*Dialectic Episode 31: Gabe Whaley: Playing the Crowd & Outlasting the Hype - is available on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/3DuZuN4MJpo2iRa17Pj5DG?si=55c66af7f60b4049), [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/31-gabe-whaley-playing-the-crowd-and-outlasting-the-hype/id1780282402?i=1000731969101), and [YouTube](https://youtu.be/dK_m-x81lrk), and all podcast platforms.* ![[31-Gabe_Whaley.jpg]] <iframe data-testid="embed-iframe" style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/3DuZuN4MJpo2iRa17Pj5DG?utm_source=generator" width="100%" height="152" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" loading="lazy"></iframe> <iframe allow="autoplay *; encrypted-media *; fullscreen *; clipboard-write" frameborder="0" height="175" style="width:100%;max-width:660px;overflow:hidden;border-radius:10px;" sandbox="allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-storage-access-by-user-activation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation" src="https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/31-gabe-whaley-playing-the-crowd-and-outlasting-the-hype/id1780282402?i=1000731969101"></iframe>  # Description Gabe Whaley is co-founder and CEO of [MSCHF](https://mschf.com/) ([Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/mschf), [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSCHF)), the art collective, fashion and footwear brand, startup, and fill-in-the-blank, famous for its viral products and cultural interventions. A few notable works include [Jesus Shoes](https://jesus.shoes/) (Nike Air Max filled with holy water), [Severed Spots](https://severedspots.com/) (a "decentralized" Damien Hirst print), [Museum of Forgeries](https://moforgeries.org/) (One original Warhol and 999 perfect forgeries), and of course the [Big Red Boot](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/style/mschf-big-red-boots.html). This conversation was heavily influenced by MSCHF's recently released *[Made by MSCHF](https://www.phaidon.com/en-us/products/made-by-mschf/)*, a "textbook," through which the team peels back the curtain and shows us inside the black box that has produced more viral hits than one can count. Gabe had a sheltered childhood and went to two years of army academy at West Point before eventually finding his way to New York City to intern at Buzzfeed around 2014. In his spare time, he started releasing weird internet projects under the name "Miscellaneous Mischief." After tasting virality a few times, he started collaborating with likeminded creatives and eventually formalized MSCHF in 2019. I've known Gabe for many years (and even did a [small collaboration](https://dinoswords.gg/) with him from my seat at 100 Thieves). We sat down to reflect on the last 15 years and the arc of MSCHF, what made it special, and where one goes next when virality makes you feel nothing and the internet feels mature. The conversation includes MSCHF's eye-of-the-beholder legibility, their obsession with value, the power of mystery, and how the product doesn't culminate with release, but after the audience has made it their own (in MSCHF parlance, "playing the crowd"). We also discuss the creative process behind the hit factory, how acting as a label rather than individuals changes their relationship to the work, whether the cultural future is actually canceled, how the internet has changed, and how real world experiences offer something to the creator and the consumer that digital life simply can't. We wrap-up by speed-running through many of MSCHF's internal values, from "always punch up," to "death is just as importance as birth," to perhaps its defining frame: "nothing is sacred." I hope you are inspired toward play, originality, embracing discomfort, and having the courage to burn it all down and start anew. Full transcript and all linked references: https://dialectic.fm/gabe-whaley # Timestamps - (0:00): Intro - (2:21): Value and Legibility - (13:24): Is the Future Canceled? - (20:00): We Create as a Result of What We Believe In - (26:11): What Makes a Good Remix - (29:08): How MSCHF Relates to the Current Thing and Evolves What Game it Plays - (38:31): Creating Something the Crowd Can Play - (44:59): Emphasis on Craft and Objects Rather than Creating "Lifestyle" - (47:27): Keeping Up in a World That Demands Constant Production - (53:11): Resisting The Internet's Scale and Lack of Friction - (1:03:15): Accidental World Building, Process, Creative Inputs, and Focus - (1:14:09): Creating as a Collective and Gabe's Role in Enabling the Team - (1:22:30): Trust, Shedding the Black Box, and Staying Original - (1:30:35): Applied MSCHF – Doors are Open - (1:34:21): Sarah Andelman, People Who are Still Excited, and Long Time Horizons - (1:41:52): Buzzfeed - (1:44:41): MSCHF Values # Links & References - [Made by MSCHF](https://www.phaidon.com/en-us/products/made-by-mschf) - [Sean Monahan](https://substack.com/@8ball) - [11. Eugene Wei - Amusing Each Other to Death - Dialectic](https://dialectic.fm/eugene-wei) - [Big Red Boot](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/style/mschf-big-red-boots.html) - [MSCHF Wholesale](https://hats.mschfwholesale.com/) - [Tax Heaven 3000](https://taxheaven3000.com/) - [Chair Simulator](https://chairsimulator.com/) - [Maurizio Cattelan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurizio_Cattelan) - [Birds Aren't Real](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_Aren%27t_Real) - [David Bowie BBC interview on the internet in 1999](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaHcOs7mhfU) - [Blur](https://store.mschf.com/products/blur) - [Jesus Shoes](https://jesus.shoes/) - [Athletic Aesthetics - Brad Troemel](https://thenewinquiry.com/athletic-aesthetics/) - [Lil Miquela](https://www.instagram.com/lilmiquela/?hl=en) - [Trevor McFedries](https://x.com/whatdotcd) - [How Twitter Gamifies Communication - C Thi. Nguyen](https://philpapers.org/archive/NGUHTG.pdf) - [Disney diagram](https://i.insider.com/5dc97530e94e8676c200a255?width=800&format=jpeg&auto=webp) - [Eva & Franco Mattes](https://0100101110101101.org/) - [Comedian - Maurizio Cattelan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedian_(artwork)) - [#13: Gabe Whaley - Making MSCHF - At Large with Scott Norton](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WN0sTCGGPhs) - [Sarah Andelman ](https://www.instagram.com/sarahandelman/?hl=en) - [Colette](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colette_(boutique)) - [Emmanuel Perrotin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Perrotin) - [KAWS (Brian Donnelly)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaws) - [ATM Leaderboard \| MSCHF (2022) \| PERROTIN](https://www.perrotin.com/artists/mschf/1181/atm-leaderboard/68518) - [Opus 40](https://opus40.org/) - [Jonah Peretti](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah_Peretti) - [Key4All](https://key4all.com/) - [PT Cruiser from Key4All](https://www.perrotin.com/artists/mschf/1181/public-universal-car/73732) - [Satan Shoes](https://satan.shoes/) - [Super Baby](https://store.mschf.com/products/super-baby) - [MSCHF on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/mschf) - [MSCHF on Twitter](https://x.com/mschf?lang=en) # Transcript ## [00:00:00] Intro **Jackson:** Gabe Whaley. We made it. **Gabe:** Are we live? **Jackson:** Yeah. **Gabe:** Let's rock. **Jackson:** Thanks for making time. **Gabe:** Anytime. **Jackson:** And hustling back from the Doomland of Tribeca. **Gabe:** I'm a menace on a city bike. **Jackson:** It's the beautiful thing about three quarters of the year in New York. **Gabe:** Right. **Jackson:** Winter comes and everything is thrown off. **Gabe:** I'll do it in the winter, too. **Jackson:** I'm not from the east coast, so it's a great struggle. ## [00:02:21] Value and Legibility **Jackson:** We are going to start with a line from [Sean Monahan](https://substack.com/@8ball) in the \*[Made by MSCHF](https://www.phaidon.com/en-us/products/made-by-mschf)\* book describing you guys. He says, “To the venture capitalist, MSCHF is a startup. To the sneaker head, MSCHF is a brand. To the collector, MSCHF produces art. Virality is the only mutually intelligible language understood by all three. Well, that and money.” There are two things that this brings to mind for me. One is the notion that you're constantly playing with legibility and illegibility. The other thing that really stands out to me about your work, beyond spectacle, is that you're playing with value—the idea of what we value and how we value the things we do. That concept of value can itself be legible or illegible. So my first question is, why value? Why is that such an interesting substrate that runs across all this stuff? And how do you think about legibility, both with regard to that idea and more broadly, what this whole container is? **Gabe:** Can you clarify what you mean by legibility and illegibility? **Jackson:** It's an idea that I've thought about a lot. A friend of mine brought it up in the context of this podcast I was pretty early on. She said, “You are currently illegible,” meaning it's not totally clear what the thing is about, who the guests are, or what the pattern is. **Gabe:** Right. **Jackson:** Her point was there will be a time for legibility, but right now, I’m in the oven. To me, there are few things at the level of scale and cultural impact as MSCHF that are constantly dipping in and out of legibility. **Gabe:** I'll start with legibility, and then we can talk about value. The way we've internally described our practice regarding being legible used to be the black box. The black box is the idea that we're not transparent. We do not tell people how we do things or why we do things. We're not necessarily trying to hide anything; it's because the mystery lends more to the imagination than reality ever could. The second, less thrilling part is that maybe we're kind of lazy. It takes a lot of work to document and tell a story, so why not create enough of a spark and put it in front of enough people so that they tell the story for you? Then they have conflicting stories which will oppose one another. Some will create factions, and different communities will form. At the end of the day, you create a much larger spectacle that has almost nothing to do with the idea or MSCHF anymore. They have consumed the idea; they have become the idea. In a lot of MSCHF's best work, and most of the work we've aspired to do, the question is how you create this handoff to an audience and let them run with it and turn it into something that is their own. There's an element of this black box and also an element of giving up control so the meaning can be defined by that end audience—which, selfishly, is also a thrill to watch. Now for the value part. 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, and their relationships with people via technology. We've constantly said here that the only point of being a human is being able to eat, sleep, fuck, and flex on your neighbor. Some people have counted me on that, but I think it's pretty true. It's a universal truth. It's always been that, and it always will be that. That gives you a lot of good material, especially the tail end of that statement. The funny thing about MSCHF is that we can put our tech startup hat on, our footwear brand hat on, or 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 we choose to do. A lot of the work regarding this idea of value comes out because we're not creating paintings that live in a white-wall gallery. We're taking objects and systems, twisting them, contorting them, and putting them back into the systems we're critiquing. They are real. There are real interactions. In order to interact, you must give up time or money or both. The value equation starts there, and then it takes a life of its own. **Jackson:** It's interesting to think about a kind of sacrifice in the consumption of a MSCHF thing. **Gabe:** Totally. **Jackson:** I [interviewed Eugene Wei](https://dialectic.fm/eugene-wei) on the show, who I think you've met. He talked about how speculation is increasingly becoming entrenched in culture—not just in obvious cases like sports betting, crypto, and gambling, but even in things like dating apps. notion around living is becoming: why bother doing anything that's going to slowly compound? I should just put it all on black. I'm curious if you've thought about that and how it plays into this. It's an interesting cut on value, at the very least, in terms of how we value things. **Gabe:** Interesting statement on the desperation that everyone's facing and how it's not even bleak; we're past that. It's truly nihilistic at this point. Who cares? It doesn't matter. Why not? Maybe some people are having fun, getting some joy out of this, and finding some community around it. Still bleak, but kind of cool. We've seen elements of this play out through a lot of the projects that we've done where different communities will form around this. They are speculating this might be worth a lot on the resale market. There's a picture of a guy with a warehouse full of big red boots that he did not manage to unload. I had seen some of the screenshots of group chats prior to the big boots dropping, and people were saying, "I got my bots ready. I'm gonna get all these out." They didn't know that we were gonna unload a little bit. Some people really got left holding the bag. Then all of his friends turned on him and said, "you dumbass," which is so brutal. **Jackson:** You guys have literally played into this, speaking of people gamifying that. You have the sock queen into the hat guy. **Gabe:** That was so bonkers. There was this time a long time ago where we were so full of ourselves, we said we would never make merch. We created a loophole for ourselves where 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. We had this [design of a MSCHF sock in the style of Costco](https://hats.mschfwholesale.com/). **Jackson:** I would argue very in the style of Costco. **Gabe:** Extremely in the style of Costco. Instead of selling one pair of socks at a time, we bundled them into a pallet of a thousand socks for five grand. 