Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398]

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/450560d10b8844d2

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My guest is Gabe Whaling.
Founder and CEO of Mischief.
What began with viral internet pranks in two thousand fourteen has evolved into one of the most singular creative companies I've encountered.
Mischief's work ranges from microscopic handbags, literally the size of a grain of salt, to tax software that helps you file your returns by going on virtual dates with anime characters. Every two weeks they release something new that challenges our assumptions about art, commerce, and culture. Mischief is hard to define, but Gabe says its goal is to monopolize a feeling.
Where subversion is the rare constant. Their most viral creation, the big red boots, took over the internet in 2023.
Our conversation explores how Gabe dropped out of West Point and built a company that thrives on breaking rules, but it's also about something bigger, the power of unbridled creative expression and what happens when you build a business around it. I hope this episode inspires you to think about what your version of mischief could be. Please enjoy this fascinating discussion with Gabe Whaley.
So one place we have to begin is just what this thing is. I was trying to put it in a sentence for my friends.
And what I came up with was an ode.
To
Subversive creativity. Whoa, cool. I wonder how you would describe in more than a sentence what mischief is. Just a level set for anyone that hasn't heard of it.
It really depends on who I'm talking to.
Because
Mischief.
means so many different things to so many different people, I think selfishly for me.
It is my excuse and my friend's excuse.
to make whatever it is that's in our heads at any given moment.
But if you ask someone in like the art world, they're gonna compare it to
For better or worse.
Banksy or Warhol or Duchamp.
All of whom I've learned a lot about in the last few years.
If it's someone in the fashion world, they'll make comparisons to like
Supreme or Balenciaga or Loeve.
Also things that I'ven't thought about in the last few years.
Everyone's actually when they look at mischief, I think they just see
A reflection of themselves and the worlds they inhabit a little bit.
And that doesn't mean they always like it.
But that is what they see.
Another way of asking it would be, what do you do over and over again?
maybe even spend some time getting into the structured process for creativity.

When we first met that I found fascinating was how far in advance some of these things are baked.
But maybe just describe like the repeated action.
That you take.
If you really had to think about like what we're doing here, we're manufacturing cultural output.
And so with that statement alone.
It sort of
removes the need for like sticking to a category or having these arbitrary lines set up that dictat and define what you do over a long period of time.
For us, it's just purely cultural output. How can that live?
In whatever format, medium, device makes sense.
to resonate the most in culture.
Both now and like in the future.
And so
If you look back at our body of work.
What that has yielded is everything from
Most obviously
very viral pieces of footwear.
to maybe more interestingly software that helps you do your taxes via going on virtual dates with a cute anime girl in a cafe.
It can be
Anything.
But the through line that ties it all together is this
underlying feeling of subversive creativity.
So how do we do that?
We're constantly thinking. We've assembled a group of people here who are
Not just thinking about these ideas, but they speak the language of these ideas.
Let's just
part of like a common understanding that we have here.
Of
Sing the world.
In terms of
Opportunities for subversion.
Most people look around this room that we're in right now and they'll see
Oh, here's a cup of water, and here's a roll of tape, and here's some paper.
And a pen and leave it at that. But for us, we're like, wait, I can take this tape and wrap it around this cup and turn the cup upside down with the water still in it, which means you can't.
Remove it without spilling water everywhere.
That's how we see everything. It's an opportunity to like flip something upside down and give it a new perspective that other people will react to.
I guess to get back to your question, though.
With all these ideas, how do you like actually
Turn it into something real.
And I knew that would be a big challenge when we started because I think
It's really easy for a creative or artistic person to
have their heads so far in the clouds in a good way that it makes it very difficult to like actually do the dirty work to
be productive to like create
work to make new outputs.
So we actually had to build a
Process and a system.
That would allow us to constantly like generate these ideas, document these ideas, vet these ideas.
And then ultimately slot them for production on a timeline.
That allows us to
effectively organize our resources, organize our time, organize our abilities.
And what that ended up yielding is sort of like a creative sweatshop here in Brooklyn.
That we have all extremely consensually signed up to be a part of it's so funny when you literally walk into the building, on your left hand side you see lots of computer monitors, some code. It feels almost like a startup.
On the right hand side you see like Willy Wonka's creative workshop.
It feels very much like a dichotomy that's really interesting.
And I want to talk about how it got to here, maybe going back to the very origin days of mischief.
It's way organized now. We'll come back to that process and go into it in detail, but
Maybe talk us through like the origin, whether it's at BuzzFeed or however far back you want to take it.
And the first couple of things that you did, which were more bespoke, more just you and a small group of people versus this big thing. Yeah, yeah.
This really all started with me just running away from real life, I think.
There's like a longer story here of me dropping out of the military academy and
Not being hold able to hold down real jobs at real call centers that I was expected to make eighty phone calls a day.
All of these things just kind of weren't working out for me.
And
I guess in protest or more accurately procrastination of these things.
in two thousand eleven, two thousand twelve.
I started teaching myself how to make websites because I had these ideas for funny
Projects.
that I wanted to build because they sort of made fun of this world that I was not allowed to really participate in.
I had this
A bit of a sheltered upbringing that ended up culminating in
What's point?
Where you're even more sheltered. And so like by the time I got out as a twenty year old,
I was seeing the real world for the first time.
and not really knowing like where my place was or like who my friends were or
How am I supposed to dress?
I talk to a lot of college kids these days and they've already got it all figured out. They're more networked than I am now. So for me I had nothing. I was a blank slate and I really just didn't know where I belonged. So I would make these websites I kinda made fun of.
Everything that I was observing.
And somehow these
websites would get a ton of attention.
And I started to learn about the relationship between like
Concept.
Production execution.
And
Audience.
Purely by accident.
One of the first things that I ever did.
If you use an iPhone, you know that when someone's typing to you, you see the three dots animate.
So in 2012, I made the first GI of those three dots, formatted in a way where if you saved it to your camera roll and messaged it to someone with iMessage, it would re-
Size itself to look at.
Perfectly as if
Someone's typing.
And
One, I never knew how to make a gift, so I taught myself how to make a gif in Photoshop.
And then I had to like
Figure out how to make that available.
By building a website for it.
Where I could explain what it was, how it works.
How you should use it.
what its intention is. And that was
The first or second
Miscellaneous mischief project. Which it's mischief now because no one can spell miscellaneous.
But that thing got like a million hits overnight. It was one of the craziest things I've ever seen, and this is
Back at a time where virality was not so cheap.
These days brands can buy it. Anybody can get lucky on TikTok.
It's a numbers game now.
But back then it was magic. You get the right idea.
To penetrate the right audience.
Or not even the right audience, the right
Initial core.
That could be
five people, that could be a hundred people, but if they saw something so compelling that they had no choice but to share it.
That was magic back then.
And I got to experience that and that was a crazy feeling.
And as soon as I got that feeling.
It's an addiction.
I don't do drugs, but that must be what drugs feel like because you get this high.
And then like anything else online.
The world moves on.
And then you find yourself in withdrawal and you need the high again.
And so if you
Managed to channel that.
lust that you've gotten from this experience, if you're able to channel that with a desire to learn and a desire to create.
It creates something really potent, and I think that's what Mischief ended up becoming.
What happened next?
What was immediately after
We'll call that the first era or something. So you have a couple of these website based experiences of virality. You just kept going. Kept going.
One thing led to another and it brought me to New York and I
bounced around a lot of jobs here in New York trying to figure out how to crack this.
'Cause I knew deep down in like my core.
