Gabe Whaley launches MSCHF's Applied Mischief agency — treating global brands as cultural raw material

Exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster. Sleep deeper, wake up energized. You can discover podfatsleep. com. And I believe we have our next guest, Gabe from Mischief. How you doing, Gabe. There he is. Welcome to the stream. You are live at the TBPN Ultradome. What's new with you? Uh how you doing?

I think everyone knows you. Maybe just launch into uh the the announcement this week about uh the the private military corporation that you're starting. Oh, you saw the Twitter. I didn't think anybody looked at that. Interesting. Everyone saw that. Everyone saw that. Yeah. Yeah. It's uh Sure. Sure.

What What do we do this week? Well, we launched an agency called Applied Mischief. Yep. The agency honestly like to to rewind where where does that even come from?

And a lot of people don't actually understand this about mischief because probably what you see is like videos of people wearing boots or like press headlines or whatever. Uh but the way we're actually organized is we are essentially a holding company of different creative enterprises based on categories.

So there's like a handbag division, there's a footwear division, there's a fine art division. There are other divisions I can't really talk about yet, but with like more bigger permanent structures. Um well, you talked about a division you can't talk about, so I hit the Oh, nice. Nice.

So we we've been operating like that for for a second now. And to make that efficient, there's been an internal back office that's like normal, right? Like finance, legal, manufacturing, customer support, but also like design and marketing.

Y and that's a group that not only does design, but also applies that sort of like mischief magic like viral juice or whatever. Yeah. Um so the thinking here was we might as well open up that to external clients. it can become a profit center, which is great.

But the other part is like maybe it can make our world a little bit bigger, too, because we're hungry for more formats. We've made so much stuff over the last like six years. What have we not touched yet? And like maybe we won't get sued this time around.

Like maybe there's just stuff that we can do that's like cool, we can uh Well, it's it's there what what seems obviously exciting to me is partnering with with global companies.

I mean, sure, I'm sure you'll partner with with startups and and scaleups and things like that, but what what gets exciting at a certain point has to be scale. So much, hey, instead of selling like a thousand of this thing, can we figure out can we partner with a company does an Apple ad?

It's like that's just not there's spe there's something special about that about just like giving it. It's almost like patronage in some ways. It's marketing, but it's just like it's still art and it's cool and it's like un unbridled. No, totally. Totally. Right.

Like the way that we look at these is like it's not a service that we're providing necessarily. Like there are brands and entities in culture that we perceive as cultural material. The same way an artist looks at their material is like paint or sculpture or marble or whatever. Like for us, Coca-Cola is material.

Give us that and we'll make something new with it instead of fabricating a marketing story to sell more units that people see through now anyways. Right. the opportunity is like there's just so much cultural material being left on the table to make new things with. So talk to me about inbound versus outbound.

I feel like in that vein of like there's cultural material if you come up with just like I have a great idea. It it would only work for this particular brand because the nature of the idea is tied deeply to the lore of that brand.

They're never going to think about this, but I need to I could the only value I could get out of this is selling it to them.

Uh are you going outbound and pitching big companies and saying I have a I have the idea for you or is it more like there is an actual process where you can sit down do I'm doing outbound outbound right now. This is a message for Gabe Newell from Valve. We want to design your submarine. I love that.

That would be an amazing project. That's that's the outbound. That's what I want to do. Or uh extraterrestrial space research organizations. We want to design that you're putting in space. I love it. We were look, we were fast company's number one design in the world in 2023.

People don't think about that cuz they think about viral, but if you actually look at like what we do, it is unparalleled. So, let us uh let's like put some stuff. We got a we got a space play for you with with a company that we're very close with. I won't say anymore, but uh yeah, we we'll talk after the stream.

Um I I have a bunch of uh I have a bunch of questions. one quickly on the business model of the new agency.

Is there a world where you would you would uh you know the standard agency model will be like hey let's do this project and we'll charge you like a million bucks or a couple million bucks but there's some scenarios where you could actually I imagine if it was a one-off more like drop style you could take a percentage of of the sales even is that something you would ever explore to get to really bet on yourselves and say like hey we think we could sell like a $10 million of this and we'll only price based on on success.

Is that is that something you would consider doing? It's totally on the table and it's it's not that's not even uncommon from like the collaboration route.