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 before the drop release. Something went wrong while we were doing a test. **Jackson:** Prematurely sold. **Gabe:** It did. **Jackson:** Wow. **Gabe:** 2 a.m. the night before. **Jackson:** Wow. **Gabe:** Early days. Still had some kinks. She got it, and we wondered, who is this person? For the next week, we started seeing this account show up on Twitter and on Reddit. The socks were showing up on eBay and StockX. This lady was not Internet native, but somehow she knew enough to create a Reddit account, find the MSCHF subreddit, and find other subreddits for collectibles, hype, or resell. She was sending her kid to school with the socks to sell the socks, and she ended up 3Xing her money over the next couple of weeks. **Jackson:** It seemed like you couldn't have drawn it up better. **Gabe:** It's freaking wild. She started sending us these crazy emails of the dream she had last night where she was a queen on a bed of socks, and people were coming up to her to give her offerings. She was tossing socks to peasants. That's when we decided maybe we don't talk to her anymore. Then we found her and interviewed her for our magazine. **Jackson:** The photo of her in the room with all the socks is pretty amazing. **Gabe:** 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. The great thing about these projects is you don't know what's going to happen, like the hat guy that you mentioned. We did the same thing with hats. **Jackson:** But it was a little bit after. **Gabe:** It might have been two years later. There was prior work on the hats. There was lore, there was a result, and there was documentation of the result, but the dude with the hats could not do it. You could also tell they were both thirsty and desperate, but there are different flavors of it. Some you can embrace as a little chaotic, and then there are some that are just sad. You could tell she was having fun. She was a nut. This guy, I think he had a bot set up to catch any tweet of MSCHF and reply to it saying, "Buy this hat." **Jackson:** There are different ways to be authentically a sellout. **Gabe:** Yes. **Jackson:** Or maybe just different ways to be a sellout. **Gabe:** There's an art to it, and the guy did not nail it. He also wasn't being creative in the communities. He was just doing the equivalent of standing outside asking, "Will you buy this hat? Will you buy this hat? Will you buy this hat?" Somehow the lady actually nailed it. She has no idea how good she was. ## [00:13:24] Is the Future Canceled? **Jackson:** We're going to talk more about that, but I want to talk about culture today before we dive into MSCHF's role. There's a line you have 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." **Gabe:** I have no idea what that means. **Jackson:** There's another line I think Lucas said in an interview: "The present is spiraling more concentratedly in on itself," in a sort of recursion. **Gabe:** I do know where he's coming from. **Jackson:** You guys have talked about this a lot, and so have many other people. "Slow cancellation of the future" is not a new idea, and I think we all feel it. It's like, where is the new XYZ? My question for you is, how real is that? To get specific, I'm curious for you to reflect on either 2014-ish, when you first started the beginnings of what this would become with Miscellaneous MSCHF, or as another benchmark, 2019, when you guys formally started. You've produced a lot of culture in the meantime. A lot has happened. But is the future really canceled? **Gabe:** I don't think so, but it's harder to see, and I think that's a big distinction. It's definitely not as legible, and you won't see it unless you go looking for it. We're at a time where you're surrounded by the wrong incentive structures and the wrong formats that immediately blind you to seeing beyond the palm of your hand. Back in 2014, the news moved a lot less quickly. That was also the tail end of an era of the Internet where it had been around just long enough for mass adoption, but it wasn't so mainstream yet. It was still an era where people shared things because they were actually interesting. Over the last 10 years, the incentives have flipped. People don't share things because they're interesting anymore; they share things to fuel their vanity. Instead of me sharing a link to something that's cool, I'll share a video of me talking about a link that's cool, and I'm not even going to include the link. **Jackson:** It's co-opted. You're talking about the Twitter thing you did where you were giving bad advice intentionally. I think maybe that was the first project, before the chat bubbles, though perhaps it wasn't even a MSCHF project. **Gabe:** That was even before the iPhone bubbles. **Jackson:** I don't know how intentional it was, but you were describing it and you said people started to comment on the product rather than engaging with it, which is the seed of this idea. **Gabe:** It was starting to happen. We also picked up on those incentive structures: if you design an idea in a certain way, the media is likely to write an article about it. Pretty quickly, we found out that clickbait was an emerging format. It was a match made in heaven. Media companies are incentivized to create clickbait. We can create projects that have an amazing clickbait layer. 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 is always that vanity-driven clickbait line. You feed the beast, and we co-opt media companies as a primary layer of distribution. As you get to 2019, 2020, media has really lost a lot of steam. That's the rise of the influencer and the content creator, and that's when you realize those groups are the new media companies. They have very similar incentive structures. Video is the prevailing format now, and it's quick, which lends itself really well to physical objects. That opened up this whole Pandora's box of where you can go with physical objects. That's why behind you there's cereal, electronic devices, collectibles, shoes, and swords. **Jackson:** Very specifically, those are two objects that are amazing in person but also jump off a screen. **Gabe:** Totally. Even down to how it's packaged, how it's unboxed, how much information people have about it, what they can tell about it, and how unique it is to them. They can tell a story or a lie about it, which creates some friction. The way that information is discovered and shared has evolved so much over the past decade. The unfortunate incentives of the time that we live in are that you are competing with everyone on the planet to create more and more content, to drive more and more views, get more and more engagement, and get more and more followers. We're all stuck looking at our own faces now. That makes it really hard to see what's next. **Jackson:** Yes. **Gabe:** Or even to care about what's next. 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 that's the magic opportunity now. MSCHF's magic opportunity 10 years ago was we understood how to work the organic distribution levers of the Internet when no one else did. **Jackson:** Now that's table stakes. **Gabe:** That doesn't matter, and the value of it is increasingly just gross. **Jackson:** You said this somewhere else: virality used to be a skill and now it's just shots on goal. **Gabe:** It's a numbers game. And that's cool too. There is good content that just comes out of nowhere. **Jackson:** TikTok is the perfect version of this. The true global talent show. **Gabe:** Totally. Kids are being creative, and that's cool. Creativity is democratized. It forces us to reevaluate ourselves and change our own game or call it quits. That was a cool era. The world changes; you gotta change with it. ## [00:20:00] We Create as a Result of What We Believe In **Jackson:** You said people create what their gods are telling them to create. **Gabe:** Damn. I said that? **Jackson:** I believe so. **Gabe:** That's pretty cool. **Jackson:** That's a really interesting idea. You were specifically talking about TikTok and Instagram. Are there other gods in this context? Is it just a few algorithms? **Gabe:** Good question. The algorithms are a very prevalent part of this. You are what you see; you are what you want to become. Unfortunately, there isn't a good diversity of things to look at now, and that is not great. The other interesting thing is that there are content creators across so many different disciplines. I was at a thing in LA this weekend for content creators, and there was an electrician in the room who was a content creator. That pulled me out of my own ass a little bit because he was looking at content creation as a complement to his primary trade, which is super interesting. We've all heard that kids used to grow up wanting to be astronauts, firefighters, or policemen, and now they want to be content creators. But maybe another layer of abstraction is coming where it's a way to document a skill or a trade, because hopefully, kids will want something unique, novel, and interesting versus everything looking the same. I believe it's going to balance out. Even though the algorithms are driving towards one thing, I have faith in human beings getting bored and being able to spot a lot of sameness. In that sense, I'm cautiously optimistic. **Jackson:** The viral era is over. It is also worth remembering we're 20 years into this, and really 10 years into this, and it's still really new. **Gabe:** It's so new. Everything is in the beginning stages. But it all comes down to some of the things that I said earlier, which is it's all about eating, sleeping, f\*\*\*ing, and flexing on your neighbor. Human beings will always find ways to discover and share stories that resonate with them. That will always be the case. Now the question is, what are the formats? What are the distribution mechanisms? We now have this opportunity to 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 more tactile? **Jackson:** Or you can at least do a long, two-hour podcast with no video. **Gabe:** Amazing. That's so counterculture. It's great. We had this riff of an idea earlier of bringing back Vine and using AI to extend the six-second videos into long-form, 30-minute videos. You're already on that wavelength. **Jackson:** Maybe one last thing on this that I was thinking about while you were talking: I can't help but compare people creating what their gods are telling them to and your "eat, sleep..." line. Michelangelo made the Sistine Chapel because of God, theoretically. Maybe it was also flexing and I have to wonder if that kind of nihilism is one reason not to get too meta about what motivates you guys. But it feels like there's something bigger or more meaningful that you're pursuing or underpinning what you're pursuing. It seems to me that the people who—maybe it's a ridiculous example, but I always talk about comparing Zuckerberg and Elon. Say what you want about both. Lots of criticism, lots of praise. I'm not sure what Zuck believes in, even though I think he's much more responsible about a whole bunch of things. Elon, criticize him all you want, definitely believes in something I would argue is bigger than eating and sleeping. **Gabe:** Yeah. **Jackson:** And so, whether it be capital-G God or otherwise, that is one of the things missing. **Gabe:** We see that in Elon because of his swiftness to make irresponsible decisions, and unashamedly so. The man has convictions and something that maybe we don't quite comprehend yet, but it's there. And I hope there's more of that. Again, say what you will about Elon—and I'm not picking a side on that. I'm