There has to be a way for whatever this is to
Be sustainable.
How can I basically find a way to
Do mischief.
Forever.
Because I can't imagine a life where I'd do anything else. It's not even that I want to, it's that I must. I don't have a choice.
This has to happen.
And so
Being in New York was a real blessing coming from the woods of North Carolina, like being in New York was wild.
Every three blocks that you walk you're in a different world with a different
type of person and a different culture and a different
Sense of style.
The diversity of New York City was such an eye opening experience for me.
that you really kinda felt like anything was possible.
And so between the years of I'd say twenty thirteen to twenty
Seventeen.
I continued doing these projects, but I also started to meet other people.
True.
Spoke.
The similar language. We all sort of like
We're aware of each other online because
Just not a lot of people think like this. Not a lot of people go that extra mile to deliver a punchline that you probably could have just.
Said.
And these people had
Very
Different backgrounds.
That were so complimentary. I'm talking people who are like true software engineers and hackers, people who are like.
real artists and real crafts people who know how to make things with their hands.
we would spend a lot of time talking and
I think the dream and the vision was always the same, which is
How do we only do this?
Even not only that.
If there is a world where we are only doing this.
What can that become?
Because there is no playbook for this. There is no
Precedent for this.
We are flying blind.
But it feels so fun.
It's such a fun thing to explore.
At the end of the day, all of this boils down to uh
How does this
Pay for itself.
How do you make money? And there's a lot of different routes that you can go with this. And I think people have tried different things in the past. People have taken the
Gallery approach.
Where you are a true artist and you get represented by a gallery and you create works and you show up at Art Basel and you sell.
Artworks.
People have taken the services approach.
Where you
are effectively an agency with clients and you do like design work and creative consulting so that at night when you have free time maybe you can make something that feels somewhat
Spiritually fulfilling.
People have taken
the media approach, trying to like create content with existing distribution on networks like
Netflix, but also maybe even like YouTube.
People have tried a lot of stuff. We had no idea what we were doing because none of us came from these worlds, so we did all of them. Which ended up looking like we raised money from venture capital. We got representative. We raised like a good amount.
Yeah, that's a whole story in and of itself. We'll get there.
We got represented by the Blue Chip Gallery. We're creating content that's gonna live on these networks.
We even tried the client services thing for a hot second and that failed spectacularly. So we killed that.
But it was all sort of what is that perfect thread the needle through line?
Of doing the thing that you would do if money were no issue.
And what do you need to do to make money?
My guess is when you started you didn't have
the ambition to make this a historically important
company or entity.
In what direction has that evolved?
Yeah, I mean back then it was like a very selfish thing. We were just bandits. We were like
I mean, honestly, it was just it looks like there's a lot of money floating around New York City. How do we get just enough maybe we're smart enough to get some of that and let's make the best work of our lives and then
Inevitably will run out of money, but it looks like that's celebrated these days.
Maybe like there's a way to spin that too.
And then we'll run out of money and we'll just leave. We'll just change our names and leave.
That was the plan.
But
Then things
Started to work.
And they were really working.
So we raised some money in twenty nineteen and that gave us the ability to
Start making like our first physical products.
And somehow everything that we had learned from the prior five, six, seven years of
creating things.
Online.
These digital
experiences or websites or apps or whatever.
That would get so much attention. These concepts would take a life of their own.
Somehow that same phenomenon happened to the physical
objects that we were creating.
I think there was like a confluence of the nature of virality on the internet with the nature of
Hype culture.
with the nature of people's attention spins being way more volatile.
There were like a lot of different
universal factors that were at play that I think the timing lined up really well for us.
But ultimately it was just working.
People were buying the things that we were selling.
For better or for worse, they were
reselling them, usually for like multiples higher than what we were selling them at. Our audiences were growing really, really fast because none of us came from any of these worlds.
We started
Learning
the playbooks of all of these worlds that we dabbled in.
But on sort of like a flat spectrum.
So instead of someone coming from finance and then trying to transition to like another industry with all their finance knowledge.
We're just taking on both industries at the same time.
Finance, startups, art.
Manufacturing, fabrication, fashion, like we're learning
All of them?
As one
Collective discipline.
And so
I think without knowing better.
We pursued a strategy of just
Doing it all.
Can we give an example of something pre physical product just to like really nail home the sort of thing that you were doing?
In a purely digital sense, and then your favorite early example of a physical product and just like the vignettes of each of those stories. Sure, sure, sure. I'm sure we'll tell lots of stories, but just to ground people in those two.
Yeah, yeah. Well the iMessage GIF is definitely like a great first example.
Another one would be
So the day that Donald Trump announced that he was gonna run for president.
I guess this must have been from twenty sixteen.
There were like rumors in twenty fifteen, but I think this really went down in twenty sixteen.
Obviously that was just shocking to a lot of people.
And the first thing that I did was I went and bought the URL friends who like trump.com.
And I set it up to auto forward to
the Facebook open graph URL.
That would load up anyone's list of friends who have liked Donald Trump. This is back when people used Facebook.
This was
Maybe one of the first truly recorded instances of
Widespread cancel culture happening.
Because
That URL in a matter of hours was hitting the tens of millions of hits.
There were no tricks. All I did was I shared her on my Facebook and I was like
Check this out.
Everyone started clicking it and then sharing it saying I just unfriended
Two hundred people.
I just unfriended thirty people. I just unfriended everyone I went to high school with.
Truly actually like alarming.
And hindsight.
This was gonna happen regardless. So I didn't do anything to encourage it, just
Expedited a little bit.
But that's another example of like a digital thing.
It's not like I'm trying to make a website with a bunch of cool graphics and parallax scroll. No, it's not that.
That's just a wrapper around a concept. It's about the concept.
How can you use something digital to like change someone's perspective or like give them that experience? Where the virality is baked itself into the concept. Right. And it's not even about going viral. Virality is not the goal. Virality is just uh distribution of the goal.
You know what I mean? And I think that's a big difference that
People probably miss a lot with mischief where they're like, Oh, the point is going viral. It's actually not.
It's all about like communication of a concept.
So that's like one digital thing.
I guess I can tell you one more.
This is kinda funny. I guess I can tell you about this one.
I might not have ever spoken about this before.
Perfect. There was a time where there was the early like
AI personal assistant craze.
X dot AI.
Where people are like CCing Amy at X dot AI into emails and saying I would literally be emailing with someone coordinating a meeting and they're like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm CCing my assistant Amy, she's gonna help us find a time and spot. And then I'm reading the dialogue and I'm like
Oh my God, they just
CC'd me onto a thread with like a bot.
And they expect it. Disrespectful actually. I was like, This is so stupid.
I hate this.
So I made my own.
I made my own competitor. It was called Reginald.
Same premise U C C Reginald into your thread and Reginald will handle it for you.
The thing is I never built a bot. It was just me
Basically like chained to my computer for twenty four hours a day for literally water and food going through my mouth in a tube.
And I was responding in real time.
to everyone C Cing me into their email threads as a AI bot.
Because they didn't know that it wasn't AI, which really makes you think the day that we all realize there is no AI assistance, they're all just people overseas. In the Philippines or something. Yes, exactly.
Looking back, and I've talked to some people in like the art world about that, they're like, Oh, that was like a performance art piece, and I guess it was.
The interesting thing about that though is
I got CC'd into the craziest proprietary email chains.
Wow.mil email chains.
I got C C'd into like corporate email chains that like
MasterCard and other play people would lose their jobs if anyone found out the information that I had access to. I got CC'd into
Craigsless casual encounter email chains of a guy looking for a blowjob in Times Square.
