]

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 mis. Misunderstood him.

[B]

Oh, interesting, interesting.

[A]

Or maybe you have a separate reaction. But I'm curious for either of them.

[B]

Oh, man.

[A]

How long did you work there, by the way?

[B]

I was an intern for a year.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

While secretly doing Mr.

[B]

Projects. Yes, exactly. I mean, 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.

[A]

I saw the Nike email.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. He was doing like very interesting sort of of culture jamming objects or moments that could be distributed through like virality, but true virality back then, like shares. Not.

[A]

Right, right.

[B]

Like 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. And 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.

[A]

Yeah. The medium is the message just like recursively on itself.

[B]

It was so easy to create and so natural to share.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

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.

[A]

You know what he's doing now?

[B]

He's still running it.

[A]

Really?

[B]

Buzzfeed still exists. And I hope he figures it out. I really do. Because he's done the long, like, he's. He's dug in.

[A]

Right.

[B]

You know what I mean?

[A]

And maybe there's a collaboration there someday.

[B]

I would be so jazzed to work with him. Personally, I don't think Mischief and buzzfeed makes sense, but 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? We still have options.

[A]

You can't pin me down. I will never.

[B]

Right, right.

[A]

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. And I would love to like speed run just like a. If you don't have a reaction, you don't have a reaction.

[B]

These are probably from our employee handbook.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. But it's an amaz. 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.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Continues to be true to this day. Super important.

[A]

I. I love the. Always punch something, never punch down is a really good frame.

[B]

Sometimes punch sideways, like it can happen. That's okay. That's where you learn. That's where you uncover new territory.

[A]

Have you ever punched sideways and then realized after you were totally punching down, down?

[B]

I mean, probably. I don't remember.

[A]

Probably. You live and learn. Mischief ensures its ideas are not pre constrained by execution.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. True, yeah. Continues to be true. 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. Ah. 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 now. 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. Give yourself the chance to break some eggs and make some people uncomfortable. Because the idea is fluid. The ideas are never done until they're out the door. At least give yourself the chance to like, let that see what happens. Yeah.

[A]

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

[B]

Oh my God, these are so great. And they continue to be true. They continue to be incredibly valuable. 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 built in. Almost 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. And it gets towed nine months later in Truckee, California. Whatever. But on a more, like, macro existential level is. Yeah, what. What is the death of mischief? And how do we make sure we're not afraid to go there? Whether we go there or not, the. The courage to go there actually allows us to go into this next phase.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

You know what I mean? Like, the being okay with it all going away. Honestly, the coolest thing that Mischief could do right now is just like, disappear for 10 years and then come back. Check. That would be amazing. I can't afford to do that. Yeah, that's too comfortable.

[A]

Don't make future trash.

[B]

We said that.

[A]

That's in the book.

[B]

We have made so much trash interesting. Don't make future trash. I don't even know what that means.

[A]

Maybe something come back to. Yeah, 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.

[B]

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. We live at a time where that sort of playing field is level. Exactly right. And you see that with 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, yeah, we're still just kids playing with tools that we don't quite know how they work.

[A]

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.

[B]

Yeah, that part's really fucked up. 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 go

[A]

to the dark place. Is that what you called it?

[B]

That's how that, that, that is. You don't go there often, but you, when you're, when you're like working on a problem, you have to like really kind of go there. Yeah. Which is rough, but it works.

[A]

We are not pranksters. We are not making stunts. A 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.

[B]

Yeah. I mean humor, humor is such an amazing tool because our brand of humor is really, 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

[A]

that probably a lot of people who liked the Jesus shoes and really didn't like the Satan shoes, by the way, also true.

[B]

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, great for pranks and stunts. Yeah, those. My take on that. Whenever we qualify an idea at mischief, we say it's got a slap in one sentence, it's got a slap harder in three. Pranks and stunts are typically one. Ours are usually three, if not two. Very rarely one, if ever. A lot of people.

[A]

Are there any that are 5 or 10?

[B]

That only happens when the crowd takes it and turns into something else. Like 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.

[A]

Yeah. It might even be one.

[B]

Yeah. Honestly.

[A]

Right.

[B]

We were 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.

[A]

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.

[B]

Yes. For any sense of meaningful scale.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, if you are 100% credulous, everything ever made is art. If you are 100% cynical, everything ever made is advertising. Yeah, that's a banger.

[B]

And my response is yes, all the above.

[A]

This is hilarious. Mischief attacks. Golf is 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.

[B]

Oh my gosh, it's so golf. 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.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

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.

[A]

Well, because a lot of people really love it. A lot of different types of people.