just saying to create art is an inherently very selfish act. I think it's an amazing thing if people can embrace that and lean into it a little bit more. **Jackson:** Believe in something. **Gabe:** You've got to believe in something. That's not a thing that's talked about so much anymore because a lot of it is audience-driven and community-driven. What are you making for other people? Have you verified it with data? Have you done user interviews? To really make art, don't let the crowd drag your vision down to the lowest mean. Take the chance. It could be shit, but it could be great. And that is always worth it. **Jackson:** You guys make a lot of decisions by data here at MSCHF, I'm sure. There's a huge data wall that you just plug your brain into. **Gabe:** We have data. We'll look at it, and then we'll be like, "Nah." **Jackson:** I think it's from Steve Jobs. There's some old line where he's talking about Google: You can explain the difference between us and Google because they A/B test 30 shades of blue. ## [00:26:11] What Makes a Good Remix **Jackson:** Let's talk about MSCHF. You are in this perpetual conversation with culture, which is why it was important to set that backdrop. It's like being in the world, but not of the world. You're able to see the water, but you'll also come down from the hill and play in the mud with everybody, which is a really interesting tension. Lucas said a couple of lines I liked: "absurd amplification of the present" and "reflecting back our time and just turning it up slightly." What makes a good remix? **Gabe:** A good remix starts with good material. You need a good starting point. We use this term, 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. To break it down into pragmatic moves, one of the interesting frameworks that has worked really well at MSCHF is taking a move from a certain industry or a certain category and then applying it in a different one. It works so well because it has that dose of novelty that everyone needs to have that eureka moment. Then they talk about it, they share it, and they engage with it. Typically, we will co-opt moves from worlds that don't talk to one another. One great example is we made a [TurboTax competitor in the form of an anime dating simulator](https://taxheaven3000.com/). It was the number one game on Steam for two weeks. **Jackson:** Wow. **Gabe:** And 20,000 people did use it to file their taxes in the 2024 filing year. **Jackson:** How many number one Steam games have you had? Because I think the [Chair Sim](https://chairsimulator.com/) was also number one. **Gabe:** The two games that we've done have hit the top of Steam for a week or two. That was a great example of taking a move from one space and applying it to another and creating something that, when you see it exist, makes sense. **Jackson:** It's intuitive or obvious. **Gabe:** You get why this should exist. It makes sense. It's a free TurboTax competitor in the form of an anime dating simulator. 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. **Jackson:** Are most of the ideas like that? Where when you see it on paper, you think, "Oh yeah." **Gabe:** The good ones tend to be that way. Then there are other ideas where we're not sure. Typically, when we have an idea and we feel like it's good, we stow it away for many months and then we revisit it later. If it still hits for us, then we will start committing resources to doing it. ## [00:29:08] How MSCHF Relates to the Current Thing and Evolves What Game it Plays **Jackson:** On that note, you guys have talked about playing with the meta of the present, but not what happened yesterday. Put another way, you've said MSCHF doesn't win as a first mover. How do you operate in the conversation, but outside of the current thing? It is a little paradoxical. **Gabe:** Sometimes it becomes a current thing, and that's an amazing case. We've had comparisons to Saturday Night Live where people think we must have a writer's room that meets every day to talk about what happened yesterday. But if you look at the roster of projects and works that we've put out, none of them respond to a current event. Typically, a lot of these things have long tail comprehension, which is super important. It's because it uses long-term narratives, long-term mechanisms, and long-term tools. Generations is too long and that doesn't apply anymore, but had MSCHF existed decades ago, it could have applied then. Now, because time is shrinking and the future has accelerated to the present, that window is a lot smaller. The meta is moving a lot more quickly, so it's a tricky one. **Jackson:** Are you deliberately anticipating? **Gabe:** Not on what's happening tomorrow or next week. But we are spending a lot of time thinking about: now that the meta is moving so quickly, what even is the meta right now? **Jackson:** It's a red queen race. **Gabe:** Who knows? have to do a lot of soul searching to figure out the proper middle ground between what gets us excited creatively and artistically, and what is pragmatic for us to be able to exist and maybe even thrive if we get it right. That is extremely existential. MSCHF was existential when I started experimenting 12 years ago. It got a little more existential in 2019 when we formally got going, and the last year was insanely existential. **Jackson:** When you say existential, do you mean philosophically or for the existence of MSCHF? **Gabe:** Philosophically, but that translates to the existence of MSCHF. There was a time when we would go viral and it felt amazing. Then, after enough times, you feel nothing. The good thing is we always celebrated before anything went out, so that was a good habit we had. Celebrate the act of creation, not the response. But over time, your excitement starts to wane, the novelty goes down, and the addiction to that drug starts to wear off. That's when you have to pull your head up and ask, "Where do I find that feeling again? And where did it truly come from? Did it come from going viral? From learning new formats? From collaborating with good people?" Where was the actual source of that excitement that gave MSCHF the ability to exist from the beginning? We have to rediscover that because the world is so different. Everything's so different. **Jackson:** It's interesting because there's the classic advice to create for you, not for the audience. I've heard you talk about that, and I'm sure you embody it. My experience of you is very autotelic—you're creating for yourselves. And yet, especially for you guys, so much of what you create is not done when it's released. It's explicitly, if not implicitly, in conversation. That's a really fascinating question to have to ponder. **Jackson:** What is this if I'm not really getting the dopamine from the external thing and the virality? What are we trying to say? It also kind of needs to go viral. There's a quote I found somewhere in Maurizio Cattelan's essay at the beginning of the book. He was quoting Sherry Levine, who was quoting Roland Barthes. A painting's meaning lies not in its origins, but its destination. **Gabe:** Yeah. **Jackson:** I love to paint, but how do you hold these things? **Gabe:** We always saw virality as a means of distribution to achieve a critical mass that could carry certain types of concepts to completion. That's all it ever was. There was also a lot of value in how powerful it made us look behind the black box. **Jackson:** Yes. **Gabe:** People couldn't figure out: Are they 200 people, or is it one guy? **Jackson:** It's a magician. **Gabe:** We've been around long enough where the black box doesn't exist as much anymore. Nothing lasts forever. We are fluid, just like the world is fluid. We are certainly evaluating what we want from the work that we put out now and what is the scale of the relationship with an audience that work is going to have. I believe 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 because we built this muscle for larger audiences. With that came revenue, a business model, and the ability to hire a team. The virality has lost its sheen. It's not as interesting, and the staying power of anything that goes viral is also pretty rough. Look at the Labubu guy now. His personal net worth just tanked. **Jackson:** No way. **Gabe:** He's $6 billion less rich now, and investors are pissed because the stock plummeted. I know exactly how that feels. We did that with the big red boots. I sold all of mine, **Jackson:** and one guy has that warehouse. **Gabe:** To that one guy. I'm so not surprised. That's just what's going to happen. When the Labubu thing was happening, the team, leadership, and investors were all thinking: How do we build Disneyland for Labubu? How do you keep this going? But the staying power of these things is not as sticky anymore. You can only 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. Then maybe you have a chance of something with significant staying power. **Jackson:** If you're playing the game of Spectacle, there's only one path forward, which is more or bigger. **Gabe:** MSCHF trapped ourselves in that game. We built the game, we designed the game, and we won it because we're a player of one. Then we are trapped by the game unless we reinvent ourselves out of it. To do that, we have to break a lot of our own rules, which I'm at peace with now. It's very exciting, but it was hard to get there. **Jackson:** When we brought up Elon, this having to play to a bigger and bigger spectacle is not only the case in the art and culture world either. It's a rat race that everybody falls into. **Gabe:** It's the Invisible Hand. It's everywhere. MrBeast 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 one of the existential questions of MSCHF, 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 and go as deep as possible and sustain that as long as possible? That's the question, but also the opportunity. **Jackson:** Almost everything that reaches extreme staying power and scale has to start small enough that it can have room to compound. **Gabe:** Exactly. ## [00:38:31] Creating Something the Crowd Can Play **Jackson:** There's this thing--the two people I know who are best at this are you and Peter McIndoe, who you recently met, who created [Birds Aren't Real](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_Aren%27t_Real). **Gabe:** I never knew his last name. **Jackson:** When I say "best at it's not quite this, but there's an [interview with David Bowie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaHcOs7mhfU) in the '90s where he's talking about the internet. They're like, "This is just another technology thing." And he's like, "No, this is an alien life form." The creator and the consumer of the content are going to be so simpatico. You guys have talked about this in different ways. You just used some of that language: the audience carrying it across the finish line. Somewhere there's a mantra like, "Buckle up, this is no longer in our hands." "It's a performance that makes the audience complete the work, not consume it." To the point of what we were just talking about, this can happen on a really big scale or a really small scale. In Peter's case, it started with taping up Barbies around Arkansas. These things can start small. In many ways, the skill is: can you create some kindling that is going to fan into flame? **Gabe:** Yep. **Jackson:** In many ways, it's the most internet-native way to create something interesting. You guys have used the all-encompassing language of creating something the crowd can play. I'm curious, regardless of scale, what goes into creating those types of instruments that a person wants to take and run with and make their own, versus just consume and move on? **Gabe:** A lot of it comes from a place of deception, which is great. For better or for worse, one of the early mantras of MSCHF was to never fall into the trap of building for your community because we quickly got this big, passionate fan base. Naturally, a lot of the wisdom passed along from the business world is: listen to your audience, listen to your fans, cultivate your community. We decided we're not going to do that. The first thing you'd have to do is start repeating things that worked well in the past. We're never going to do that. In fact, we're going to make things, and you're either going to love it, or if you hate it, we're going to tell you to shut up and love it—and then you're going to love it even more. It could be wrong, and I think it's unique for different people and different groups, but it was good for us. Somehow the audience could feel the authenticity with that sentiment, and they f\*\*\*ing loved it. The first product we put out with that mentality was our [Blur collectible](https://store.mschf.com/products/blur), which is a brick-shaped hunk of plastic rubber that looks like a stack of cash blurred out with the Blur tool in Photoshop. We