The Tim Ferriss Show: #671: Bobby Hundreds — Building an Iconic Streetwear Brand, Making $7 Million in 40 Minutes, The Power of Garfield, Why Korean Entertainment is Taking Over the World, Maintaining the Mystery, The Fickleness of Fortune, and Developing “Nunchi”

00:00:00 - 00:30:00

In this episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, Tim interviews Bobby Hundreds, the co-founder and chief creative officer of The Hundreds, a global streetwear brand. They discuss Bobby's background, his work in the streetwear industry, and his involvement in various projects. Bobby also shares his publishing journey and his passion for writing. The conversation touches on topics such as community-building, finding a sense of belonging, and pursuing one's passions despite societal expectations.

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00:30:00 - 01:00:00

The podcast explores the success and impact of The Hundreds, a streetwear brand that gained popularity through blogging and streetwear. The founders emphasize the importance of long-term cultural impact over short-term financial success. They also discuss their experience working for Warp Magazine, which allowed them to showcase their diverse talents and challenge the notion of excelling in only one area. The conversation touches on the rise of Korean pop culture and entertainment, attributing it to intentional efforts by the Korean government to export their culture globally.

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01:00:00 - 01:30:00

The podcast delves into the cultural impact of South Korea in various industries such as gaming, film, music, and pop culture. It explores the concept of 'Han' in Korean culture and its influence on emotional repression and artistic expression. The hosts also touch on the growth of Korean companies like LG, Samsung, and Daewoo, as well as the power of collaboration and community-building in the streetwear and fashion industry. They highlight the importance of relationships, diversity, and the Korean practice of 'Nunchi' for success.

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01:30:00 - 02:00:00

The podcast discusses the challenges of managing a growing network and the influx of requests and messages. It explores changing phone numbers and the benefits of having a new number, including temporary silence and privacy. The speaker reflects on the success of their fashion brand, The Hundreds, attributing it to collaborations and trends. The podcast also discusses the importance of survival and thriving in the streetwear industry, anticipating market saturation, and meaningful product creation.

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02:00:00 - 02:30:00

The podcast explores the launch strategy of a fashion brand, emphasizing the importance of creating hype and limited supply. Collaborations with artists and independent properties are discussed as a way to maintain authenticity. It also explores the revenue streams and focal areas of The Hundreds, a direct-to-consumer brand, including their success during the pandemic and seasonal drops. The podcast touches on the cultural impact of reclusive celebrities and the allure of leading a private life. It also mentions the worth of investing in NFTs and the challenges associated with the NFT journey.

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02:30:00 - 03:00:00

The podcast delves into the rise of NFTs and their impact on various industries, such as art and fashion. It discusses the potential for physical assets to be converted into digital assets on the blockchain, eliminating the need for escrow periods. The conversation also highlights the challenges and opportunities associated with NFTs, including the need for more emphasis on holding NFTs and the complexities of the NFT community and user interface. The podcast emphasizes the importance of building robust infrastructure to keep users safe in the crypto and blockchain space.

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03:00:00 - 03:27:32

The podcast discusses the importance of artists and creators continuing to produce new work over time to build a brand and increase the value of their previous creations. It uses examples from the art world and fashion industry to illustrate this concept. The guest also mentions the potential of NFTs as collectibles and the need for creators to explore different marketplaces to monetize their work.

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Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs.

This is Tim Ferriss.

Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show.

This is an in-person episode and I'm sitting in...

I heard my little Pikachu in the background.

I am sitting in an Airbnb in Venice, California.

It is a beautiful bluebird day out today,

unlike some of the gloom that we've had before this.

And my guest today is Bobby Hundreds.

You can find him on Twitter at bobbyhundreds.

Bobby is an artist.

He's a great artist.

Bobby is an artist, designer, and storyteller

based in Los Angeles, where we are right now.

He is best known as the co-founder and chief creative officer

of global streetwear brand The Hundreds.

He's also behind the Family Style Food Festival

and the NFT project, Adam Bombsquad.

Bobby is also the best-selling author

of This Is Not a T-Shirt, a memoir about his life

and how he built a brand around community.

His newest book, NFTs Are a Scam, slash NFTs Are the Future,

about his two-year journey into Web 3

we'll publish through.

I never know how to say this.

How do you say this publisher's name properly?

Ferraro Strouss and Giroux.

Yes, exactly.

FSG.

FSG.

I think that's why they just go with FSG.

Which also publishes some of my favorite authors

of all time.

So I may come back to that in just a second.

Twitter, as mentioned, Bobby Hundreds.

Instagram, Bobby Hundreds.

TikTok, not surprisingly, Bobby Hundreds.

And then bobbyhundreds.substack.com.

Bobby, so nice to hang with you.

Nice to hang with you too.

I guess as of this week, Blue Sky.

Yeah.

Blue Sky.

Blue Sky, man.

Let's start with FSG.

How did you end up signing with FSG?

Because I think FSG, they've been around a very long time.

Unique shop.

They publish any number of folks,

including I believe quite a few of John McPhee's books,

which are spectacular.

How did you end up landing on them?

I think it could be wrong.

Maybe the most Pulitzer's, some of the classical.

I would vote a yes for that.

If I had to bet, I would bet.

It's a little bit of a different publishing house,

a little bit more intellectual and writerly.

And that was really in tune with the type of writing

that I've always practiced and been drawn to and attracted to.

So I was actually just as surprised as anyone else

when I sat down with all my different publisher interviews.

And that was on the table.

And then they came back with the strongest offer

and were most receptive to what I wanted to write about,

which at that time for that book was just the story of my life.

I hope that's a testament to the type of writing that I do.

I write the entire book myself.

And I think many people are often surprised to learn

that most people don't write their own books,

especially memoirs.

And if you're a successful business person,

you don't write your books.

It requires a lot of labor and time.

And I actually enjoy writing.

So maybe that means that I'm a true author.

I do have a little bit of jealousy,

maybe even a little writerly insecurity.

You know, FSG, that's legitimate.

So here you are with this esteemed publisher, FSG.

Where did you begin in terms of growing up?

Let's begin at the beginning.

I don't always do this,

but I think it might be helpful in this case for painting a picture.

So where does the story begin?

I grew up in Southern California.

I was born in Baltimore,

but I grew up in Southern California in a town called Riverside,

which is an hour east of here,

and to the more towards the desert.

And it's just, we call it Browntown.

It was smog and dust and rocks and dirt.

And everyone is brown like me,

but not a lot of Asian-Americans.

And so I felt a little bit marginalized,

just a little bit outside of the mainstream conversation.

And didn't feel like I belonged.

I didn't feel like I belonged necessarily in my own home.

I was a middle child of three boys

and just was the outcast, the black sheep.

I remember walking into our bathroom in the morning

and everyone had a white toothbrush.

And for whatever reason, my parents gave me a black toothbrush.

And I was like, there it is.

Subtle.

Yeah, there's the illustrated example

of how I don't belong in this family.

And so that was always my narrative growing up.

I never quite got along with my parents or my teachers or authority.

So I gravitated towards fringe interests,

ones that welcomed me like skateboarding and punk rock

and the hardcore scene.

And also me being an artist,

that's where I really found a home.

And I started building relationships

and friendships around that.

And I never felt like I quite had a community.

And so when I found these subcultures,

that felt like a resting place for me.

And then that's what also encouraged me

or incentivized me to build a brand, really,

which is what the first book was about,

was I didn't have a universe of my own.

So when you create your own brand and company,

you can do that.

You can build your community piece by piece from the ground up.

Two questions related to what you just said.

The first is how did you relate to Korean culture

and the connective tissue, the behaviors,

maybe the beliefs in that environment?

I would love to know.

And then secondly, when did you begin to identify as an artist?

Oh, wow.

So I'll answer the second part first.

I was always so appreciative

that anyone would acknowledge me as an artist.

I think that was the first rung of identity

that I could hold on to

because I didn't necessarily feel

like I connected with my Asian American heritage.

My parents were immigrants.

They had emigrated here to the States in the 70s,

along with a lot of other Korean Americans and Asians

because the government opened it up at that time.

And their old world, more Eastern views,

more Confucian ideals didn't necessarily

parallel with America in the early 1980s,

which was all about individualism.

And there was a certain aesthetic of the type of person

you were supposed to be

and you're supposed to fit a specific mold

and you weren't supposed to stand out.

And me not feeling like I necessarily fit

into the context of my family or my town,

I wanted to champion that.

Like I really owned the fact that I was different

and especially through the lens of my art.

And that really went against

what my parents were trying to instill in me.

You know, the Confucian ideal is that

you live a very circular and non-disruptive life, right?

You go with the flow.

Lots of filial piety.

Yes, that's right, exactly.

And so for me to speak out or speak against

or to not be a rule follower

was so problematic in my household.

And that was abrasive against my father

and we just had a lot of friction because of it.

That only made me feel more of an outcast.

Did the art start when you were, say, five?

Was it Legos? Was it drawing? Was it comics? Was it D&D?

Like what informed what you were doing

with your hands or keyboard?

Where was it manifesting?

As early as I can remember I was drawing.

I found pictures and crayon illustrations

from when I was three years old

at my parents' house the other day.

I vividly and viscerally remember drawing those pictures

and what my process was and what I was thinking about

if there was a kid on a seesaw with a beach ball next to it

and how to make it look more of a ball

than just a flat circle.

And so there was never a time where I wasn't an artist

and actually when I think back that far enough

as soon as I could read and write, which was quite early,

I ended up skipping first grade because

even before I started kindergarten,

I was reading full books and not children's books

but actual more or less...

Anna Karenina.

Les Miserables.

But then they realized I could read and write quite early

when I think I was around four at that time

so then they just kind of accelerated me a bit

but I started writing at the same time

and so the art and the writing went hand in hand

and to me they were both the same language.

I felt like I was doing the same thing

but writers have a little bit of a chip on their shoulder.

I don't think society or culture necessarily

appreciates writing the same way that they do with the arts

because visual art is a lot easier for people to consume

and to understand and it's a lot more palatable,

especially me in the 1980s growing up and to your question

what was informing my art was Garfield comic strips,

Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson,

and I think Calvin and Hobbes to that point

is more about the writing than it is actually

about the illustrations, the way that he was processing ideas

and delivering jokes.

That's much of my humor, my sarcasm came from that.

Garfield was more about the style of character

and caricature as well and so between those two

that's what inspired me, motivated me to write.

We were growing up in the time of Saturday morning cartoons

and comic books and Eastman and Laird's Ninja Turtles

and so I became known more and more not as

oh there's that weird Asian kid in the corner

or the guy who's not very good at traditional sports.

It's he's the artist and as soon as I could hang on to that

and really own it I felt like I was special

and now I had meaning and belonging in this community.

So one who has no, let's say, understanding of your back story,

someone who doesn't have the ability to fill in the gaps already,

who isn't from it, maybe this is the first time they're listening to you,

they're like oh, so he took that, he ran with it,

he became a professional artist and then A, B and C

and it just unfolded naturally and now he's at FSG, how nice.

I would like you to...

Oh God, I wish it was that easy and linear.

Maybe, maybe not, you know, but I would love for you to

describe who Abe was, I'm going to keep it very general.

So who is Abe in the course of doing homework for this came across

descriptions of, in particular one conversation,

but conversations that you had with someone named Abe

and so could you just paint a picture of where you are in life,

how old you are, what is happening here.

Yeah, so I wanted nothing more than to be an artist,

nothing more than to pursue a creative path in my professional career

and just in my personal life and that was always frowned upon

growing up in a Korean American and an Asian immigrant household.

You know, my parents went through hell just trying to move to the States

and build a better life, you know, they're coming out of the Korean War,

Korea when they were growing up was more or less a third world country

and for them to endure and survive that amount of struggle,

make it all the way here with nothing and then to watch their children grow up

and one of them to want to be an artist, which again that narrative is always

contextualized as a starving artist or a struggling artist.

That's not why they went through all that.

So they really try to mitigate and clamp that down as much as possible.

I ended up having to draw under the sheets of my blankets or under my bed.

I remember my friends growing up, they were reading playboys,

you know, after the lights went out or comic books and having to hide it.

I was doing that just so I could draw and as soon as my parents would come in,

I would crumple up the paper and throw it away.

And so I wanted nothing more than to have the opportunity to just draw or create

or make art for a living and that was never allowed.

Even my teachers, you know, when I talk to them about it, they're like,

oh, that's no life, you know, there is no path for that.

And it's kind of striking to think about in today's context.

When I think about young people coming up in the social media era,

it is not only allowed and encouraged, there is actually a very clear path

to figuring out a way to make music or dance on TikTok

or to start some kind of social media presence and build a brand out of that.

Again, we weren't allowed this.

And so I had been conditioned to believe over and over again

that I would never be an artist and so I needed to figure out a different way.

I ended up going to law school. It was right after 9-11.

I was freelancing for a lot of magazines at the time, doing a little bit of fashion editing,

traveling back and forth to Japan, covering music and also

the early foundations of Japanese streetwear from a bathing ape,

brands like Neighborhood, Double Taps.

And I've realized the media was drying up, not unlike what's happened

in the last few years, but it was, it fell off a cliff.

You know, the advertisers kind of shrunk and all the books were kind of thinning out.

And I was like, I'm by bookkeeping magazines.

Sorry, by the magazines.

And so I didn't have much work coming in.

And then I did what any good Korean son should do.

I went to law school.

I was going to say, what was on the short list?

It's like doctor, astronaut.

Yeah. Oh, no, no, no.

Astronaut is very unsafe.

Yeah. And there's no, there were no Asian astronauts.

The only reason I bring that up is there was one Korean American.

I can't remember his name.

I wish I could.

Who was like, doctor, lawyer and astronaut.

And I have another friend is Korean American.

He was like, oh, God, this guy's making my life with my parents much, much harder.

Oh, that guy.

Yeah, you know what I'm talking about.

Yes, we all know him.

None of us quite remember his name, but he is the most hated.

We don't bring him up in the house around your parents.

All right. So, so long.

So long.

Yeah. We had really two options in the 80s.

You could be a doctor or you can be a lawyer.

And my dad was a doctor and he said, definitely don't be a doctor.

And so, why did he say that?

Malpractice, just the Clinton era.

And there was just a lot of, you know,

he was blamed for too many things.

He delivered babies.

So liability risk.

Liability and risk.

And he's like, America's so litigious.

You just, it's not worth it.

And doctors do so much.

I mean, it's insane.

The amount of schooling that they have to go through.

And then, you know, to get into that profession and work around the clock.

And it's quite thankless, especially a job like his.

So he encouraged me to go into law school.

And that's where I thought, yeah, maybe I can do this because my logic was I'm a writer.

I'm pretty opinionated and argumentative and persuasive.

Everyone's like, you're a little bit of an asshole.

So I think you'd be great at being a lawyer.

And I wanted to actually enter because I've always been involved in some type of like

socio political work or some type of activist work as early as I can remember.

I was going to like protests and rallies like,

because just growing up in a punk rock scene, that was the background.

So I was like, maybe I can get into some type of human rights or public interest work.

If I go to law school and it's not only a meaningful job,

it'll pay the bills.

And then at night, I can pursue the arts.

I can draw and just be creative and start brands and do what I really want to do.

But again, I had been so brainwashed to believe the narrative that I couldn't actually do that

for a living.

And so no one had given me permission.

This man Abe that we're talking about in my first summer internship,

I was working at the LA Superior Court.

And the research attorney on site was a man named Abe Edelman.

And he was a genius.

Everyone knew him because he had literally memorized the library the first day of work I came in.

He's like, what case are you working?

And I told him it was like a crack in the sidewalk type of personal injury case.

And he was like following me to the library and he felt the books with his hands.

It was so savant, like a beautiful mind.

And he pulled the book out, flipped to the page, you know, 1034 drew his finger down to the paragraph

and was like, there's your answer.

There's your case precedent.

And I was like, how did you do that?

He was like, I memorized library.

This man Abe.

As one does.

Was irascible, very stubborn, did not get along with anyone in the courthouse,

but they all had to abide by him.

And he really took me under his wing.

You know, he had a lot of other interns, but not too old, right?

In retrospect, at the time probably seemed quite a bit older.

Not too old at all.

In fact, he was roughly around the age I am now.

I just turned 43.

I think he was 42 or 43.

At that time, I was 22, 23.

And he looked like he was in his late 60s or 70s because he was actually dying of cancer.

And his body was ravaged.

He looked like a homeless person.

That was another reason people kind of stayed away from him in the courthouse.

He had like a bad smell about him just because of the colostomy bag.

And there was medicines that he was on.

And so we really intellectually struck it off.

I love the man.

And we would go to lunch every day and, you know, talk about like hopes and dreams and other things.

And by the end of that externship, which was about two to three months in the end of August,

You just said externship.

Yeah, you know this internship and externship.

I see the prefixes different.

They are a little different, but it's depending.

It's contingent on law school.

So Loyola law for whatever reason called them externships.

I don't know.

I can't explain why we can call it what.

It's ambide externship, whatever you want to toggle back and forth with.

So by the end of my externship, he started to disappear.

He just wasn't coming around that much.

His health was failing.

And so I didn't expect to actually see him on the last day of work.

I show up and he's sitting on the end of a long bench.

And there were nine or 10 other interns alongside me and he was doing reviews.

So he's going down one by one and I'm at the tail end.

And this is something like a performance review.

It's a performance review.

Just thank you for your time.

This is why I think you work on blah, blah, blah.

He gets to me and say, first of all, thank you so much, Abe.

And he's just like, no, thank you.

He's like, I've been doing this for 20 years.

You're one of the brightest interns I've ever had.

You're going to have all the success and victory in the world.

And I was like, really?

And he's just like, yeah, you're going to be an excellent lawyer.

He's like, you're going to have all the cars.

You're going to have all the women.

And I was like, oh, plural.

I love this.

Yeah, let's go.

I'm all, let's go.

Green light.

Green light.

And I just lit up.

And he looked at me and stopped me and said, but you should never do this.

And I was just taken aback.

I had him repeated again.

I said, wait, I don't, I miss something.

You just said I'm going to be an amazing lawyer.

He's like, oh, you will.

You'll be very wealthy doing this.

You should never do this.

And I said, why not?

Am I not good?

And so I started taking personal offense to it.

I was like, I've done everything you've asked me to do.

I've written these brilliant memos.

He's like, it's not about the work.

Your heart's not in it.

And then I got really defensive.

You know, this is the defensive Korean American part of me

that just starts standing up.

I'm like, what the fuck do you mean?

Oh, you know, I'm K-Rage.

Yeah.

The K-Rage starts coming out.

Like, how dare you say this?

He's just like, what do we talk about when we go to lunch every day?

And I'm like, we talk about work.

And he's like, we don't talk about work.

What do we talk about?

And I was like, OK, we talk about the hundreds, which was an idea.

There was nothing material out of the hundreds yet.

There were concepts.

I used to carry around a black book.

For anyone who grew up writing graffiti or tagging,

we always carried black books and you tag in there.

And you'd share that with your friends and everyone.

This is basically a bound, like leather bag.

That's right.

Sketchbook.

That's right.

And in that book, at the end of it,

I was writing down ideas and building up frameworks for the website

because I also did web design at the time.

So I was building up the website

and then coming up with concepts for t-shirt graphics.

I was like, this is the idea.

It's a streetwear brand, but it's also a media platform.

And it's going to showcase my life and the process

of building a brand from the ground up.

And I'll be transparent.

There is no other clothing company like this.

It's not really even like a company.

It's more of a personal project and it's like a diary.

And so I'd written this all down.

And throughout the entire summer, we would talk about work,

but then we'd end up there every single time.

And he's like, the hundreds.

And I'm like, dude, the hundreds is just an idea.

He's like, your heart is with the hundreds.