Really wild.
So anyways, those are some examples of digital interventions.
Mischief light.
They're like predecessors to a lot of the things that we've done now that
Where I I would say like anything that we do digitally now is significantly more
complex and high production value.
And typically is designed to like handle scale from the
Beginning.
What do you think is a perfect example of an early physical product?
That had some of the same
features of the purely digital.
I'll just tell you like the first two.
So the first one
And this was crazy because again, we're like not
fashion or hype people or sneaker people by any means. We're truly just outsiders to all of these spaces.
But we had this idea to
Take a Nike Air Max Shield and inject water into the air bubbles?
'Cause then you can say you're walking on water like Jesus.
And so we were like, Okay, well, which Nike shoe should it be? And we narrowed it down to the classic Nike Air Max ninety seven, all white.
And we had it here in our studio. Some of us had some needles. I don't know why, but we took the needles, got some water, injected the water into the air bubbles.
And we looked at it and we're like
Oh my god, it actually looks really
Good.
And there's the whole like walk on water thing, but then we're like, okay.
If we're gonna do this, how do we
build as much symbolism into this as possible. Well, okay.
How many do we make? Let's make twelve, one for each disciple.
What do we price it at?
What's the Bible verse where Jesus walked on water? It's Matthew 14, 25. Okay, one thousand four hundred twenty five dollars.
Let's add this.
cross amulet that you can buy off of Amazon to the shoelaces because that'll just make it look good.
Let's create packaging.
Where when you open the box the interior
is a waterscape, so it looks like the shoe is actually walking on water.
We basically took a no holds barred approach to just jam packing as much religious
symbolism into the product as possible.
We actually didn't really know what was gonna happen. Just looking at the shoe itself and the imagery of all the context that we designed around it.
It was very compelling. We had
the right feeling.
And I think that's our biggest predictor even to date of
Is this gonna perform well or not? It's just do we still get that feeling.
There's a sort of shared electricity that jolts through all of us when we see it and we're like
Oh okay, this is gonna be interesting.
We built a website for it and like we do for everything, it's always like a bespoke website because that's the best way to control every aspect of the story.
possible versus an Instagram post or YouTube video where they control the constraints and the dimensions and the timing and everything.
And we set the product live for sale.
And the twelve sold out immediately. And that was the most money we'd ever made in our lives. It was like twenty five thousand dollars. And we're looking at the Shopify like, Oh my God, we're rich. This is crazy.
But in the meantime, we check the site traffic and it's just continuing to climb. It's climbing and climbing and climbing and climbing.
And then we're checking the news and this thing is all over the news.
And then someone messages us and is like
Wait, you guys are on late night with Seth Myers right now.
And they sent us the clip and Seth Myers is talking with the shoe in his background.
He's like talking about the shoe and how this is like taking over the internet.
And then he closes out by saying
Don't forget, Jesus rose from the grave three days later. And when he said that, we all looked at each other like, Oh my God, let's do it again.
In three days.
So over the next three days we went and
bought every single Nike Air Max ninety seven all white in
New York City.
Went to every single store. I remember going into the flight club and I was like
I have five credit cards. I will take how many do you have? And they're like, For real? And I'm like, Yes.
We ended up getting sixty seven pairs.
Brought them back to the studio, made all of them in three days.
Got the packaging.
And we're ready to go. Three days later.
We set it live again to go for sale.
And we're just praying like let these sell, please.
We don't wanna be stuck holding the bag on sixty seven pairs.
They sold out.
Instantly again.
So we're looking at some like a hundred thousand dollars in our bank account.
And this is where like my recollection of the story gets a little bit hazy because it's sort of like
In the movies where time slows down a little bit and everything's kinda blurry and hazy.
I remember the guys were like
Not really celebrating, but yelling and
Domping around like pulling their hair out like
Oh my God, this actually happened. Like is this real?
Are we dreaming like it doesn't seem real?
But I was the one still on the computer and the Shopify.
Apparently during
The thirty seconds between when the shoes sold out.
And thirty seconds later.
I started increasing the inventory on the back end.
Until thirty seconds later we hit a million dollars in sales.
And then I shut down the store and I closed my computer and I looked at the guys and I'm like
We have to make
Seven hundred pairs as fast as possible.
It was eleven thirty in the morning on a Tuesday.
I remember we walked down to the only bar that was open.
At that time in Brooklyn.
We had a drink for an hour in silence.
No one talks. We were not celebrating.
But we also weren't fighting.
Then we walked back in silence to the studio and as soon as we got
Through the door?
Credit cards started flying and phones started dialing. We were hitting up every big box retailer in the Tri-State area. We needed to buy seven hundred pairs of these shoes.
make all of them and deliver on the sales that we had done.
Because we had just never seen anything like that.
And while the guys did that, I hopped on the first flight to San Francisco and raised more money.
Wow. Yeah. So similar sort of feeling vibe and energy from like the digital
Outputs that we'd cut our teeth on.
Getting started.
But when it comes to a physical product, it's just so much more visceral because you're like
touching things with your hands, putting things in boxes, you're shipping them to real people.
And there's real money involved.
It's intoxicating. I have to ask a question that's probably hard to answer with words. You've already said it.
But
It feels key to this, which is you talked about as a language before that everyone kinda speaks.
The nature of the feeling when you know you have something.
What else can you say about it that is
in the things you create.
That allows this sort of thing.
To happen.
Because
It's amazing how consistent it is.
Across the body of work.
And I'm gonna start diving into different
The art world, the fashion world are all different.
But you've been able to do it in enough places now. This is not random.
Maybe now's the time to talk about the process.
That leads to one of these outputs.
Because
I just wanna understand more about what is imbued in that shoe and the million other things that you've done that just have this quality.
to capture imagination.
Yeah, yeah.
If I knew how to articulate like the magic, people would have probably tried to figure it out by now. And I think
They are trying to
And not to dumb it down, but I think
Big part of it is
At the end of the day, I don't even think what we do is
that profound or new.
It's actually like
Pretty simple.
It takes
Something that
people are generally familiar with.
Whether it is a shoe or an existing artwork or an existing system.
The iMessage dots.
These are systems that people are already deeply familiar with.
We just have to like
Tweak it a little bit.
inject our point of view into it.
And then push it back at you.
And so
Really at the end of the day, I think the greatest mischief projects
are ones that are this multi-angled mirror that are just reflecting a slightly distorted version of your own reality back at you.
And we have a pretty good sense of when we've done that well.
And we have a good idea of even before it goes out to the world.
This is
Tapping into
Not the Zeitgeists, because mischief actually doesn't exist in the Zeitgeists.
Because we do these things a year in advance.
There's a term that often comes up in like conversations around Warhol and Duchamp of like cultural ready maids.
Which is this idea of taking existing
object and culture that is known for one thing. And then
putting it in a new context that will give it a new meaning. So Deschamps did that with the toilet.
Toilets.
Or
Designed for what we all know toilets do.
But then he like
Puts it in a gallery setting or a museum setting.
And it really just shocked everyone.
I think we do that in a way, but
In a way that's more relevant to just like the way that the world works right now.
What did you do at Art Basel at the ATM?
So this is actually a funny story because it was never about going to Art Basel and this was never about us being in the art world. This was about us
Finding the best way to distribute an idea that we had.
So we had this idea a while back of creating an ATM machine with a digital leaderboard as part of the ATM machine.
Totally normal functioning ATM.
You can withdraw cash, you can check your balance.