thought it was funny to put that on a website with a checkout button that says 'pay to reveal.' There's a $25 checkout button with a blurry stack of cash on it, but what the end user doesn't realize is that it is a perfect-resolution photo of a real object. We thought, this is going to be so funny, but we're also going to get so many chargebacks and a lot of angry emails. We made sure we did this under a different LLC because we didn't want the chargebacks to affect MSCHF's ability as a merchant to handle transactions. We took 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 highest-performing collectibles on the secondary market. We made 1,000 on that first run of the U.S. dollar, and people got it and just ran with it. They started making videos of conspiracy theories. Some people broke theirs open and said there were drugs in it. Some people ate theirs live. They just came up with so much lore that we could have never predicted. We got zero chargebacks and zero angry emails. It ended up becoming a franchise in and of itself, ironically. But with no more meaning, because the gig was up. **Jackson:** Yeah. **Gabe:** Then it just became an object that looked cool, which is interesting and totally fine. **Jackson:** That's the half-life of most MSCHF objects, I would presume—at least most of them that hit some kind of escape velocity. **Gabe:** This was interesting because it hit at the beginning because of the gotcha. Then it carried itself on its own just because it was a cool-looking object, which is not a business that MSCHF engages in. **Jackson:** Interesting. **Gabe:** But we ran with it. **Jackson:** Yeah. **Gabe:** We thought, all right, it works. That has been seen in a lot of the things we've done, which is interesting. The Big Red Boot, for example, only had 300 pairs at the beginning. When it first started to pick up heat, it was in this cool kids, avant-garde, art-design-fashion crowd—very 'if you know, you know.' Then it started to pick up steam and began showing up on celebrities, and then on content creators. By that point, we had figured out how to make 20,000 pairs, so we sold a bunch of them. **Jackson:** Maybe atoning for the sins of the [Jesus Shoes](https://jesus.shoes/). **Gabe:** 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. **Jackson:** I can go viral if I wear this. **Gabe:** It became a tool. In the early stages, it was a cool kids' flex for the cool art kids. Then it became a tool for the content creators. Same object, completely different meaning, completely different value system. **Jackson:** A lot of fashion actually goes through that cycle. **Jackson:** Or maybe culture in general. **Gabe:** I think you're probably right. We compressed decades of fashion wisdom into one very hectic two-week time span. **Jackson:** It's funny, too. All of these things are an invitation that the person willingly opts into, but you subvert them on the way. **Gabe:** We're kind of making fun of you, but you still like it, and that's okay. ## [00:44:59] Emphasis on Craft and Objects Rather than Creating "Lifestyle" **Jackson:** On the note of the boots, you make lots of objects, but you also make fashion objects—things people can wear. To me, that feels a little different than something you can play or consume. Of course, there's the element of, "I can use this as a tool or status object." But whether it's utility, symbolism, or even fantasy costume, fashion is somewhat tied to identity. I'm curious how your approach changes, if at all, for things that people can actually wear and put on themselves. **Gabe:** Unfortunately, it didn't change much. We didn't go into the mindset of designing against an identity, which in the industry they call "the lifestyle." You create content around that lifestyle to sell the things you're depicting. We did not do that. You can see that in the wide range of footwear we put out, which clearly does not work for one specific lifestyle. The way I would describe it is one part conceptual practice, but many parts a design exercise. This is another part of MSCHF that people might not realize. We are some of the best designers in the world, full stop—across the board from graphic branding to object design, material design, packaging design, and web design. I think it gets lost how good we are at it because you're thinking about the concept and the response. **Jackson:** And many of these concepts are so loud. They're so built to jump off the screen. **Jackson:** Maybe that's something interesting that opens up. You can be more subtle if you're playing to a smaller audience. **Gabe:** I think so too. Part of my existential crisis is coming down to the notion of the act of creation and craft as maybe the solution for the thing we were always looking for. Maybe that was the source of the euphoric feeling we've had from the beginning, because the virality and being able to control so much attention wore off. But we still get the high from the act of creation with new formats we haven't touched yet. We are also addicted to higher stakes and bigger ambition, so there is some risk there. But that's what makes it fun. ## [00:47:27] Keeping Up in a World That Demands Constant Production **Jackson:** I'm going to get a little heady for a minute, so you have to forgive me. **Gabe:** Let's do it. **Jackson:** There is an essay that came up a bunch as I was doing research that I think is particularly influential to your two creative directors. It's just a fascinating lens to look at MSCHF—this '[Athletic Aesthetics](https://thenewinquiry.com/athletic-aesthetics/)' essay that Brad Troemel wrote 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 a work from a series of isolated projects to a constant broadcast of one's artistic identity 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 aesthete's audience, once assembled, becomes part of their medium." The metaphor that came to mind reading this is that traditional art or creativity is like creating a special meal, and this is almost like an IV drip of steady nutrition. 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 still representative. And 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 is that MSCHF almost perfectly straddles this, with one foot in and one foot out. You're playing this game really deliberately and very deliberately subverting it. It is this hyper-online, ephemeral world: nothing lasts, and you ship new things every two weeks. You are the athlete, but then you're also playing with ideas that are way more substantial and permanent, and maybe that's even where you're going now? **Gabe:** That's what we're trying to figure out: how do you not get trapped by your relationship with an audience? How do you go to a place where the individual works can stand on their own, even if MSCHF's name isn't on it? The challenge that we've set for ourselves is to not fall into the trap of what Supreme did, which is now to just put the name everywhere. Instead of a good idea, you just put the logo on something and call it a day. Whether you like their move or not, it's totally fine. But for us, I don't want us to fall in the trap of just riding 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 over 10 years ago. It totally exists. **Jackson:** Maybe it's most apt--tor people who haven't read the piece--it's really describing the modern content creator. Does Supreme even need the shirts? Drop the product entirely is the way things seem to be swinging. **Gabe:** Yeah. **Jackson:** There's one other line from the MSCHF 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 that articulation play into your strategy? **Gabe:** It was really useful since 2019 because our business model was a cycle of reinvention. We were always iterating the best and the last. We knew that we would meet a lot of people who discovered MSCHF through different points. 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 realize that many things they had seen on their feeds or in the news had also come from us. Some of those would be what they would rank as the best. Now they're following us, so they have a last. But we reinvent the last, and maybe we also reinvent the best. That's how we looked at our relationship with our audience. We adopted a model where we're just constantly iterating on the best and the last, which was cool. That'll still apply to where we're going. It's just going to be over a much longer time horizon. **Jackson:** You've built this entire thing off of bi-weekly drops. **Gabe:** Yeah. **Jackson:** Is that— **Gabe:** Done. **Jackson:** That's done? **Gabe:** Done, done. **Jackson:** Wow. **Gabe:** Instead of putting out 40 to 50 new things a year, we might do three, maybe five. And you might not even know they were us. That's the truth. They will be a lot more high stakes and a lot more ambitious. Ego death to reinvent. **Jackson:** I'm excited. ## [00:53:11] Resisting The Internet's Scale and Lack of Friction **Jackson:** Another topic. From a very viral [Noah Smith tweet](https://x.com/Noahpinion/status/902301308702515202): "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 played in this realm. The Big Art Boots are a quintessential example of merging the hyper-real anime and video game land. friend [Trevor McFedries](https://x.com/whatdotcd), who made [Lil Miquela](https://www.instagram.com/lilmiquela/?hl=en), talks about New York City as a soundstage for the internet today. And finally, from [Sean Monahan](https://substack.com/@8ball) again: " Thus is the rubric under which I understand MSCHF. They have mastered the art of taking the internet and making it into real life." Do things feel as built around internet culture anymore? Or is part of what this new direction you're suggesting is turning that off a little bit? Is "internet culture" even a helpful frame? Is it just everything? **Gabe:** I didn't come online until 2011, 2012, so this is bonkers to even extrapolate on, but it seemed like the internet was a place where real subcultures could spring from nowhere. You could find a subculture that worked for you, and it was this beautiful secret that you had with strangers. **Jackson:** Niche at scale. **Gabe:** Yeah. And now that doesn't exist online, **Jackson:** or it's hard to find. You have to be in some weird Discord or whatever. **Gabe:** What is internet culture now? It's hard to tell, but I think the advances in technology over the last 10 years gave way too much scale and access to these niche communities. That makes them a little bit less interesting and a little bit less cool. You need some friction. It needs to be a little bit hard to find, a little bit hard to penetrate, hard to stay in, and hard to be in. But when you find it and when it's good, it really matters. it's an internet subculture or an offline subculture. It's just: Can the subculture exist and can it last? **Jackson:** And maybe does it have the time to cultivate in the oven? **Gabe:** That's the biggest thing. Can new subcultures actually arise and stick around? There were the Dada movements and the punk movements. There used to be scenes. I don't know if scenes exist anymore. **Jackson:** And if they do, they're probably not on the internet, or at the very least, they're going to be really hard to find. **Gabe:** Maybe they figured it out. **Jackson:** 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 creating a game where you're the only player. More recently, you asked, "What is the opportunity when everyone else is doing the same thing?" And you teased a list: permanence, the real world, elevated craft, and secrets. **Gabe:** Dang, I said all that. **Jackson:** Going back to what we were just talking about, you're not going to share much, but can you tease us? Can you talk about what a game of only one looks like in a world of abundance? **Gabe:** Practically speaking, the most logical trap would be to say the shelf life of virality has shortened, attention spans are shorter, so we should increase drop production from once every two weeks to once a week. That would have been the natural move. Another practical move would have been to build a clipping team, bring in a content creator who makes a video of the thing that you do, clip it up, and then push it out via dark social. That's what the practical move would have been, and I reject that move. Instead, all I'll say is we have a theme parks division now. Hopefully, that tells you nothing and everything at the same time. **Jackson:** It's funny, the next thing I want to talk about is world building. When I think about world building, I most quintessentially think about Disney. For Walt, 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." I almost wonder if, here we are lamenting where everything's going, it's just the pendulum swinging. **Gabe:** It totally is. The kids are going to party again, and people are going to hang out and seek physical thrills. **Jackson:** What makes a place special to you? **Gabe:** I’m still trying to figure that out. But I'll tell you where I had that realization that it was important earlier. This year we had a gallery exhibition in Tokyo. We had this opening where all the locals were invited—the cool Tokyo art kids, the scenesters, all of that. I have two observations from the opening. There was a great crowd, thousands of people, there was a line. What I really love about the crowd that I've seen at any MSCHF in-person event is you have such a range of people. It's a 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. 