The Smartest Idiots in the Room

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[upbeat music] It's two forty-seven AM on a Tuesday in March twenty twenty-one, and a group of twenty-somethings in hoodies are hunched over workbenches in a windowless factory space in Maspeth, Queens. The scene looks like a heist movie. Someone is on lookout. There's blood involved, their own, actually, being carefully injected into the air bubble soles of Nike Air Max ninety-seven sneakers. They have approximately fourteen hours until a federal restraining order hits. Nike's lawyers have been on the phone all day. The sneakers in question, six hundred and sixty-six pairs, each adorned with a bronze pentagram, an inverted cross, and a single drop of real human blood mixed with red ink in the sole,

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and they've already sold out, all of them, in under sixty seconds at one thousand eighteen dollars a pair. The company making them is called MSCHF, pronounced Mischief, and their lawyer has just gotten word that a US District Court judge is preparing to shut down the entire operation. So they're pulling an all-nighter,

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racing the legal system, stuffing shoes in boxes like they're loading sandbags before a flood. "It was just one of the best bonding moments," one of the co-founders would later say. "You feel sort of like Indiana Jones getting in the door before the rock tumbles on you."

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By sunrise, they'd shipped every single pair except one, the six hundred and sixty-sixth shoe, which they'd planned to give away on Twitter before the court said no. Nike's lawsuit accused them of trademark infringement, dilution, and deceiving customers into believing that Nike manufactures or approves of Satan shoes. The athletic apparel giant demanded all profits, triple damages, and a permanent injunction. And Mischief's response? They released a T-shirt priced at sixty-six dollars and sixty cents. The design, a screenshot of Nike's legal complaint. Here's what nobody wanted to talk about, though.

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See, this wasn't the first time that Mischief had done this exact thing. Just two years earlier, they had released Jesus shoes, the same Nike Air Max ninety-seven, but this time filled with holy water from the Jordan River instead of blood, and those sold out in minutes, too. But Nike didn't sue. The only difference? Well, Jesus was good for the brand, while Satan [chuckles] was not, and that's when it hit me. Mischief

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hadn't made shoes. They'd made a trap, a legal, cultural, theological trap disguised as footwear. Nike walked right into it. The lawsuit was the product, the controversy was the art, and the blood, well, that was just garnish. Today, Mischief is valued at over two hundred million dollars. They've released nearly one hundred drops, everything from microscopic Louis Vuitton handbags that sold for sixty-three thousand dollars to tax software, where you file your returns by going on virtual dates with anime characters. [chuckles] They've been sued by Nike. They've been shut down by Boston Dynamics, criticized by the Vatican, and called everything from internet trolls to the most important art collective of the decade. So today, we're gonna dive into the very weird and very dumb world of a company called Mischief. You've probably never even heard of them, but you might have seen some of their stunts, some of their pranks, and I guarantee you, they are sort of the epitome of what not to do and succeed. Welcome to Dumbify. I'm your host, David Carson. Let's get dumb.

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Dumbify, let your neurons dance. Put your brain in backwards pants. Genius hides in daft disguise. Brilliance wears those googly eyes, so honk your nose and chase that spark. Dumb is just smart in the dark. Dumbify. Yelling like a goose! It's thinking wrong on purpose with juice.

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[upbeat music] Okay, so here's the dumb idea we're examining today. The best business strategy might be having no strategy at all. In fact, making pointless things, refuse to explain them, and let confusion do your marketing. [chuckles] Now, I know what you're thinking, "David, that's not business advice. That's more a cry for help." And you'd be right to think that, because everything we've been taught about building a company says exactly the opposite.

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So, for example, know your customer. Mischief doesn't know who buys their stuff. They don't even wanna know. Or the business advice to solve a real problem. But Mischief, well, they actually create problems: expensive, confusing, occasionally blasphemous problems. Or there's build trust through consistency.

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Well, Mischief releases a new, completely unrelated thing every two weeks, a rubber chicken bong one month, uh, a paintball armored robot dog the next. Or maybe things like, explain your value position to your customers. But Mischief's founder once said, quote-

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...