He's like, I don't know what it's going to become, but do that.

Because one day you're going to wake up

and you're going to be 40 years old like me

and you might be dying of cancer.

And you may have spent your entire life doing something

that you never truly loved.

And I was like, what about you?

He's like, I was meant for this.

He's like, I was born for this.

Don't you see me walking around these halls?

And he's like, I own this place.

I've loved every second of what I do.

He's like, you will have wasted your life.

And he ended up passing two to three months later.

And then it really resonated with me how short life could be.

And when I turned 40, and again, I'm now 43.

When I turned 40, the morning I woke up,

it's like the conversation happened yesterday.

It was the first thing I thought of when I woke up.

I thought of Abe.

I went actually out and visited his grave.

And I just remembered that moment.

And I was so grateful that he had imparted that advice to me.

Because 20 years really does just go like that.

And the next 20 years is going to go.

And you can say, oh, it's fine.

I'll get to that dream later.

Or maybe I'll do that once I'm secure and stable enough.

Again, the hundreds was a nothing.

It was just an idea.

I had the luxury and privilege of having a little bit of money

and some savings stocked up so that I could survive off of a dream.

And so I should preface it by saying that.

But I really didn't have anything to my name.

And he gave me permission.

It was the first time in my life that anyone had given me permission.

Not only acknowledged what I was trying to do, but saying, you can do it.

And because he gave me permission, then I gave myself permission.

Which was the most powerful part of it of, wait, you can do this.

Why can't you?

Well, everyone's always told me I can't.

You know, I was still a child.

And so all my authority figures were like, you cannot do this.

This is unreasonable.

There is no future.

And so I believed it.

And then for the first time, he's like, you don't have to believe that.

You can believe this.

And then I was like, yeah, of course, why not?

Nobody knows what's going to happen tomorrow.

And then I just stepped on the gas and I never look back.

And so I can attribute that very reason I'm sitting here with you, Tim, is because of Abe.

Man, thank God for Abe.

Thank God for Abe.

Yeah.

If your life circumstances had been slightly different and you had gone there a year later,

how different your life could have turned out?

I had six or seven other research attorneys with different sets of interns in the courthouse that

summer.

And I wasn't even really supposed to be with him.

I showed up late to the first day.

I was wearing big baggy clothes and they were like, oh, you need to go into Abe's camp.

They were like, you're not going to belong anywhere else over here.

You need to go with Abe.

And it would have gone a completely different way.

It also could have gone a completely different way if he had given me permission and I didn't

give myself permission still.

So it was still on me at the end of the day to make the choice of, no, I'm going to commit to this.

And I'm going to believe what he said and I'm going to believe it for myself.

We're going to bounce around a lot because that's the way natural conversations work.

My question is you have this revelation.

You're given permission and then you give yourself permission.

What was the conversation like with your parents?

There was no conversation as a typical in a lot of immigrant households.

I hid that shit.

I ducked my head, pretended like I was going down the law.

It still had two more years of law school left.

I finished law school.

I got it.

So you basically went on autopilot.

I went on autopilot and I started...

That's actually perfect though because you had this grace period.

Where you could be Batman and pretend that you're Bruce Wayne or you could be Bruce Wayne,

but then hide it and put on this mask and be an artist.

This is my comic book origin story.

This is what I always imagined when I was growing up.

I'm going to have a normal day job, appease my parents,

fit into society, make enough money to get by.

So then at night, I could convert myself into Batman or Superman and be an artist.

And so I started doing that.

Even after he gave me permission, I was just like, this is what I want to do.

I'd started law school.

I had to finish.

And what I did starting in the new year was...

It was funny because there were kids that...

Well, now that they're not kids anymore, other students who've become big lawyers,

I'll run into them around the city.

And I'll be like, oh, I remember sitting behind you in class

and your screen on your laptop was bifurgated between notes on this side on the left

and on the right side, it was Photoshop and Illustrator.

And through...

As the class would progress, the notes would kind of cascade down

and then the drawings would start materializing.

And by the end of the class, I'd have a full page outline

of all the points I needed to take home.

And then I would have a graphic, a t-shirt graphic finished.

And it almost became a challenge for me.

I would start as soon as the clock would begin.

I'd be like, go.

And then the professor would start talking.

And then I would toggle back and forth just using shortcut keys.

So just because it's fun to share.

So I did the same thing without a screen.

But all throughout school, I was drawing.

And I would have one side.

This is back in the day.

I'm dating myself here.

Trapper Keeper style, right?

Like, open up.

I'd have the three-ring binders.

And then I would have the spiral notebooks.

And I would have one side where I would do drawing.

And then one side for notes.

I think partially because I had extra cycles, right?

The class was reasonably slow.

And if I didn't occupy my brain with the drawing,

it was very hard for me to concentrate to capture.

So I had to do both.

I also enjoyed doing both.

But I had to do both.

I did that all throughout school until I graduated from college.

I know exactly.

I'm getting goosebumps as you're talking about that

because I know exactly what that is.

And there are a few of us, maybe many of us,

that can relate to that.

And I almost felt like those two blue lines

on the left side of the page,

this area over here is where you did all those doodles

and would just start sketching

just to keep yourself engaged with it.

Otherwise, I would completely tune out

or I'd fall asleep, right?

That's how bad my ADHD is that I cannot focus.

I still do it.

I'm going to do something.

If you ever zoom with me, you'll notice I'm looking down a lot

and it looks like I'm taking notes.

I'm drawing.

Yeah.

And if I don't do that,

I will just completely fly off the path.

Hopefully not going to offend anybody,

but even when I am interviewing someone on stage

and if I have a clipboard and pages,

I will sometimes doodle some type of abstract geometric pattern

because it helps me concentrate.

It's not that I'm bored.

I'm listening.

It just helps me concentrate.

So let's provide people who are not familiar with the hundreds

just a flash forward and then we're going to flash back.

So could you take a second just to brag about the hundreds?

Sort of when shit was the craziest

and it was just like, oh my God, I am riding a rocket ship.

Just so they understand some of the impacts,

some of the status of the hundreds,

could you just maybe give people a snapshot

of if this were a time warp and you get shot forward?

And they're like, okay, here's a preview

of some of the crazy stuff that's coming

and then we're going to go back.

But just for people who are not familiar with the brand,

let's do that.

And then just take like a minute or two to be like,

okay, here are some of the bullet points

and then we'll flash back.

We had very sudden and sharp success out the gate

and we're very ill prepared for it emotionally

and spiritually, mentally,

and it would have been much worse today.

I very much empathize with young influencers, brands,

people who suddenly are on the map

because the immense weight of the internet

congratulating you and adoring you, it's flattening.

I think it's too much.

And I felt that in a very fractional way

at the very first end of the web one internet,

you know, with the blog.

The reason why we had so much momentum was that

people were discovering the hundreds,

LA streetwear and whatever this movement came to be

and also online narratives and blogging all at the same time.

And so for those who don't quite remember this,

blogging began in 1999 with Blogger and Blogspot.

I was one of the first to sign up for it

because I had grown up writing and publishing punk rock zines.

And here was a way that was much easier to make,

lower lift, but also cheaper zines and with wider distribution.

I could reach people on the other side of the world instantly.

And that was a revolution, right?

Just the concept of self-publishing, independent publishing,

free at your desktop, you could be sitting in your room

and start communicating immediately

and people can start learning your story.

That broke my mind.

Like still to this day,

I can't think of anything that's happened

on the internet or with tech.

That was that much of a cultural shift.

We've then incorporated that into the buildings of our brand.

And many people understood us as a t-shirt company,

as a streetwear brand, as,

oh, we were part of this cool sneaker collecting movement

that was happening.

And the other half of the people knew us as,

oh, I just like reading what that guy's thinking about

and eating for lunch every day

and who he's hanging out with because it's cool.

We were on the front lines of culture.

We're associating with the next artist you need to know.

A lot of our friends became the next biggest rappers.

The kids that were hanging out on our doorstep

turned into Odd Future and Tyler the Crater.

So you wanted to monitor what I was writing about

because then you were always a little bit ahead.

You had your finger on the pulse.

Had my finger on the pulse.

On the pulses, yeah.

Pulse is.

And not intentionally, it was just happened to be

the community that we were starting out

and just all the kind of weirdos.

LA at that time, more or less, was kind of corny.

It was a lot of Von Dutch at Hardy.

It was a lot of reality television.

It was a lot of Paris Hilton and Vida's old clothing

and Juicy Couture.

And so no one was really looking to LA

in a progressive sense, in a culture sense,

of their leading any type of art movement.

We're not looking to them for fashion or leading the trends,

even with music at the time.

Hip hop was starting to focus on other parts of the country.

And especially street style,

people didn't want anything to do with it.

If anything was happening, it was American apparel.

It was more of these ring spun like fitted t-shirts

and nobody wanted this aesthetic.

They weren't into it.

And so we knew that there were young people here

that were doing really amazing, incredible things.

It's just that the media wasn't focusing on it.

So through the power of the blog,

we could reorient everybody's attention

to focus back on what was happening around us

over on Fairfax, which became our neighborhood.

It became the block.

I forget where we started that question.

So we started with, I want to let you run for a bit,

like a Marlin, like high speed, lots of horse power.

So I wanted to let the lead out a bit.

I was wanting to just give some bullet points

of when things were the craziest.

Bullet has left the gun.

Yeah, bullet has left the gun.

And you have a tiger by the tail.

I'm using a lot of different metaphors here, as I want to do.

What are some of the things that would give someone

an appreciation of the scale and the reputation

that the hundreds achieved?

And then we're going to go back in time,

but just to give people an idea of what the brand did.

So when I say that there was a very sudden and sharp success,

it still was a hockey stick in the sense

that the first couple of years, what we thought was winning,

by today's standards, I don't think anyone would consider it

that we were on top.

And it was very organic in the way that we were building this brand.

We were trying to actually not sell it.

We would show up at trade shows.

We would actually cover our racks with tarps and turn buyers away.

The exact opposite of what you're supposed to do.

We would pay for the trade show and turn down almost every sale

except for one or two.

And that would create demand because we knew

we were investing in the longevity of the company.

Right.

So after two or three shows.

Creating the scarcity or an imbalance between supply and demand.

Exactly.

Creates a story, creates conversation.

Story, attitude.

There's an aura around the brand.

We had a reputation.

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I think that of course the world has changed and it's different,

but I mean you've made a lot of smart decisions.

And I think success needs to be viewed within the context of the times.

It's kind of like if you compare the latest blockbuster film now,

they might make more money.

I'm making this up guys, but then say gone with the wind.

But when you consider the constraints and the penetration

of movie theaters at the time and so on,

gone with the wind destroys everything.

Not everything, but just about, right?

So keeping in mind the times and so on.

Evidence and proof of that is that 20 years later,

I went, there was a fear of God,

a big fashion show at the Hollywood Bowl last night here in LA.

And I'm 20 years into the game and when I'm there,

I run to 100 people that I know and are giving us our props

and paying us our dues and are giving us the roses and all that.

And I don't know, I could be totally wrong,

but there are a lot of brands of the moment right now

that are making a ton of money,

but are you going to be around in 20 years?

Are people going to remember what we did?

Playing the long game.

And so I think the cultural impact of what we were doing

sustained much longer than any type of financial success at the time.

But we did have financial success.

Question here, and if this goes nowhere, then we can clip it,

but did Tommy Hilfiger almost buy the company?

Tommy Hilfiger wanted to buy it.

He did, yeah.

We've been courted by so many different designers,

business owners on that scale.

We just went through another bout of these

over the last two to three years.

We just finished another riveting round of due diligence

over the last six months.

Sounds like so much fun.

Interrogating and just forensic files going through

every dollar we've ever spent to see how much the company is worth

because they were considering buying it.

And Tommy didn't work because right at that moment,

that was the inflection point in the other direction

where fashion turns on a dime and we had been carried by momentum

for the first 10 years.

When you're saying what were the moments,

Jay-Z wearing it on stage when he came back for his hangar tour

and being dressed in our product on the front page of USA Today

and MTV.com at the time, and that was very noisy.

We were selling out of sweatshirts and making at that time,

which was a considerable amount.

We would do a drop, make a few hundred thousand dollars

using that money to build a store and turning money over and foot.

Our first store over in the Fairfax neighborhood is 400 square feet.

And we were doing, I don't know, millions of dollars

out of that store every day.

So the conversion, the metrics on it were unreal.

It's insane.

But we're in our 20s.

You know, we don't know.

And we thought everyone experienced that type of success.

We thought that was normal to go around the world

when people are greeting you and wanting to host you.

It's like Rick Rubin out of the dorm room,

ending up signing LL Cool J's.

This is one of his first act.

He's like, oh, yeah, this is just how the music business works.

And then Beastie Boys, I think we're number two.

And he's like, oh, yeah, no, this is just,

this is just how things work.

And he's like, this is how things work.

Maybe not.

Yeah.

And you don't appreciate it until there are dry seasons

and then there are droughts.

And you look back and be like, oh, we had it so good.

You know, especially in Fashion and Street,

where when momentum is in your corner, it's a pretty easy job.

You just show up, say the right things, hang out the right people.

And you're on fire.

But momentum can also turn on the dime,

which is what happened when Tommy was looking at us.

So let's come back to that.

I want to leave that as a cliffhanger.

Sure.

So we will come back to that.

But we're talking about this momentum.

We're talking about Jay-Z on the cover of USA Today in your gear.

Let's go back because I want to figure out

how you began to hone in on this brand

and the creation of this brand.

So first, and I know we're not going in chronological order

because that's just not how human conversations go generally.

The hundreds, where'd the name come from?

The hundreds is, first of all, it was the decade that we started the brand.

It was mostly a reference to community.

And the premise of the project was that we were people over product.

That's been our mantra since the beginning.

It's always about putting the community first.

And I'm not just talking about customers and fans,

but highlighting the people in our circles

and talking about the artists before we even get to the art.

Because I believe the personal narratives and the stories,

the context are the most meaningful part

of why you even engage with the art to begin with.

And I think with product especially, and at that time,

again, you have to remember that brand owners,

the purveyors were very much divorced

from the customers and the consumers.

There was always a wall.

And there's a beauty to that.

There's a little bit of mystery sometimes

when you're supporting a company and you're like,

I have no idea what it's about or who's running this thing.

And I think tech has played and continues to play a large role in changing that.

This is true for authors for the vast majority of the time that books have existed.

They have not had a direct relationship with their readers.

Exactly.

And we've now seen 20 years later why that was maybe the best case sometimes.

But for us, I wanted a direct relationship with our audience.

And that's just, again, coming up in the punk scene.

And when you go to a hardcore show,

it's impossible to tell sometimes who the vocalist is

and who the crowd is because they'll jump into the mosh pit.

Sometimes there's no stage.

Everyone's literally figured out like on the same plane.

And the microphone will pass around and you'll say,

who's actually in the band who's not?

And everyone is a part of the moment and in the band at that time.

If we continue with this montage,

and I know this is for some folks like watching Memento.

So you're welcome.

White toothbrush, white toothbrush, black toothbrush for Bobby,

white toothbrush, white toothbrush.

You don't feel totally at home at home.

You don't feel like you fit in in the sort of default environments,

school, et cetera, traditional sports.

So you gravitate to these, let's say fringe subcultures.

And then you mentioned as we got to Abe in passing

that you did A, B, and C in college and spent some time in Japan and so on.

So I don't know if this is going to be specifically the magazine,

but was it Warp Magazine?

Warp Magazine.

That sort of staged the cosmic intervention.

I mean, was that an inflection point for you

or just a critical point that redirected things?

So how did that happen and why was Japan important also

out of my own personal curiosity?

Yeah, I grew up skateboarding and reading a lot of skate magazines

and transworld media, transworld had skate surf and snow,

and they also had a fourth magazine called Warp.

Warp Magazine was almost a precursor to what the world became in terms of youth culture.

It was a hybrid of skate surf, snow, music, fashion, all in one.

And again, trying to rewind back to the 80s and the 90s.

If you were into metal, you were like a hessher,

you looked a specific way, you wore a specific t-shirt,

and you were part of that crowd.

If you're a punk kid, you hung out with the punks, the skaters were over here,

and you listened to very specific types of music.

You remember this.

Oh, I do, yeah.

No one mixed playlists.

You didn't listen to Taylor Swift.

If you were a black flag person, you listened to Black Flag.

That's right.

If you were a Slayer kid, you listened to Slayer.

Right, and you didn't play together.

You might say, what's up?

And you had respect, but you're like, oh my god,

look at that poodle head over there.

And then the poodle heads were like these dumb skins,

you know, whatever it was.

And so everything was so segmented.

Warp was fascinating because it was one place for someone like me

that grew up listening to punk,

but was also very much immersed in backpack rap and graffiti and art.

Backpack rap?

Backpack rap, like underground hip hop.

OK.

Yeah, deaf jokes and raucous records.

And it wasn't the mainstream rap.

It was always like that subculture,

subterranean type of approach to music.

And so this spoke to me.

I was in college, one of my early, my first TAs.

She's like, hey, do you need an internship this summer

because you're a good writer?

And I was a photographer and whatnot.

She's like my boyfriend at the time,

her boyfriend was the editor-in-chief of Warp magazine.

I was like, oh my gosh,

I grew up reading that magazine.

I'd love to work there.

And so that was, yes,

it was definitely a turning point for me, too,

because it was one place where all of my different facets were embraced.

I was a photographer, you know,

I grew up shooting skate and band photography,

and I still love to do that.

Being a writer, but also freelance art,

all in one place.

And the magazine accepted it all.

Yeah, also, I mean, it seems like after being denied for so long,

told you can't do things,

you have the opportunity to take these seemingly incompatible,

disparate interests and have them accepted by a publication,

right, an institution of sorts that you respect.

A globally distributed publication

where everyone can see me in all my capacities, right?

I'm not abbreviated to just, oh, he's a writer,

so he's just doing music reviews.

Oh, now I turn to this page and he shot that photo.

And so now I can utilize all my tools.

So what were some of the key lessons learned there,

or key influences that shaped you from that point forward?

Well, I think what it did for me is it was not only liberating and empowering,

but it also revealed that not everyone is a monolith.

Many people are just like myself,

that we have so many different disparate incongruous interests,

and we can excel at all of them at the same time.

We can be multi-hyphenate.

And I think this was very early.

You know, this is more than 20 years ago, 25 years ago,

the internet normalized this conversation we're having right now

to where someone like my son's age,

I have two boys and the older one is 13.

If I was telling him this right now,

he'd be like, what do you mean you could only listen to that kind of music?

Or what do you mean you could only do one type of art?

Art is everything.

You know, you should be able to write and shoot photos

and be a TikTok influencer and also go to law school.

You should be able to do all these things.

And I'm like, I'm telling you,

the world did not allow people to be more than that at the time.

Well, I feel like now the problem is almost swung from one side of the pendulum

to the other where, and also I should say for folks,

we're like, how do these older stories apply?

The reason that I want to dig into these stories

and these historic examples is to look at the decisions

that were made, the unorthodox paths chosen

because those are lessons that transcend the time bound, right?

So that's why I'm doing what I'm doing

in terms of co-piloting the conversation.

But it seems like when you were growing up,

and just by extension when I was growing up,

one of the key unlocks was removing constraints.

Like how could you remove some of the constraints

that were seemingly imposed on you?

And now we don't have to spend too much time on this,

but now it's like, okay, if all of the constraints have been removed,

maybe people need to be very creative

in how they apply some positive constraints

so that they're not scattered across 10,000 things.

It doesn't need to be one, but if it's 10,000 or 50,

chances are it's going to be a tough slog.

Right, yeah.

I think that was born of us growing up in the postmodern age,

and no one wanted to hold to any singular truth.