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. **Jackson:** Talk about something to believe in, by the way? To go back in the conversation. **Gabe:** Exactly. Creativity as a value to aspire towards is a real thing and will continue to be a real thing. Even if we had, at max, 5,000 people, that's nothing on the Internet, 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. Someone sent that to me and said, "You're viral." And I felt \*nothing.\* I can't really tell you why, but the crowd of 2,000 or 3,000 people felt so much more significant than a video of my piece getting 30 million views. Who cares? It would be better if it never even made it on social media. Just let these 3,000 people cherish this forever. That would be great. That's what we've been working on, rewiring ourselves here internally to reflect on our own work and our own path forward. **Jackson:** I would observe, whether you like it or not, there is something beautiful in the notion that part of what made that thing go viral was that it came out of something real. **Gabe:** It absolutely did. We had this office cubicle that you would see in a typical corporate building, complete with a desk, a Windows XP computer, a printer, and stuff all over the desk. But above the cubicle where you'd typically have fluorescent lights, there were fluorescent lights and also a shower 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. It's a perpetual rain cubicle. It did make a good image that would perform on social media, and it ended up becoming a meme where people would say, "This is me today at work," or something like that. That was not what we had in mind; we just liked the visual and the artistry of it. But good things will continue to help people get the views online. And it wasn't even our TikTok account. **Jackson:** The other thing that calls to mind--I always say: a party's quality is correlated with how hard it is to get there. The reason Burning Man works is it's just super hard to get there. **Gabe:** The friction is valuable. **Jackson:** Yes. **Gabe:** It's valuable and self-selecting. **Jackson:** I love this example--this guy C. Thi Nguyen has a paper from a few years ago called \*[How Twitter Gamifies Communication](https://philpapers.org/archive/NGUHTG.pdf)\*. 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 incrementally interesting. It could mean 100 people loved it. 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. **Gabe:** Yeah. **Jackson:** All that's contained in that is the equivalent of your 30 million versus the 5,000. **Gabe:** I would go to bat for that one kid any day. **Jackson:** Perhaps the less cynical take was we need to burn ourselves out on the dopamine that comes from the hyper-real to realize what we had in front of us. **Gabe:** I think it will happen. I have faith. ## [01:03:15] Accidental World Building, Process, Creative Inputs, and Focus **Jackson:** One last note adjacent to this would be world-building. So many of the things I love I would put in that bucket, whether they're brands, IP, or people. I would argue the most impressive thing about Taylor Swift is her world-building and the way it's something to participate in. Part of that is the physical part, and part of it is that she's so present. Whether you want to be cynical about that or not, you think about the classic Disney example: [the diagram Walt drew](https://i.insider.com/5dc97530e94e8676c200a255?width=800&format=jpeg&auto=webp). People often conflate that with branding, marketing, and storytelling. The physical part of it is one part of it. I'm curious to what extent you have anything in your mind when you think about world-building and what goes into trying to do that well. **Gabe:** We accidentally started doing it. Retroactively, I'll say our approach was in opposition to the folks who do branding, marketing, create a campaign, do out-of-home, show up on social, whatever. That's a style of world-building. What we ended up doing, in hindsight, was relentlessly creating new cultural output that was valuable to people, whether they spent their time on it or spent money on it. By doing that enough times, consistently enough, across enough categories, we were able to monopolize a feeling that MSCHF actually owns. That's the world we created. But we totally did not mean to do that. **Jackson:** One of the things you have in the book is all these values, and one of them is almost deliberately avoiding being cohesive: "We're not a brand, we're just making." And yet, there is some through-line. I know it when I see it. **Gabe:** Yeah. **Jackson:** Or I feel it when I see it. **Gabe:** That only came from being relentlessly consistent over a long period of time. **Jackson:** Consistent in what way? **Gabe:** Consistent in that every couple of weeks there's something new. **Jackson:** Just literally consistent. **Gabe:** Literally consistent. **Jackson:** Not "mood board" consistent. **Gabe:** It just had to be consistent in a timely manner. Fortunately, most things that we put out had the same emotional quality. I wouldn't say everything did, but most of it did. **Jackson:** Content that comes out of a physical thing or experience that people really resonate with, I have to imagine, contains something. Whether it's trivial, utilitarian, or more mystical, it's the quality without a name. It's run off from the source. In the case of MSCHF's creativity, is it possible that the feeling is just something that happens in this room, in this building, that gets packaged in there? **Gabe:** I think so. When I'm asked what the process is or how we come up with these ideas—if there's a framework or a magic bullet—I tell people it's an internal shared language. It's not too dissimilar from a jazz club. At the end of the show, anybody can go up and just start jamming together. 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. They have a shared language and mediums that they know how to make work together. We're the same. It's not an incredibly new or 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. **Jackson:** You mentioned process. You've talked about this in a few different places where you have what might surprise people: a very rigorous and almost boring process around creativity, with daily, scheduled brainstorms. It rhymes with what so many creative people do, especially someone like Jerry Seinfeld. He talks about locking yourself in the room every day. **Gabe:** It's a total drag. **Jackson:** Jerry even says, "Find the struggle you can tolerate." **Gabe:** We call it the dark place. You gotta go there. **Jackson:** Maybe a slightly more optimistic question—what has it been like personally for you to train the creative muscle and actually feel that muscle? Whether it's in the context of brainstorming or more broad, what does that feel like? **Gabe:** It's a constant hunt for new inputs. That's really what it is: new inputs, new insights. We have this shared language that we speak here, so the ideas will come, but you need the inputs. That is probably the most dynamic part of MSCHF. There is someone whose full-time job is to create the equivalent of a collegiate curriculum. They curate all of these topics, and those are the inputs. In fact, what's behind us is a board of random words on a whiteboard. That's from the topic mining that was happening a couple of weeks ago: curriculum building. **Jackson:** You said topic mining? **Gabe:** A lot of them have nothing to do with one another. There's toilets. There's Eva and Franco Mattes, who are some interesting artists in Canada that it seems 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 that 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 get free inputs. It's so important. **Jackson:** It's a demanded or required conflict with the other. **Gabe:** It's so critical. It creates tension, and out of that tension come new ideas and new perspectives. Then there's work and training in how you take that big vision and mold it into something real, and how you create the strategy to put it out into the real world. We built a process around that too. It comes down to the inputs for this group that has that shared spoken subversive language. **Jackson:** It probably doesn't apply to most of the group, I have to imagine, but you-- perhaps uniquely--grew up without a lot of inputs. Has there been anything active around how you immerse yourself and find things? Where do you find interesting inputs? **Gabe:** That's why I love being in New York—because I have access to so many different worlds. You can match the categories that MSCHF has a presence in to my own thirst to acclimate to the world that I've entered. That's why we entered the footwear space, the fashion space, the fine art space, and the tech space and raised venture capital. We took a very flatline approach to every element of culture. Now that we've exposed ourselves to those worlds, 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 or hospitality. We have done no TV or video. We have not touched AI, in the last four years. We've never done anything in crypto. Maybe now's a good time to do something in crypto because the herd already ran off the cliff. **Jackson:** Eh, we'll see. [Laughs]. The current administration really loves crypto. **Gabe:** I'll go back and focus on real estate or something. **Jackson:** You're aging into a few of those, which is fun, and probably with your audience. Maybe this relates to what you just said. We talked about using time as a filter. There's a classic idea that focus isn't saying no to bad ideas—it's saying no to good ideas. How do you do that, especially in what is certainly an idea-by-committee world? **Gabe:** There's no crystal clear, concrete answer to that, to be honest. It's about time and place—what makes sense right now, but also what I anticipate will make sense in the long term. A lot of it got simpler as soon as we narrowed in on what still gives us that feeling of euphoria. **Jackson:** Not having something every two weeks probably helps, too. **Gabe:** That also helps. That was a beast. It worked, but it was brutal. **Jackson:** Picking up on "it worked"—I really think doing something every day or every week for a while is almost a guaranteed way for something to happen. It's a sorry truth, but it works. **Gabe:** We were hedging our bets. Back in 2019, we knew MSCHF was something that's really hard to define and put into words. We knew the output was also really hard to describe and difficult for people to comprehend. We decided to brute force this category— **Jackson:** Keep knocking on the door. **Gabe:** And maybe shift the 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 has succinctly defined a category for our type of output, but it totally does exist. There are examples of other players trying to use some of these moves, and that's cool. **Jackson:** The drops thing—maybe it came and went, but that was totally you. **Gabe:** That was us accelerating what was already starting to happen. What we picked up on was an emerging meta. **Jackson:** Yes. **Gabe:** If we can take that move, co-opt it, and use it on other categories, that'll be pretty groundbreaking. People will stop and just be like, "What?" And now everybody wants to do a drop. **Jackson:** Have you given up on the meta? **Gabe:** I just don't really know what it is. Maybe it doesn't matter anymore. Maybe you have to see past it. **Jackson:** If things are moving fast enough, maybe there's just a... **Gabe:** It's hard to tell. ## [01:14:09] Creating as a Collective and Gabe's Role in Enabling the Team **Jackson:** We live in the age of the individual. We talked about that a bit. There are very few collectives or brands. You've even compared MSCHF to a band. There are very few bands, lots of solo artists. Maurizio Cattelan, in that essay I referenced earlier, talks about MSCHF's lack of authorship as a "lack of definite paternity," which is an amazing line. **Gabe:** Hilarious. **Jackson:** There are examples of this, certainly, but even in most bands, Lennon-McCartney was rare. Something even more zoomed out, where everything was done by MSCHF, is even rarer. How has that changed your relationship to the work? **Gabe:** The great thing about being the... what did Maurizio say? An indeterminate... **Jackson:** Lack of definite