YouSaid · the spoken record

Gabe Whaley

lines on the record: 94
first: 2024-11-26
most recent: 2024-11-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“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, because it's a vanity thing at the end of the day, you're like being accepted by people in high positions that were 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.”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As the outsider, not by choice, we're all outsiders because just somehow we would never land it 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”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 crickets. 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.”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 $27. 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 30s, early 40s, athletic build. He had on a suit with a Oxford shirt that maybe was unbuttoned one too many times, five o'clock shadow gold chain, Gucci loafers.”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess like day three, it was fully open to the public, and by that point this thing was truly like the talk of the town. It was the piece of Art Basil Miami 2022 to the point where the fair made us relocate it because the crowd was getting so big it was blocking fire escapes. They signed five extra security guards just to like man the crowd because the crowd was also like getting not 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 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?”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up meeting Emmanuel Periton who represents a lot of artists that a lot of people are familiar with, like Maurizio Catalon, who had the banana at Art Basel a few years prior. So of course he was going to 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 Basil. 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.”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they're like, no, no, no, again, that's not how it works. We have 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 get 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. Back to the original point of the story, I start cold calling all these galleries because 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 Gagozhin and Pace and Hauser and Worth and White Cube and Zorner. I was just going down from the top of the list. And none of those panned out. But somehow through a different avenue, I had”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 fair. 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 booths 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 Mr.”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So gamifying the flaunting 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 Basil, Miami, and it seems to sort of be like the armpit of the rich people will. And the more that we 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 our basel? We don't even know what it is actually, right? So we find artbasil.com or whatever and start cold calling the people who run artbassel.”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is actually a funny story because it was never about going to Art Basil, 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 cache, 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.”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not the zeitgeist because mischief actually doesn't exist in the zeitgeist 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-made, 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 Duchamp did that with the toilet. Toilets are designed for what we all know toilets do. But then he like puts it in a gallery setting or a museum setting and 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.”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. If I knew how to articulate 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 a 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.”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, similar sort of feeling vibrant energy from like the digital outputs that we had 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”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“During the 30 seconds between when the shoes sold out and 30 seconds later, I started increasing the inventory on the back end until 30 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 700 pairs as fast as possible. It was 11.30 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 talked. We were not celebrating, but we also weren't fighting and we walked back in silence to the studio and as soon as we got through the door, credit card started flying and phones started dialing. We were hitting up every big box retailer in the tri-state area. We needed to buy 700 pairs of these shoes, make all of them and deliver on the sales that we had done because we had just never seen anything.”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We ended up getting 67 pairs, brought them back to the studio, made all of them in three days, got the packaging, and were 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 want to be stuck holding the bag on 67 pairs. They sold out instantly again. So we're looking at some like $100,000 in our bank account. And this is where my recollection of this 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 kind of blurry and hazy. I remember the guys were like, not really celebrating, but yelling and stomping 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 in the Shopify. Apparently.”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 send 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 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 Aramax 97 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'll take how many do you have? And they're like, for real. And I'm like, yes.”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is going to 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 a 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 12 sold out immediately. And that was the most money we'd ever made in our lives. It was like $25,000 and we're looking at the Shopify like, oh my God, we're rich. This is crazy. But in the meantime, we checked the site traffic and it's just continued.”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What do we price it at? What's the Bible verse where Jesus walked on water? It's Matthew 14 25. Okay, 1,425 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 water scape. 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 going to 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 going to 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.”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just tell you the first two. So the first one, and this was crazy because again, we're like not fashion people 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 shoe and inject water into the air bubbles because 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 Airmax 97 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 going to do this, how do we build as much symbolism into this as possible? Well, okay, how many do we make? Let's make 12. One for each.”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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.”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, exactly. Looking back, and I've talked to some people in 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. Got CC'd into like.mil email chains. I got CC'd into like corporate email chains at MasterCard and other places. People would lose their jobs if anyone found out the information that I had access to. I got CC'd into Craigslist casual encounter email chains of a guy looking for a blowjob in Times Square.”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I made my own. I made my own competitor, it was called Reginald. Same premise UC 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 24 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-Seeing me into their email threads as an 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.”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was a time where there was the early AI personal assistant craze x.ai where people were like CCing Amy at x.ai into emails and saying, I would literally be emailing with someone, coordinating a meeting. And they're like, yeah, yeah, I'm CCing my assistant, Amy. She's going to help us find a time 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”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And it's not even about going. Virality is not the goal. Virality is just 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 one digital thing. I guess I can tell you one more. This is kind of funny. I guess I can tell you about this one. I might not have ever spoken about this before.”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is back when people use 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 200 people. I just unfriended 30 people. I just unfriended everyone I went to high school with. Truly actually like alarming in hindsight. This was going to happen regardless. So I didn't do anything to encourage it. 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 scrolling. 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?”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. Well, the iMessage GIF is definitely like a great first example. Another one would be the day that Donald Trump announced that he was going to run for president. I guess this must have been 2016. There were like rumors in 2015, but I think this really went down in 2016. 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 OpenGraph URL that would load up anyone's list of friends who have liked Donald Trump”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 of 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.”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Inevitably will run out of money, but it looks like that's celebrated these days. Maybe there's a way to spend 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 2019 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 spans being”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, back then it was like a very selfish thing. We were just bandits. 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 smarter enough to get some of that and let's make the best work of our lives and then...”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got represented by the blue chip gallery. We're creating content that's going to 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?”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 represented. We raised like a good amount”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 this boils down to 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”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To 2017, I continued doing these projects, but I also started to meet other people who spoke this similar language. We all sort of like were 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 were like true software engineers and hackers, people who were like real artists and real craftspeople 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”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Because 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 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 kind of felt like anything was possible. And so between the years of, I'd say, 2013.”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These days, friends 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 100 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 manage 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.”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 is 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”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somehow these websites would get a ton of attention. And I started to learn about the relationship between 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 GIF of those three dots formatted in a way where if you saved it to your camera roll and messaged it to someone over i messaged it would re size itself to look perfectly as if someone typing it forever 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”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My friends were, or how am I supposed to dress? I talked 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 that kind of made fun of everything that I was observing.”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 able to hold down real jobs at real call centers that I was expected to make, 80 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 2011, 2012, 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 bit of a sheltered upbringing that ended up culminating in West Point where you're even more sheltered. And so like by the time I got out as a 20 year old, I was seeing the real world for the first time and not really knowing like where my place was or like who.”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big challenge when we started because I think it's really easy for a creative or artistic person to have their head 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 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”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. It's just part of like a common understanding that we have here of seeing 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 of these ideas, how do you like actually turn it into something real? And I knew that would be a”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you really had to think about 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 dictate 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.”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 going to 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 as someone in the fashion world, they'll make comparisons to like supremely more valenciaga or Lueva. Also things that I've wanted to thought about in the last few years. Everyone's actually when they look at mischief, I think they just see a reflection of themselves in the worlds they inhabit a little bit. And that doesn't mean they always like it, but that is what they see.”
2024-11-26 · Invest Like the Best · Gabe Whaley - Building MSCHF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.398] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source