But the twist is
If you do any of those things.
It will take your photo and then rank you on a leaderboard with other people based on who has the most
amount of money remaining in their bank account.

So it's gamifying the
Faunting of wealth.
We were like, Okay, this is amazing. We have to do this, but
The concept is never enough for us. You also have to think about like
Where does this concept show up? How does it show up?
So we're like, okay, this could go maybe
Somewhere in Brooklyn outside of our studio.
Maybe we find a way to put it in Times Square for like the foot traffic there. But then the more that we kept thinking about it, we're like
We've heard of
Art Basel, Miami, and it seems to sort of be like
The armpit of the rich people world.
And the more that we like poured into it, we're like, this really seems like the best place for this ATM machine.
So
How do we get it there?
What is Art Basel? We don't even know what it is, actually, right? So we find artbasel.com or whatever and start code calling the people who run ArtBasel.
Actually I remember calling their head of North America or something.
And I was like, Okay, I'm with this group called Mischief. We have this
art piece that we want to display it.
Your art chair.
How do we get a booth?
And they sort of like laughed me off saying, like that's not how it works. Only galleries get the boost here.
Artists can't just submit random pieces.
And I'm like, okay, sounds good. So two weeks later, I come back and I've incorporated Mischief Gallery. And I'm like, We have a gallery. We'll pay. We'll do it.
How much does it cost? We'll do it.
And they're like, No, no, no, again, that's not how it works.
We have like a prevetted list of galleries.
That are known to us a long time in advance.
I'm like, oh wow, I wish you just told me that. Where is this list of galleries? So I got the list of galleries.
And this is where I start learning about the art world from the beginning of
That ecosystem between the art fairs and the art advisors and the blue chip galleries and the more experimental galleries and the museums and the auction houses. It's a very interesting ecosystem of smoke and mirrors and lies and deceit.
But
Back to the original point of the story.
I start cold calling all these galleries'cause I realized I need to go in through them. And so I'm cold calling
I don't know how much you hang out in the art world, but like
Gagosion and Pace and Hauser and Worth and White Cube and Zwerner like all I was just going down from the top of the list.
And none of those panned up, but somehow through a different avenue, I ended up meeting Emmanuel Periton, who
represents a lot of artists that a lot of people are familiar with.
Like Maurizio Catalan who had the banana.
at our basel a few years prior, so of course he was gonna take our call because it makes sense, and now we're good friends with Maurizio.
Anyways, Emmanuel was like
Yes, let's do it. The ATM machine sounds great.
So
We take the ATM machine, we get into Art Basel.
Funny thing, the first day is the most exclusive preview day for I guess the richest but shadiest people.
They were so not into this project. They would walk past it and
You know when like someone walks past you, but you know they're paying attention to you, but
They're clearly not.
looking at you like they're working really, really hard to not make eye contact.
That was our ATM machine that whole first day. People were just not having it.
But as the
Week progressed.
It started to open up a little bit more to the public.
with each day until I guess like day
Three.
It was fully to the public, and by that point
This thing was
Truly like
the talk of the town. It was the piece of Art Basel Miami twenty twenty two.

The fair made us relocate it because the crowd was getting so big it was blocking fire escapes.
They assigned five extra security guards just to like
Man the crowd.
Because the crowd was also like
Getting it.
Rowdy necessarily, but they were bumping into the art of the other galleries, which is not good.
And then the most interesting thing happened, which was
a new group of behavior started to occur around this ATM machine.
There was always a big crowd around it.
And people once they would like muster up the bravery, they would go do it.
And at that point it's a performance.
You are performing in front of a captive audience.
Willing to sort of like show where you stand among the wealthy and the poor.
And
What ended up happening was
There were two types of people who would engage and two types of responses that these people would get.
There would be like normal people like
students or younger people who would go up and they would have a
remaining account balance of twenty seven dollars.
And when they would do that and get
sunk to the bottom of the leaderboard in front of everybody, the crowd would erupt into applause.
Kind of a wholesome thing.
We see you, you see us, we are one and the same.
And then you juxtapose that with the really rich people who are also
If you're engaging with this
It really says all that you need to know about this type of person.
The wealthiest person who engaged with this actually did it twice.
He was probably like late thirties, early forties.
Athletic build.
He had on a suit with a Oxford shirt that maybe wasn't buttoned one too many times, five o'clock shadow gold chain, Gucci Loafers.
And
A very attractive girl on his arm. He came and swiped.
And clocked in at like five and a half million. And the couple turns around to the audience.
Expecting the same reaction and it's cricket's.
Complete silence.
Honestly.
So excruciatingly awkward.
But that's not the end.
Three hours later they come back.
And he swipes again and clocks in at nine and a half million.
And then turns around and still the same reaction. And so maybe at the end of the day, the outcome of the experiment was quite wholesome.
It was good.
Which is
I think normal people get it.
One of the progressions that I'm most interested in
And
for mischief is at at first it's sort of isolated thing. You buy some shoes, you do some things here outside the door we're sitting
You send it in packages and it's pretty tight loop.
As you've entered more big worlds, art, fashion, maybe hospitality, other big things where there's all these different stakeholders.
You've described to me before that you get sucked into and begin to be shaped by the world.
And I think there's lots of perversions that you've
learned about in these worlds.
Maybe go to fash next, since we talked about art there for a minute.
How does that feel to enter into like
An alternate reality.
where there's all these different rules and there's all these different players and
What do you learn and how do you avoid
getting sucked into the game and staying panda.
As the outsider not by choice.
We're all outsiders'cause just somehow we've never landed inside of these institutions.
It's not like we
really made a conscious decision. It was just never accepted.
So you don't really know what you're signing up for when you start to get not just accepted by these worlds, but pulled.
I will say it's fun.
You are
Able to learn
from like a fire hose so quickly about the social dynamics, the hierarchies of the power players, how the products and the manufacturing and the distribution works.
What are the cultural symbols that are important?
What are the pockets of these people?
How do they operate? Where do they hang out in the city? Where do they hang out globally?
How do they view each other? What's the existing drama within all of these worlds? It's actually like really, really fascinating.
I think the cool thing is from our vantage point
We're able to see
all of these worlds at the same time and pick and choose
what's meaningful to us and also what's not meaningful to us and maybe what's harmful to us.
But you do have to be careful.
'Cause it's a vanity thing at the end of the day. You're like being accepted by people in high positions that
We're just not from those places. So part of it, it does feel good.
It feels good to be accepted. It feels good to be recognized.
Feels good to be validated for being good at something.
And it's a slippery slope because we have to remind ourselves
We didn't do this.
to be validated. We never did this to be accepted by these worlds.
We did it because we think
It's all absurd.
All of it.
And so
How do we
keep our sanity. Like how are we able to look in the mirror each morning and still see who we
were originally.
versus this new person that we could become.
And it does get hard. It is tricky.
Is it fair to say that there is both
From an ingredients sense.
some nihilism and some like incredible hope.
And generative. I think you nailed it.
It's nihilism in the sense
Nothing matters and we're not necessarily gonna make the world a better place, but
Maybe this will ease your fall.
And in that sense it's a little bit hopeful too.
We're not mean spirited. We're not
edge lords necessarily trying to like take the piss out of an institution or something like that.
I think there's just a hidden way of
Seeing the world.
Subversion.
Can be uh
higher form of creative output.
It just fuels us for some reason.
There isn't even necessarily like a higher calling beyond
our personal desire to make
The most creative work of our lives.
Let's talk about process in detail now.
How if I take anything that's coming off the line next week.