I grew up in a religious home.

America at that time was 76% Protestant,

Christian, or identified as such.

And we all subscribed pretty much to what the government was saying,

what the systems were saying, and we abided by that.

And then many of us realized that some of those rules

and some of those boundaries were harmful,

and that they weren't inclusive, or they weren't acknowledging,

or they were actually infringing in our lives in some type of way.

And so I grew up under a lot of those restrictions and regulations,

and expectations, and I wanted nothing more than to break through.

The bands that I grew up listening to, like Youth of Today,

had a big album song called Break Down the Walls.

And so you're constantly thinking,

if there's a wall in front of me,

I got to burst through it like the Kool-Aid Man, right?

If there's a rule that's meant to be broken,

first understand the rules and then break them.

And so wherever there was a straight line,

I wanted to crinkle it, and if the line was crinkled,

I wanted to flatten and straighten it out.

And we've lived like that, especially people like me,

or those who are renegades or rebels,

have lived like that for so long that we've now gotten to a place

where all the boundaries to your point are quite blurry and soft.

And that is amazing in some regards,

but then it also leads to so many various truths

and facts and misalignments.

How did Japan come into the picture?

Japan came into picture because Japan in the late 90s

was the hub of what streetwear fashion is known as today,

street culture.

And that was because what the Japanese were doing

was they were coming to America,

a designer like Nego who was responsible for a bathing ape

is a perfect illustration of this.

I don't know how much truth there is,

but there was always mythology that Nego was going into New York,

camping outside of high schools,

and just monitoring how young people were dressing.

And so the Japanese were so good and adept at this

that they were doing it with car culture.

And then Nego, take that back to Japan.

Perfect it.

Tweak it.

Tweak it.

Right.

Put in their own spin on it,

and then just be very meticulous about the details

with which the Japanese are always very, very good at doing.

From the packaging to the way like a hemline is constructed,

and then present a new type of streetwear

that is a little bit more thoughtful and considered,

and at maybe an elevated price point,

and then it feels premium.

And now it's geographically out of reach too.

So there's like a little bit of an exotic allure around it.

Yeah, exoticism.

The language is a little bit different.

And so Japanese streetwear became very much invoked

by the late 90s.

And from what we were looking at here in the States,

they had done it.

They had appropriated Levi's and made vintage Levi's

a really hot commodity in the 80s and 90s.

Is Kay coming on that for a second?

Yes.

So I was in Japan.

This is my first time out of the US as an exchange student in 92, 93.

Oh my gosh, yes.

And I was coming from growing up on Long Island to Tokyo,

which was quite a transition.

And I recall there being this incredible denim culture

that I'd never been exposed to in Japan.

And there are jeans being sold for thousands of dollars,

which blew my mind.

I see Brad Pitt doing jeans advertisements on television,

and the ads make no sense whatsoever.

It was probably Edwin.

Edwin.

It was exactly Edwin, I remember.

Like there's one, he's just like falling down the stairs

in a subway, and then he looks up and he's like,

smiling, Edwin with his jeans on.

I'm like, what the hell is going on here?

But I did notice that many things I took for granted in the US

were transplanted to Japan.

And of course they did this with manufacturing as well,

automobiles, et cetera.

They're really good at sort of borrowing and then tweaking

and modifying and prototyping.

Question for you based on dinner last night.

So I was chatting with our mutual friend, Neil Strauss,

who introduced us.

Love you, Neil.

Love you, Neil.

And he was commenting on a recent trip to Japan.

I don't think you'd mind me saying this,

where during my time in Japan, you would see a lot of American

or pseudo American culture.

So you would see variants of pretty bizarre English,

which we could talk about sometimes on huge billboards.

And you're like, clearly they'd not want to bother to check anything.

Maybe it just doesn't matter because it's for Japanese people.

And it was a culture infused with a lot of American cultural influence.

But then they would tweak things and make things better

in a lot of ways or different coffees.

Another amazing example, right?

Like it's hard to find a 45 minute pour over in the US.

You can find places like that in Japan,

like Jiro Dreams of Sushi,

but for a cantankerous old Japanese guy who makes one type of coffee,

that exists.

What Neil observed in what I've also seen on recent trips is that

Korean pop culture is starting to, in some respects, overtake that.

So you see a lot of K-pop in Japan.

You see it also in the US.

So as someone who has their finger on the pulse

and you have your hands in so many things,

you know, so many people, how is it?

Maybe something like Squid Game on Netflix is a causal factor,

but maybe it's just a consequence of other things

that I'm not aware of.

Parasite, how has Korean pop culture and entertainment

become such a force now?

It's intentional by the Korean government.

Okay, tell me more.

20 years ago, they coordinated and orchestrated

what's known as the Korean wave.

They realized that if they can export their culture

in terms of marketing and branding

and essentially characterizing Korea as the coolest

and the ones that are the most innovative and on the front lines,

that they will have a greater world power.

And that has only proven to be true.

Pure genius.

How did they do that?

Do you have any idea of any of the actions they took or any of the policies?

Well, this government directly funds and works with the music labels.

And so that's kind of unheard of here.

You know, those two were separate entities.

They're very much in the weeds and working alongside funding,

giving investments to and helping out entrepreneurs

to get these industries off the ground.

They're like Korean entertainment.

Korean entertainment.

That is ready for worldwide export.

It's clearly leading.

In television, you see it across Netflix.

I think Netflix just greenlit over 100 more Korean dramas.

So if you've seen any of those pop up,

there's a really good one right now called Glory.

My favorite Korean drama is called Itaewon Class.

I think it's universal.

Once you get over the subtitles and you can swallow that,

these are stories that you've never seen told in this way or fashion before.

And Koreans are a little sick and twisted.

We've been through so much that it makes for some really interesting story lines.

Korean film, as you know, parasite, sweeping the Oscars.

Everything, ever all at once is not a Korean film at all,

but just the influence of Asians and Asian Americans in entertainment.

That has been worked on for many, many years.

Korean cosmetics.

The beauty industry, global, constantly leading.

Everyone wants Korean beauty.

Korean food products are about to take another step.

There are some really big Korean food companies that are entering the U.S.

You might see BBGO on the Lakers uniforms.

Everyone doesn't really know what that is.

They think it's a restaurant.

It's like Farmer John's, but for Korea.

And we were talking to them a little bit and consulting.

And what I told them is because they were like,

how do we get into Korea?

We want bulgogi and kalbi to be accepted here.

Well, the first thing is we have to normalize the fact that these foods,

we don't have to even classify them as Korean foods.

I don't eat pizza and think I'm eating Italian food, right?

It's American food.

I don't eat hamburger and I think it's German food.

It's just a hamburger.

It is going to get to a point where Korean foods are going to be so normalized and accepted.

There's a huge chain in the Midwest right now, a Korean barbecue chain.

I'm blanking on the guy's name and the name of his restaurants.

Very popular.

And they're all in the Midwest.

They're in like Kentucky and Indiana and people love it.

The Midwest loves to eat red meat and marinated barbecue ribs

and fresh vegetables alongside that.

It's very healthy.

Some parts of like the more vegetarian vegan aspects of the Korean food palette.

So BB goes coming in and there's some others.

There's one that's coming in with vegan or animal cruelty free type of products.

And so they're coming with vegan sausages, Korean meats.

What do you think has contributed to this?

So I can think of a whole bunch of plausible explanations

that are not usually exclusive, right?

There could be a ton.

So you have the government funding and coordination, which is wild and fascinating.

I want to read a book on that.

And then you have changing tastes and hey, at some point,

things cease to be new and people are looking for a shift, right?

So there is just a newness and things that have reached their peak and descended.

And then the next chapter begins.

I also was watching a documentary not too long ago related to League of Legends.

And for those who don't know, I'm not much of a gamer,

but the scope of League of Legends.

And I think at some point they had 200 million monthly active users,

something insane like that.

Maybe it's higher now.

This was an older documentary, but they talked about launching the game in Korea.

And how launching the game in Korea was sort of the super bowl of desktop like PC gaming

because of the broadband penetration.

And like the broadband penetration is so high in South Korea that

it has affected almost all aspects of culture and what goes viral and what does not.

Are there any other factors that you think play into?

And then in a sense, sorry, I've got a lot of caffeine guys.

And in a sense, right?

Then you have the success of not just something like Parasite,

but Korean American directors and actors.

And then I think Crazy Rich Asians was a very big deal

in establishing the sort of market viability.

And then all of a sudden, once you have a few success cases,

then the studios and then all these people are like, okay, let's put money into this.

Now that looks like a sure bet.

Yeah, exactly.

But what has contributed to this?

And part of the reason I'm asking the question

is because I like to study these things,

but also it might help people listening and me to look further down the line

and maybe spot things earlier in the nascent stages.

And I'm fascinated by places like Korea that in such a short period of time

go from, as you said, sort of a third world to what you find now.

Singapore would be another amazing example.

Right. I mean, the story of Singapore is just insane.

Are there any other factors that you feel were critical to Korea becoming

and Korean exports becoming as in as they are now?

Yeah. And we didn't even acknowledge Korean music, by the way.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So BTS and Blackpink and I have been big hit,

had done with the music industry and just completely broken TikTok and the algorithms.

And Korean pop artists like Blackpink, headlining Coachella,

which is whatever your take is on that,

it's bonkers to me to even see that because we grew up listening to Korean pop music,

almost embarrassed of it as Korean Americans, because why did that change?

How did it change?

I think it changed. Some people point to Psy. Do you remember Gangnam Style?

Yes, absolutely.

Okay, of course.

I can still do the dance.

That was this really bizarre breakthrough moment for Korean pop culture.

Absolutely.

And there's someone much better suited out there in the universe that can break down

why anthropologically that was happening.

But me as a Korean American that never saw many of our faces in pop culture,

in American pop culture.

I mean, we were growing up in the 80s when people didn't even know where Korea was.

Kids would say, are you Japanese or Chinese?

And it wasn't until the 1988 Olympics in Seoul that I finally had a reference point.

I'm Korean. We're having the Olympics in Korea this year and people were like,

so is Korea and Japan or China?

Like they still didn't quite get it.

From that, all the way to Psy being the biggest global hit maker because of YouTube.

That was one of the craziest things anyone had ever seen.

It was insane.

And he had already had a long career before that, but it was the way that I think YouTube

actually, he capitalized on YouTube and YouTube capitalized on him.

And now there was this universal language of just a really fun pop song with a fun dance

that anyone could do.

I was in Sicily at the time at a friend's wedding and almost everyone was from this

very small Sicilian town looking around the room at the reception, kids dancing,

grandparents dancing to Psy.

And I just, I had to catch my breath.

I couldn't believe my eyes that a Korean artist was affecting and influencing Sicilians

to listen to their music.

The thing that I will say, and this is a total abstract and very anecdotal,

there's no science behind anything that I'm about to talk about.

But Koreans are known to have this emotional repression which then manifests and converts

into brilliant art, romance and passion, and also violence.

And it's called Han.

Have you ever heard of this?

I am shocked that I haven't because I have so many Korean friends.

Yeah, so many Korean friends.

I know.

Han.

Because even your Korean friends, they might not know about this.

You can Wikipedia this, H-A-N, in the cultural context.

So the belief is, and I thought it was just me that was wired like this.

As you hear me talk, go listen to other Korean Americans from my generation and below.

They all kind of sound like this.

We have a lot of angst.

We're very artistic and we can be very emotional and impulsive as well.

And so that, what they think it is historians believe is because essentially we got our

asses kicked for so long.

We were on top.

We were gigantic people at one point in time, Mongolians.

Koreans are still really tall.

I think on average now, in Korea, a male is about a half inch shorter than the average

American male, which that's just in one generation.

Not only are we growing as an economic power and a cultural power, we're growing physically.

There's a show on Netflix right now.

It's really popular.

It's called The 100 or something like, have you seen it?

I have.

All these buff Korean dudes.

Yeah, and women.

And women.

Yeah, just smashing one another.

Yeah, just changing the ideas of Asian body shapes.

When you go to Seoul, really people look like that.

You go out into the clubs, they're gigantic six foot four men, huge, like beautiful statuesque

women and they're just like in their most peak physical form and beautiful.

And they do a lot of surgery and have like the greatest beauty products and everyone

just looks perfect.

It's like a real robotic AI, like futuristic life.

But we, for whatever reason, we have that instilled in us because we were on top at one

point, we were the best.

And then Japan, which was a small island, came along and kicked our asses and kicked

a lot of people's asses out there on that side of the world.

And so we were humbled.

And so ever since then, our pride has it so that we know that we should be better,

but we have just been held down, right?

Impoverished.

And so companies like in the eighties and the nineties, it was companies like LG,

Samsung and Daewoo.

Samsung, when I was growing up was a joke.

You wanted only Japanese electronics.

You wanted Sony, Panasonic.

Anything made by Samsung was that's going to break.

And the people behind Samsung knew that.

They knew that was a reputation in the stigma with anything that was of Korean product,

but they had so much pride that they believe that their product could excel and be the best.

They worked so hard at that.

And so many artists, especially Korean American artists, you see the same thing.

It's just in us to prove ourselves and to come out on top.

My children are half Korean and I still see it in them in the way that they're reacting

and I'm like, is this just a biological?

I mean, it's in our DNA.

Yeah, some epigenetic thing.

It might be genetic because the way that they react,

we can get kind of easily frustrated when things don't go our way

and we just want to break through.

And we want to break the system and make it work and we won't stop until we win.

Is the Han, okay, I'll look this up.

Is it the Han of like, Hanguk?

It's like the...

I don't know if it's, I mean, it's spelled the same way.

I don't know if it's coming from like the same etymology.

Yeah, I'll check it out.

Yeah, okay.

Makes sense though.

Yeah, it's an interesting one.

All right, so we're going to take a left turn and we may come back to this,

but I'm so glad.

I love talking.

By the way, Tim, I never get to speak on these subjects,

so you're giving me a platform to do so.

Oh, I love this.

This is so intensely interesting to me.

So if anyone else has more to add to this,

please hit us up on Twitter and let us know

because I would love to read a long investigative journalism piece on this

or book or anything like that.

Watch a movie, a doc, let's do a podcast.

So the Jay-Z USA Today cover, I don't want to gloss over this.

Sure.

How does that happen?

So I know nothing about fashion.

Jay-Z, what is it?

I'm not a businessman.

I'm a businessman.

He's no idiot.

So how does that happen?

How does Jay-Z end up on the cover of USA Today in your gear?

In hundreds.

Exactly.

At any given point in time, there's another new young streetwear brand

that everyone wants to be on first.

And even though there are thousands of them starting up every single day,

everybody's talking mainly about two or three.

I was at a party two nights ago at a store called Cherry here on Melrose in LA.

Cherry is one of those brands in LA people are talking about.

And in that time, we were still raw, a little bit undiscovered,

but the stylists and the people in the industry knew that we had the momentum

and we had the bag and the juice.

And so stylists essentially do this type of work.

They are the ones that are really almost like the A&Rs.

They're kind of seeing what are people talking about?

Okay, I'm going to go pick from them.

A&R, this is from music.

For music, but A&Rs and they're kind of doing the same type of work in a fashion realm.

Could you just explain what that is for people who don't know?

Yeah, they're essentially scouts.

Scouts.

Yeah, they're scouts.

And so stylists are doing the same.

They're paid to do this, to know, you know, Jay-Z always wants to look relevant

and that he knows what's going on in culture.

So you're going to pay a scout to go out there and source fashion

to make it look like your hip and that you're actually part of the community.

Not that he's not, but just you want to make it look like you're the most

coolest, right?

Yeah.

And trendiest.

And so I'm assuming we don't know how that product ended up on Jay-Z.

I'm assuming that his stylist came to our store, bought some stuff and brought it

over to him and said, you have to wear this.

Is there anything proactive that you did to seed your product in not necessarily

that individual case, but if stylists are the taste makers on some level?

That's right.

For celebrities, right?

If they are the scouts, is there anything that you did

with respect to stylists or otherwise to help create that type of demand,

whether for these entertainment figureheads or people who are then going to

have this irradiating ripple effect or otherwise?

Well, there's multiple ways you can do it.

You can pay these people, which is what a lot of brands do.

They work with PR agencies.

We've never done this, but you can work with PR agencies.

PR agencies have relationships with stylists and they say, hey, I'll pay you,

you pay me, we'll carry that down, and then this product ends up on X, Y, Z celebrity.

The other way to do it, which is just what's always come natural to us,

is being a part of the culture and the community.

Most of those stylists are actually in the culture and community.

They're friends of our crews or they may even be working for us in some capacity

and they turn into stylists.

LA, New York, and fashion streetwear especially is still a very small tight-knit world.

Most people, especially the ones that are innovating and influencing the most,

they know each other somehow.

If you're out there and you're doing the work and putting on events and speaking that language,

you are going to connect and build relationships with these people

to where they're going to be like, yo, I need something.

Can you bring it over real quick?

Yeah, I got you.

We'll throw it over.

So that speaks to the current benefits of, say, being in LA, one of the benefits.

And you also are just immersed.

You're saturated with entertainment, of course.

But at the time that you started, you mentioned people were not looking to LA

to set any trends in streetwear.

Did you ever consider in the early stages, say, moving to,

I'm not sure, I may not be picking in the right place, but New York

or elsewhere to be in the middle of the action?

Because many people who come on the podcast do that.

They'll say, where are the movers and shakers?

Where's the action?

We're going to have the most serendipity and they pick up and they move, right?

Bob Dylan did this.

Bobby Knight did this, as Bill Gurley has famously talked about

in his speech at UT Austin, chasing down a dream if people want to look it up.

But you did something different.

How did you, if you did, make that decision early on?

Yeah, I hear this and I see this all the time, especially from our young community,

especially if they're living in remote locales.

Hey, I'm trapped in Denver.

I'm in Indiana.

I live in the Philippines.

I have a great idea.

I don't think I'm going to get much exposure if I stay here.

Should I move to a big city?

Should I move to LA?

And I've always looked at it like, be the big fish in the small pond,

champion your home.

That's what you know.

That comes most natively and authentic to you,

especially if you're proud of where you're from.

LA has a lot of problems.

We're sitting here in Venice right now.

Yeah, there's an entire homeless encampment across the street.

There's a lot of things that aren't great about LA and the city that we live in,

but I still think every time I come back and I come home,

I don't think there's anywhere else like this.

And I just knew.

And it wasn't that I knew all the millions of people that live in this city

and thought that they were all great,

but I knew that the people in our immediate community,

our direct friends, had so much to offer and they weren't being heard.

So if we built the platform-

Could you give maybe an example?

Sure.

There was, I'm trying to think of early collaborators with us.

Yeah, it could even be like a composite hypothetical,

but just like a, let's say there's a person X,

work could be a real example.

Yeah, so there's a friend of ours named Topher,

who is an amazing artist,

but even he, at the time,

you know, everyone's not really looking to LA for that style of art, perhaps.

But if we can help build a platform

and then bring our friends up on stage to work with them,

then everyone can start enjoying and experiencing their art alongside with us.

And so that was really the philosophy with how we were building the brand.

The idea was to build the stage for ourselves.

And then once we have the notoriety in the audience,

okay, now we can share the microphone with others.

So is it fair to say that one of the most critical components of your success,

and I know that's a squirrely word, but let's just use it for now,

has been simply asking the question over and over again,

how can we highlight people?

Yes, always.

Yeah, that's inherent in the work,

because a Rising Tide lifts all boats.

I've never looked at anyone else as a competitor.

I've always believed that I'm competing against myself.

If any other brand is winning or getting one over on us, that's our fault.

If we want to play that game.

So I've never looked at anyone as an enemy or going against

or mitigating our success in any way.

We have to work collaboratively in order to build the entire platform.

So all can be seen.