Like some of the collaborations that we've done in the past have been that kind of model where it's like you make a bunch of product together, we both invest on our own ends and then you split the cut afterwards.

I think what's more interesting though is because of Mischief's position as like this artistic entity like in a way like we have a personality, we have an audience and so we're actually like building a pipeline of joint ventures. Yeah. With Yeah, that's what I was getting at. It's not even about 10,000 units.

We're talking about millions of units. Yeah. Over forever, basically. Concern. Yeah. Like I want I want the I want a mischief themed line of of kids toys, right? Like I would happily buy those. I I would buy a bunch of those, right?

And so that's like if you partner with the right company that should be in the the you know my personal lifetime value would be in the hundreds of dollars and I would even pay a premium. Yeah. Because I know it's you guys behind it.

Um another question I have uh you know I've I've leveraged the the drops kind of model to do marketing. I was inspired uh by you guys uh uh to do marketing for my last company, Party Round.

And something that I've noticed recently, a lot of companies in tech say they want to do drops, and it's because they're inspired by mischief and they just see like drops get attention. I want attention. I One drop, please, sir. One drop, please. One drop, please. The usual, sir. Sign me up.

No, but the thing I usually push back on and the thing I'm curious to get your opinion on is like I think when companies think they want to do drops, what they really want to do is true advertising and they don't even know the difference.

And so like where where's that line for you and how often are you know would you talk to a company and it's like what you really want is to do advertising. Yeah. Just like a consistent message delivered via every channel forever might be the right thing for not even forever or like a few months for a quarter. Yeah.

I would I would take it even further and it's it's like that is the final goal which is like get a message out into the people get them talking whatever but like the the focus on the drop is is misplaced. Drop is just a delivery mechanism for something new.

What these guys are actually looking for like what they actually want at the end of the day is how do you break through the noise? And right now you can either just make more content, which honestly the ROI, I think, is going down on that. There's too much content and not enough demand. Yep. Sorry. It's just how it is.

But the opportunity is you can make new things that fit within your brand parameters, that use your brand as cultural material, that are actually interesting, that are tactile, that have a story to them. And if they happen to be ephemeral, then it's a drop. But don't get hung up on the drop.

just make something interesting. That's all are ideas valuable and and and and if you had to you know what kind of think about like a a making something new, how much is it is it the idea versus the execution? Do you hire Do you hire idea guys and then like operational excellent people and they're like a dividing line?

Yeah. And and to me I I John and I will sit down with companies that we're friends with and we'll generate like 20 ideas. It ends up being super frustrating because you're like we're get we're feeding you this like incredible idea.

It doesn't even cost a lot to do and if you do it right like it could be like a million dollars of like you know brand value, however you want to measure that.

But it it it feels like you can give people these these things that in your hands they might be million-dollar ideas but but uh poorly executed poorly executed negative value. Totally. I think it's like uh like squeezing a balloon on two ends. Like there's the conceptual power and then there's the execution.

Uh there are things where like the concept is really high. And the execution doesn't have to be crazy. You don't need a huge budget. It's just a good idea and it's going to work. What you typically see a lot of brands do is they're afraid of good ideas because good ideas have not been done by definition.

Um so they lean more on the execution and you see like large budgets and like huge bloated teams and production.

So it's sort of like now if you can dial in both that's the magic right that's but that's really hard to do because more money more risk you want to it's you just you don't you want to derisk on the concept side. John, to your question, uh, I don't hire idea people. Everyone here is an idea person.

We did, I'll give you an example. A couple of years ago, we made handbags, right? They're very expensive. The smaller they get, the more expensive they become. So, we made a microscopic handbag that sold at auction for $63,000 at Paris Fashion Week, at Corell's whatever coronation of Louis Vuitton.

That idea came from a summer intern. Anyone here can have an idea, right? the lawyer. Our general counsel joins brainstorms. Our ops lead joins brainstorms because being creative doesn't mean you have good ideas. Being creative just means you're human.

You have insights and you have reactions to things that are going around you. That's it. And then also like being creative means you're not afraid to like look stupid. And I think that's like a big defining trait here because anybody can look stupid here including myself.

What uh have you ever seen highly complex ideas work well as marketing advertising stunts? This is something that uh we we end up I think David Oggov said like simple ideas are powerful ideas. That's certainly something I've seen in Mischief's work throughout your entire career.