How far back does it go?
Who contributes ideas and how? What role do you play? How does the team work together?
In as much detail as you can, like what is the process.
The most important thing that
I think I've done here was
Create a system where people are not afraid to have ideas.
So if you think of any other creative
workplace or creative industry.
Typically like junior people are pitching to senior people.
Jobs are on the line, pride is on the line, you're afraid to be wrong, you're afraid to be judged for a bad idea.
To me, those are like the killers of creativity.
So
From the beginning I did a lot of work.
A curating the right type of people where
Ego is not
an obstacle to having a good idea or preventing someone else from having a good idea.
Creating an environment where people can feel a little bit reckless.
They can make mistakes.
They can make a mess and
That's very straightforward. You look around at this space, it feels like you can make a mistake. Being in a warehouse is really important, actually. If we were in a white box in Soho, you wouldn't want to mess it up.
And then
Creating also this culture where it
Doesn't feel like it's just
my ideas getting made or the ideas that I like.
That really boils down to
creating a certain sense of codes and sensibilities that we all sort of agree on culturally.
And you see that come through in the work.
So that was the most important thing that I ever did because at the end of the day
the people who come up with the ideas at Mischief are actually everyone. You can work on the finance team. You can be our general counsel. You can be on the manufacturing production team.
Anyone here can come up with a good idea. Anyone is capable of coming up with a good idea.
And in fact, it's more valuable to get good ideas from people who aren't in the business of good ideas because their vantage point
is real versus people who there are people whose jobs are to come up with ideas, but they don't exist in a space that they can actually reflect on.
It's fake.
We choose to
exists in real spaces and then as a result
You create ideas that
Art.
able to exist in these spaces as well, in a way that's very interactive and almost experiential in a way.
So
That's the vibe part, but then brass taxes.
You brainstorm
Rigorously.
Multiple times a week.
They're timed.
on the same schedule every single time.
There's a curriculum planned in advance. It's almost like designing a school curriculum. So like every quarter there are
Topics and concentrations and
themes that we think are important for mischief in the future.
And then also topics, concentrations and themes that
We have no idea about.
Just to like
challenge ourselves with new information and keep challenging ourselves to not just exist in our own bubble that we've created.
The brainstorms.
Happen. Every idea is documented.
We have an entire library of these ideas.
And then
Over
I'd say like a three to six month period.
All these ideas are run through.
A fairly long tail vetting process.
That involves evaluation based on
Normal things like
Can we afford to do this?
How much money are we gonna lose doing this? Will we make money on this?
Is it even possible?
Or does it need further research?
But then also things like
Does this
Shape.
The personality of mischief.
In the way that
We want.
It's almost like mischief as a child and we're like
Raising it.
As soon as we
land on concepts that we feel really good about. We actually put them in a pile.
And then forget about them.
And that part is what makes this take six months.
Because then we will
Open that pile six months later.
Look at them and be like, Okay.
I already forgot about these ideas, but now that I'm looking at them again, do I still feel very excited about them? Have they survived the test of time? And if they do.
Then they are ready to slot for production. And typically that's done about twelve months in advance.
So even now we know
all of next year's calendar already. Wow. Yeah.
We're already working on it.
You've talked to me before about the value of rules. I think something you said was rules are interesting because they let you know where people before you drew the line.
Say everything you've learned or think about.
rules in the role that they play.
That line is specifically something I remember writing down when I was at West Point.
'Cause there were just so many rules.
They typically like drove most people crazy while they were there. Cause I mean, it's the army. If you break rules, you're gonna get in a lot of trouble. It's as simple as that. And
There are so many rules for everything that it's impossible.
To not break a rule.
But for me, and maybe this is my problem, but
Every rule was an opportunity to like
create some sort of absurdity that I thought was just really entertaining, even if it meant I had to do like a thousand pushups for it.
This is my coping mechanism. I'm going to
put a copy of the communist manifesto on my bookshelf during the inspection just to see what happens. And of course you get destroyed for that, but it's so funny when they see that on my shelf. And so
Very similarly with mischief.
You look at these institutions, you look at
how these herds of people
Operate.
And like
different worlds and different concentrations and you understand.
Where their lines are.
But we really see the lines as like opportunities.
Not
Constraints.
They're just creative opportunities.
So you're playing
With boundaries is the bottom line. Yeah, yeah. And I think
In the most I guess concrete sense of the word.
We even look at the law as a creative opportunity.
And when you really think about the law and
Hopefully all of us know this by now.
The law is clearly not objective.
And it is not set in stone and it can be changed on a whim based on
Who is in power at any given moment.
So for us, we actually we embrace that.
as a very creative opportunity to
maybe change the way that the law is interpreted or even like
Create new laws.
And I think that's very interesting, actually.
I want you to not hold back on the answer to this question.
What?
impression and lessons did you learn interacting with the world of venture investors.
Honest answer.
Just like any other industry.
There are good ones and then like not so good ones.
I think this is less about venture investors and more of just
The nature of all of these different variables that have descended on the world in the last, I'd say, five to ten years of a lot of capital.
And hype being way more valuable than like long term sustainability and
I think venture capital in many ways became like
a sort of quick fix to someone's
Vanity?
And when we realized that we're like, Well, we should raise money because we can like play this game.
But what I didn't realize is a there are good ones.
People who
Or
Down to embrace the long term vision.
Even one as ambiguous as mischief.
And also like have our back through all of the crazy things that we've been through.
And I think we've had really, really good ones.
But I'll say the bad part.
Which is
I think VC and also tech in general.
Are just so self important.
And so insular to like their world?
That they forget about the rest of the world and
how real people think and like what real people care about.
Maybe that's fine because I think most people in various industries do that too.
The other part is generally
These people don't really have good tastes.
And so there was a time where I think mischief was being
Pretty celebrated by
Silicon Valley, at least in the early days. Like every early stage company, when you raise money, it's like wow, this is the next hot thing and whatever.
But then we like started doing things that maybe didn't really speak to the tech world or the VC world as much.
It was speaking to like other worlds.
And then you started to like sense some tension and lose that early fan base.
And there was a aha moment where I was realizing I'm really pay attention to their feedback.
I'm seeing what they're saying online.
reading Twitter and LinkedIn and seeing people do the big threads analyzing what our new move was and what they think we're doing wrong. And I was like
Holy shit.
I almost fell for this.
I almost started creating exclusively for that world because it's where the money came from.
So I deleted my LinkedIn and Twitter.
And Facebook. I got off cold turkey sent my Instagram to private.
And I was like I will never let not even just V C, but like I will never let
Any specific world.
have that much influence on the things that I choose to do.
If you think back on the project that got
The biggest
Which one comes to mind?
Definitely the big red boots.
For better or for worse. Say more.
Uh a year ago we made these big red boots that just look like a
Astro Boyd.
I mean that's it. There's nothing really that profound about it.
But
I think we made them at a time where
There were a few things happening. One
In the fashion space.
There was this movement towards the absurd.
Absurd.
Pieces.
So that was happening.
Additionally.
In the fashion space.
And sort of just like in general, we live at a time where people aren't sharing new information.
They're actually just sharing
content of them reacting to new information.
That's another thing that was going on.
We were sort of at this peak of
the hype cycle around sneakers and footwear and resale and all of that as well.
And
We're at a time where like
The algorithm is what dictates virality?
But
The alternative is still true, which is when
human beings see something that
resonates with them, they will find a way to share it or share their reaction to it.
Oh, and then one other thing was
There had been a lot of talk of AI and metaverse and I don't know.