There's so many people in the world.

And this was directly in contrast with so much of streetwear up until that point.

And not just streetwear, but fashion and brand building.

The traditional model has always been, especially here in the States,

is that you just do your own thing.

You know, it's your individual path.

You don't play well with anyone else.

If you acknowledge anyone or you collaborate with them,

it's going to hurt you.

That's very false.

We believed in the power of collaboration early on.

We believed in the power of diversity and having diverse voices

involved in the presentation of the brand.

And so in the early years of the hundreds,

what we started doing was we started hosting block parties on our street.

And the reason why we did that was to invite all of the other brands

to come in that at the time we were all very small and independent,

but we had our own little universes.

And it wasn't us saying, hey, we're co-signing each other.

It wasn't us saying, oh, we're all even.

What do you mean by co-signing?

It's not like we're validating each other, saying that's a brand

that we think we're going to vouch for and say they're good people

and they have a great product.

We're not even saying that.

What we're saying is that everyone has their own lanes,

but we can all exist together and be respectful and professional

and hang out and party.

Got it.

So these are potential competitors, perhaps in the minds of some.

They're sort of adjacent, but you each have slightly different lanes.

And what were you hoping to come out of that?

Would it be the sharing of best practices, the just cordial relationships,

so that if there's the flow of talent from one to the next,

it doesn't turn into a huge disaster?

What came of the spot?

For me, what it was, it was all those things.

But for me, what it was, is what it presented and symbolized externally

to the audience, to the market, because now it looks like we're a movement.

If all of us are working in tandem and agreeing and in confluence with each other,

now there's more trust in this idea of streetwear.

Oh, it's not just these individual silos, these kids on remote islands.

It's actually a network.

And so if you're a kid coming up and you're a fan of the hundreds

and you're a fan of Huff or Diamond or Supreme,

and then you see them all kind of hanging out together,

there's more trust.

And I think brand building is really at its heart about trust building.

It's about dependability.

Is this thing going to last forever?

Yeah, I think about brand sometimes, it's a reliable, durable association over time.

The hundreds means X.

When I engage with the hundreds, it means X,

so that is going to be dependable over time on some level.

Yeah, and I think people want that in this world more than ever,

when everything is a little mushy.

And so what you're doing is you're making streetwear look like it's a fad to,

oh, this is a movement with some permanence.

And now the network is growing because if the hundreds believes in Diamond

and Diamond believes in Huff,

then I can believe in all three of these brands

because now they're fortified, right?

They are a lattice.

And so that's what I wanted to do in doing those block parties early on.

It was a fun party.

But then all of a sudden people started looking at Fairfax,

which is our neighborhood over here in LA as,

oh, that's where I can go and everyone is part of a community.

So when I talk about building brands around community,

I mean that it's about these relationships.

And again, it's not anyone vouching for each other or saying,

this is my close friend or anything.

It's just, oh, collectively,

they are a thing that we cannot ignore anymore.

So let me throw out something I haven't thought about in so many years.

It's been a while since I've pitched journalists directly.

But back in the day, I remember I got great advice

from a writer at some very large publication.

And I don't remember if it was a he or she, it doesn't matter.

But they said to me, one example of something could be anything.

One example is an exception.

Two is interesting, especially if they're geographically separated.

Three is a trend.

And the reason that they said that to me was in the very early days,

I think people are tempted to pitch their company

or their product or their service as a story to a journalist.

This is why you should write about, say, the four-hour workweek.

I'll just use my example, the first book.

That's a very hard pitch to get someone to write a long piece

about a single book, a single launch, a single product.

But the way I incorporated that advice

and the way I suggest some people incorporate this advice

when they're launching things is see if you can sell around your product

such that, okay, four-hour workweek,

let's pick a few umbrellas that fits under.

Okay, let's choose remote work.

Great, okay, so the four-hour workweek

and what's happening in Silicon Valley in 2007 could be one example.

Let me find another example in New York

and maybe another one in Chicago.

Then I can go to a journalist and I can pitch a trend piece

or a style piece with three examples.

And then that, I would say, was one of the key ingredients

in the coverage of the four-hour workweek.

So in a similar way, you were fortifying, creating this, not quite,

what do you guys call in Korean?

Chébor, like the way, it's not quite,

but you're creating this fortified network

that presents a more interesting story.

And humans are meaning-making machines.

Yeah, so that's what I'm gonna say.

It goes from a fiction or a myth to now this is a reality.

I mean, everything begins with myths, as we know.

And so the idea of streetwear,

when you really get down into the granular nitty-gritty of it,

it doesn't make any sense.

It's just t-shirts and, like, we didn't invent the t-shirt.

The t-shirt's been around since the 50s, James Dean, right?

And so when you, like, trying to define

and what exactly is and what are we doing,

I'm like, oh, this is just like a repackaging

and purposing of punk rock or 70s street gang fashion

or what James Dean was wearing in the 50s.

It's not about the actual fashion.

What it was was this movement and this network

of individual artists that were coming together

and building something collectively.

That's streetwear.

So when you're highlighting folks,

you have a platform.

Maybe it's blog, website.

I mean, now, of course, there are a million different tools.

But in the beginning, when you were doing this

in a very deliberate way,

I use that in a very positive sense, right?

You're being focused.

You're using the platform and the microphone

to highlight people.

You can't highlight everybody.

Right.

You have to pick and choose.

How did you pick and choose?

So the curation.

Exactly.

Yeah.

I think for us, it was people that we believed in.

It's the same philosophy as when I go out

and invest in someone or angel investor back a startup.

I want to believe in the person first.

It's not even really about the work.

And this is why we emphasize people over product

and it's so community focused all the time

in the human story because the art changes.

The product always changes with people.

Yeah, totally.

So you can't just bank on someone as if someone were to invest.

We never had an investor.

But if someone were to invest in us at that time,

they would have invested in us as a t-shirt brand.

But we were never meant to stay relegated to t-shirts.

And that would have been a huge problem for them and for us.

Because now we are imprisoned in making t-shirts.

But as an artist, we continue as a creator, you evolve.

And they would have never foreseen denim

and denim would have never foreseen us building retail stores

and then us getting to NFTs like NFTs didn't exist back then.

And so no one would have thought to look that far ahead

and so I always look at the person first

and if there's something in there,

for whatever reason, when we're talking about,

oh, I have the pulse on many things,

it's this ability to be able to read people.

Oh, there's actually another Korean term for this.

It's called nunchi.

Have you heard of nunchi?

Nunchi.

I love the sound of it.

Nunchi and there's many historical reasons

and contextual reasons for why this exists as well

is being able to read a room.

Koreans have this incredible sense of gauging how people are

and just reading emotional states.

You know, that is so...

I've never put a finger on it precisely like that,

but that's so true.

And I'm generalizing based on really only whatever,

half a dozen to 10, like really close Korean American friends.

But when I think about watching them in rooms,

they are good at that.

Yeah.

Why is that?

Because that's actually not broadly...

I don't think that can be generalized across East Asia.

Right.

No.

At all.

I think it might have to do again with the war history

and just knowing where our place is

and having to understand this Japanese imperialist

that's in my neighborhood.

Where do I stand against him?

If you read Pachinko by Minjin Lee.

This is supposed to be an amazing book.

It's been recommended a ton.

I haven't read it yet.

A beautiful book will be known as one of the best books of all time

and it's modern, like in the context of it isn't modern,

but the writer just wrote this book.

And so I strongly encourage everyone to read it.

My manager actually worked on the television show on Apple.

You can also watch the TV show.

Beautiful.

Both of them.

You'll get a very clear understanding of how Koreans are,

but Nunchi is all over that.

Yeah.

So Pachinko, correct me if I'm wrong,

I just learned this in my last,

let's see, my two trips ago to Japan,

which I did not know.

So Pachinko is this...

It's a gambling game.

It's like a vertical pinball machine.

It's extremely loud and they're everywhere in Japan.

And you walk in and you put in money.

It's kind of like slots.

Let's just say.

I did not realize it's something like what 75%,

maybe 85% of them are owned by Koreans.

By Koreans.

I didn't know that in Japan.

Yeah.

I had no idea.

And there is this really fascinating

and somewhat tortured history between Korea and Japan.

Just because of war.

Super tortured.

So if you read Pachinko,

you'll understand a lot of my family context as well.

My grandparents also had to live in Japan at one point.

Yeah, please read Pachinko, everyone.

You're going to be spellbound by it.

I promise you.

But yeah, Nunchi.

Going back to Nunchi, if you see Koreans,

we rarely step into the room and steamroll over anyone.

We are very slow to grab the microphone first.

I hated being called on in class.

And I had no problem talking class,

but I'd rather sit and observe and get the lay of the land

before I entered.

And so we're always very careful and considerate.

And again, these are all generalizations.

So I don't want anyone to take offensive saying,

don't pigeonhole me and classify me as that type of Korean,

because not all of us are like this, obviously.

But I think it can be a positive, powerful thing for us to...

I'm going to speak for all the white people.

I'm just kidding, I was kidding.

You are the white.

I am the Korean, and we're going to do this.

We're going to get it covered, folks.

All right, we're not leaving this podcast episode

until we sort all this out.

So the Nunchi, when you think about that sensitivity,

let's just say, that orientation,

are there any early examples of people you highlighted

that really clicked, that just really had, for whatever reason,

an effect on the brand or business,

or ignited the rest of the community?

Are there any that come to mind?

Yeah.

Because you're experimenting also in these early days.

It's not like you had a playbook that you're just executing

the same way every day.

You're testing a lot.

You're throwing a lot against the wall.

So I'm wondering, and it doesn't have to be in the category

of people you highlighted, but just in those early phases,

let's just say, just before you hockey sticked,

or as you were hockey sticking,

what were some of the experiments that really worked?

And you're like, okay, it's time to pay attention to that.

Well, in terms of individuals, I think this is true across the board.

I've always been so magnetized and attracted to passion

and passionate people.

Those who are stubbornly and almost irrationally devoted

to whatever their craft is, and they have to see it through.

And that's, again, the Korean side speaking to me,

and that's something that's really innate in my own experiences.

And so whenever I see that, I know that they can make it,

even though their specific art or product or brand

that they're working on might fail.

I'm like, they're going to either evolve and graduate

to the next level, or they'll come up with something else,

and I'll bet on them in the long run.

I've been able to spot it in streetwear and art and music.

When you do that, how does it help the hundreds?

It helps the hundreds in the sense that I think people look to us,

and they still do, to be, again, one of the first ones

to work with a specific individual or post on that.

Just to be sort of ahead of the curve.

That's right.

There's a young sculptor kid out of South LA right now.

His name is Young Kazi, and Kazi yesterday went out

and he's like, I have a supreme collab.

This is a big deal.

And we were the first ones to give him a t-shirt collaboration.

Thinking of musicians.

Machine Gun Kelly.

I was the first one to introduce him to everyone in Los Angeles

when he moved here.

And we spotted him in South by Southwest.

There were six people in the room, and watching him perform.

And this man was giving it as always,

jumping up on stages and speakers.

And there was only six of us watching.

It didn't make any sense, but I was like,

this guy's going to make it, and he's charismatic.

Let's start helping him out.

We used to have a print magazine.

And we'd always feature a female on the cover,

which I wanted to do because we were known as a menswear brand.

But the brand was really gender neutral.

Anyone could wear it.

So we wanted to start changing that narrative.

For many of those models or subjects,

it was their first magazine covers,

and they ended up becoming big deals.

It was Rita Ora, Azilia Banks, Olivia Munn,

I think it was her second cover, but personalities like that.

But we just knew.

I ran into Karuchi last night, and Karuchi,

I think it was her first magazine cover,

and then she became a big actor.

But we just know when someone's going to break,

and I even have this relationship now

where I meet someone fascinating,

and I'll spend some time with them.

And then there comes a moment where I'm like,

I'm about to lose you.

And this happened once there's an actor named Ruby Rose,

who some people might know out in Hollywood.

She moved here from Australia.

I was one of her first friends in LA.

We'd known each other for a very long time.

And then she got cast in Orange is New Black.

And I could just tell things were kind of changing a little bit.

And I said, hey, I'm about to lose you.

Because she's about to go hypersonic.

Hypersonic.

And she's like, what are you talking about?

You always talk about this thing,

and I'm like, it's going to happen before you leave.

I need to shoot you.

So I shot her for a magazine cover.

She shows up an hour and a half late to the shoot.

We do the entire thing.

She's just like, sorry, I'm late.

I had all these auditions.

She was auditioning for all these big movie franchises.

And when I was like, it's happening, she's like, no.

She's like, I'll never stop talking to you.

What are you talking about?

We're such close friends.

Two years to the day, I think I'd earmarked it,

put it in my calendar.

I texted her and I was just like, how are you doing?

And she's like, wow, that was a whirlwind.

That happens in LA.

And to your very first question, that's happened to us

so many times, especially in the internet and social media age,

where it's things, when they accelerate,

they're to an immeasurable degree, right?

And you cannot keep up.

That happened in the early days of the hundreds.

It's happened three or four times since with the hundreds.

It happened again during the pandemic,

because we had another surge, because everyone was locked down

and they were resorting to comfortable brands

that they had known and grown a familiarity with.

And they wanted that.

It was almost like soul food for them

to revert back to their favorite high school street wear brand.

And then it happened, for me personally, it happened with NFTs,

because when those were starting to come up,

we had already been involved for six to eight months.

And then the amount of phone calls and the amount of emails

and the amount of people that were reaching out,

I never thought I'd have access to any of them.

Also, whenever this happens in my life,

I have to change my email and phone number.

I do this thing where I coordinate it at the same time.

And I will plan it to the minute where I will be like,

get on my ITs phone, be on the phone with Verizon,

and they change them now.

And it's this beautiful silence for three days.

It's impossible.

It is.

But it's this really crystal clear, beautiful silence for three days

before everyone finds me again through my wife or through DMs

or through my business partner, Ben.

But somehow they track me back again and it comes back.

It's like, catch me if you can.

Yeah, I always thought that when celebrities,

we know a lot of celebrities.

So whenever celebrities change their number,

I always thought it was because their number got out.

That was the assumption.

But it's not because their number gets out.

It's because they're getting flooded

with so many people asking them for things.

And so you have to change it.

I have to basically divert all of my plans

and now fixate on this changing email and phone

because I've had the same email.

I have many email addresses, but I've had one forever.

And I've had one phone number forever.

And as you said, it's not that my phone number gets out

and therefore there's a problem.

It's that I've accumulated a million loose ties.

And maybe I had a great dinner with someone 10 years ago

in a group context and they were fantastic.

And for whatever reason, it made sense to connect at the time.

But now every time their brother, cousin,

or they have a book or a startup or film the blank

for five other things, I get an email or a text message.

And over time, it just turns into a daily title wave

of inbound requests.

So how do you make this switch?

The reason I haven't done the switch so far

is I have, I think, an irrational fear

that people I know who are important to me,

who haven't, say, emailed or texted in a year or two,

will get lost.

So how do you do this?

You have done this multiple times.

I would love to know.

It's much harder today because so much of our phone

is connected to our identity for 2FA purposes.

And so that becomes an extra, sorry, two factor authentication.

So it becomes an extra layer of, oh, if I change my number,

then I won't be able to 2FA or get into certain accounts

because I don't remember what passwords are.

Right.

And so that makes it a little bit more complicated.

But I think you just have to be willing to sever relationships

and know that they're gone.

You're going to lose them.

OK, so we'll get into this, I'm sure, at some point.

But when NFTs were starting to really fire,

there were only a few people that in the world,

and not saying like three or four,

I'm saying, but there was just like a scant amount of people

in the world that could take this very complicated subject

and explain it in very simple terms.

And I think I was one of those people,

and I also have such a big network that everyone was coming to me.

And then they all came to me at once.

And so I've never experienced this in my career

for a year and a half straight.

Wait a second.

People sold the JPEG for $69 million?

Bobby, now I'm interested.

And we're in the middle of the pandemic.

People are bored and they're gambling a lot.

And so they're like, oh, he has the keys.

He knows how to do this.

He did it.

He sold 25,000 NFTs in 40 minutes.

I want to do that too.

That seems like a really fast, easy way.

And all I'm doing is waving red flags saying,

don't come over here, turn around, you turn, you turn.

Back, back, back.

But the calls and the emails and the messages

that were coming, every A-list Hollywood star you can think of,

women, men, all of them, I've talked to about this and gone through it

and said, hey, you know,

there's even an anecdote in the book where Seth Rogen and I,

we were at his house and I'd been, you know,

through three sessions explaining what's going on.

And he didn't really ever want to do it.

He was considering it because it's right up his audience's alley.

Right?

Like that type of dude was really interested in flipping JPEGs.

He's like, is this something I need to consider?

We ran the gamut of all these conversations.

I couldn't keep up with it.

And then I felt bad.

You know, I have a lot of guilt.

And so saying no to people or just not returning calls,

I felt really bad about it.

And I forget who it was, but someone who deals with this kind of problem a lot

was like, it's okay.

Just ignore them.

When they need something else from you,

they're going to find a way back.

You're not severing any ties.

They're going to fight.

Even if you change your number,

they're going to find you when they need you again.

So it's not like you're ever losing them.

But yeah, sometimes it feels like they're like barnacles or skin tags.

They're like skin tags and you're just like,

how do I have so many skin tags?

That's definitely going to be in the description of this episode.

But I'm also guilty of that on the other end.

I've done that to friends all the time.

Someone that I met.

I met you and I was like, oh, by the way, Tim,

let's talk about my book.

And thankfully you were gracious enough to want to talk to me about it.

The stars aligned also in a very unusual way.

So I'm happy it worked out.

And we're going to get there.

But I want to cover the mechanics, just the process.

So yes, you have the two-factor auth considerations.

And I would say for most folks, it's a very good idea.

Well, look, I'm not a doctor.

I'm not a technologist.

So talk to professionals.

But generally, move to some type of authenticator or one-time password

as opposed to your phone number,

just because of sim swapping and different attacks.

Especially if you're a public figure,

they're just more attack vectors.

But how would you go about doing it?

You coordinate with Verizon.

It's very easy to switch your number, by the way.

You can do it within five minutes.

So you call whichever carrier?

You call, sorry.

No, just don't call Verizon.

Verizon's going to be like, you don't use us.

You can call your phone carrier and just say,

hey, I want to switch my number.

And they're like, OK, you can pick from any of these.

And it changes just immediately.

So you get on that phone call.

And then if you use IT or if you want to do it yourself,

you just set up an auto reply on your existing email that says,

I don't use this email anymore.

That's it.

If you want to direct people to a new email,

you can do that.

Otherwise, it's just, hey, this is a dead end.

And then you set up a new email at the same time.

And then you email out to the people

that you absolutely have to stay in contact with

for work reasons, for family, for friends.

It's probably only about 30 to 50 people, to be honest.

That's not that much.

Yeah, the email I, from a process perspective,

find easier to wrap my head around.

Let me ask just a bunch of dumb, specific questions.

I can't be the only person who wants to change your number.

When you change your number, this is such a bloodite question.

I know people.

What happens to your, say, call history text messages

that came into the old number?

Do they remain on your phone so you can reply from a new number?

Not to be crats.

It really fucks shit up on that scale of things.

Not to get too technical, but it really fucks things up.

It really fucks shit up, especially with iPhones,

for whatever reason, the message, the messenger, my message.

I don't know what we call it, iChat, all of that.

And especially if you're using it on your computer,

people will start getting your texts from,

you know, whenever you get a text from an email address,

it's the weirdest thing.

Like, why are you emailing me a text right now,

or it's going to their email?

A lot of that starts happening,

and it takes a while for it to sync back up again.

This is just my own anecdotal experience with it.

I could be doing something wrong.