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... lends more to the imagination

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than reality ever could.

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The question isn't really whether MSCHF is weird, because obviously [chuckles] they're weird. But the question is, what if weird is the only viable strategy left? In a world where everyone is optimizing their A/B testing, focus grouping their way to the exact same bland middle, maybe

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the contrarian move is to be genuinely, unapologetically, inexplicably

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strange. Maybe pointlessness is kind of the point. To understand how MSCHF became the anti-company company, you have to understand Gabriel Whaley.

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And to understand Gabriel, you have to start with possibly the most un-MSCHF origin story imaginable. [upbeat music] Gabe went to West Point. Let that sink in. The founder of a Brooklyn art collective that sells Satan shoes, puts paintball guns on robots, and describes itself as a dairy company, attended the United States Military Academy, the institution that has produced more generals, more discipline, more starched uniforms than any other place on Earth.

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And Gabe lasted two years. He said he chose an undefined path after West Point, and he later said that that was a decision that required embracing the unknown. Translation: He had no idea what he was doing. He was just... Well, he just knew that military structure wasn't it. [upbeat music] So Gabe moves to New York. He gets an internship with BuzzFeed around twenty fourteen, right when viral content was becoming its own economy. And he found his way into a little department that was essentially doing what MSCHF does now: making weird internet things that people couldn't stop sharing. And then his department at BuzzFeed got shut down just months after he arrived. [chuckles] Just classic! Most people would have seen that as a setback, but Gabe didn't. He used the time to start tinkering with his own ideas. His first project was a website that sold bad advice for one dollar on Twitter, and that went viral. His second project, called Late Night Snap Hacks, was a site that let you fake your Snapchat location, so your friends would think you were out partying when you were actually just, you know, in bed eating cereal at eleven PM. And that also went viral. There was a third project called Wingman, and that was kind of a Tinder dating app clone, but it would only work on airplanes, because apparently, you know, that's, that's what people needed. So every time something worked, Gabe noticed this pattern. The things that broke through weren't solving problems. They were filling gaps in the market. They were creating moments of, "Wait, what?" They were making people stop.

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You know, they would just stop scrolling, and they would say something out loud. And Gabe said, "It's kind of like doing drugs." [chuckles] By twenty sixteen, Gabe had gathered a small crew of fellow weirdos, Lucas Bentel and Kevin Weisner, as co-creative directors and officially launched MSCHF. Their first major drop was called The Persistence of Chaos. It was a two thousand and eight Windows laptop loaded with six of the most destructive malware programs in history, viruses that had supposedly caused over a hundred billion dollars in damage to the global economy, and they sold it at auction for one point three million dollars. A laptop full of viruses. So someone wanted that. They paid over a million dollars for that,

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and that was the moment MSCHF realized they weren't just making products, they were making art, conceptual art, that people would pay real money for, not despite of its uselessness, but really because of it. The thing that makes MSCHF different from every disruptive startup that came before them is they're not pretending to be something they're not. Most companies try to seem cool, but MSCHF is just genuinely bizarre. Most brands, well, they'll manufacture controversy for clicks, totally fabricated. But MSCHF, they actually make products that are the controversies. As Gabe put it-

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We believe it is better to make art that participates directly in its subject matter. It is stronger to do a thing than to talk about a thing.

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I like that. [upbeat music] So every two weeks, like clockwork, they drop something new.... Sometimes it's shoes, sometimes it's a game, sometimes it's a weird rubber chicken that's also a functional bong. The only constant is that it will make you say, "Why does this even exist?"