But is there some sort of contrarian or nuance to that concept? I think there could be. The the line that we use here is a good idea should slap in one sentence and then slap even harder in three. And that just means there there are layers, right?

Like you appreciate it for the headline, but if you like really dig into it, you're like, "Wait up. Is this thing making fun of me? And do I still like it? And am I gonna it? " And if I buy it, am I a chump or am I a patron of the arts? Right? It's like uh the layers are good.

The ambiguity is good, but at the end of the day, like from a marketing perspective, just being practical right now, like people's attention spans are so low and honestly like people are just we're all like very distracted. So, you don't have a lot of window to like nail it.

So, you do got to have that one liner like pretty dialed in. How uh how dialed in is your crystal ball when it comes to releasing new things on the internet? Like do you have a do you feel like you usually have like a pretty accurate sense of how much attention something will get?

Do you get surprised or do you still get surprised often? Totally still get surprised. Like you you always get surprised.

I think um it's easy for us to fall in a comfort zone where we're like oh yeah like this will work because what that ends up doing is you start coming up with ideas based on a framework of what has worked. Mhm.

So we actually put in a lot of effort to come up with formats and mechanisms that don't really fit into our existing framework that we're like I don't know if this is going to work and is this offensive? I don't know. Are people going to buy slices of this giant foam baby that we're cutting up in Brooklyn? I don't know.

They did. No, you know, like is there a project that you think is like criminally underrated? People are obviously familiar with the boots. They're familiar with the uh the the the shoes and the footwear stuff and some of the other projects.

But what what what's your what's your example of a project you're like, "Ah, that's still like one of my favorites. " Good question. And the reason it didn't really get seen as much is because to be honest, we were a little bit scared. Okay. And so we end up buried it in an art show that we did.

But uh are you guys familiar with the paradox of the ship of Thesius? Yes. But explain it for the listener. Totally.

So it's like uh it's this old paradox where imagine you have this like large wooden ship and every day over seven years you're coming up with a new piece of wood identical to a piece of wood on the ship and you are swapping it out. The question is after 7 years is it the same ship or is it a different ship?

We found that uh a very interesting question and so we decided to uh apply that in our own way to a sink located in the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As one does. How do you as one does? Yeah. Explain. So we we found the sink. We did recon. We uh not me. I'm not I it wasn't me personally.

It was somebody here names. But we found, you know, we we tracked down the serial numbers, the parts, uh, ordered exact like replica. We we ordered the exact same parts, built it here, tied off the dimensions of the bathroom here so that we could practice swapping things out.

And then over many months, we would walk into the Met and do a quick swap and leave. Then the next day, do it again and do it again. Bolt by bolt, screw by screw. Just an art enthusiast. I just I just like art and I I go to the bathroom. That's all I'm big. How did you get the big piece through?

Isn't there like one piece? That that so that we decided to leave. Okay. That we did not swap out. Although we had um a plan. We we we we fabricated a wheelchair that could have hidden in the seat. But that I'm telling you, we got we got a little bit we we were honestly scared. You got a little carried away.

We still we still did it. we got everything else. And uh so yeah, they they they have our sink and we have their sink and ours is now um part of like our art gallery. So that's amazing.

Although although I believe they figured it out and they've replaced it cuz as soon as we announced the art show, even though the sink was sort of like hidden in all of the other pieces, um people definitely found out and there was a line in the Met for that bathroom. people.

They should have they should have sectioned it off, turned it into an installation. So, if anyone if any of your if any of your viewers are on the board of the Met, uh the coolest thing you could do right now is acquire that sync from us and put it back. Let's make it happen. Let's make it happen.

Army, how how many millions of dollars do you think you've left on the table by not doing crypto projects? The painful question. Is it like a It has to be like a hundred million like at least. Yeah, probably. Honestly, probably. Probably. Yeah.

Um and is there is there um uh like there I'm sure at some point there will actually be a way to do this. Like there has to be something that makes sense.

Like we did something back in the day with party round where we did it was called helpful VCs where we made crypto punks for every VC and then we put them on a website and we said you have four hours to retweet these otherwise we're going to auction them off and it was like it's for like charity right we weren't like trying to make money and that was like one of the ways that we broke through and like shortly after um uh I think there might be something to do with crypto in like stable coins where there's not as much gambling involved but there might be something with crypto I don't know.