I've been on text support trying to explain,

and they're like, yeah, this is just really funky right now.

It's just a thing.

It turns into a little bit of a thing.

So there's a little bit of pain.

There's a little bit of friction.

So sell me on the upside though, because I need the encouragement.

Yeah, the upside is, first of all, I'm telling you,

those first few days of silence,

I'm hoping to buy more than a few days.

Okay, I have this thing where I love washing the dishes.

If you ever asked me to wash the dishes after a meal,

I love it because it's the only place,

especially in my house, where nobody asks me of anything.

There's two things that I do.

Surf, everyone's like, why do you surf so much?

Do you love it?

And I'm like, no one asks me for anything when I surf.

And when I wash the dishes, everybody leaves me alone,

because for the first time,

it looks like I'm contributing to the household.

So my wife isn't bothering me.

The kids are like, daddy's actually doing something meaningful.

Let's leave him alone.

And then I can think, I can't answer a phone.

No one can text me while I'm washing dishes.

Same way I feel when I'm surfing, but when you change your number,

I do it on a Friday afternoon, so then I have a weekend.

And it's better than going to Hawaii for a vacation.

It's like a brain vacation for 48 to 72 hours before they'll start trickling back in again.

But to this day, I get people being like,

dude, I've been messaging you for years,

and you haven't replied, or finally someone said this isn't his number anymore.

Can you please tell whoever this is to tell his friends?

And I apologize, but I'm like, oh, I'm sorry.

And I should also add the other layer of complexity now

is that people, because of your DMs, right?

And especially young people, they DM more than they text or call anyways.

And so as long as you still have your social handle,

you are going to get those messages,

but I don't have a lot of those apps on my phone anymore,

or my WhatsApps and my telegrams.

I don't even have them on my computer.

And then I have them archived and hidden.

I have the apps off of my phone.

So if I ever want to like pull those up,

I have to go through six steps and it's too much of a hassle.

So it's archived in your phone like a hidden folder.

So there's just friction in pulling it up.

Yeah. So you just want a little bit of more of a mental hurdle of,

oh, I have to get to that. I won't do it.

And so even in my group chats that I love to be a part of

in my WhatsApps and telegrams, I archive them so it's,

they're still there, but then you have to like open it up,

then jump into archive and then pull them up

as opposed to them just being there.

I have no badges on my phone, no notifications,

all my calls are like silent, muted.

And it's just, I want communication on my terms always.

And so when people are, and I think I'm not alone in this,

you know, if you text me, like sometimes I won't answer texts

for like three to four days.

And I answer them just like I would emails.

And I'm like, Hey, sorry, I've just been working,

especially when I'm in writing mode.

It takes me 40 minutes to get into the zone.

So you cannot interrupt me for about six to eight hours at a time.

During our water bathroom break that we took,

which may have been invisible to the listener,

but now you know how the sausage is made,

you were mentioning a tieback to the question around Korea,

South Korea.

And if we're seeing this current explosion

for many reasons of influence coming out of Korea,

and if we further relate that to some of the descriptions

that you had of characteristics of Korea and the Korean people,

where would you be looking to next and why?

My theory is that creativity is born of struggle.

And Korean struggles for so long.

I mean, many people all around the world have struggled

in different ways, but Korean struggles for so long

that when they finally broke through,

it all emoted and manifested in really beautiful art.

And I would suggest looking at other regions of the world

that have either been repressed

or just haven't had the education or the medicine

or the technology advancements or regenerations

and are now being supplied with such.

So India, the Middle East,

are probably really strong areas of focus right now

for a lot of industries, especially for me.

I try to build as much of our Indian community as possible

from here, constantly conversing with Indian followers.

Whenever I get an Indian follower, I'll start messaging them

and be like, how did you find me?

What's going on? What's going on?

Because Indian is just like a vast, vast, vast country

with just a zillion people in it

that have all different backgrounds.

And I know very little about it.

It's on the entire other side of the world.

So the art that is coming out of there,

I collect a lot of art with my partner Ben.

And the art that is coming out from that region of the world

is also like none other art.

In the filmmaking, same things happening.

I think there was an Indian film.

And I'm so, I'm sorry that I forget.

The RRR.

Yes. Yeah. That did well at the Academy Awards.

Killed.

And so I think we should, we'd be remiss

if we didn't acknowledge what India is doing right now.

So I want to type one loose end before we move to

the scary dark neighborhood.

Oh no.

Known as MFTs.

No, the jungle, the forest, the black forest.

We alluded to the rise and then perhaps the change in taste.

I don't want to put words in your mouth,

but the change perhaps in the company and the momentum

that seemed to have coincided with interest

from say Tommy Hilfiger in acquiring hundreds.

Could you just paint a picture of what happened during that time?

Fashion is very fickle and so much of it hinges on momentum.

And when you're young and you're an entrepreneur and an artist

and you're finding success, the ego wants to believe

and loves this idea that you're in control

of whatever path your career is taking.

But as you grow older, you realize that you're subject

to so many different influences and factors in the ecosystem.

And so when I look back on it now,

the hundreds was, had really, really fast success in that era

because of what Ben and I were working on for sure

and the community we were involved in.

But there was also a rapper named Kanye West

that was also getting really deep into streetwear

and working with like a lot of cartoon art.

And our mascot was this cartoon bomb

that people really gravitated to and loved.

And the retro sneaker movement was starting

in that period of time in the 2000s,

all these really rainbow colorways

and people wanted colorful clothing.

And then they wanted streetwear brands to kind of coincide with that

because no other segment of fashion

was communicating that you were into sneakers.

And so there was just a confluence of factors

that contributed to our success at that time.

And so as much as it seems like you're in the driver's seat

and you're in control, you're still on someone else's road,

let's say, right?

And so that road could end or that road can detour

and you might take the wrong path

or you might run out and feel whatever, all the metaphors.

But there will come a point in time

and we had been told it for the first 10 years,

fashion is really volatile.

It's a really dangerous business to be in

because when it stops, it stops immediately and without warning.

And we had survived the recession in 2008 to 2011

when the rest of the world was really, really struggling.

We were thriving.

We were just crushing it.

Streetwear was having a really golden moment.

And then people had their fill

because the way that fashion goes

is that you cannot be wearing the same thing today

that you were wearing yesterday.

And especially if you're a young person, identity-wise,

you cannot be wearing in high school what you wore in middle school

and you certainly can't be wearing in college what you wore in high school

because these are moments of transition and you're coming of age

and you want to differentiate in segment and divorce yourself

from, oh, that was me under my parents' roof

and now I'm an independent person.

My hairstyle looks like this.

I've adopted these traits and now I dress this way.

I can't be associated with that.

And so we were moving into that generation

where the kids that had grown up with us were like,

oh, I wore that when I was young and I was an active skateboarder

but now I'm in college and I'm trying to attract women

and whatever it is or like men.

And now there's a new type of fashion that speaks to this

which is when streetwear started to adapt and evolve

and the style became less branded and it became more subdued.

Not as colorful.

We want blacks and grays and neutral colors

and this happens in fashion all the time.

We don't want loud patterns and camouflages.

We want solids.

We want the clothes to drape like this

and then it graduated to, well, that's all juvenile amateur hour streetwear.

Let's start penetrating and influencing high fashion

and when that movement started happening

then we looked almost alien in comparison

because we're a real street brand that the kids on the street,

they jump over fences wearing our t-shirts

but how do you jive that with what's going on

on the Paris fashion runways

where you're making these beautiful garments,

pieces of art, works of art

and these designers are now being esteemed as design gods

and that was not anything that was in our DNA or communication.

We were always of the community

and wanted to speak directly to the streets

and then when it came back around,

you know, it's happening in this moment the last two to three years,

there's been return and call back to

well, we wanted grounded streetwear again,

we want to wear what the streets were,

we want to be a part of the community

and so it toggles back and forth.

This is just how trends work.

What did that mean in practical terms for you and the company

over the span of three months, six months,

whatever the period of time was, right?

When you say things can change quickly,

does that mean that you guys were sort of on top of the world financially

and from a brand positioning perspective

and then six months later it was totally different?

Yes, it is that fast and dramatic

and heartbreaking when your distributors overseas

are dropping you left and right,

a store that you sold to for seven years straight

won't return your calls for the next season

because they order season by season

and there's a reason they're going to give us,

it's like, hey, times have changed, sorry.

Times have changed.

Hey, it's not you guys, it's us.

We have to survive now and we can't sell your product

and so we need to find the hot new thing.

It's not personal, it's business, right?

And street where so much of it is architected around,

it is personal, it's not business.

It's all personal relationships,

especially for a brand like ours,

which is our entire journey being translated online.

It's the most personal thing.

And so when these relationships start to stutter

and you're looking out in the marketplace

and you're not being received the same way,

talk about an identity crisis.

That's a real hardship that a lot of young brands

and entrepreneurs will never be prepared for.

But turns on the dime, I've now understood

over two decades of doing this.

It's all just about surviving and thriving.

It's all about just making it to the next cycle.

I don't even need to be the best,

I don't need to crush it, I don't need to win any awards.

Just get me to the next cycle if you survive, you win.

And of the class that we started out with at that time in 2003,

there were hundreds, if not thousands of streetwear brands

that were really doing well at the time.

We're one of a handful that still exist.

And of that do exist ones that are still profitable

and are still considered respectable

and people treat us like as a modern streetwear brand.

And so surviving and thriving is the name of the game.

We are sophisticated and savvy enough

to know now when it's coming.

And so we're entering another downturn.

We've been in it for the last few months.

But we saw this coming a year ago and so...

How did you see it coming?

We saw it coming just in, there was so much inundated,

there was so much product flooding the market

that every time this is happening.

You're like, okay, this is peak saturation.

We're gonna have a rubber bands gonna snap back.

If everyone is carrying this X amount of this blue sweater

by every brand in this amount of volume,

people are gonna not want that blue sweater anymore

and then the stores are gonna get stuck.

And then when the stores are stuck with it,

they're gonna start discounting it.

And when they start discounting it,

that just sends ripples across the board.

Six to eight months later, nobody is in the mood to buy.

They have been traumatized

and they're like, we're gonna just wait and hold off.

We have too much product.

And then there's supply chain.

This is a COVID situation.

Supply chain issues also.

So you look into the crystal ball,

really you look at the spreadsheets

and you look at the distribution and you're like, okay.

We're about to have a turn here.

A downturn.

And you see that say a year in advance.

What do you start to do?

You cut fast and you cut deep.

Cut fast, meaning headcount, meaning inventory, meaning overhead.

Everything.

Yeah.

And unfortunately it deals with people's lives.

That must be a tough conversation

because for the people on the front lines, perhaps,

they're not seeing what you're seeing.

They don't see it.

Things are great.

Yeah.

And from a PR brand perspective,

it's a little bit harmful too

because not everyone else in the marketplace

or your peers or competitors see it coming.

And so they look at you like, wait,

we're crushing it right now.

Why are you guys doing layoffs?

Why are you struggling?

Why are you-

You're like, no, we're planning ahead.

You should be selling more sweatshirts right now.

You're not reducing, but we're like,

those sweatshirts that you're selling right now

are going to come back to you and haunt you.

And so you need to diet correctly now.

It sucks because being a little bit far ahead,

we're always the harbingers of the bad storm approaching.

And yeah, you're right.

Some of the staff that have been with us

and are really, really amazing people to work with,

they don't understand when we're like,

your work is great and everything is hot right now,

but we have to do this to get ahead.

So cut fast, cut deep.

It's not personal.

And then just being really mindful of the expenses

and again, consolidating and limiting

the amount of product that we're making in the marketplace.

Getting back to making products

that's really intentional and meaningful

and this is made to sell.

This is made to wow from an editorial perspective.

This is meant to create noise

because when times are fat

and everyone is just humming along,

everything's just working,

you can really sell anything.

Yeah, you can get a little loose.

You get a little loose.

And that's when you just reap.

You're reaping the harvest and you're going out.

You can do anything you want.

I personally dislike those times as a creative person

because they're the least creative moments of my career.

No one has to steer the boat.

There's inertia.

No one needs me to get up and captain the wheel.

Everyone's looking at me like, Bobby, take a break.

You're only fucking shit up by getting in the mix.

You're like, we're good.

Just put more of this cartoon bomb on everything.

It's selling.

But I'm like, I didn't do this just to make money.

I did this to make art.

And so whenever time slowed down

and the boat needs a little bit of a kickback

and people call me back, hey, can you get back in a seat?

I'm like, thank God,

even though we're not making as much money right now,

I get to try things.

So if you're comfortable, I'd love to give people a picture

of what the company looks like today and just the business.

It's like, okay, here's the pie chart

or here are the different divisions.

Maybe we could start with the shirt that you're wearing.

So what is the shirt that you're wearing?

I'm wearing a Phantom of the Opera shirt.

It's actually a collaboration that we did with Andrew Lloyd Webber.

I'm wearing it because, emotionally,

I'm a little bit sad that they're closing the show.

Do you know this?

I don't.

Yeah.

After 35 years, it's leaving Broadway.

Really?

Yeah.

I had no idea.

And so it's just like a tribute to that.

I don't know.

I felt like it when I was wearing it this morning.

So the reason I bring it up is for most people

who are not of the street wear world,

they might have a certain image in their mind,

but Phantom of the Opera is probably not appearing.

What does the business look like today

in terms of operations and just the business model slash models?

Actually, can I tell a story about this real fast?

Absolutely, of course.

And it's to that point, we are known for our collaborations

maybe more than anything on the marketing front.

We don't do traditional advertising,

billboards, magazine ads, or anything like that.

We do collaborations.

Because collaborations, number one,

I believe that's the beginning point of all creativity

is two minds coming together, making something out of nothing.

And also it helps cross-pollinate audiences.

And it's all about us just educating our community

on what this collaborator is all about.

And there are putting them onto something,

but it also says something about us.

So what is a collaboration?

A collaboration can be for us,

as simple as us working with Adidas

and doing a new colorway of a shoe and putting our brands on it.

It can be if we're working on a project with, let's say, Pokemon,

you know, getting their characters to interact

and engage with our IP or our fans,

like to see us communicating and relating

and building with some of their other favorite properties

or brands or artists.

And you interact with some huge brands and big IP.

These are the biggest of the big.

Yeah. When we were starting,

that was a little bit frowned upon in streetwear

because streetwear was supposed to be anti-establishment.

Anti-establishment.

And one of the first major collaborations we did was with Disney.

And the reason why we did it is because we kept ripping Disney off,

right, doing these weird parodies in Mickey Mouse.

And they came to our booth at a trade show and said,

please stop.

We are going to sue the pants off of you.

We're good at this.

We're good at suing.

We're really good at suing.

Our lawyers, we're holding them back.

They're championing at the bit.

Or we can do this officially.

Why don't we do a creative collaboration together?

And that was chaos, you know, this.

I mean, good for them to recognize that.

To even open that door and have that conversation.

Well, they changed the tune for them a bit

because up until that point, Disney.

They are very protective of their IP.

Oh my God, maybe the most.

And that's also speaks to the strength of their brand.

Absolutely.

But they, at that point, consumer products was really focused on selling.

And their success is mainly with women and with young people, children,

Disney consumer products.

And they had a really difficult time penetrating this market,

which is teenage guys, 20-something guys who are into rap music and skateboarding.

They're like, that's just not Disney's lane.

What trade show was it?

I'm curious how they were even there in the first place.

It was Magic.

The Magic trade show, which still exists.

It's a Las Vegas fashion trade show.

Trade shows are not as in vogue anymore in practice.

We haven't done a trade show in many years.

But the Disney folks were there ostensibly to find licensees, perhaps?

That's right.

Looking at relationships where they can listen.

I can't speak for them, but I do know a lot of the studios and the licensors

are walking around, number one, to see if anyone's infringing.

Number two, their creative teams are walking around to gather and collect references and inspiration.

So it's a great place to go to see what the art's going to be like in six months.

And so you guys started this first major collaboration because you were infringing,

basically, and they came by and said, okay, look, there are two ways this can go.

We're going to sue the pants off of you, or let's just do it officially.

And I was like, they're like, you can have any property you want.

You guys want Mickey Mouse?

And I was like, no, that's not our approach to anything that we do.

It's too obvious.

It's too mainstream.

I'm like, you know those characters in Peter Pan, the Lost Boys, and they're like,

why do you want that?

They weren't reinvigorating that license.

That movie wasn't coming back into theaters.

They're like, those characters, why?

I'm like, because narrative and storytelling wise, that's us.

We've always been fighting the corporate pirates.

We don't ever want to grow up.

They're really fun little mischievous kids.

We're the Lost Boys.

They're like, all right, so we do this project with them.

It was the first and last time that they allowed any partner to do what we did,

which was merging the logos to a point where they were almost inextricable and almost confusing,

which is the entire point of IP is to avoid brand confusion, likelihood of confusion,

right, in trademark law, copyright law.

And we were taking the Disney font and writing the hundreds in it.

And all of this flew under the radar.

I am amazed you got away with that.

Because we got away with it because we had, thankfully, we had folks on the inside that

were on our side and knew that it would just have a really big impact.

And so the project released, we sold it to specific stores around the country, lineups.

Everything sold out within an hour.

Kanye West had a blog at the time.

He blogged about it.

He's just, you can still Google this.

He's just like, this is crazy what these kids have done, the hundreds.

Who are these guys?

And so that was another inflection point for us.

And there was a lot of chatter because it was a corporate brand that we were collaborating with

and it wasn't so independent.

But at the same time, our approach to that was always,

if you're going to work with a big dog like that, always make it look like you got one up on them,

whether you got paid or you just came out on top.

So you're a smart guy, right?

So you, I would have to imagine, I don't want to speak for you, but Disney comes along,

you have this launch, you're like, okay, I'm thinking long term.

If this works, it'll probably open up some interesting doors.

I want this to work.

Yes.

So what are some of the ways that you stack the deck?

What were some of the key decisions that you made in that launch?

In that launch.

Yes.

So you describe some of the product design, which is clever, right?

So it's like corporate, but it's also kind of anti-corporate in the way that you did it.

Yep.

Just in terms of the launch itself, I'll let you answer that any way you want.

Well, you, at that time, this was also a novel thought because we've grown very custom to limited

drops and drop culture and everything needs to hyper sell out right away.

Streetwear, for the most part, in terms of this genre of fashion, invented this.

And it's not like we were the ones who created either, you know, brands had already been doing

this for years.

So we've limited this supply.

They didn't understand that they were like, don't you want to make a lot of money?

And we're like, no, it's not about making money.

It's about making noise.

We were building a brand forever.

I want this to be the next Levi's and it's not making the money now.

I need it basically amortized over the course of my career.

So we don't want all the money right now.

We need enough money, but we just want to make noise.

And so let's just make a few products and just a little bit of inventory and let's have it sell out

immediately.

And so as soon as that happens, then the demand goes through the roof.

People, how do I get this?

When are you reprinting it?

And again, context at that time, every other brand would reprint.

We're like, we're never making this again.

And then we started to build this reputation of, oh, wait, so if I like this shirt right now,

I should get it.

I'm like, we're never making that shirt again.

And we didn't.

And like that project.

And you have to stick to that.

You have to stick to it.

If you deviate, yes.

Game over.

Exactly.

Now you're unreliable.

And the whole point of being a brand is that you're dependable as that's what you said.

And they're going to hold you to that.

And Disney didn't understand it either.

Hey, when are we going to do this again?

What's our next collaboration?

Oh, we're not working with you guys anymore.

What do you mean?

And they loved working with us because again, for the first time,

they had access to this demo that they never quite had before.

They ended up working with a bunch of other streetwear brands and repeating similar success.

And now Disney does a lot of streetwear stuff.

So what did you do?

I find it hard to imagine that you weren't thinking ahead.

