31: Gabe Whaley - Playing the Crowd & Outlasting the Hype
Gabe Whaley is co-founder and CEO of MSCHF (Instagram, Wikipedia), the art collective, fashion and footwear brand, startup, and fill-in-the-blank, famous for its viral products and cultural interventions. A few notable works include Jesus Shoes (Nike Air Max filled with holy water), Severed Spots (a "decentralized" Damien Hirst print), Museum of Forgeries (One original Warhol and 999 perfect forgeries), and of course the Big Red Boot. This conversation was heavily influenced by MSCHF's recently released Made by MSCHF, a "textbook," through which the team peels back the curtain and shows us inside the black box that has produced more viral hits than one can count.Gabe had a sheltered childhood and went to two years of army academy at West Point before eventually finding his way to New York City to intern at Buzzfeed around 2014. In his spare time, he started releasing weird internet projects under the name "Miscellaneous Mischief." After tasting virality a few times, he started collaborating with likeminded creatives and eventually formalized MSCHF in 2019.I've known Gabe for many years (and even did a small collaboration with him from my seat at 100 Thieves).
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Speaker A: Welcome to Dialectic, Episode 31 with Gabe Whaley. Gabe is the CEO and co-founder of Mischief. Mischief is hard to pin down. Depending on who you ask, it's a startup, a fashion brand, performance artist, cultural commentator, and a virality machine. There's probably a long list of other descriptions any given beholder might see them as too. Over the years, they've become a category of their own, and people will often describe mischief for X when talking about spectacle marketing or the viral drops they're known for. For nearly 6 years, they released a new drop every 2 weeks, a product, a website, an art piece, or something even weirder.
You may have come across MSCHF by way of some of their most famous releases, stuff like the Big Red Boots, the time they cut up a Damien Hirst print and sold it for parts, the time they created 999 forgeries of a Warhol drawing, mixed them all together and sold them all. And the Jesus Shoes, the Nike Air Maxes they filled with holy water back in 2019 that were probably the first time MSCHF went supernova on the internet. I've known Gabe for years, and Mischief and he are at an interesting turning point.
I think it made it a particularly interesting time to sit down with him and reflect on where they've been, what they've learned, how they do what they do, and where they might be going. I think any creative person and anyone who's interested in how the internet is changing us, our attention, and what we value will find Gabe's philosophy at the very least thought-provoking. He and the Mischief team are keen to say that nothing is sacred and and they are definitely always finding new ways to be irreverent. And yet this conversation made it even more clear to me how much they deeply care about the act of creativity and making sure to find new ways to stoke that flame and begin anew.
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