Yeah. Yeah. You have to remove you have to make it not like a speculation, you know, based on because as soon as you leave the like like the the people who get the joke are and then the people who don't get the joke show up and then and then they're losing their life savings, that doesn't feel good.

Uh whereas whereas like if somebody, you know, is is bidding on that handbag um like they they probably know what they're doing. They understand that it's not and they understand that.

Look, I think I think that crypto route for us is um we've often plotted our own death and I think there's like a chaotic evil way to go out where you just pull that rug. Yeah. I shouldn't even because now everybody's going to know. Everybody's going to know.

Well, I think um switching gears to to another uh topic that I'm I'm sure you guys uh so one, I don't think AI is going to take your guys' jobs anytime soon.

Uh despite it being able to maybe piece together, you know, random ideas, uh it's so much about uh taste and things like that, but uh how excited are you to leverage that technology for for some of um for some of these various plays?

Honestly, TBD and I think I think it's I do I will say like unlike the whole like crypto craziness of the last couple years, um we we didn't get into that cuz we didn't feel like it was here to stay yet. That that's like the truth.

Like when you see the herd run so fast, it usually means they're running towards the end of a cliff. There's a little bit of a similar sentiment right now. That said, I it is rooted in something real. Um, but we're not in a rush to like use it necessarily, right? If it's going to be here forever, we've got time.

Like it's mischief doesn't win as a first mover. If you look at all of our work, it was never about being the first to react to something or the first to like make use of a format. Um, so we'll see. We just have to see.

How do you think about uh are there any projects like time is an interesting variable that you can play with, right? Like part of the thing with the the the the sync stunt that you guys did is is just the narrative and the story of like you guys were conducting this in secret for a long time.

It was like a very and and that's part of what makes it so entertaining is kind of like the the lore of what went into it. But but have you thought about even longer term plays like things that you could do over a decade or or or 50 years that in hindsight would just be absolutely hilarious?

And uh but but again take this sort of incredible planning. Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, we are at that stage of just like our lives and as a company now to be thinking like that, right? Cuz like if you think about it, we we're in Yeah. If you if if you had, you know, I know you guys have have a few investors.

If you told your investors, first thing we're working on is a 50-year stunt and you're they're telling you like, "All right, buddy. " Like, "Why don't you put some points on the board first? " Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But you guys, I feel like have earned it now. Like I I you know, something like a decade. No. Yeah.

Cuz like we've we spent basically like we've only been around for the pandemic and post like a little bit post pandemic, right?

And all of that was just like you don't know what's coming like live day by day like just survive like banks are shutting down okay get through to till tomorrow right but now we've been around for a second we're more well known we have our existing infrastructure and now we really are asking the questions of like okay what does that legacy look like in 10 years or should we uh should we disappear for 20 years and then come back that would that would actually be the coolest thing we could do is uh go dark for two decades and then come back with a banger.

It's worked for It's worked for other It's worked for other artists. Um I I I uh could you do something? So So we both loved uh Nathan Fielder's latest sort of like aviation stunt television show. I can see I've heard a lot about it. I haven't watched it. I mean you you should.

It's one of the few people in the world that I think is executing on your guys' level in the sense of he's next level. Yeah. Like one sentence, you know, pitch. That's hilarious, but then the more you get into it, like the funnier it is.

But could you do something like that for like the cost of housing or something like that? Like sort of a decade long stunt like Mischief like Mischief figures out a way to like reduce, you know, cut the cost of housing in the United States. I mean, that was the craziest. Yeah.

Like, we um if there are any uh like pricey neighborhoods that would love to commission us as an artist to install a sculpture, we have a really good uh trailer park trailer that we would love to erect in a public square that will drive. I can just see like the like the right RV. Like there's this RV outside of our gym.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. kind of yellow from the sun. Really, the windows are open, the aluminum on the outside. Yeah, Winnebago. It could be a stunt for Winnebago. What do you um how do you feel about the state of uh social media like broadly?

Uh it it feels like we've gotten to a point where in many ways the platforms look so similar, but they also have their own character. Some of them are becoming Lindy.

even thinking about how durable like Twitter and Axe have been despite all this change, but what what's your and and do you even do you do you feel like you need to use social media or are you better off not using it and then just releasing you know stuff on the platforms? Yeah. Yeah.