So the launch goes well.

Launch goes great.

What's the next collaboration?

We couldn't look like we were just doing consecutive corporate licenses, right?

That's only one type of collaboration.

It's not bad or it's not wrong.

It's just one type.

Yeah.

But if you did four in a row, people would be like, okay, these guys have sold out.

They're just selling out and they're slapping logos together and it's just a corporate thing.

And so I think, and I don't remember this is so long ago, but the way I remember it back then was

then we started working with smaller artists or independent artists or more obscure properties

around the same time we worked with Stan Sakai and Dark Horse Comics,

because I grew up with Eastman and Laird's Ninja Turtles and I loved Usagi Yojimbo.

Yeah, for sure.

So Usagi was, he made this cameo in like issue three and then they incorporated him into the

animated series, but he wasn't a part of the Ninja Turtle universe.

And I just loved that, that he didn't necessarily belong, but here he was coming in from a different

universe.

Yeah.

So Usagi Yojimbo, just so people have an idea, Rabbit, who is, I think Yojimbo is literally

bodyguard, something like that in Japanese.

I should look it up, but similarly you're not going for Mickey Mouse.

Right.

We're not going for Mickey Mouse.

They were like, don't you want to do Ninja Turtles?

Because those are really hot right now.

I'm like, no, there was this random rabbit samurai named Usagi Yojimbo and we need to

work with Stan Sakai directly.

This Japanese American comic book artist.

Yeah, Yojimbo does mean bodyguard.

Yojimbo's bodyguard.

And we can't just work with the property.

I want to work directly with the artist.

I want to work with him.

I don't want to just pull a piece of art out of a style guide that someone prepared in

a PDF and put in on a shirt.

I need to work with him.

And all the way up until today, this shirt I'm wearing right now, it's a Phantom of

the Opera collaboration.

Why?

You know, when I was saying why we even do collaborations is not just to educate our

community on our partner and what they're all about.

Whenever you're speaking on somebody else, it highlights a nuance about yourself.

And so now we're not a monolith of, oh, I thought you were just a streetwear brand

and all streetwear brands are like this.

And it's just about skateboarding and rap music or whatever it is.

Well, we are into Phantom of the Opera.

Now we feel more human because most people aren't just these monoliths and they don't

just have one unidirectional creative path.

And so for us to work with a musical, it even startled and surprised Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Because when we got on the phone with them, they thought it was a joke.

You know, Andrew Lloyd Webber sincerely was asking, oh, he was asking, are you guys being

sincere or are you being ironic?

I don't understand why you'd want to do this.

And I was like, I have to explain something to you.

I love the theater so much of what we do in streetwear is theater.

And so that's the message that I want to send to the audience, that it's all one and the

same.

The things that we're talking about in the musical are very much on par with everyone's

lives.

So he's like, I don't get it, but let's do it.

And then he loved it, right?

And so he even like made an Instagram video where he's wearing the jacket and talking about it.

So what is the, if this were, let's just say a Harvard Business School case day, and they're

like, okay, the hundreds, let's look at the current state of the hundreds.

What does the company look like just in terms of revenue streams or primary focal areas?

Yeah.

What does that look like?

So we're talking right now in the spring of 2023.

We're coming out of the hotbed frenzy that the pandemic was 2020 to the early parts of 2022,

maybe late 21.

What happened in those periods is for those who aren't aware, I'm not going to assume that

anyone knows this.

Direct to consumer brands exploded.

Everyone was fishing a barrel, stuck at home, shopping online for comfort or because they

were bored, or there was stimulus checks, right?

There's a lot of money floating around.

And so we just had a boom.

If you were set up online in any type of capacity, you were as chances that you had a very, very

successful booming couple of years, and we did.

Those were some of arguably maybe the best years that we even ever had as a business.

We couldn't stop selling.

It wasn't a gradual rise.

It was overnight.

We do drops every week to two weeks, meaning there's another collaboration that we're

introducing to the world, Pokemon Project or Harry Potter Project to an artist that we're

making t-shirts with.

Today, we did an Earth Day project.

So there's Earth Day t-shirts on sustainable recycled t-shirts.

So we do these drops, and the lockdown started March 10th, I think.

The next drop that we had, it was tripling numbers, right?

And we were like, oh, everyone loves this artist.

And everyone did love that artist.

His name is Blue the Great.

He's a local LA artist.

He's worked on Jordan Clabs.

So we're like, okay, everyone likes Blue.

Let's try this one.

And I think the next project was with the state of Roald Dahl.

And we did all of his books as t-shirts and sweatshirts when bananas, right?

And so that was the course of the next two years.

Let me just pause for a second.

So not to beat a dead horse, but just so I understand, is the majority of, and I'm

going to act as a stand-in for the audience.

Okay, so just so people understand the business, is then the revenue that's

generated by the company that you're using to pay the employees and so on.

Coming from you forming a collaboration with, say, a licensing agreement predominantly,

doing a launch every one to two weeks, and then you are driving direct consumer sales,

or is there another component where you have retail distribution,

or these partners themselves are also promoting to their audience?

Are they driving to your website?

Are they selling inventory that you ship them some other way,

just so people have a picture of how things are moving around?

It's all of that.

So we are still a seasonal collection brand.

Four to six times a year, we do big seasonal drops.

And that's a comprehensive range of apparel that you see hanging in retail stores.

And this would be the hundreds.

This is the hundreds.

No collaboration.

Yes, it's pure inline products.

Sometimes there's collaborations that will sprinkle in there, but the store buyers,

they buy it a year in advance, year and a half, six months in advance.

We produce it, and then it ends up and it all releases.

Hey, the spring collection's out right now.

Here are the retailers, and you can buy it online from us.

When we do these drops that I'm talking about,

those are outside of the general inline collection,

and they're the specialty online drops.

But we also have a physical store.

And so you can also go to the store when we do a drop,

and that's where you'll see a line of kids waiting for it.

And that's a hyper strike, very limited,

one time only drop of collaboration, let's say.

How much of the collaboration drops is almost a marketing slash PR function,

where you're using that to create the noise that creates the visibility

and informs the brand that then helps you to sell the seasonal collections.

Yeah, there is this really delicate dance, right?

You're doing, it's exactly that.

When we started doing collabs 20 years ago, they weren't to make money,

because streetwear was really small,

and people weren't accustomed to drop culture and drop mechanics, right?

It took everyone about 10 years to warm up to this idea of,

oh, it sold out, and did you learn your lesson?

You better be on it for the next one.

And so as soon as it comes out, okay, let me grab it and take it off the table.

Nowadays, I would say it's a mix.

I'd say half of the projects we do,

like when we collaborate with Pokemon,

we have a few projects coming out with Star Wars over the next year.

When those projects drop, they are so noisy,

right, that that's a huge chunk of change revenue that's coming in.

I love that.

It keeps the business going, obviously keeps the lights on,

but in order for those to sell,

and for them to even gain that amount of energy,

it's all in the smaller collaborations that lead up to it

with unknown artists, the next band that you've never heard of,

that you're going to love tomorrow, the hot new rapper.

It's all those little projects that they don't make a ton of money,

but they're just really good for the culture and storytelling of the brand,

and they round us out so it doesn't look like,

because there are some brands that only do corporate licenses.

They're specifically architected just for that reason, right?

And then there are brands that won't do any corporate licenses,

and they'll only work with really small-time artists and keep it pretty small,

and it's a very core type of brand.

We ride the line in between because we know it's like Coachella, right?

You have the mainstream artists,

you have Blackpink headlining along with Frank Ocean,

and then you go for, that gets most of the ticket sales.

Everyone's wanting to see Bad Bunny and Rosalia,

but then when you're there, you discover the smaller artists

in the Sahara tent are on the side stages,

and so everyone kind of works in concert, no pun intended.

Same with the smaller names on the bill.

They want to go and perform.

It keeps the festival grounded and a little bit closer to the street,

but then they also get the exposure that the mainstream artists bring,

and so everybody wins.

So a couple of things.

First, funny side note that I would want to corroborate,

but apparently Frank Ocean was interviewed for some mainstream music publication.

This was a couple of years ago,

and I believe he said that when he's on stage performing,

a lot of the time he will have this podcast playing in one earpiece.

What?

Yeah, it's pretty wild.

I've never interacted with him, but if that's true, thank you, Frank.

What up, Frank?

Yeah, that's wild.

He's a really thoughtful and heady individual as we all know.

Yeah, super.

He grew up also on Fairfax and was just around the shop,

and he came in a few years ago right before the pandemic,

and we made a t-shirt that said,

he knows the kids that work in the shop,

and we had a shirt that says,

maintain the mystery,

and I use that phrase a lot in our branding and our messaging,

because I love that.

We are such a transparent and communicative and open brand,

but I do believe there is a magic and a power to maintaining mystery,

especially in brand building.

Could not agree more.

And he walked into the store,

and this is so Frank.

He looked at everything and he's like,

what is that?

I will buy that shirt.

And he started wearing it around town.

You can just Google the hundreds, Frank Ocean,

and you'll see it.

He's walking down Soho with Kendall Jenner and Hailey Bieber,

or someone, Gigi Bella Hadid, one of the girls next to him,

and so that shirt just went viral.

Maintain the mystery.

Maintain the mystery.

It was the most Frank Ocean moment for the hundreds,

but that's frankly, yeah.

What a great story.

Yeah.

So if we then go back to Disney, Lost Boys,

good news, bad news, went great, guys.

We're not going to work with you again.

Yeah.

Good luck.

And I know it wasn't quite that simple.

Then you go back to the roots,

with respect to highlighting up-and-comers.

What was the next big brand licensing deal,

and how did it happen?

The next big one.

Because now I can imagine you have a lot of inbound,

you probably have full-time team who handles licensing,

and maybe there are two or three trade shows that you go to,

but you have a couple of channels through which

you develop these relationships.

But since the Disney came about in a very idiosyncratic way,

let's say, how did the next one happen?

Or whichever you can remember.

Yeah.

Right?

But like, did you go seeking it,

or was it some different dynamic?

It's probably the most common question that I get asked

from young entrepreneurs,

is how do you do collaborations,

and how do you set them up,

and how do you even go about walking into a deal?

And the answer is that they're different every single time.

Sometimes they're entirely serendipitous,

we're sitting at a bar and like,

what do you do?

Oh, you work there.

Hey, we should do something together,

and we'll write it on a cocktail now.

Yeah, LA is a good place for that too.

Right.

And then sometimes it'll be a handshake,

where there's not even a contract put up against it.

We worked with Epitaph Records,

which is a punk label that I grew up listening to.

And we worked on that project for,

this is a whole other thing,

sometimes collaborations take a long time.

They can happen overnight,

and Epitaph took 11 years for it to come together,

just to get every band to sign off.

But even with that project,

girl, what's the owner was like,

you don't have to even pay us.

This is advertising for us,

you guys keep all the money.

So every agreement is set up a little bit differently.

And I'm trying to think of the next big one.

I mean, we didn't work with Disney again for 12 years,

and that was with Roger Rabbit,

and the same thing applied with that one,

in that Roger Rabbit is a really bizarre anomalous entity,

where it's split up.

It's like a product of divorce of every studio

that came together for that Lightning in a Bottle moment.

Warner Brothers, King Features, Disney obviously,

all Hannah Barbera,

all put their cartoons in one project,

and Steven Spielberg too.

And then they said,

we're never doing this again, we hate each other.

That's why every character has equal amount of time on screen.

Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse,

when they're falling in the sky,

it's the exact same amount of seconds,

because Disney was like, well, if Bugs is in it,

then Mickey has to be in it.

And they was like...

It's like two agencies duking it out with their stars.

It was like seven studios that were running Hollywood at the time.

We're never doing this again.

I suppose my question is, you get Disney.

Yeah.

This is one of the best-known brands,

maybe the best-known brand in the world.

Yeah.

There are a few others that might vie for first place.

I think Harvard would be another one,

which globally,

dominant brand.

How did you use the fact that you had had a successful launch

to help with things over the next few years?

Well, Google at the time really worked.

And so if you looked us up,

that came across and Connie blogging about it was very impressive.

You put together essentially a deck

and say, these are some of our greatest hits.

If you're approaching a partner who doesn't know anything about you,

or if you're trying to win them over,

you're saying, hey, this is everything that we've ever done,

and this is how fast it sold on.

This is how much money we made if they want to see that.

Other than that, most of our projects have been inbound.

Someone reaching out saying, hey, we're with this estate.

We're with the estate of Jackson Pollock.

You guys do a lot of work with art.

I was going to say, the next project that I can think of,

that was a huge success and it was on that scale.

And this one was even more meaningful to me

because it's how I learned how to draw,

was with Jim Davis and Garfield.

Oh, wow.

And we directly reached out to them and said,

hey, we have to work with you.

And they are a licensing powerhouse.

In some ways, they invented a lot of consumer products and licensing,

and it all started with, I don't know how old you are,

but in the early 80s, late 70s, they were called stuck on use.

They were the Garfield stuffed plushes

that were on the insides of the car windows.

Totally.

And it looked like they were hanging on.

Up until that point, 1978, Garfield was just a local comic.

In fact, it was just about John Arbuckle.

And then by the second or third edition of the comic,

Jim started realizing that people were more interested in the cat

than the guy.

So then he spun it around and made the comic about the cat.

And he made money doing this comic.

And a licensed sore from, I want to say from Asia came to him and said,

hey, can we license this for these?

We just want to make these stuck on use and put them in people's cars.

And he said, sure, I don't really get it,

but I don't even know what a license is.

But like, let's do it.

It transformed the company.

It made the company what it is today.

I went and directly visited them there in Muncie, Indiana,

which is like an hour and a half outside of Indianapolis.

They're in this giant orange barn with like a big paw print on the side of it.

And the entire organization was built off of the backs of those stuck on use.

Wow.

For the next three to four years, they made all their money.

And then they realized credible comics are great.

Licensing is where the money happens.

Spaghetti is breakfast cereals, TV shows, blankets.

I grew up with all that bed sheets and my alarm clock, which I still own Garfield.

And that was, to me, this really important lesson in how to build a brand that can be

beloved, still make money and stay true to the art.

I don't know if he's still doing anymore,

but back then he was still in the office every day overseeing everything,

even the blue lining of the comics.

And so we worked with them multiple times.

And this is total tangent.

But when you look at the two comics that I loved growing up, Garfield,

was architected that way.

And Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes, which was anti-licensed.

Bill Watterson never licensed the thing.

So those we are like, Calvin pissing on Ford logo stickers.

I heard a story, maybe somebody can verify this, that he hated licensing so much,

the idea of merchandising, that someone, maybe a business manager,

someone brought him into an office and they wanted to set up this meeting.

And there was, it must have been Hobbes, like a stuffed,

there's like a four foot stuffed Hobbes in the corner.

And he was so upset that he took some like pair of scissors and just hacked it to pieces

in front of everyone in the meeting.

And he was like, that's how I feel about this and goodbye,

which I kind of love that he's so clear,

that he's so clear on it.

He had such an set idea and opinion on what Calvin and Hobbes was supposed to be

from the moment he started drawing that thing.

I don't know how it's like he could read the future.

And look, I don't think that property has held up as well as Garfield,

just because it hasn't been licensed.

And he retired that comic.

I was in high school.

Do you remember the last one?

I don't remember the last one,

but I still have all of my paperback collections of Calvin and Hobbes this day.

Yeah, my kids read them,

but a lot of young people don't know what that comic is anymore at its place in time.

And it might just kind of die in the vine like that, which is okay.

He probably doesn't care at all.

I don't think he cares at all.

He recently announced that he might be doing something,

or I think he dropped a new comic strip just for the fun of it.

Every three to four years,

he kind of pops back up again and says something,

but he doesn't care.

He's so elusive.

There's a documentary called Dear Mr. Watterson, I think,

and it's about the entire documentary is this guy trying to get Bill into a dock.

That's hilarious.

It's like in search of the snow leopard.

Yeah, there's a few of these figures in my life.

Culturally, they're all the same.

Salinger is one, Bill Watterson is another.

But even in streetwear,

there's a character by the name of Don Buswiler,

who's arguably the most iconic and influential streetwear pioneer.

Don, and I'm in contact with him every single day, but no one else is.

He joined a religious group.

Some people call it a cult in the 80s.

He was on top.

He's from Miami.

Animal Farm, his store was probably the first real streetwear store,

owned the club scene, made a ton of money for two to three years,

went to a trade show.

This is how the mythology goes.

Went to a trade show, made a million dollars,

walked into his room, tore up all the P.O.'s through him out the window.

Purchase orders.

Disappeared.

Sorry, the purchase orders disappeared.

No one knew where he went.

I love these stories.

And then he showed up in a cult.

They ride bicycles around the country, eating trash out of bins.

Freakings, sometimes they're called.

Yeah.

And 2020 had done a documentary on this cult called The Brethren.

Look, a lot of that is mythology.

I'm good friends with Don.

We talk every single day,

but he still leads this very virtuous spiritual life,

where he lives off the land, he travels the world,

and not a week goes by where he tries to convince me out of this.

And he's like, how's business going?

I'm like, it's good, it's a little stressful.

He's like, I'm waiting for you on the other side, constantly.

This is where I am today in Israel.

This is where I am today in South Africa.

This is my office.

And he's alone, or he's on top of a train,

just going into the middle of nowhere, enjoying his life.

So those are the people.

I don't think I could ever be these people,

but they are my north stars.

There's part of me that wants to be one of those people,

but I'm very skeptical of my own ability to ever do it.

I seem to be too addicted to my own suffering.

And self-imposed, grinding.

But these cases of folks, and there are others,

I don't know how much we would have in common,

but you find, say, this is not the same,

but like a Daniel Day Lewis, right?

Just like, disappears for five years, no idea where he is.

And then he shows up and wins everything.

And then disappears for another four or five years.

And then wins everything.

And then he's like, yeah, I'm done.

Oh, man.

You know, or what Dave Chappelle did as well.

How many people can do this though?

50 million.

He's like, no, I'm good.

Yeah.

See you later.

I romanticize and idealize that life too.

Maybe if I was disciplined enough, I could do that.

But I don't know.

I like saying yes to things.

Branding is all about saying no,

but I like saying yes to so much.

Also, maybe the key, not to get too metaphysical or philosophical,

but maybe the key is having these friends.

So you can say, maybe at some point I'll do that.

And that will be like the salve on my soul

that addresses all these things.

And the key is not doing it.

Because then you can't burst the illusion.

You have this hope that you kind of keep on your shelf.

And you're like, if I ever did these things,

I could see how it would change my life.

And that's the value.

Because for instance, I know so many people,

and I'm sure you do as well,

that once they have a degree of financial success

that allows them not to be worried about A, B, and C,

they realize that actually the money does not fix their problems.

And their mental health and their inner demons.

Which is why I think in part so many,

and look, this is not like, as one of my friends,

America weeps for these people.

It's like, no, it's like a joke, right?

Nobody expects any sympathy for people.

They're like, oh my god, I have money now and I'm so miserable.

But I think it's not that in a sense they were miserable all along.

It's that they get the money and they realize,

oh, this doesn't fix the things.

And then they lose some degree of hope.

So maybe in this case, it's like with the reclusive,

it's like, okay, let's keep this hope in its pristine,

sort of, un-over-examined state.

So I can put it on a shelf.

Anyway, we're getting down a pretty deep rabbit hole.

Let's completely flip this around.

Yes.

And I'm going to go straight for the juicy bits.

We've alluded to NFTs.

All right, at one point,

you and your team made more than $7 million in 40 minutes

by selling 25,000 NFTs.

Was it worth it?

Oh, boy.

And that's going to be a strange question for folks.

But you and I have had some conversations offline.

Yeah, was it worth it?

How do you even begin to unpack this?