paternity. **Jackson:** By the way, this is [the banana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedian_(artwork)) guy. **Gabe:** I know. **Jackson:** This is the artist who taped the banana. I should have said that earlier. **Gabe:** He actually has an incredibly long and rich track record of making really good, subversive art pieces. **Jackson:** One of his earlier pieces, I believe, was that he taped a person to a wall. **Gabe:** The great thing about MSCHF being the owner of the works—and not me as an individual or anyone else here—is you remove a lot of ego from the process. It keeps the culture here intact so that it can survive much longer than most places probably should when you start to get the amount of attention that we're getting. It was unintentionally almost like a protection agent to keep us intact from losing our own minds. The alternative is you start to get high on your own fame. **Jackson:** This one really blew up. It was created by so-and-so. **Gabe:** And you get high on the access you get. What happens in any band when they become really hot? All of a sudden you're turning on your family, you break up with your girlfriend, go chase a groupie, you start being bad with your money. All these things totally could have happened. **Jackson:** And the team breaks up. **Gabe:** And then the team breaks up. MSCHF being this faceless entity—maybe not so faceless anymore—protected us from that. In our heads, and maybe we're full of ourselves, we like to think that the MSCHF experiment can survive beyond any of us. And that is the dream. Maybe one day I'm no longer part of it, or I die—that's the natural course of things. Could it still exist? That's pretty cool. The other answer to this question is that by not having an individual be the author, I don't have to do all the press interviews again. Laziness is the root of a lot of our inspiration. **Jackson:** Years ago, we had dinner. This was probably three or four years ago. I think you were in a particularly tired or cynical period, and you admitted that you were spending a lot less time on the creative side, if any at all. You talked about how your main or singular goal was creating this space for creative people that would preserve the earnestness, optimism, and hope. You've also used language in several places around play as an underpinning of what happens here. How does that get fostered? Several years later, you've continued to make it happen. **Gabe:** I know. I had to work on my resting bitch face. When we had dinner, that must have been during the pandemic, or maybe… **Jackson:** The tail end, probably 2021 or 2022. **Gabe:** At that point, on one hand, you are the current thing, but on the other hand, it's a fight for resources. Things are going wrong. Banks are shutting down. Our ships with our cargo from China are getting fired on by rebels in Yemen. What the f\*\*k is going on? We just want to make a stupid TurboTax anime dating simulator. There is this internal Jekyll and Hyde thing that I still deal with, which is, on one hand, relentlessly and ruthlessly fighting for resources for the group here and then protecting them from all of that bullshit. The other part is, how do you continue to curate the right people to think about the world in 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? A lot of the folks here have been here for years now. **Jackson:** They've been around the virality block, probably. **Gabe:** Totally wore off. How do you reinvent that? I think a big part of it is a massive dose of humility and being okay to change. Just because this worked so well for a moment in time doesn't mean that it should continue working. Rationally speaking, that makes a lot of sense, but it's harder to do when you built it, and it is who you are, and it's everything that you've got. So it continues to be tricky. But I've also found that 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. I'm starting to lean in on that part a lot more, which is pretty fun. **Jackson:** Also, just the opportunity to give a creative person runway or open pasture. **Gabe:** Let them rip. I have a board meeting tomorrow. I'll get chewed out for an hour, and these guys will have… **Jackson:** You're the meme of the guy with the arrows. **Gabe:** They'll have no idea. No one here knows I have a board meeting tomorrow. And it's going to be fine. **Jackson:** You were [talking with Scott Norton on an interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WN0sTCGGPhs), and you brought up how doing that museum project in Korea was a new inspiration. You had reflected that, especially in contrast to New York, which is the most cynical place ever. New York is Woody Allen. Culturally, in Korea, they have more earnestness around commerce and creativity mixing. **Gabe:** It's crazy. **Jackson:** It's interesting how even something like that can rejuvenate this or heal some of the cynicism. **Gabe:** It totally did. Prior to that, it's, "Oh, you're going to sell out by making too much inventory," or "You're doing this collab—what a sellout," or "You're doing too much stuff." **Jackson:** You made a shoe with Jimmy Fallon. Screw you, man. **Gabe:** Exactly. "You're a sellout." I'm like, "F\*\*k, you're probably right. Why did I do that?" He called. Of course we were going to do it. But then you go to Korea, and it's just unbridled enthusiasm for creativity in whatever form. That feels pretty good. I remember that feeling. Let me go back to that. Ironically, it was the kids who brought that back to me and reminded me about it. So I came back from Korea thinking, Alright, let's channel that again. Let's not think so hard and let's just make the things that we want to make. Let's not listen to the critics or whoever—the original fans who say we have turned on them or whatever. **Jackson:** The first time that's ever happened. **Gabe:** Exactly. That was very eye-opening. I'm really glad that happened. ## [01:22:30] Trust, Shedding the Black Box, and Staying Original **Jackson:** What does trust mean in the context of MSCHF and your audience, if at all? **Gabe:** Good question. I don't know. We're probably reinventing that as we speak. I think there was a case of most people knowing that when we put something out, it would be generally worth their time and/or money. There's a group of people who definitely trusted that it would \*make\* them money. **Jackson:** Right [laughs]. **Gabe:** For a while, we listened to that a lot because the secondary market is a drug. **Jackson:** We had this at 100 Thieves. Same thing. **Gabe:** We didn't know about that world. We fell into it by accident. It's like, "Wait, what is going on? What are these Discord groups? What's a cook group? What are these bots? How?" **Jackson:** And it's a really interesting canvas for all of the second-order, interesting audience stuff you guys like to do. **Gabe:** We quickly learned about these mechanisms and how to play with them, which was also very fun. But at the end of the day, my answer would be it doesn't matter if there's trust or not, because we're going to go in a direction where the work has to speak for itself, whether our name is on it or not. So it is kind of a big...reinvention. **Jackson:** This is not something we haven't talked about at all, but you just did this \*Made by MSCHF\* book. I think a lot of what we're discussing is retrospective and reflecting on this. There's one more Troemel quote from that Athletic piece. He says, "Athletes' self-editing is now outsourced to the audience who carefully pick over the barrage of content with unprecedented zeal. Their eagerness to assess and evaluate artists' work lies somewhere between being volunteer market researchers and a wish to bend artists to their will and democratize their art." Again, so much of this is less relevant as you move into a new phase. **Jackson:** But you've also done... You're with [Perrotin](https://www.perrotin.com/), and 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 narrativizing it. I'm curious, is that a "we'll do this every once in a while and otherwise not bother" sort of thing? Clearly some of it is up to the audience to interpret. I'm curious about your current relationship to that context-adding. **Gabe:** It also started in Korea. The kids came up, and they were excited. The reason they were excited is because they could see a vision of the future for someone like them where creativity can lead to a lifestyle or a career path that isn't restrained by the current jobs that exist in the industry. That was a very interesting feeling. **Jackson:** And also, it's not in some black box as much. **Gabe:** From Korea, we shed the black box, and that's where the book came from. We have school groups come through here all the time. We're teaching a course at SCAD now. **Jackson:** Wow. **Gabe:** We do more community events now. A black box is not that interesting forever. Look at Banksy. Eventually it becomes a meme unless you evolve it. Part of it is acknowledging we've been around for over half a decade, and perhaps the most defining half decade of our lives. We're not these punk rock kids anymore. I'm 35. My COO just had a kid. We were all in our 20s with no money and nothing to lose when we started this. Now, we acknowledge our context and our place within our context. 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. The black box is basically gone. The doors are open. You send us a message, and if it's good, we respond. It's all open. The book is a textbook. It's a resource. It's not a picture book. It's a "here is how we did this, down to the science." **Jackson:** It's almost case studies. **Gabe:** They are case studies. There's an index of every single thing that we've ever done, organized by different categories and other criteria. The Korea trip was a pivotal moment that lent itself to the book and to opening up the doors more. 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 putting our money where our mouth is. No more tricks. No more games. The work will have to be so good. And we'll die on that sword. If it's not good, that's not good. **Jackson:** I should also point out, a great magician tactic is to put everything in plain sight... wink wink. [Laughs]. **Gabe:** There you go. Maybe this is just part of a highly calculated PR tour. **Jackson:** At a super broad philosophical level, you talked about that halfway mark when you left West Point and chose this undefined path. It's an especially stark contrast to a group of people who are quite literally "choosing war over uncertainty." Another line from you is: "Comfort and predictability are antithetical to everything we do and believe in." **Gabe:** Interesting. **Jackson:** 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. How do you stay original? **Gabe:** The great thing is the world keeps changing and making us more uncomfortable, so it's working out for us. But the other part is not choosing to go out of our way to seek comfort, making sure our incentives aren't set up in a way where we're just seeking predictability, dependability, rinsing and repeating. We've made all these mistakes and have fallen in these traps. But now, our eyes are clear. Let's do things where we don't know what the outcome is. Let's do things that we don't know. **Jackson:** Maybe the two-week drops became comfortable in some weird, insane way. **Gabe:** It started super uncomfortable, but then it became comfortable for us. It also probably became comfortable for other people. There was a novelty in how relentlessly consistent we were, but then it was just consistent. That also, in hindsight, was not destined to last forever. **Jackson:** Do you ever get tired of novelty? **Gabe:** No. We're constantly still looking for it, but it's manifesting more in bigger formats, like different challenges, which I think is normal. Anyone in any line of work or lifestyle is looking for things that stimulate them. That's why you get up in the morning. Theoretically, we're doing the same thing, just in our own way. **Jackson:** It's funny how what novelty means can change a lot over time. Also, it's almost definitionally easy to forget that. **Gabe:** Exactly. ## [01:30:35] Applied MSCHF - Doors are Open **Jackson:** You launched Applied MSCHF, or at least announced it. It's a revenue driver and a consulting thing, but also an opportunity for more scale or media, which you talked about a little bit earlier this year. Is there anything to talk about or share on that note, or is it still under wraps? **Gabe:** It's nothing crazy, and it falls in line with the thinking behind the book and teaching the class. The doors are open. There's a team here that's really good at a particular thing that a lot of people want. For the right people, we will do work with them. **Jackson:** What does "the right people" mean? **Gabe:** It's not category-specific. It could be any