[B]

I know. No, this is just. This is our nerdy revenge from being shoved in the lockers in high school.

[A]

Yeah, you Brooklyn losers would hate golf.

[B]

Now we're gonna pick on golf. Pickleball will be next.

[A]

I think pickleball is plenty picked on. If you build it, they will come bad versus build it where they are good. And then a sub point of this is using quote unquote, real infrastructure steals authenticity, authority and credibility. Yeah.

[B]

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 go to them. We are so obsessed with this sort of Trojan horse practice of hiding in disguise of the cultural readymades and then reinserting them back into the systems that we are critiquing from the start.

[A]

Yes. And the people who are buying it are probably part of. They're. They're sort of the butt of the joke.

[B]

I wouldn't say butt of the joke, but they are part of the performance. Right. And whether they're the butt or the joke or not is actually up to them.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Right. Talking to one another.

[A]

Right.

[B]

For us, we. We are making fun of us. Yeah. We are an indifferent arbiter. Right. Like, you are what you are.

[A]

Sometimes it goes the other way. I was reading about the baby shoes, like, which were clearly. Yeah. Trying to do one thing and then they were like, beloved by this like adult baby fetish.

[B]

That was so weird. So that, that was like a design exercise and playing with this idea of scale, like Baby shoes are sort of like weird proportions. What if you make it bigger? How weird does that look in photos? So we're like, let's make sort of like this playful kid shoe. And man, we have a very passionate. The Internet is big fan base of furries and adult diapers.

[A]

That's another version of the second order not being designed.

[B]

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.

[A]

Right. Has. Yeah. World building, by the way, everyone.

[B]

Right.

[A]

We don't quote, we don't make fiction. Getting people to act on quote, unquote, real systems is more powerful than getting them to act on constructed ones.

[B]

Yeah. I mean that. 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.

[A]

Yeah. Versus also, I have an idea in my head about what a film's supposed to be.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. Right. And. Yeah. And so. And also the context is missing from, 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. Let's just make it real. Let's seize the means of production and put it into the market and see what happens.

[A]

There's. 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.

[B]

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. Like, you could have done it like a small batch or an artist could have like lived off of it as a performance for 20 years and documented everything and like had a video and then done a gallery show of like, I lived off of this powder.

[A]

Instead they just made it and they sold it dead.

[B]

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. Do the thing.

[A]

Softbank. We work Ebitda Slide is speculative fiction. Same thread, obviously.

[B]

It's just a great slide. It comes up so much around here, I don't know why, but, but part of it is also just like if that's how the rest of the world operates, we're not even being crazy.

[A]

Wow. Wow.

[B]

You know, the bar is so high, Masa.

[A]

I know the goat. Just a couple more knockoffs are reposts by the market. Real and fake are made in the same factory.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Kind of self explanatory.

[B]

I mean, all true. Right. And so we, we think knockoffs are quite tool as long as it's acknowledged as a knockoff. 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 of the thing that we did. And in that sense it was kosher.

[A]

Well, yeah, and in many ways the Hirsch thing is like as close as you can get to blurring that line anyway.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. And then the real and fake are made in the same factories. 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 another place that we got a lot of excitement from.

[A]

Don't invent constraints for yourself when you don't need to.

[B]

Damn. I feel like we're in a position where we need to. So I, I have invented that. But it, 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?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

Because everything is so fluid and, and so dynamic.

[A]

Yes, I, I talk about this much lower stakes. But like plant the seed, don't like look at the seed in your hand.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. Right. And, and you don't know what kind of seed it is. Yes. It could become so many different things. So you just gotta, you just gotta let it ride.

[A]

Mischief doesn't make content. Mischief operates off platform.

[B]

Yeah, I mean it is, 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. We, we, I think we have the TikTok handle, but I don't know. I don't even have TikTok on my phone.

[A]

Maybe that's the novelty. Maybe it's Gabe's TikTok.

[B]

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. But it was important for us to not fall in the trap. Kind of what Brad Tramell 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, because when you fall into that trap, you're going to start changing the works to 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.

[A]

I mean, there's a real world lesson in the fact that the real world is definitively off platform.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

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.

[B]

Yeah, 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 their. 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. 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. 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 look up and be like, where is that person? 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. I mean, yeah, in a way, this whole Mischief experiment is an incredibly Sisyphean struggle of just, like, zigzagging around.

[A]

Yeah, you can't catch me.

[B]

And at a certain point you have to ask, like, is the herd chasing me or am I chasing.

[A]

Ah, there you go. One last question. Those ideas I. I just listed, many of them are in some way, like, mischief values.

[B]

Totally.

[A]

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. You 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?

[B]

No, 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.