Because you have, as you noted earlier, been tracking NFTs for a while.

You were tracking them before a lot of folks were paying attention

and then you became a source of knowledge and people came in

and had a lot of questions for you.

Yeah.

And you had what I think a lot of people would consider a huge home run.

Yeah.

So feel free to lead into the story any way you like.

But the question of was it worth it is one I want to at least keep on the radar.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm going to be a politician about that.

Was it worth it in the end to get into NFTs, delve into them, create a project?

Absolutely.

Speaking of suffering, was it painful and horrible?

And at times, did I regret entirely ever stepping foot into that space?

100%.

And if you take money out of the equation, the $7 million, people also have to be mindful of

almost all of that went right back in.

So we didn't pocket that.

That's actually going back into supporting the company.

The other thing people had at the time of was like,

wow, you guys made $7 million in a day.

We didn't.

Also, yeah.

Pre-tax.

Right, let's just.

Pre-tax.

Important to note.

Even with crypto, pre-tax.

And people are like, oh, you made $7 million in a day because they just assumed that these

assets were generative and we built that project in like two weeks or something.

We spent eight months doing.

In fact, we spent over a year researching, listening to the community, being in clubhouses,

trying to figure this out, doing the education part of it before we even stepped into how

do we make this happen?

And then let's create all the art.

And most of it was manual.

So if you look at our art, it's not like Mr. Potato Head style where you're just flipping

traits around their individual pieces of art that were borrowed from 20 years of history

from the hundreds, right?

So our project was set up a little bit differently.

And so if you look at it like, oh, they made $7 million over the course of a year,

and not to show too much of ourselves, but in terms of us selling clothing,

we make a lot more than that, like as a clothing company.

And we had reduced the amount of clothing that we were selling in that time.

Consciously, and also because so much of our efforts, and especially me,

my attention was entirely consumed with making these NFTs.

If anyone reads the white paper, which is essentially the Bible as to why we built that

project to begin with, a large motivation was to essentially go against what fashion has

been doing in terms of contributing to waste in the world from a sustainable perspective.

And if we can move a lot of digital ownership, but really a lot of digital status signaling

online, instead of having to make product against it, it costs so much to make this

stuff, and it just ends up in a landfill in Chile.

We can do that with JPEGs.

It makes a lot more sense as us as fashion brands to move into that realm.

And so there was a lot of things that we were trying and experimenting with,

and I think we actually moved the needle with in doing it.

So was it worth it in the end?

It was.

Did we make money?

I think we lost money.

The amount of time that we've spent and the amount of resources we've invested into giving

back into that community who supported the project and has been with us along the way,

it hasn't actually come out like we're profiting a great done off top.

Like we've lost money by being a part of this.

And even if, let's just say, you made a bunch of money.

Yeah.

In that moment, we did.

Right.

Yeah.

In that moment, you did.

The work that goes into it beforehand and afterward is sort of invisible, right?

Because what people see is the drop.

I just want to point out also, because I like to do this when I interview folks,

you were talking about your early collaborations and the importance of coordinated

drops and drop mechanics.

I just want to point out that you could not have predicted that the learnings in that world

would later apply to something like this.

That's right.

So it's easy to connect the dots looking in the rearview mirror, but

it's good that you didn't take a bunch of money and get pigeonholed with a board who's like,

hey, you're a t-shirt company.

CEO, we have the right to fire you, by the way.

And you're like, but wait a second.

We want to explore in these areas because we want to try to at least envision where the

puck may be headed.

Yeah.

You had mentioned to me, I don't think you'll mind me saying this, but at one point,

you're like, yeah, you could basically consider, and I know this is an overstatement,

but like any of the profit that I might have had, I put the entirety of it into therapy.

Oh, right.

Yeah.

Not an easy year.

Right.

No, the mental language that comes with this, especially if you have issues with guilt,

which I do, especially if you have savior complex, which I do.

This is not the lane for you.

This specific corner of NFTs, which are PFP projects that people were trading and collecting,

which is what we wanted, but then also started gambling with because when you reduce the

art just down to a tradable asset, then you can start flipping them at a really lightening

pace and it turns into a Ponzi Nomics and turns into just hypergambling really quickly.

Super quickly.

Right.

And so people realize that with NFTs pretty early on, like 2021, 2022, I think we've actually

gotten out of a lot of that either because people were satiated or they were mainly burnt.

And this is a little bit tangential, but now we're seeing it happen in other sectors.

And so I wrote the book also almost as a bellwether for other industries to look at.

Eventually, everything, luxury handbags, sports cards are already starting to do this.

Any collectible and anything is really collectible with the hindsight of nostalgia

is going to end up on the blockchain.

Someone is going to record those assets on the blockchain and then they're going to

hold them in a vault.

So here's a great example.

Sneakers.

Right now, if you trade sneakers, you're buying them and collecting them and selling them off.

You're probably going through an app like StockX or Grailed.

And what they do is you send them the sneakers, they list them on their website, and then they

inspect them.

And then if someone buys those sneakers, then they deliver it.

So there's actually this escrow period where it takes a couple of weeks for you to actually

get your sneakers that you bought from somebody else.

Two to three weeks in the pandemic goes like four weeks.

Now, what's going to start happening is that that's a lot of movement for a product.

A lot of risk too.

A lot of risk.

It's a lot of waste.

It's a lot of gas and fuel and jets and ships moving things around.

And it just takes too much time.

And so what we'll end up doing is those sneakers will end up being converted to NFTs

and just sit on the blockchain.

And then when you send them the shoes, StockX or a company like that,

in theory, you would hold them in a vault.

If you were transacting on the shoe and you have no intention of wearing them,

you're just buying and flipping.

You'll do it on the blockchain just like an NFT does and performs.

And if you ever want to call the sneaker out, you can.

And then you burn the NFT.

Right.

And so there's a lot of companies that are looking at this structure because everything,

the secondary market is becoming so massive, not just in fine art, not just in sneakers,

but again, luxury handbags are like huge right now with women and men that are going to Japan,

sourcing them, bring them back here and flipping them for two to three times the price.

Right.

So you make like an extra three to four grand on a bag.

You do that a hundred times.

Like you're doing pretty well.

And so eventually those are going to end up on the blockchain as well.

And when you start doing that at that pace and there's no escrow period for you to be

thoughtful or to think about what you're doing or even to consider the art,

and you're reducing everything down to just a code.

And now you're not even acknowledging that there was any human involvement in this.

It gets into this really slippery and very almost dystopian category or lane where now

it's not about the creation at all.

Everyone's a day trader.

And out everyone becomes a day trader, whether you acknowledge it or not.

And so when NFTs were really, NFTs have been around for three to four years and arguably

when we got in at the end of 2020, it was not really looked at in this way.

It was about collecting art and buying art and selling it.

And then board apes happened.

And that summer there was a few projects leading up to board apes.

But what board apes did was essentially they tied in some type of utility to the NFT.

And that changed the narrative for the first time where it wasn't just collectibles anymore.

Crypto punks, which were the biggest NFT project, PFP project at that time, and still is in my

opinion, they're the alpha and omega.

Crypto punks had no utility.

They were just trading cards.

And it's the same way that Pokemon cards are set up,

tops and sports cards, anything under fanatics.

They don't promise utility because if they promise utility with their collectibles,

then they become securities.

That's a stock.

You have to be very careful with that.

You have to be very careful.

I'm going to say not financial advice all over this.

Yeah, that's where you end up with an ankle bracelet that has you on house arrest in the

best case.

Right.

And so if you look at a company like TCG, like the ones that run the Pokemon cards,

they don't even acknowledge the secondary market exists.

They're all about just primary market.

What do you mean?

These are just fun cards for kids to play a game with.

Disney is coming out with Laura Canna.

It's their version of a Pokemon card game, like a magic to gathering.

That's going to become a huge collectibles of a pop culture card market, right?

Right now, sports cards are kind of ruling trading cards.

Non-sports trading cards are going to become massive.

Star Wars is already doing anything associated with Disney because Disney is

leaning so heavily into this space.

Everyone's looking at anything made by Disney right now.

They're Mickey Mouse autograph cards coming out of Asia that are like $30,000.

So people are going to start trading these things as well.

And these are digital.

No, these are physical trading cards.

These are physical.

These are physical trading cards.

But on the digital card front,

Disney's making Veeve is the NFT blockchain of choice for a lot of the bigger studios.

And I don't know how official this is.

I've heard that Veeve makes billions of dollars a year.

And no one ever talks about it.

They only want to talk about board apes.

But Disney NFTs trade much more than anything in the board ape or atom bomb squad or doodles

or artifact or any of that.

But people don't look at it like it's a gambling thing because over there,

people are actually collecting them and holding them.

And so it's just I've had no problem with the way that people flip NFTs.

I think there just needs to be more emphasis on people holding NFTs.

And in order for them to hold them,

there needs to be a collectible asset or a culture built into it.

And that takes time.

I think that understandably NFTs, let me just back up for a second.

If people are left, so non fungible tokens, NFTs,

this is going to be very simplistic.

But think about it.

Please correct me if you want to change this definition.

But think of it as digital title, right?

So you have digital title to X.

It could be anything.

So envision a world where rather than buying tickets from scalpers

or going on to StubHub or whatever it might be,

it could still be on StubHub.

But let's just say Ticketmaster wants to get a cut every time their ticket is resold,

travels from hand to hand.

It could take the form of this NFT where it's not quite this simple.

I understand that, guys.

But they get some royalty, right?

They get some cut every time it changes hands.

Or you think about all the waste.

Some would say just administrative cost, fine.

But you think of all of the intermediaries

and all of the costs associated with, in many cases, buying a car

or especially buying a house.

A lot of that at some point could be made much cheaper

and much faster through digital means.

And then you could still have, say, an NFT that corresponds to title, right?

And so you could have a piece of artwork

that is in and of itself identified with this NFT.

And so you can buy and sell that.

That's how you prove the equivalent of, say, provenance, authenticity.

But you could also have something physical, as you said,

where you buy a pair of shoes.

You're never going to wear these shoes.

It's like maybe buying a really fancy bottle of wine.

The same could be true.

You buy a really fancy bottle of wine.

You are a collector and a trader of wine.

You may hold it for five days.

You may hold it for five years.

But you're not in the business of storing wine in your basement

and shipping it around.

You're in the business of buying and selling.

So that wine could stay at this central storage facility

by some exchange or something like that.

And you are simply using smooth, hopefully, technology, reliable,

hopefully, trustworthy, hopefully, right?

Because, by the way, code is not always perfect

to buy and sell in a much more frictionless way.

And what I'm curious to know,

and I guess I'll say just one more thing,

which is NFTs in the form of artwork,

I think, made for a very easy to understand on-ramp

for a lot of people.

And there's still a lot of ugliness in the multiple senses.

You have, people aren't going to like this, some folks.

But I think anonymity breeds really bad behavior.

So one of the features can also be a pretty big bug

in so much as almost everyone I've spoken to

has come from outside of NFTs.

Like they're not NFT native and they launch something.

They're like, this is the worst so-called community

I have ever been exposed to.

All of the worst behaviors are reinforced.

And it's really bad.

And there are good people, of course,

but it's hard to drown out the negativity.

So there's ugliness.

There's also ugliness just in terms of user interface

and the ability to have, let's just say,

even friends of mine buy an NFT to support another friend.

They're like, God, this is so complicated, right?

So I guess two questions just in terms of what you see coming.

But also the bigger question is, why write this book?

Because books are hard.

Books are so hard.

At least for me, they're hard.

I had no intention on writing a book about this world.

But as I've talked about on this podcast,

my entire journey has been transparent.

When we started the hundreds, from day one,

I was blogging about what we were doing.

Here are the rivets that we sourced for our denim.

Here's the store that we sold to.

I want you to meet them.

This is what we ate lunch with today.

And this is the artist that we're hanging out with.

You should follow up on them.

And so everyone was along for the ride.

So as we were building our business

and discovering and learning about streetwear ourselves,

so was our community.

And we were always on the same page.

And the same thing happened when I started discovering Web 3.

I remember the day that I learned about it.

A friend of ours, this guy Trevor,

posted something on Twitter about Beeple's sale

in December of 2020, three and a half million dollars

off of a digital piece of artwork.

I could not wrap my mind around it.

It not only confused me.

It frustrated me.

It angered me.

I got really pissed off.

I was like, this doesn't make any sense.

This is totally unfair when there are perfectly good artists

out there that can't sell canvas.

And now we're selling JPEGs.

This is a myth and a lie.

Whenever my brain moves into that territory,

I always pause and I just start questioning myself.

And it made me curious.

I was like, I want to expunge this off the face of the planet.

But before I get there, I have to understand everything about it.

And there were definitely some soft and blurry parts of it.

And still some elements, especially when it gets into metaverse talk,

that I'm like, this is kind of bogus.

But there were some really useful and important parts of it

that I thought were valid.

And that was what captivated me and drew me into the space of,

here's a technology that can potentially correct

a lot of the frictions and a lot of the errors

that we've been repeating, especially in fashion,

and how we build companies.

And for the first time, maybe we can balance out

a lot of the disparities between the owners and the consumers.

Perhaps we can rectify how artists are paid through secondary sales.

Again, I come from collecting a lot of physical art.

And it is a little insane to see an artist sell work for $5,000

and a collector to turn around and flip it for $50,000.

And the artist makes none of that.

Like that doesn't seem quite fair.

And it keeps that starving artist narrative going.

Instead of you never hear of starving art gallery, right?

It's always the artist is the one who gets screwed over in the end.

And so that's what really attracted me to the space.

And I thought that there was a lot in that.

And I wrote these essays, not just for me,

but for our community to understand.

I'm like, this is what I think is going on.

In 2020, it was called crypto art, crypto media, more than NFTs.

And so my first essays were about that.

And then I started holding Zoom rooms

where I would invite anyone to come in.

And we would just talk about it.

And that working definition, or that open-ended definition

and discussion about NFTs, I don't think I've ever stopped.

Anyone who enters a room and claims to be an expert and say,

this is, again, the concrete truth or fact about what NFTs are.

And I'm like, do not listen to this person.

Back away.

Back away.

Because this is a living conversation.

Everything is still happening in real time.

Goalposts are changing, shifting every single day.

Some of the things that everyone believed were true last year,

last month, last week, about NFTs don't apply anymore.

And so you cannot come in and say, oh, this is what an NFT is.

Now we're starting to understand more and more

that physical things can be NFTs,

because from the very beginning,

NFTs were really just like code on the blockchain.

And the narrative for so long was, oh,

it had to be a digital JPEG or something online.

It's like, oh, no, no, it can apply to that.

But it can also be something physical.

It can be this table that we're sitting at right now.

So people's ideas and impressions of NFTs are changing over time.

I've recorded all of these in essays

that I've been writing for the last two years.

And I started off by talking about how NFTs are a scam.

And the last chapter is called NFTs are the future,

because I extract the elements of it that I believe can live on

and may be more meaningful to us in different ways,

not just in gambling with million-dollar monkey JPEGs,

but in ways where we can use it to be disruptive around business

or how we treat our customers and our communities.

I actually start off the book by talking about SPF and FTX.

I have to acknowledge that.

And our good friend Neil Strauss was the one who was just like,

hey, have you ever thought about the fact that there are parallels

with SPF and Charles Manson and killing crypto

or killing the hippie movement?

And as I looked into what Manson and what his murders did

to the hippie movement and theoretically killed it,

Joan Didion was writing a lot about it.

At the time I opened the book with a Joan Didion quote,

she's like, basically, this is dead.

The hippie movement is corrupt.

It's a bunch of immoral, morally bankrupt people.

And then Charles Manson happens.

And then that's just proof that these people needed some kind of structure.

And what she got wrong in that is,

number one, Charles Manson was actually never a hippie.

He escaped from jail and he preyed on the vulnerabilities

in the hippie culture.

And then he took advantage of that,

which I don't know anything personal about SPF really.

I don't know him as an individual,

but it seems like there's a lot of room for that in crypto.

The infrastructure is so porous and scaffolding is not established yet.

So anyone can walk in and take advantage of somebody,

especially with all the anonymity, all of the dense language,

all of the open tech, it's just very easy.

Yeah, and a lack of structure, right?

Lack of infrastructure.

Lack of infrastructure.

And some folks are not going to laugh and look,

this is true for everything, but especially in crypto or blockchain chats.

There are a lot of checks and balances in the,

let's just call it the sort of trad fine, right?

Traditional finance world.

And there's a lot of bloat.

There is a lot of red tape.

But man, a lot of those regulations were created for very good reasons.

Right. Yeah.

And when you remove those guardrails,

not all outcomes are going to be good.

Yeah. Well, when you think about it with crypto,

what's happening is that you become your own bank,

which sounds amazing.

And parts of that are actually really powerful and enabling

and they should exist.

But what many people won't tell you is that you become your own bank,

you also have to become your own bank security guard, right?

And not many people are set up to do that

or are informed on how to do that through ledgers

or other types of security devices.

And even if you use hardware wallets,

I mean, I just, speaking as someone and maybe you've had these issues,

we don't have to get into it necessarily, we could,

but you certainly know celebrities.

You relate to something called a wrench attack differently

when you've had real security risks.

And I think it's an abstract event

that most people assume will never happen to them.

But in this world in particular,

there are real security risks.

And that's scary.

There's a reason why we're banks appealing in the first place

because people are like,

I don't want to have to sleep with my gun next to my bed

because I have gold bars under my mattress.

And you're right, you're totally right.

This is a problem that is facilitated by the nature of the internet

and how fast the conversation happens.

And we've never experienced anything like this before

where we have such a powerful technology.

I still very much believe, by the way,

in digital ownership and sovereignty and blockchain and crypto.

I very much do.

But the progress is happening at the same time as the conversation.

In fact, the conversation is outpacing the infrastructure at this point.

And so when you get into that mode,

because of the nature of Twitter and Discord

and all the what's happened group chats,

everyone is ideating and innovating so quickly

that the technology to actually build this stuff takes decades.

And so we're getting so far ahead of ourselves.

So this is what we can do and this is where it can go next.

Well, someone actually needs to sit and build this.

It's hard to even do that in the bull market

because everyone is trading so much

and no one is actually building anything.

We'll get to the security piece later.

Thankfully, right now we're in a moment

where everyone's taking a breather

and there are really capable people in the background

who are developing and building

and engineering programs and networks

that will keep us safer as we move forward.

And eventually we'll get caught up,

but it is going to take some time.

What are some of the coolest things that you're seeing

in the broadly speaking Web3 space?

That's an all-encompassing term, but just for simplicity.

What are some of the things that you're seeing or tracking?

I think just the idea of smart contracts

are going to be very useful for us, right?

And so and then records like of deeds and ownership receipts,

like we may need those things.

Membership, like Starbucks,

it has a really good membership rewards program

that's starting to being built.

Nike entered the space with Dot Swoosh.

What they're doing is very much along the lines

of what I do just because I come from fashion.

They're realizing that instead of having

to produce all these physical sneakers,

sometimes people just want to be able to collect

and own great art.

And they're also utilizing Dot Swoosh

so that their community can become creators

and put in their own flips and spins on shoes

and if they're ever made,

then they will get a kickback and profit off of the upside.

And so those elements of Web3 to me,

and that's really where I start pulling out of the book,

is that we cannot just look at Web3

as relegated to these digital assets,

these like gambling NFTs, these crypto like mediums.

Web3 is really a philosophy that can transcend.

And if anyone has watched the air movie,

have you watched the air movie yet?

No.

It's the Jordan Shoe Deal movie.

I know of it.

Yeah.

That idea, what the movie's about,

I'm not giving anything away here,

is Michael Jordan's mother insisting

that Michael Jordan gets paid a cut

of every shoe moving forward.