It's um definitely a lovehate relationship with the with the platforms, right?

Because like platforms, if you if you really think about it, they started as a way to share things that you found were interesting and now they are mostly ways to share uh photos and videos of you talking about things that you find interesting.

It's kind of become like less novelty based and more vanity based, which is fine. That's like a fundamental human instinct, so I get it. Um, I would continue to love to find a way to not use the platforms to disseminate information. And that's kind of how we started. Our first audience portal was Venmo.

Um, we had a huge audience on Venmo. And we like had this huge phone bank, uh, like a Chinese phone click farm. And we every time we had a new project, we would Venmo our audience a penny and they would get that notification because that's the most powerful notification layer in your ching. The chuch-ing, right? Yeah.

I am now banned from Venmo for life. Well, PayPal, let me know. PayPal. We we'll have the CEO of PayPal on. I think the last company that came on works with Venmo. We'll we'll uh we'll work on this. We should get this first. This is this is important.

Um uh we were we were reading an article in the New Yorker yesterday about this concept of IRL brain rot, the the the examples were the viral laboo laboo Dubai chocolate, the the viral Italian sandwich. Uh we saw a few of these.

Joe Weisenthal at Bloomberg was also writing about the the these kind of like viral as being something that you stamp on your product as a product feature almost and I was wondering if uh if you're worried about the the the spillover from uh internet slop culture into the real world just kind of how you're tustling with this idea of brain rot coming into the real world.

I don't even know if you read the article or you have thoughts there but I think I saw it on Instagram. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. You probably did a frontfacing video talking about it or you saw someone do a frontfacing video talking about it. Reaction video. Yeah.

I mean, look, it would I I I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but like what Mischief has put out historically is kind of in that brain rot category. Yeah. I mean, the boots the boots, right?

It's like absurd absurd aesthetic and and maybe maybe even I could be so conceited as to say we were part of creating the responsible.

No, you guys definitely that that it was an era of minimalism and it was like the the Everlane era and the boots the boots are like, you know, an incredible reaction to that of being like absurd absurd aesthetic just like popping imagery off of your screen.

But then the ch the challenge with this this trend, right, is if you go back to minimalism, it's it actually becomes I mean maybe maybe as as like for me, right, I'm I I became part of the mischief audience and mischief customer in my early 20s. I'm in my late 20s now.

Eventually, maybe I'd want some ultra minimalist uh you know, mischief item for my home.

But but but but at the same time like once you get on the on the on the maximalist track like you're kind of on this maximalism treadmill where you just got to keep like going crazier and crazier and and you know maybe maybe in the internet era there's no turning back. It it's totally possible, right?

Like we might we might have built a machine so effective that it's now our master and like how do you break free from that, right? But um I'm not too worried. Like we don't we actually don't think so hard about it. We just kind of make the things that we like and then uh if it ever stops working then do something else.

Yeah. Figure it out. Well, I I have an idea to put out in the ether. I think next time a an A-list celebrity is going through a massive comm's crisis, PR crisis, or a scandal, they should hire you guys to create something more more viral than than the scandal.

just need to they just need to do another crisis to compete with that. All they got to do is go to Twitter and be like, "Send a Bitcoin to this address and I'll send you two Bitcoin. " And then they actually do it. They actually genius. Yeah, that is a get that is a one time get out of jail free card.

You heard it here first. Just payoffs. If you Yeah. If you're a celebrity and you're in trouble, you're you're you're caught at a Coldplay concert, that's the only way you can reverse the tide. You will be good. Go for it. Yeah. Awesome. This is great. Yeah, thank you.

It's really great great to get the update and uh just hear your so much clarity on on all these different areas that we talk about all the time. Yeah, we could talk for hours. Yeah, we'd love to have you back uh whenever whenever it makes sense. Yeah, we gave Gabe and I kicked around an idea that we won't share now.

We'll we'll we'll leverage that for for your next appearance. I can't I can't wait for it. 100%. Let's do it. Awesome. Awesome. I'll talk Great to catch up. See you. Cheers. Bye. Absolute legend. One of the best to ever. What if we found out that that Dubai Chocolate was was uh was was a mischief stunt?

It's It's possible. It's possible. Anything's possible. Well, if you want uh to do a stunt, you want to promote a stunt, you want to have some fun with billboards, head over to adquick. com. Out ofome advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.

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