The big red boots looked like
It was photoshopped onto people. Like it existed in this strange, uncanny valley of is it real or not real?
So all of these factors combine to create this perfect storm that we had no idea was coming.
We made them and we only made a couple hundred pairs.
I remember
Looking at some my
Partner here.
running around in the studio with them and like those look
Kinda cool.
Let's make some, but nobody's gonna buy these and they were really expensive to make'cause we made them at a really high level of quality.
So we're like we'll make a couple hundred and we'll just sell them and
I think it'll be cool. Like I think people will
Talk about it and
It's interesting.
It got so big.
Everything.

the algorithm smiled upon it and then as soon as people realized that they were like, Wait, if I do
Content.
With the big red boot.
I'm gonna get a hundred X the views that I usually get.
And then in addition to that
People were sharing it.
Like the old days.
People were literally like
Finding screenshots of this boot online and sharing it.
with their friends on their platforms. So you're getting old school virality.
Pure emotionally driven sharing.
with new school virality.
The algorithm has smiled upon this.
creating the perfect storm of a pretty like iconic image, not in the sense that I think it's important or not, but
It's just so recognizable.
Never seen anything like it.
Have you ever felt the feeling like the Shopify store feeling with the Jesus shoes sense? The feeling is
We've looked at each other when it's happening in the past and we're like
Literally what we say to each other is All right, buckle up.
Because this is no longer in our hands. We don't control this anymore.
It has taken a life of its own. The narrative is gonna change. It's gonna find different audiences. They're going to reshape it to fit
their perfect image. That's what happened with the big red boot at the beginning, the first few days of it starting to really pop off.
It existed in these
Niche underground creative fashion.
Spaces.
A cool.
underground thing that not that many people knew about that
you could style creatively and it was cool. And we're like, this is amazing.
We wanna be
In these underground spaces.
But then it hit mainstream so fast.
That it became basically like a tool to go viral.
And I'm not saying that's a good or a bad thing. It just changed shapes. It had a
different meaning at that point. And you just can't control it. When it happens, you don't control it.
You just
Pray.
How do you think about the fact that
If you had turned that store back on with the Jesus boots or something, maybe you could have sold ten million dollars worth
Talk a bit about supply and demand and that line and if that's something you mess with too.
Or what you think about it and have learned about it.
There's so much written now about
luxury products and
Always having supply be one less than demand.
How do you think about this topic?
the up close micro perspective.
Not selling enough.
compared to your demand makes sense. Then you want to hold that over for later or something.
But for us it's not really about that. It's about
Every two weeks we release something new.
And they're all gonna spike at different levels.
Some are gonna be bigger than others, but
We're at a point right now where they will all be a spike.
But every time you do a spike
it builds off the foundation that was left by the prior spike.
Because there is continuity, there's retention.
And so when you zoom out from the past five years.
It's actually just one big upwards curve because you're building off what was held over from the prior.
No.
The tricky thing for us when we're doing that is
We are not
Selling out quickly of big red boots.
So that we hold over an audience to sell them.
Big Red Boots again.
We are holding them over and then we need to
Educate them.
To be okay with the idea that the next thing after the big red boots.
is anime dating tax service software.
And we turn a ton of people from that because they're like
I was here for these shoes. Why are you sending me TurboTax competitor anime dating cafe?
But what that does is we're building the world for ourselves that we want to exist in.
where creativity is that ultimate North Star from a value perspective.
And so supply and demand
Isn't as much of a

Move more of the same.
It's more of
A way to generate
Attention.
That helps us distribute an idea and a concept.
That can
hopefully educate a significant enough percentage of those people to stick around with us for the ride.
You said something to me before, which I've loved, which I've used a lot since, which is that you can't define mischief just as you couldn't at the beginning.
But you can think about how you are trying to monopolize a certain feeling.
For the person interacting with Mischief.
How would you describe that feeling that you're trying to monopolize? And I love that framing. Anyone can ask that question of themselves. Right, right. I love that.
It will be different things to different people.
But I think there is this feeling of
Subversion there is this feeling of levity.
It's kind of funny, but like not funny in the way that like you see on Saturday night live. And hopefully it also just makes you
Pause and think a little bit like
Oh, interesting.
I never thought of it that way, but it's totally true. This is just a reflection of a phenomenon that already exists.
And then at the end of the day.
Hopefully you just see it and
embrace this idea of pure unbridled creativity.
That's what it is at the end of the day. It's the idea that
nothing that you see in front of you is what it may seem. It can be an opportunity for something like so much more.
And hopefully like people are
Seeing what we do and they feel
inspired to break some rules, make something or
Do it in a different way.
The rules are all fake.
One of the things that's so important here is protecting that creativity. And I know sometimes you do that with legal work, with technology work, with capital that can fund these things.
Protecting that core like raw thing seems like
The heritage that you're building up.
If you were giving
a sermon on how to protect one's creativity.
based on everything that you've learned and all the times you've felt the siren song pulling you away from it.
And wanting a certain world ex
Give them what they want versus
Express yourself creatively.
From all that added together, what would you say about protecting one's own creative potential?
It's a tricky one.
And it's something that I couldn't even say I've nailed perfectly.
It's something that I'm just constantly working on.
And every time
You feel it slipping, you have to like be so alert.
acknowledge it and deal with it immediately.
But there are like tactical things that you do.
And this is probably all the MBA business school self help book type stuff.
Choose the right people.
Fire the wrong people.
Set the right vision.
These things are cheesy, but they're true.
There's more to it as well. How do you create an environment where fear isn't the primary motivator for someone to get their job done? How do you curate a physion where people feel like they can make mistakes?
How do you celebrate the act of creation and not the act of
Virality, for example.
We never celebrate when something hits.
We don't celebrate when something goes live.
If anything we'll celebrate the day before.
Just to acknowledge the act of creation, which is to us the most holy act.
A lot of these little things build up.
Two
Preservation of this.
Feeling.
Why is it a holy act? That's quite a phrase.
We make stuff from nothing.
It is literally like an act of God.
There was nothing and then there was something.
It's been that feeling ever since the beginning, even making my first website. It was such a
Eureka moment for me where I was like, holy shit.
It wasn't there.
And then I literally spoke and
Now it is.
That's a crazy feeling. We can never forget that feeling.
The stark contrast is West Point in my mind.
What is
The most
good and bad things that you remember.
Or take from
the couple of years that you were there. I think you left right before the obligatory service came. Exactly. I did so I did the hardest part, which was the first year, and then I stuck around for one more yeah, which was about how long it takes to quit. So
I mean
Personally, I probably needed my ass kicked a little bit.
I wasn't a fully formed human being yet, so
There is something to say about the discipline and
The work ethic that you get from it.
I think the biggest thing is
West Point.
to train you for what you're gonna do later, they get you really comfortable with the impossible task.
So
The best example is the rule for the academic curriculum is for every hour that you're in class, you're assigned three hours of homework.
But West Point doesn't run like a normal college where you choose your schedule and stuff like that. No, you're in class for seven hours a day.
So if you do the math.
The math doesn't add up.
Not their problem. You just have to figure it out.
It's impossible.
Let's say you get in trouble, you have to do a thousand push ups.
Not many people can do a thousand push ups.
Most people cannot, only a few in the world ever.
Again, not their problem. You just have to
Find a way to get through it.
And I think that was really valuable because
Mischief is
used to taking on things where it's like there's not really a playbook on how to do this.
It's not straightforward at all. And you just
figure it out. You roll your sleeves up and you figure it out. And I think that was a really valuable thing for me personally.