category. It's 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. Applied MSCHF does a couple of things for me. One is, there was a robust operation built around that two-week release cycle here that can now be reapplied to external partners. The other part is that by opening up the doors to external partners, we're given more material that we couldn't have as efficiently gotten on our own. **Jackson:** Or legally. **Gabe:** Or legally. Now we have enough clout, leverage, name, and track record to be able to push boundaries with permission, which is cool. A lot of people think MSCHF was always about sticking it to the man and punching at all corporations. **Gabe:** 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 a mechanism, but that wasn't our reason for being. Applied MSCHF creates the opportunity to give new inputs and new material to the team, and that's a good thing. The Applied MSCHF team can also service the other internal enterprises that we're running, like the theme parks division that I'm being so cagey about. **Jackson:** You've concretized a number of more coherent and legible product verticals—shoes, handbags, stuff like that. I don't know if you've used this language, but there are aspects of this that resemble the European fashion house idea. I'm curious to what extent that's resonant, if at all, with parts of the business. **Gabe:** It is starting to feel like that. It's starting to feel like a house of creative enterprises with a shared back office that is not just finance, HR, and legal, but also a creative back office, which is Applied MSCHF. That is now a back office that's also revenue-generating, which is very useful. That gives us the opportunity to double down on categories that we've gone deep in that are meaningful. We have a successful handbag business, a fine art practice with a blue chip gallery, and a few other verticals that I can't talk too much about yet. When you zoom out in three or five years, it will look more like a house, which is cool. It'll look like a house and still be different from a house based on the outfits. ## [01:34:21] Sarah Andelman, People Who are Still Excited, and Long Time Horizons **Jackson:** What have you learned from [Sarah Andelman](https://www.instagram.com/sarahandelman/?hl=en)? **Gabe:** That is a great question. She is such an amazing person. I never knew about [Colette](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colette_(boutique)), by the way. Never heard of it until I was introduced to her. They said, "She's a legend," and I asked, "What's that?" which is so embarrassing. **Jackson:** Maybe you were out of West Point, but you were... **Jackson:** Yeah **Gabe:** there's no way I could have known. Why would I know? **Jackson:** It's kind of a deep cut. **Gabe:** I met her, and she's this cute French lady who dresses kind of quirky and seems to know everyone. Everyone seems to know her and adore her. She is so excited by our brand of novelty: objects, creative experiences, and creative takes on not just the fashion space, but any space in general. It's so inspiring because she was the top of the game for decades. **Jackson:** It was her and her mom, right? **Gabe:** It was her and her mom. They shut it down and moved on but continue to engage and be excited. I draw a lot of inspiration and parallels to that moment of me in Korea, acknowledging that I want to continue to engage, go deeper in a community, still be a part of this, and give back to it. Sarah Endelman changed MSCHF's whole trajectory by introducing us to [Emmanuel Perrotin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Perrotin). Prior to that, she had only ever made one introduction between an artist and Emmanuel Perrotin, and that was two decades prior. That artist was Brian Donnelly. That's [KAWS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaws). **Jackson:** Oh, my gosh. **Gabe:** I came to her and said, "We have this idea for an [ATM machine](https://www.perrotin.com/artists/mschf/1181/atm-leaderboard/68518) with a leaderboard that ranks people based on how much money is in their bank account, but we really want to get it into Art Basel. I keep calling them, and they keep saying you need to be part of a gallery." She said, "Maybe you should meet Emmanuel." **Jackson:** I don't know that world well, and I suppose most listeners don't either. But he's pretty serious. **Gabe:** Top five. Probably number five, but he's up there. I'm still learning about this world too. Since the 60s or 70s, there have been a handful of art world power brokers who controlled the movement of money between the ultra-wealthy into this asset class of a Koons or a Hirst. Emmanuel is one of those people. **Jackson:** Talk about different layers and metas. **Gabe:** There's so much to unpack with that world. Emmanuel is one of those people. As big and powerful as Emmanuel is—a global gallery with spaces all over the world in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States—he, like Sarah, continues to be excited. That's why it worked out so well. He said, "I'll do the ATM machine and let's do a group show or a solo show." We did another solo show, and now our work is starting to show up in museums, which is amazing because that's permanent. All of MSCHF up until now was built on ephemerality, but now some of it is going to be part of a permanent collection in very reputable museums. In the past, that might have been seen as selling out, like you're a part of the institution. But I think permanent documentation of things that we've done in the past that other people can access is very cool. We are pro all of that happening. **Jackson:** It's cool to notice this pattern across people who are still excited. I always tell the story. Elton John came to USC when I was in school, and it was cool to see him. The highlight of the whole thing was he was talking about Lorde. This was in 2012, and he said, "Guys, it's amazing. There's this young artist, and she sings about getting on a plane for the first time." That was the part that he got most excited about. **Gabe:** That is incredible. What I take away from that, and what I've started to realize in the last 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 thinking year by year. But I've been in New York City for a decade, and I've been doing MSCHF for over a decade. I'm acknowledging that it is a long-term game. This is a long haul. I'm inspired by people who have had success on multiple scales larger than my own and are still excited. That's amazing. I hope to be entering my 40s and my 50s still excited and not too high on my own supply. **Jackson:** There's a lightness to it, but there's also a settling into yourself. **Gabe:** For sure. Which is why you see the most disruption coming from young people. They're not settled yet. They're angsty and willing to experiment and take risks. They have nothing to lose. **Jackson:** But it's also rare that they do things that are as substantial. It is really interesting to think about how the longest time horizon you hear people talking about is five or 10 years. **Gabe:** Yeah. **Jackson:** What could you do? I was just up near Woodstock in New York and I went to this quarry that a guy made. It's called [Opus 40](https://opus40.org/). He spent 40 years digging out this limestone quarry. What even opens up when you don't think on a one-year or five-year time-horizon? What is now in play? **Gabe:** It changes the whole game. It changes the type of relationships you choose to have and the way you invest your time and your resources. Are you working on the current thing or the next thing? It changes a lot for me. It also gives me a sense of security because I invest in relationships that I count on having for the next two decades, if not more. Which is comforting. **Jackson:** There's a little bit of freedom through that kind of commitment. **Gabe:** There is. It makes your world bigger. I'm in the headspace of how I can do things that make my world bigger. There's a sense of longevity in that statement as well. **Jackson:** It's really cool. ## [01:41:52] Buzzfeed **Jackson:** One miscellaneous question—I think our mutual friend Blake Robbins said you have this take on BuzzFeed, that it was actually the right strategy but in the wrong economic environment. Maybe I misunderstood him. **Gabe:** Oh, interesting. **Jackson:** Or maybe you have a separate reaction. I'm curious for either. **Gabe:** Oh, man. **Jackson:** How long did you work there? **Gabe:** I was an intern for a year. **Jackson:** Okay. **Gabe:** Yeah. **Jackson:** While secretly doing MSCHF projects. **Gabe:** Yes, exactly. I don't remember saying that, but if you look back at Jonah Peretti's history, he is one of our predecessors. **Jackson:** I saw the Nike email. **Gabe:** He was doing very interesting culture jamming objects or moments that could be distributed through virality. But it was true virality back then. It had to be so good that you couldn't help but share it with five to ten other people. That's when actual viral things happened. I understand what he was going for: How can you create a platform for this? How can you build a business around this? Essentially, it's taking the mechanism of how people discover and consume content and taking advantage of the ways that people also share it. And that led to the listicles. **Jackson:** The medium is the message, recursively on itself. **Gabe:** It was so easy to create and so natural to share. But what happens when there's too many listicles? It doesn't matter anymore. Then you also lose control of your distribution with all the platforms. I totally understand all of these things because we experienced that, probably on a smaller scale. **Jackson:** You know what he's doing now? **Gabe:** He's still running it. **Jackson:** Really? **Gabe:** BuzzFeed still exists, and I hope he figures it out. I really do. Because he's dug in. **Jackson:** And maybe there's a collaboration there someday. **Gabe:** I would be so jazzed to work with him. Personally, I don't think MSCHF and BuzzFeed make sense. 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. It doesn't mean we're secure, but we're not stuck. We still have options. **Jackson:** You can't pin me down. I will never... **Gabe:** Right. ## [01:44:41] MSCHF Values **Jackson:** As we wrap up, I have a list of things I pulled from the beginning of the MSCHF book. I don't know if they're even in the handbook, but you have all these one-liners and ideas that I think Lucas and Kevin wrote down. I would love to speed-run them. If you don't have a reaction, you don't have a reaction. **Gabe:** These are probably from our employee handbook. **Jackson:** It's my favorite thing in the book, and it's 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." **Gabe:** That continues to be true to this day. Super important. **Jackson:** I love the "Always punch something, never punch down." It's a really good frame. **Gabe:** But sometimes, punch sideways. It can happen. That's okay. That's where you learn. That's where you uncover new territory. **Jackson:** Have you ever punched sideways and then realized after you were totally punching down? **Gabe:** Probably. I don't remember. **Jackson:** Probably. **Gabe:** You live and learn. **Jackson:** "MSCHF ensures its ideas are not pre-constrained by execution." **Gabe:** That 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. Because what we've learned is if you want it bad enough, there is a way to make it happen. There just is. Eventually, you have to figure out if you're going to cross that line, but there is a way. Good ideas are often limited before they're even fully formed by the production team saying no. Give yourself the chance to break some eggs and make some people uncomfortable. The idea is fluid. The ideas are never done until they're out the door. At least give yourself the chance to let that happen. **Jackson:** See what happens. **Jackson:** "Death is just as important as birth." Then, "MSCHF 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!" **Gabe:** These are so great, and they continue to be true. They continue to be incredibly valuable. The death thing is actually really interesting. Typically, when anyone thinks about an idea, they're like, "What is it? What is its form factor and how does it enter the world?" But no one ever talks about how it exits the world. For a lot of ideas that we've put out, there was usually an exit strategy built in—a death strategy. The most obvious one is a lawsuit, but there are other ones too. With our [PT Cruiser](https://www.perrotin.com/artists/mschf/1181/public-universal-car/73732) with the [5,000 keys](https://key4all.com/), the death strategy was that the crowd would figure it out. And it gets towed nine months later in Truckee, California. But on a more macro, existential level, what is the death of MSCHF? How do we make sure