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And then make you share it with everyone that you know. Now, you might be thinking, "Sure, this sounds fun, but being weird only works until someone bigger decides to crush you." And yeah, you'd be right to wonder, because MSCHF has been sued, restrained, shut down, and disabled by some of the most powerful entities on Earth. And the remarkable thing is that every single obstacle only made them stronger. Let's go back to those Satan shoes. When Nike filed their lawsuit, they were furious. The filing claimed that MSCHF had caused, quote,

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"immense confusion," [chuckles] and, quote, "tarnished Nike's brand with an unwarranted association with Satanism." People were calling for Nike boycotts. So picture right-wing politicians just demanding action. Pastors were giving sermons about Nike shoes. And the part that made MSCHF's lawyers smile was that Nike never sued over the Jesus shoes, which were shoes that MSCHF had made a couple of years prior, if you recall. And it had the same modification process, the same Nike Swoosh prominently displayed, and the same sort of sneaky, we-didn't-ask-permission vibe. The only difference was the public's reaction. So Nike wasn't suing because MSCHF broke the law. They were suing because MSCHF broke... Well, they broke the wrong taboo. The Jesus shoes made people smile, but the Satan shoes made people freak out, and Nike only cared about their brand when the freaking out started. MSCHF's attorney, David Bernstein, said the quiet part out loud. He said: "MSCHF's controversial statement was intentional, and Nike's lawsuit effectively amplified MSCHF's artistic message." Okay, so the lawsuit was essentially free advertising. Every news story about the legal battle showed the shoes. Every outraged tweet drove more interest. The temporary restraining order from Nike, well, that was actually content. When they eventually settled, agreeing to a voluntary recall, I love that, MSCHF issued a statement saying that they'd already achieved their artistic purpose, because the shoes, well, the shoes they made illegal became instant collectibles. Secondary market prices just went through the roof. The story of the shoes Nike banned became more powerful, more valuable than the shoes themselves. And this is what happens when you build a company that wants to be attacked.

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In February of twenty twenty-one, MSCHF did something that even they probably thought was a little crazy. They legally purchased a Boston Dynamics Spot robot, you know, the creepy dog-shaped robots that go viral every time Boston Dynamics releases a video of them, you know, dancing or doing parkour. Then they mounted a paintball gun on it. Then they put it in an art gallery and let random internet users remotely control it via their app. It was called Spot's Rampage.

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And for a brief, glorious moment, anyone on the internet could just log in, take control of a seventy-five thousand dollar robot dog, and have fun firing paintballs at art installations. But for some reason, Boston Dynamics was not pleased. First, they released a statement condemning the project, saying it violated their terms of service and represented exactly the kind of weaponized robotics they don't want to be associated with. I get it. Then, and this is the part that kind of blew my mind, they actually remotely disabled the robot. According to the gallery that hosted the work, Boston Dynamics remotely disabled MSCHF's legally purchased robot via an undisclosed backdoor. Think about that for a second. You buy something, you pay full price, it's yours, and the company can still reach inside and turn it off?

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So what was MSCHF's response? They renamed the piece. Instead of Spot's Rampage, they renamed it as Spot's Revenge and exhibited the disabled robot as a commentary on corporate control over consumer products. So the obstacle essentially became the art.

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And then in February twenty twenty-three,

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MSCHF released what might be their most successful product ever, the Big Red Boots.

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They look exactly like what you're imagining: giant, cartoonish, bright red boots that make you look like the Japanese cartoon character, Astro Boy. The material is described as thermoplastic polyurethane, which is plasticky rubber, and ethylene vinyl acetate, which is essentially rubbery plastic, and they retailed for three hundred and fifty bucks,

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and they sold out in under seven minutes.... Within days, they were selling for over two thousand dollars! Celebrities like Lil Wayne, Diplo, were wearing them to NBA games and fashion weeks. The hashtag generated over twenty five million views on TikTok. There was no celebrity partnership announced in advance. There was no influencer campaign. Just, "Here are giant red cartoon boots. They look stupid. They cost three hundred and fifty bucks. Good luck!" And the obstacle here wasn't a lawsuit or a robot kill switch, it was kinda logic itself. These boots, they made no practical sense. First, they're really uncomfortable, they look really absurd, and you can't wear them to most places without really getting stared at awkwardly, [chuckles] and that's why they worked. You know, in an economy where every brand is trying to seem effortlessly cool, MSCHF achieved something really rare. They made something that was effortfully ridiculous.

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Time for science. Time to get unnecessarily nerdy with it. 'Cause nerding out is what we do, and we're not going to apologize for it. Get ready for science. Ooh, ah!

