“Everyone bifurcates the world into content and distribution,” Whaley told me. He has brown hair, is of average height, and was wearing a nondescript gray t-shirt and jeans when we talked. “From the beginning, we viewed those as the same thing. Each object gets better with more participation, and so does MSCHF. Scale is not the goal. Scale is a too... See more

• What’s one word on your mind right now?

• What’s an idea that jumped out at you from what you just heard?

• What did this remind you of?

• Share one way you might make this better. 

• On a scale of 1 to 5, how confident/excited/clear are you on what you just heard?

• Raise your hand if you felt ____ about this. Raise your hand if you felt _____ about this. (

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We say that the most powerful work operates through evoking visceral, emotional responses, yet we’ve been seemingly conditioned to believe that critiquing and evaluating is the professional necessary first step. But the fact is that we can’t truly feel an idea, we can’t truly live an idea if we’re standing on the outside and looking in being clever... See more

Creativity requires connecting the dots, and connecting the dots requires allowing time for my subconscious to consolidate my ideas and make associations. This means that, from time to time, I need to just stare out the window and do nothing.

This doesn’t feel productive, even though it is.

As someone who has decades of experience on the web, I hate to compare myself to the tortoise, but hey, if it fits, it fits. Let’s be more like that tortoise: diligent, direct, and purposeful. The web needs pockets of slowness and thoughtfulness as its reach and power continues to increase. What we depend upon must be properly built and intelligent... See more

Thinly veiled insults (“Really?”/“That’s weird”/“…interesting”) are often compliments delivered by people who are at odds with themselves. Take them in stride.

In our society, the spaces for adults to play are mostly constrained, for example, to sports, or going to the pub. And opportunities to live a life of imagination are reserved for exceptionally privileged people, like designers, actors, artists and film directors. This lack of imagination in our lives is an existential risk for society and humanity... See more

The core idea is to explore the emotional dimension of songs and pieces of music by putting together a judicious sequence of personal narratives related to hearing or performing the work in focus.