we're not afraid to go there? The courage to go there, whether we go there or not, actually allows us to go into this next phase. Being okay with it all going away. Honestly, the coolest thing that MSCHF could do right now is just disappear for 10 years and then come back. That would be amazing. I can't afford to do that. Too comfortable. **Jackson:** "Don't make future trash." **Gabe:** We said that? **Jackson:** That's in the book. **Gabe:** We have made so much trash. Interesting. "Don't make future trash." I don't even know what that means. **Jackson:** Maybe something to come back to. "MSCHF as a practice and as an entity, manifests the ambition for a creative entity to wield tangible communication power competitive with the cultural power held by global companies, celebrities, and media entities." **Gabe:** That is the whole reason that MSCHF exists. We realized that because of the Internet and the distribution mechanisms allowed to us, an idea can have the same competing power as Kim Kardashian or the United States government or Lockheed Martin. We live at a time where... **Jackson:** that playing field is level. **Gabe:** Exactly. You see that with content creators and cable news networks. Same thing. The playing field is level. So it's such an opportunity to apply all of those tools that are typically only afforded to global corporations and celebrities to ideas, just for the sake of the idea. There's no other ulterior motive. Sure, it makes money, but not enough to be significant. Making the money for a lot of these concepts is just the culmination of the concept coming to life. We're still just kids playing with tools that we don't quite know how they work. **Jackson:** It captures something interesting, though, which is you're both taking yourself seriously enough for this to be possible and not taking yourself too seriously. **Gabe:** That part's really f\*\*ked up. It's that Jekyll and Hyde thing. I have to wake up and have a board meeting tomorrow, but then come in and brainstorm. **Jackson:** Go to the dark place—is that what you called it? **Gabe:** You don't go there often, but when you're working on a problem, you have to really go there. It's rough, but it works. **Jackson:** "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." "Humor is a tool to get people to engage with a point of view." **Gabe:** Humor is such an amazing tool because our brand of humor is in the eye of the beholder, and that creates attention because some people might not find it so funny. A lot of people found the Jesus shoes funny. A lot of people were brutally offended. **Jackson:** There were probably a lot of people who liked the Jesus shoes and really didn't like the [Satan Shoes](https://satan.shoes/). **Gabe:** Humor was the wedge that created the opportunity for those things to exist. But it's so subjective, and that created a really valuable tension that ended up being additional layers of distribution for us, which is great for pranks and stunts. Whenever we qualify an idea at MSCHF, 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. **Jackson:** Are there any that are five or ten? **Gabe:** That only happens when the crowd takes it. The Big Red Boot ended up becoming that. Even though for us, you can't write a manifesto around this. It's just a cool-looking thing. **Jackson:** It might even be one. **Gabe:** It's an interesting-looking thing. But then it just became so many other layers. That one is a five-liner if you really dive into it. It's interesting. **Jackson:** I wonder if there's a lesson there. Can the modern world even tolerate a multi-order thing? If you're really going to have it go the distance, it needs to be intrinsically pretty simple. **Gabe:** Yes, for any sense of meaningful scale. **Jackson:** " If you are 100 percent credulous, everything ever made is art. If you are 100 percent cynical, everything ever made is advertising." That's a banger. **Gabe:** My response is yes, all of the above. **Jackson:** This is hilarious: "MSCHF attacks golf as a way to attack all the nebulous concepts attached to it" and then "sample the thing that signifies culture larger than itself. For example, golf." Then there's a whole bunch of other stuff about how much you guys hate golf. **Gabe:** There's definitely a three-line explanation for the golf, but I prefer to live in the world of the one-line explanation, which is just "golf sucks," and I leave it at that. It's so much funnier to me. It's a waste of natural resources, it takes up space, it's an activity reserved for the elite. All of those things are true, but it's just way funnier to dunk on golf for no apparent reason. **Jackson:** A lot of people really love it. A lot of different types of people. **Gabe:** This is our nerdy revenge from being shoved in the lockers in high school. **Jackson:** You Brooklyn losers would hate golf. **Gabe:** We're going to pick on golf. Pickleball will be next. **Jackson:** Pickleball is plenty picked on. "If you build it, they will come (bad) vs. build it where they are (good)." A sub-point of this is: "using, 'real infrastructure' steals authenticity, authority, and credibility." **Gabe:** 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 the context there doesn't really exist. It's this other notion of assuming that people will just come to you when the opportunity is to go to We are so obsessed with this 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. **Jackson:** And the people who are buying it are probably the butt of the joke. **Gabe:** I wouldn't say the butt of the joke, but they are part of the performance. Whether they're the butt of the joke or not is up to them. For us... **Jackson:** "Are they making fun of us?" **Gabe:** We are an indifferent arbiter. You are what you are. **Jackson:** Sometimes it goes the other way. I was reading about the [baby shoes](https://store.mschf.com/products/super-baby), which were clearly trying to do one thing, and then they were beloved by this adult baby fetish. **Gabe:** That was a design exercise playing with this idea of scale. Baby shoes have weird proportions. What if you make it bigger? How weird does that look in photos? So we decided to make this playful kid shoe. We have a very passionate fan base of furries and adults. **Jackson:** That's another version of the second order not being designed. **Gabe:** Totally. And it's fantastic. It's great. The people in the theoretical MSCHF House party or the MSCHF High School Cafeteria— **Jackson:** Right. World building, by the way, **Gabe:** Everyone, right. **Jackson:** "We don't make fiction. Getting people to act on 'real' systems is more powerful than getting them to act on constructed ones." **Gabe:** That simply lends itself to us making real things. 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, a song, a poem, a film, or a television show. These are one-dimensional communication pathways. Versus... **Jackson:** Also—I have an idea in my head about what a film is supposed to be. **Gabe:** Exactly. And the context is missing from those experiences. Those are all great formats, and people have done really good jobs with them. The opportunity that we saw was to just do the thing. Let's make it real. Let's seize the means of production, put it into the market, and see what happens. **Jackson:** "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." **Gabe:** It took me so long to come around on that Soylent line because the guys had been saying that for years, ever since I first met them. They're right. You could have done it as a small batch, or an artist could have lived off of it as a performance for 20 years, documented everything, had a video, and then done a gallery show about living off of this powder. **Jackson:** Instead, they just made it and they sold it. **Gabe:** It was a business. It was a company. They put it out into the real world. And that's 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. **Jackson:** "The Softbank WeWork EBITDA slide is speculative fiction." Same thread, obviously. **Gabe:** It's a great slide. It comes up so much around here. Part of it is also, if that's how the rest of the world operates, we're not even being crazy. **Jackson:** Wow. **Gabe:** The bar is so high. **Jackson:** Masa. The goat. "Knockoffs are reposts by the market." "Real and fake are made in the same factory." **Gabe:** All true. We think knockoffs are cool 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 we had to be okay with the idea of people creating NFTs of our works and making money off of them. 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. **Jackson:** In many ways, the Hirst thing is as close as you can get to blurring that line anyway. **Gabe:** Exactly. "Real and fake are made in the same factories" is a true insight, which is very funny. Instead of fighting these dynamics, you can use them as material. And that's another place that we got a lot of excitement from. **Jackson:** Don't invent constraints for yourself when you don't need to. **Gabe:** Damn. I feel like we're in a position where we need to, so I am inventing that. But it goes back to the production question earlier: How can you avoid creating unnecessary roadblocks for yourself to see where an idea might go? Because everything is so fluid and so dynamic. **Jackson:** I talk about this on a much lower-stakes level, but plant the seed. Don't look at the seed in your hand. **Gabe:** You don't know what kind of seed it is. It could become so many different things, so you just gotta let it ride. **Jackson:** "MSCHF doesn't make content." "MSCHF operates off platform." **Gabe:** It continues to be true. We never invested in making content for the platforms. We have an [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/mschf/?hl=en), but we rarely post on it, and it took a long time to even get to that point. I think we have the TikTok handle, but I don't even have TikTok on my phone. **Jackson:** Maybe that's the novelty. Maybe it's Gabe's TikTok. **Gabe:** We have a [Twitter account](https://x.com/mschf?lang=en), but we don't really use it. I don't think we even have an audience on Twitter, at least not on our handle. But it was important for us to not fall in the trap Brad Troemel was talking about, which is when suddenly it's not about the individual works you're putting out, but about the relationship between the audience and the content you make about your works. We decided never to fall into that trap. 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 we live in and the internet ecosystem we're a part of, other people make the content for us. So it works out. **Jackson:** Maybe there's lesson in the fact that the real world definitively off platform. **Gabe:** Yes. **Jackson:** One last one: " Make it shitty. Aesthetic populism. Communicates effectively." It's funny to think about in the context of the conversation earlier about craft, but I don't think they're mutually exclusive. **Gabe:** It's funny, because when Kevin and Lucas first started building the design team here, we somehow stumbled across amazingly talented, truly brilliant designers. There's just a small handful of them here. I remember in some of their first work at MSCHF, they were so confused and even frustrated with Kevin and Lucas, because they would say, "It's really good. Make it shittier." Good design will forever just be good design and no one will remember it. But shitty design—maybe people actually remember that. So it comes down to what we talked about earlier. 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. Then maybe that herd will look up and be like, "Where is that person?" **Jackson:** "Where's that guy going?" **Gabe:** And then they're going to start following you. You run with them a little bit, see what they're doing, and then you reverse directions again. In a way, this whole MSCHF experiment is an incredibly Sisyphean struggle of just zigzagging around. **Jackson:** "You can't catch me." **Gabe:** And at a certain point, you have to ask: Is the herd chasing me or am I chasing the herd? **Jackson:** One last question: those ideas I just listed—many of them are, in some way, MSCHF values. **Gabe:** Totally. **Jackson:** You guys are also very pragmatic and opportunistic. It's hard to pin down and not super legible, but you are principled in some set of ways. In many ways, those values are a flexible frame for the people here, past and future, to look through and work with. You also say, "nothing is sacred." That's one of the big values in the book. One of the other phrases in that book is, "change anything that stops being helpful." My question is, is anything sacred? **Gabe:** No, nothing is sacred. It's a mindset. It's a lifestyle. You have to be ready to go anywhere, pull yourself back if you go too far, but be prepared to go there. Safe space. **Jackson:** Thanks Gabe, this was great. **Gabe:** Awesome.