And then
Sounds so cheesy. The leadership lessons are also like really good.
I remember
being out in the field during your summers.
out
Doing patrols for months.
We were out in the field.
And there was a simulated mortar attack.
So you like see the things flying in, you hear the sounds and it's like all right, we gotta get out of here.
And I remember my platoon leader.
Was like, all right, we need to run this way, like grab all your stuff. So it's like you have a eighty pound bag, you've got your weapon.
You're running.
And there was someone on the team who was a lot smaller. I mean, she was probably like seventy pounds and
She had a eighty pound bag as well.
And she w had a pretty bad trip'cause we're just running, you gotta go.
Without hesitation, he picks up her bag as well.
Hands her her weapon and is like let's go So he shoulders
Close to 160 pounds.
And books it.
And then once we like get to safety, hands are back the bag, no questions asked.
No issue.
And I remembered seeing that I was like
I like that. You take care of your people.
You don't make a big deal of it.
And then you move on. I thought that was really good.
Those were a couple of things that stuck with me.
The bad things.
I don't know, I think it's all like pretty good experience actually.
It's more so uh if I stayed I was gonna just keep getting in trouble and then
That's when really bad things would happen.
Do you think the fact that you came out of that, because I know prior to that you really didn't have a lot of culture experience, my understanding is you're
Not allowed to do a lot of stuff as a kid.
played a lot of piano and were incredibly pretty good classical pianists. Incredibly focused.
Do you think that emerging as a twenty year old
Without any influence on you.
ended up being a major part of why you're able to I think it was huge see the world this way it was huge because I'd learned about culture
All at once.
On a flat spectrum.
I was
Learning about
Urban outfitters at the same time of learning about Kanye West, at the same time of learning about Marvel, and also Instagram had just been bought and the social network had just come out.
I was getting all of these things as if they were part of the same
Core curriculum.
I do think that was very valuable.
And you just have such an open mind.
Because you're like
The world is so big and I don't really know where I belong here.
I think that was everything actually.
The point you made about impossible tasks.
The hours of homework or the push ups.
What's the best analog in the projects that you've done? Which project
was the most impossible task that you've tackled and gotten through.
And I asked because it seems like
Every story I've heard, and I've heard so many now of people creating incredible things.
This kinda ends up being
A or the key ingredient.
Yeah, yeah. I should have specified earlier I think most people in their careers do hit this wall and they learn how to deal with the impossible task.
The thing about West Point is like I got it on day one as an eighteen year old.
Super valuable.
For us, I mean
Mischief is the impossible task. We shouldn't even be here, right? Like on paper, this doesn't make any sense.
There's a good friend of mine who is actually
He spent some time in VC.
And I remember talking to him in twenty nineteen when I was trying to figure out if I was gonna raise for this or not, and he was like
Honestly.
I like you, but I don't think you can do it.
And it has nothing to do with you, it just doesn't.
Work this way.
This kind of thing doesn't work.
You need such a repeatable hit rate. You need such a strong understanding of audience and retention and
A nose for culture, it can't work. It can't last.
Actually I hung out with them a few weeks ago.
And he said, Yeah, I remember that conversation and honestly if someone came to me today
pitching what you were pitching, I would tell them the same thing. Like it shouldn't exist.
I agree it shouldn't.
This is the impossible thing. And then every project has also got its impossibilities too, and you just figure it out.
Tell us what you've learned about fashion.
I think fashion is two things. I think on one side fashion is utility.
Basic needs, shelter, protection.
And then the other side is fantasy.
Costumes.
Human beings love costumes.
Personally I hate Halloween, but people frickin' love Halloween.
And then I go to these fashion runway shows and I'm like, wait, they're just celebrating Halloween early. This is crazy, right? It does come down to fantasy.
And the fantasy is not just tied to aesthetics, but it's also tied to
value and legacy and
symbolism and cultural ready made and
Because of that, I think it is such a rich space to play in.
Because also it is so tied to identity.
These are symbols that
are created by designers that are created by brands that you wear on your body.
And in some ways they kind of serve the same function as a painting in your home might.
So I think it's interesting.
When Mischief sees that, we're like, Okay.
You can try to
Focus on creating things that are aesthetically pleasing. And that's one way to go.
But you can also seek to exploit
The tensions that people have between these objects.
Not just from an aesthetic perspective, but also like a value perspective, an identity perspective.
Last summer
We made a handbag that was the size of a grain of salt.
Because we noticed this
Pattern of
The smaller the handbag gets, the more expensive it seems to become.
And we're like, Well, let's make one really, really, really small, and then it's sold at auction for sixty four thousand dollars. So most expensive handbag of all time by volume, for sure.
How did you do it?
So my best friend from childhood
He's a postdoc at Columbia in biomedical engineering. So he helped us
Basically like identify and then modify a
Manufacturing process that allowed us to create
this handbag at like a microscopic level.
We made it.
There was like an image of like a little green speck on a thumb that just spread like wildfire last summer.
And it said everything that everyone is already thinking about.
Passion which is
It is absurd.
But not in a hateful way. It just
It is.
What do you make of the fact that
Only fans has
orders of magnitude more revenue than
Patreon.
We're just humans at the end of the day. That's all it is.
There's nothing profound about it. It's just
Whatever Maslov's hierarchy of needs it's all bullshit.
All human beings care about is
Being able to eat, sleep.
And reproduce. And flex on your neighbor. That's like the true those are the only things that matter to us as human beings. And obviously OnlyFans takes like a huge one of those. And then TikTok, Instagram, social media takes a huge one of those, and then the rest is just fun and games.
Have you ever played into the Flex on Your Neighbor very directly and specifically? Oh, that was the ATM machine I'm of course, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
There was a website that we made a long time ago where it was
First person.
social media footage of dining experiences at the finest dining establishments in New York City. So like
Imagine like vertical videos of Oh, I'm at Carbone, here's my meal or like
Noma or Eleven Madison or Perse or Lebernadine.
And then we created a website that published all of this footage so that you could download it and
Post it to your stories. So it looks like you're eating at all these places. And people did it.
So many people use this.
One of my friends has this great saying, We're not searching for meaning, but for the feeling of being alive.
Is that what you
Or chasing, do you think?
For ourselves or for the people who interact with our stuff? Both.
Definitely not meaning.
I don't think we're smart enough to
even know that for ourselves much less other people.
The feeling of being alive.
Yeah, maybe.
The truth is, I just don't even think we're that profound about it at the end of the day.
It's a lot simpler.
We see the world in a very particular way.
And then we communicate it in a very particular way. And I think
In some senses, music is the best analogue.
I think mischief is a band.
And we have a very particular sound.
We have a particular set of instruments.
And we've been on tour for a few years now, and it's going pretty good.
Which is great because when we first assembled, we were only playing a wedding's to really like continue this analogy. But then it started to work.
We just have a sound.
Mm-hmm.
People seem to be into it.
I know you have the right people. You've recruited the band members.
What have you learned about doing that effectively? Like
What is great recruiting?
abstracting away the kind of person you're recruiting.
What have you learned about
Getting ridiculously good at that.
The initial core group
So there's like a founding team of
Four others.
We started
Jamming together.
Back in twenty eighteen, I think.
And there was no sense of recruitment there. It was just the vibes. Vibes and we all had nothing to lose because we had nothing going for us.
This was pure luck, but we're still so tight and aligned even today.
Even though we've grown in our own context has changed and Ms. Just place in the world has changed.
