You may know MSCHF for their stunts, performance art, shoes, or other provocations. I’ve known Gabe for a long time and this was a special conversation. I feel grateful to have caught him at a reflective time for MSCHF and himself. After a decade+ of going viral, how did they do it, what matters, and what comes next?
Please enjoy, including a list of my favorite lessons and ideas from the conversation.
Dialectic Episode 31: Gabe Whaley: Playing the Crowd and Outlasting the Hype - is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube, and all podcast platforms.
14 Lessons from Gabe Whaley on Going Viral, Reinvention, and the long game of making MSCHF
The black box can be a storytelling tool. “We’re not necessarily trying to hide anything; it’s because the mystery lends more to the imagination than reality ever could.”
People don’t share other’s content, they share their reaction to it. The early internet was about amplification, but the incentives have flipped. “People don’t share things because they’re interesting anymore; they share things to fuel their vanity. Instead of me sharing a link to something that’s cool, I’ll share a video of me talking about a link that’s cool.”
You’ve got to believe in something. “That’s not a thing that’s talked about so much anymore because a lot of it is audience-driven. What are you making for other people? Have you verified it with data? Have you done user interviews? To really make art, don’t let the crowd drag your vision down to the lowest mean. Take the chance. It could be shit, but it could be great. And that is always worth it.”
Depth is anti-fragile. When you’re hooked on going viral, the only move is to go bigger, louder, and produce more content to feed the beast. The antidote is to go smaller and deeper. True significance comes from holding a “relationship with a small audience for as long as possible—and then a little longer. Then maybe you have a chance of something with significant staying power.”
Novelty comes from cross-pollination. Take an idea from one industry, rip it from its native context, and drop it into another where it doesn’t belong. A good remix often starts with taking a culturally ready-made–something already loaded with meaning—twisting and re-launching until the familiar looks alien. The intersection of two worlds that never talk is the easiest place to make something feel fresh.
Creativity can be engineered by hunting for inputs. MSCHF schedules brainstorms and builds their own curriculum of reference material—collecting stray ideas, outsider references, and unrelated topics. Even daily routines become creative assets: public spaces, overheard conversations, or the chaos of a commute are all sources of raw material.
Play the crowd. MSCHF’s best work isn’t done when they release it. True spectacle happens when the audience takes an idea and runs with it: “They have consumed the idea, and they have become the idea.” This is how your creations can become truly meaningful, but in that process, are no longer yours.
Avoid the tyranny of the now. “We’re all stuck looking at our own faces now. That makes it really hard to see what’s next. Or even to care about what’s next. That is a golden opportunity because everyone is stuck looking two inches ahead of them. A few people will have the discipline to look 10 years away from now.”
Celebrate creation, not response. After you go viral enough times, you will feel nothing. Even the most addictive drugs wear off. MSCHF celebrates before their drops, not after they’re successful.
Creating the conditions for others to create is its own kind of art. For Gabe, that means, assembling the right people, engineering ideal conditions, and absorbing the operational hiccups so the MSCHF team can be free to create.
Subvert the real. The best material is often real: banks, businesses, marketplaces, legal frameworks. A prank embedded in reality hits harder than any narrative arc because it can’t be dismissed, and more importantly, because it forces a response.
Use virality as a Trojan horse for substance. Gabe and the team aim for ideas that “slap in one sentence and slap harder in three.” Let simply appeal or provocation smuggle your idea into enough hands that it can mutate, grow, or crash on its own terms.
No black box is interesting forever. MSCHF has begun to peel back the curtain as it evolves. “The doors are open. That puts us in a place where we have no choice but to let the work speak for itself, because the black box is not going to do us any favors anymore. It’s putting our money where our mouth is. No more tricks. No more games. The work will have to be so good. And we’ll die on that sword. If it’s not good, that’s not good.”
The physical world awaits. As the internet subsumes more and more of our attention, the real world becomes an increasingly special canvas. A room that holds three thousand people experiencing something deeply is more valuable than millions of scrolls and likes and reactions.
Description
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). We sat down to reflect on the last 15 years and the arc of MSCHF, what made it special, and where one goes next when virality makes you feel nothing and the internet feels mature.
The conversation includes MSCHF’s eye-of-the-beholder legibility, their obsession with value, the power of mystery, and how the product doesn’t culminate with release, but after the audience has made it their own (in MSCHF parlance, “playing the crowd”). We also discuss the creative process behind the hit factory, how acting as a label rather than individuals changes their relationship to the work, whether the cultural future is actually canceled, how the internet has changed, and how real world experiences offer something to the creator and the consumer that digital life simply can’t. We wrap-up by speed-running through many of MSCHF’s internal values, from “always punch up,” to “death is just as importance as birth,” to perhaps its defining frame: “nothing is sacred.”
I hope you are inspired toward play, originality, embracing discomfort, and having the courage to burn it all down and start anew.
Timestamps
(0:00): Intro
(2:21): Value and Legibility
(13:24): Is the Future Canceled?
(20:00): We Create as a Result of What We Believe In
(26:11): What Makes a Good Remix
(29:08): How MSCHF Relates to the Current Thing and Evolves What Game it Plays
(38:31): Creating Something the Crowd Can Play
(44:59): Emphasis on Craft and Objects Rather than Creating “Lifestyle”
(47:27): Keeping Up in a World That Demands Constant Production
(53:11): Resisting The Internet’s Scale and Lack of Friction
(1:03:15): Accidental World Building, Process, Creative Inputs, and Focus
(1:14:09): Creating as a Collective and Gabe’s Role in Enabling the Team
(1:22:30): Trust, Shedding the Black Box, and Staying Original
(1:30:35): Applied MSCHF – Doors are Open
(1:34:21): Sarah Andelman, People Who are Still Excited, and Long Time Horizons
(1:41:52): Buzzfeed
(1:44:41): MSCHF Values