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Okay, so why does this work? Why do things that make no sense generate more attention than things that do? Part of the answer comes from a psychologist named Jonah Berger at Wharton. His research on virality identified six factors that make things spread, and he calls them STEPPS, S-T-E-P-P-S: social, currency, triggers, emotion, public, practical value, and stories. Kind of a mouthful, but MSCHF hits five out of six on basically everything they do. So social currency. Well, wearing big red boots makes you the main character. You're not just wearing these shoes, you're wearing a conversation piece. And triggers, well, they release drops every two weeks, keeping themselves constantly in circulation. Emotion, every product generates a very visceral reaction, usually either, "I love this," or, "I hate this." Public, you cannot miss someone wearing these big red boots. Stories, every MSCHF product comes with a narrative, usually involving someone being angry about it. And the only factor they skip is practical value, because why would you add that? But here's where Berger's model misses, I think, in what MSCHF figured out instinctively. The strongest viral mechanism, I think, is more or less one single factor, not these six factors. It's more about cognitive dissonance.

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When you see something that violates your expectations, so like shoes with blood in them, a microscopic handbag, or that tax software that was actually a dating simulation, your brain just kinda does a double-take. And in that moment of confusion, you reach for your phone, because you gotta share whatever this is, [chuckles] with someone else. So that confusion is really what creates the connection.

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Researchers at Stanford call this the psychology of the unexpected. When something defies categorization, our brains spend more processing power on it. We remember it longer. We talk about it more. I mean, that makes sense.

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Dum, dum, dum, dum, Dumb Word of the Day. Dumb Word of the Day. It's a word. It's dumb. Use responsibly.

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[upbeat music] All right, it's time for my favorite part of the show. It's time for Dumb Word of the Day, and today's dumb word, pretty cool. It's

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pataphysics, spelled P-A-T-A-P-H-Y-S-I-C-S, pataphysics. Pataphysics was invented in eighteen ninety-three by a French writer named Alfred Jarry. He defined it as if physics studies the laws that govern the universe, and metaphysics studies the principles behind those laws, then pataphysics studies the stuff that shouldn't exist, but does anyway, the exception to the rules, the imaginary solutions to nonexistent problems. Sound familiar? MSCHF is basically a pataphysics lab. They create imaginary solutions to problems nobody has. So what Jarry understood, and what MSCHF has since, I guess, monetized, is that exceptions are more interesting than rules. The things that shouldn't exist are more memorable than the things that should. Pataphysics treats every absurdity as worthy of serious study. It says, "If reality is arbitrary anyway, why not make the arbitrary more interesting?"

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Let's use it in a sentence: [upbeat music] I used to think building my career required strategy and planning, but after watching MSCHF succeed by making blood sneakers and cartoon boots, I've decided to pursue a more pataphysical approach. Specifically, I'm going to start a company that sells bottled nothing and see what happens.

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Actually, wait, I think MSCHF maybe already did that. Never mind. All right, here's your challenge for this week, and I'm calling it the unexplainability audit. Here's how it works. First, think about something that you're working on right now, you know, a project, a presentation, a creative pursuit, even if it's just an email that you've been drafting, and then ask yourself, "Could I explain this in one sentence to a stranger on an elevator?" And if the answer is yes, good, that's what normal people do. But now I want you to ask, "What if I made it harder to explain? What if I added one element that made someone say, 'Wait, what?'" Not confusing for confusion's sake, but something that disrupts the expectation, a detail that doesn't quite fit, a choice that seems arbitrary but might actually be interesting. Bonus points if someone asks, "Why did you do that?" And you genuinely don't have a good answer. I think you're onto something. [upbeat music] And that's our show. Thanks for getting dumb with me today. I'm David Carson. If you want more delightfully inexplicable ideas, subscribe to the Demifying newsletter at david-carson.com. Until next time, this is David Carson, signing off from the beautifully pointless space of imaginary solutions, where the only strategy is having no strategy, and the experts are still trying to figure out what just happened.

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