But there is something so magical about being in a room with that.
initial group of people where you're just scroving.
We were just so remarkably on the same page, but had such complimentary skill sets.
Nothing like it.
But then of course, like you have to grow and you have to like find your team and I think
You place a lot of value on
Things that probably end up reflecting
Yourself a little bit.
I think like attracts like.
And for us.
We have a high emphasis on
The ability to like
Roll up your sleeves to be scrappy.
to get through that impossible task.
We have a big emphasis on
Being a good person, which I know everyone says, but for us specifically, that means you're humble, you don't bring in ego.
And what that usually ends up also meaning is that
People here are nerdy and introverted.
So
Even though I think we're pretty well known now, you might even say famous.
If we really wanted we could start.
Showing up in these circles with these
Socializes at these
Clubs and parties, but we don't.
No one here does. No one here cares.
In fact, I think a lot of the people here when some of our stuff really pops off, they actually don't know'cause they don't even care if it's big or not.
They just care that they made it.
And I think that sensibility is really valuable. That's why this place exists even today.
And that's why
We really haven't had many people quit.
Never.
Under five, I think.
In five years. People stick around.
Does it feel like you're at any sort of crossroads right now?
Yeah, yeah, it totally does.
There are a few things that are going on.
One.
Our context has changed.
We're not unknown underdog as much anymore.
I wouldn't say we're establishment.
But we're just a lot more well known.
That changes how
We see the world a little bit and that also changes the type of work that we can do a little bit.
Because we're just bigger.
The other part that that also impacts is
It changes a little bit about how we see ourselves and how we talk about ourselves and how we like communicate with others. There was a time where we were a huge black box. I would never be doing this interview with you.
Because there was value in like the secrecy.
when nobody knew who we were and they couldn't understand our intentions or motivations or like our goals.
But now that we're more visible.
I think we're hitting a point where it makes
sense to share a little bit more.
And hopes that other people
See this.
And walk away.
rethinking their own perspectives on like
creativity and the act of creation and doing things.
Which I think is really good.
So those are sort of the philosophical internal struggle crossroads.
But then there are other crossroads too.
in the world right now, I think virality is increasingly just a cheap
Tool.
Like I said earlier, back in the day.
The act of going viral was black magic.
Ten years ago.
But it's not the case now. Now it feels
Artificial, cheap, kinda gross.
So we're thinking a lot more about
Almost how to suppress vir virality.
actively fight that which is a crazy thing to think about. That is not what
a real business would say to do right now. It's continue to hemorrhage as many free eyeballs as you can, no matter where they come from or what the intention is. Just keep doing it.
For us, I think it's an important time for us to think about how do you make that a little bit harder for people? How do you create more secrets?
So that's another crossroads that we're at. And then
I guess.
From like a business point of view.
We also have to
think about the difference between quick short term cash and long term cultural importance.
Where our motivations are. The opportunity to make money
Tomorrow exists. But then we have to remind ourselves
Was that the goal when we started?
Or has our goal changed?
What is that now?
And I think where we're
ultimately navigating to is
When we started this, it was always how do we create a world for ourselves where we can just make all the stuff in our heads.
And then do it with our friends.
And I think that very much continues to be the case.
And then the other part is
For better or for worse, we want to see this last as long as possible.
And we don't really know what that means or what that looks like.
Were you surprised by that?
When you started, did you think that you would end up caring that this thing lasts for a very long time?
Nope.
No, not at all.
Not at all.
I think we're like getting to a point where
This can be important from a historical point of view.
But to do that we need to last a bit longer.
Five years is not enough, ten years is not enough. It probably needs to be closer to twenty years.
Sure, part of this is vanity driven.
For sure. But the other part is
I think it's the highest calibre of personal challenge.
Which is how do you make sure that what you did was actually important.
How do we make sure that
We survive this test of time so that
it was important enough for kids to actually learn about this in art school or
their history classes.
In the same chapters of Duchamp and Warhol and
Maybe we're creating like a new
area of study altogether, who knows.
Part of me I'm also like getting older. I'm like in my mid thirties now and I spend a lot of time talking to students.
I'm so excited when they are inspired by what Mischief does.
Because unlike
most kids in design school or art school or fashion school, like you get the degree.
And you go get the job, and typically it's some sweatshop at like an ad agency or a fashion house or
a design studio and you have to like politic your way up
to creating more bullshit work that you don't really care about. So that maybe in your spare time you do something that's creatively fulfilling.
When they see mischief, they believe that it's all possible.
That's kinda cool.
So I'd like to keep that going as long as I can.
A strange challenge for you.
Imagine a open
Area of a big bookshelf.
In which I want to place an object, a mischief object.
That
When I look at it will remind me of everything you've told me today.
Which object do you think would
Do that best.
It's gotta be the tech software.
It's the box set of our TurboTax competitor.
It's got the CD ROM and the booklet inside, but on the outside it's just anime.
I think that's a really, really good example. Where did that come from? You've mentioned that twice. Tell that
Story in closing here.
ingredients there is a adversary which is turbotax and there's plenty to unpack with turbotax.
their monopoly and their dark UX patterns and
How it's just a questionnaire at the end of the day, but they upsell you for like all these random things through fear.
Plenty to unpack there, so good adversary.
We also believe it shouldn't cost you money to file your taxes. So there's that as well. And then there's this other
observation that
Everything is becoming anime.
Or everything is becoming if you want to
Consider.
metaverse avatars games, like everything is heading in that direction.
One of the things that we love to do here more often than not is jam two completely polar opposite worlds and together to create something new.
And that led to TurboTex three thousand, which is our version our free competitor to TurboTex.

You started on the internet.
In the days when it was heady and fresh and new and like a frontier.
Feels very different today.
Do you think the internet still has a sense of place?
I don't know.
Personally, it feels a little bit depressing.
Because
I don't know if people are
Creating as much
Newness.
Versus
And this sounds so jaded and cynical, but I think people are just creating what their gods are telling them to create.
And the gods are TikTok. The gods are Instagram and
any moment where like the algorithm changes or like there's a new platform update
people change their behavior. Exactly right. Like they're not creating road new
And then
You look at what performs well and then you mimic it.
You copy it and then
Ultimately, like when you zoom out, everyone is just feeding into this frenzy.
Which is a bummer.
But I think everything moves in cycles.
And I also think
At the end of the day, human beings are
A deeply creative species.
I'm bullish that we're gonna figure it out.
The pendulum will swing in the other direction before too long.
The last question I ask everybody, what is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?
I don't know if it's the kindest thing.
But I remember this
meant a lot to me and it meant a lot to a lot of us here.
There's a very well known artist named Paula Peevee.
She's
represented Italy at the Bienale very, very far along in her career.
She's also represented by Periton, who we're represented by
And she wrote us a note.
I think six months into that time where we were starting to get accepted by that world.
I paraphrased, but her notes said something along the lines of Of all of the greats that I've gotten to know over my career.
Mischief is the one that seems to represent
The future of that.
They would have wanted to see.
But then she also accentuated with that.
Make sure that you don't
create for them at the same time.
And that kinda stuck with us.
That's just the first thing that came to mind when you asked the question.
Gabe, I think this thing that you and your team have created is so
Singular.
It's so obviously
Uh incredible form of self expression for you guys.
I hope that people take a little bit and just wonder about
What?
something similar could mean for them and go create some stuff.
And hopefully someone creates like a competitor and we have beef someday.'Cause that would be good for business. So you could duck out your neighbor. Exactly. Exactly. Thanks so much for your time.
Thank you.
Mm.
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