And that was revolutionary at the time.

Nike resisted it, eventually she got her way,

and then it changed sports endorsements

and especially athletic shoe endorsements forever.

And everybody won.

Nike won the shoe wars.

At that time, they were kind of struggling

against Converse and Adidas.

Then they come out on top, set the tone.

Revolutionary 40 years ago,

we're still watching the movie today

being mind blown that Michael Jordan's mom

asked for this and Nike agreed to it.

You walk away going like,

oh my God, that's an amazing thought.

That the creator or the athlete

or the sponsored person or the influencer

should be paid alongside the company.

Why is that such a crazy revolutionary thought still?

The production company that made that movie

is called Artists Rights, I think.

That's Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.

Right.

And the way that that company is organized

is established on the same philosophy.

No one seems to be talking about this in the press,

but what they're doing is that creators

are getting paid alongside them fairly.

And so that idea, which again,

actually goes back to the hippie movement,

like the hippie movement never died.

It just got repackaged and redefined

and reshaped.

And now we understand it as environmentalism,

sexual liberation, women's empowerment.

We don't call it the hippie movement anymore.

The same thing is going to apply

with crypto and NFTs in Web 3.

We might not call them.

I've said this from the very beginning

because everyone's like, where are NFTs going to go next?

We might not call them NFTs.

They may not look like monkey JPEGs,

but the ideals and the principles around them

are going to affect business and brand building forever.

That 100% agreed.

It's too bad that, in a sense,

that I think the baby's getting thrown out

with the bathwater.

Like there's been a lot of bad behavior

and with the anonymity comes wash trading

and all sorts of very shady behavior and short-term,

sort of short-term incentives drive a lot of strange things.

Not really strange, actually.

It's totally predictable based on the incentives.

I would love to double-click on how artists are compensated

and to get your two cents on what you think

this might look like in the upcoming years,

because I think the allure of, let's just say, NFTs,

blockchain, et cetera, for many of my friends,

and for me, frankly, on one level,

was this prospect of an annuity.

There's the initial sale,

but then the creator gets a compelling royalty

of each subsequent sale.

And what I think many people who got in for that reason

realized is, wait a second,

I've been doing this for a year and a half.

It's actually not as immutable as I thought

in the smart contract.

And on a platform basis, there will be competition.

And a lot of these platforms are competing for the purchasers.

So they're getting rid of fees.

They're getting rid of royalties.

Oh, fuck, now what?

And at least for a period of time,

I haven't been tracking it closely,

but there was this race to the bottom to capture a mortgage.

Still happening.

Still happening.

And then there was a blowback,

and then so and so it enforced this,

and then that triggered a change in this platform and that platform.

But do you think that given the incentives to day trade

and speculate that the toothpaste is out of the toothpaste tube,

so to speak, and you can't put it back in

with respect to the race to the bottom,

or do you think that the appeal,

the initial appeal to musicians, illustrators,

artists and so on, can be preserved or take another form?

Yeah.

Because man, there was a period where it's like,

I had a friend who was a musician and very good musician,

but had always had to tour and do a lot of things that were

incredibly taxing to make the model work financially.

And all of a sudden, while the royalties were more or less intact,

he was able to generate a real fantastic living for himself.

Yeah, we were too.

And then things changed.

Where do you think this is going?

Are there any innovations that you would like to see

or that you are seeing?

Because the dynamics have changed such that

I think it's become a lot less compelling as it stands now,

or as it stood, let's say, as of December of 2022.

Yeah, as far as creative royalties are concerned.

Exactly.

Yeah, how are you thinking about this?

I think on the technical front, what's going to have to happen

is that most of these projects are going to have to set up

their own marketplaces, kind of like CryptoPunks.

Yep.

And if you want to buy and trade and collect and sell,

you do it on their website.

And so it ensures that they are still getting some kind of royalties.

So it's funny because the conversation kind of started there years ago,

that everyone was like, oh, we are going to,

because everyone is essentially modeling themselves after CryptoPunks

and they're like, we're going to make 10,000 just like CryptoPunks

and we're going to have our own marketplace.

But then it was so much easier to use OpenSea

because someone else had already set up the marketplace.

And these marketplaces had all agreed there was a moment

when the crypto artists came together and actually wrote a letter

and said, hey, we would really prefer it and we would appreciate it

if you would preserve this artist's royalty.

And the marketplaces agreed out of a gesture.

It's not built anywhere.

We all came in with the promise, but it was just the promise.

It was a pinky promise that they would preserve these rights

for the artists and creators.

And then we get into a bear market and things change very quickly

where one marketplace is like, well,

maybe we're going to cut that down a little bit

so it's a little bit cheaper to trade over here.

And then another marketplace is like,

whoa, the momentum shifted in a matter of two to three weeks.

We were 80% of the trading volume.

Now we're 20%, we're going to have to go to 0%.

And so we were stuck in the middle of all of this

because in the fall of 2022,

we were releasing a second project called Baton Bomb Squad.

And we were working with OpenSea on the primary sale.

They came to us and said, why don't you launch it

through our marketplace?

We're doing this with new projects right now.

And we were like, great.

They were in the background talking about doing the same thing.

Let's cut out the artists and creative royalties.

They didn't tell us this until the Friday afternoon

before our Tuesday drop.

And so at first they couch it with, oh, with new projects,

we can build into the smart contract

that if you're going to get stuck on OpenSea,

we're going to keep you here.

You can't trade on the other marketplaces,

but we'll still give you your 10% or 5%

or whatever you're asking for in terms of your royalties.

We're like, all right, well, is that it?

Oh, but your existing collections, any old collections?

Yeah, you're going to be kind of screwed.

You're not getting royalties on those anymore.

And we're listening to this.

I'm on a call.

I write about this.

It's the very last chapter in the book.

I'm at Disneyland with a bunch of other NFT creators.

And I'm under ND.

I'm not allowed to tell them what's happening.

And they're like, what's wrong?

Because I'm on this call and freaking out.

Because I'm watching the entire romantic premise

that I entered Web 3 with evaporate.

This is everything I've ever told my community

and any fans of the hundreds or anyone on the outside

when I've gone out on the speaking circuit,

this is the power of Web 3.

We can finally reward creators and artists the right way.

Come in.

And now we're seeing the biggest marketplace in NFTs saying,

oh, we're just going to eliminate that and not really run it by anybody.

They said, oh, we're going to leave it open

for discussion for the next few weeks.

But I'm like, no, you've already made up your mind.

They have to protect their bottom line, too.

I'm not even 100% blaming them.

I think they should have done the right thing.

It's a lot easier for me to say in my position.

But it is this fiction that Web 3 offers this greater royalty.

Automatically.

And I think everyone must be aware of that.

We tried to fight it.

We went out on Twitter Spaces and we talked about it

with the people who run OpenScene.

We had these debates back and forth.

And I wrote essays about it.

And Fuyoshis, who's an amazing NFT artist,

wrote like a call to action and kind of a request of letter,

handwritten letter.

Thank you, X, our friend Ryan, Betty from Deadfellas,

fuck render.

A lot of the artists and creators came forward in unison

to say, hey, we need to protect us.

This is really what Web 3 is modeled after.

And if you take this away, then it changes the entire dynamics.

Some of them are still fighting that fight

and being very vocal about it.

I've come to a place where I'm like,

I don't think I'm going to be able to change any of these

marketplaces minds.

Again, they don't care about me.

They don't care about what I say about them on the internet

or in my book.

So how can artists continue to make money?

And then I started looking back at physical collectibles again.

And if you think about it, NFTs,

when people were making these PFP collections,

they were inspired by CryptoPunks.

And CryptoPunks was just one project at Larva Labs made.

And they stopped.

There was only CryptoPunks one.

Well, arguably, we won't get into it.

There's V1, but they had one collection of these CryptoPunks.

They made me bits and they got into some other things.

But CryptoPunks was just one.

So I think everyone was under the assumption,

oh, if I make a project, I'm only supposed to make one

and flip those over and over again to the same people

and just move the money around in the same 10,000 JPEGs

or, for us, the same 25,000 JPEGs with 8,000 owners.

And everyone's just shifting it around to the same community.

That actually never quite made much sense to me.

But as a business in Web 3,

okay, it's fine because every trade I make 4% on,

so I'm still making money off of this existing project.

If you turn those royalties off,

the automatic rational decision for me is,

you need more collections.

Now it's sort of all things that were old or once new again.

Exactly.

And you sense that it falls right back into your sweet spot.

Yes.

And you're kind of...

Exactly.

Thank you.

The zone of genius.

Exactly.

And we can draw it all the way back to Air Jordan.

Air Jordan did not stop at Air Jordan 1.

They had great success with that shoe.

It blew it out of the water.

They made more like 5X the amount that they thought they would

or whatever it was.

The next year, they made the Jordan 2 and the Jordan 3.

And the thing is, when I went out and I said,

hey, we're doing a second collection called Badum Bomb Squad.

There was a lot of grumbling from our community.

This is going to dilute ownership of the first collection

because now you're splitting people up.

And I'm like, it was never meant to be stuck in the same room.

The entire idea of an artist is to continue making work

to be prolific, to grow the audience.

And the more art that I make, the more my career flourishes.

There are more touch points with different customers to come in.

But I'm not going to speak to the same 8,000 people

over and over again.

And even if we have a dip, which we did,

we released the second project just like the Air Jordan 2 came out.

And it was a flop.

It did not perform the same way that the Air Jordan 1 did.

And over time, they made the Air Jordan 3

and they stuck with the idea as a brand.

Every year, there's been another Jordan since.

And the last one just came out in a thing a few months goes.

Sells for $137.

The Jordan 1 today sells for $25,000.

So the more Jordans you made,

the halo around the existing, the original ones,

got only bigger and increased in value

because that's the strength of a brand.

What's the value of the first appearance of Batman

if it's the one and only appearance?

Totally.

I was looking at Rally today and they have a Pokemon wrapped box

first edition.

It was insane.

It was like $230,000.

And so at the time, you're like,

wait, we already have Pokemon cards.

Like, you don't need to make more.

You're going to dilute the community.

Who thinks like that?

And FT people think like that because the space is so new.

They don't understand the strength of brand building

and how this is supposed to go.

But we've been doing this for 20 years.

And I'm like, guys, the first stuff that we made

wasn't valuable then.

We sold out of like 25 t-shirts to our friends.

Nobody cares.

If you can find one of those today, they're priceless.

We didn't think about that back then,

but 10 years in, 20 years in, you look back

and there's a halo around all that product.

And it only comes by building a narrative over time.

So an artist doesn't just make five paintings and stops.

An artist keeps making.

And then all those works are part of the repertoire.

I just went to New York and Richter had his last show up.

And he's the most expensive living artist today.

Cissac or Hart.

Yeah.

Richter.

Yeah.

He's the most expensive living artist today.

Has his final show up in Chelsea.

Is at Swarner, I think.

And I could be wrong.

Don't quote me on that.

And the final painting on the wall, he's in his 90s now.

And he didn't stop at making only 10 paintings.

The man lived his entire life.

So that painting, it's not for sale because nothing's for sale.

But it could probably enter the market at $30 to $40 million for one painting.

So it's just something that NFT people, collectors have to understand that.

And I say this a lot in my work.

Sometimes it takes some time.

We need to give things room to grow and breathe and materialize and mature.

But if you're only looking and you're choking and you're suffocating a project

to be everything in that moment, in that year, within that art, it's going to fail.

It is impossible to sustain that energy.

You need to make other art.

So that art looks more special.

And it seems counter.

I was saying this from the beginning.

Everyone thinks of Supreme as a limited brand.

Everyone's like, oh, it's really hard to get.

I'm like, Supreme is the most unlimited brand.

Every season they put out a new collection.

Within those collections, they're limited and they're scant and the resources are finite.

But Supreme as a brand is infinite.

It's going to exist forever.

It is the next Levi's.

It's the next Gucci.

It's going to be the next big fashion house.

It goes on forever.

Every season you can keep buying.

But then the halo, the minuscule, the minimal pieces in between, those are the special ones.

So that's how I have to look at NFTs.

I understand why people don't look at it like that because they're stuck in the CryptoPunks model.

But we have to get out of that.

And as creators, we will make money by moving more on the primary market

until someone figures it out or we build our own marketplaces to get our cut of the secondary again.

I'm all about collectibles, if you can't tell.

Like I'm a big collectibles guy.

I love collecting and I'm not a really good trader.

I don't know how to sell.

I always lose money on anything I try to sell.

I love the idea of collectibles, whether they're physical or they're digital.

And if they're digital, then they're NFTs.

And you gave me some really good advice way back in the day

when I was preparing to launch Cockpunch, the Legend of Cockpunch,

to raise money for Saise Foundation, my foundation,

which then in turn funds early scientific research predominantly.

And the project ended up doing really well and selling out very quickly.

I mean, a matter of whatever it was, 60 minutes or 90 minutes.

So that's the good news.

It raised whatever it was, $1.7 or $2 million for the foundation.

All those funds have been distributed already to grant recipients.

And Neil introduced us.

And I remember I was in New York City in an Uber.

And we had a fantastic conversation.

We went through all these different mechanics and specifics.

And I was asking you about the pros and cons of different brackets of pricing

and the number of days that you thought might be effective for a reveal.

Ultimately, I was doing the project also as a creative unlock for myself

so that I would write fiction and be held accountable in some way.

Which has proven fantastic.

It's exceeded all of my expectations.

But what was happening, I'm not sure if we talked about this behind the scenes for me,

was I delayed the launch date because of a lot of the changes and variables

with respect to the marketplaces.

This was also happening.

It was in the midst.

This was in the midst.

This was in the midst.

Another, I don't want to say complicating factor,

but one aspect of this that made it fascinating for me and also led me to pause

was I'm an early investor in open sea.

I was like, okay, this is interesting because now I'm seeing it from two different perspectives.

I'm looking at it as an investor and someone is understanding the competitive pressures

on open sea.

And I do think that that could have been communicated better.

The comms definitely could have been handled differently.

And I'm not speaking for anyone on that team, but these are good people.

The people I interact with are great people, but understanding the cutthroat competitive

nature on one hand of what it takes to try to not just grow but maintain for the long term

a competitive financially viable marketplace and at that time being on the cusp of launching

a project and thinking, fuck, what does this mean for me?

Because the second areas were also intended to cover the costs and be fed back into the

project because all the primary sales were grown on the foundation.

I'm like, I'm hundreds of thousands of dollars into this project,

as it's just something I'm going to have to eat or will I have a chance of covering

my expenses?

So looking at it from both sides raised a whole bunch of questions.

And in retrospect, I'm very glad that I had that experience because I was forced to look

at it from two sides.

I think I did this game because empathy wise, for me to attack

open sea, and I did my part, I spoke my piece, but I couldn't even drag them.

So much of it was reminiscent of some members, not my entire community,

some members of my NFT community also coming after me saying, hey,

you promised us this or I was under this expectation.

You gave us this false hope that X, Y, Z, and I'm not seeing that.

And I'm like, I never promised that, but that was the context of the space.

Everyone was starting to enter NFTs by the fall of 2021 thinking rich, right?

Even though- Free money.

We didn't say that anywhere.

All we said was even when we minted, we said, these are digital collectibles.

They're just like sports cards.

They're like t-shirts.

No one up until that point was buying and collecting the hundreds

thinking they were going to get rich.

I never thought about it that way because in the beginning of 2021,

when we were really getting into NFTs, none of us thought like that.

We were like, oh, this is cool.

You can make art and then a customer can buy it and it's done.

That's it.

And then by the end of the summer, people were like, hey, that guy over there just

made $10,000 flipping that JPEG.

And everyone's like, can I do it?

Oh my god, it worked for me too.

And then the entire narrative and expectations changed right as we were

launching our collection.

And so when we came in with these plans for it to be, oh, this is a collectibles project.

It's like streetwear.

And then people were like, oh, I'm buying these things expecting something else,

even though we never promised it.

That really sucked.

And I can't blame those people, even though I never told them that.

I can't blame them.

Yeah, incentives are incentives, man.

Incentives are incentives.

And so the same thing with OpenSea, me having run a business for 20 years,

at the end of the day, they have to protect their bottom line because

if they don't, they're out of jobs.

They can be all for the culture.

But if they don't exist anymore, then how much can they help the culture?

And so they're saying, hey, guys, this is what we have to do in order to just,

we're going to be put out of business by these other marketplaces unless we do this.

I think there's other things they could have tried.

Of course, it's easy for me to say as a backseat driver.

And it's not my business.

I don't know internally what's going on over there.

I'm just from the outside being a grumbler.

But that was the moment where, empathetically, as a business person,

I was just like, okay, I know what it's like.

Totally.

So a handful of questions, and then we'll wind to a close,

as we've been going for, God, for almost four hours, probably.

Yeah, that's perfect.

Which is great.

Which is great because it doesn't feel like it to me.

No, super.

Usually this would really hurt me, but it's not.

Yeah, I know.

It's super, super fun.

Super is super easy, peasy.

And that caffeine is awesome.

You've seen me consume a fair amount of caffeine.

And it's a beautiful day here, too.

I mean, what a great time to have this conversation.

Yeah.

So a couple of questions for you.

Just I call them rapid fire, but the answers don't need to be rapid fire.

But the intention is to have kind of a handful of bite-sized Scooby Snacks for folks.

What are some books that you've gifted frequently or recommended frequently to other people besides your own?

Besides my own.

I like to, you know, speaking of which, you just gave me a book, a Rumi book.

I did.

Gold.

I do also give books of poetry, Rumi, Neruda.

A lot of people come to me for business and entrepreneurial advice just because

that seems to be what people are attracted to most in my speech.

And so I put them onto books like that, like The Hard Thing About Hard Things or Ben Horowitz.

Yeah, Ben Horowitz's book or Phil Knight's Shoe Dog, right?

Is a great, kids in the street where I love that book.

And then if they're looking for entrepreneurial or brand building advice,

I, you know, Simon's the next stuff is like very easy to understand.

Start with why?

Start with why and leaders eat last.

But I read a lot of F.S.G. books just to bring it full circle.

I like reading a lot of fiction.

I'm doing a talk tonight at a local bookstore with Hector Tobar, who's one of my favorite authors.

It's not fiction.

Well, it is kind of like a fictionalized nonfiction book on The Chilean Miners.

It's called Deep Down Dark 33, but it sounds kind of random.

I love that book.

I love The Godfather by Mario Puso.

I've given that out a lot.

That's probably one of my favorite books.

All right.

I've only seen the adaptation, so it sounds like I should try reading the book.

And the story of Mario Puso as he was writing all that literature,

you know, the way that he dedicated himself to the craft, it's really beautiful.

I think a lot about it.

I'm a father, and he was in his home writing it every day and trying to raise his family

and just kind of put his heart and soul into it.

Oh, wow.

Seems to have worked out.

It worked out.

Yeah.

Thankfully for all of us.

Yeah, seriously.

All right.

The billboard question, which is metaphorically speaking,

if you could put some message, quote, image, anything on a billboard

that would reach billions of people, non-commercial,

what might you put on that?

Could be anything.

Lately it would be to be slow to judgment.

You know, and I said earlier, sometimes it takes some time.

I say that a lot.

Everyone is in such a rush to be right and definite and have such a cemented idea of

what truth is or what the reality is that they don't want to give anything room to grow.

And I became very sensitive to this being involved in what three over the last few years

because there are elements of the technology that I think are going to be very useful,

transformative and positive for the world.

But everyone was so quick to write it off as either a good or a bad.

The entire NFT Web 3, which I'm like, NFTs can be many things guys.

And they're like, well, all of it is good or all of it is bad.

You know, everyone's speaking in such absolute terms.

It threw me off because I was like, guys, it's so new.

We won't know what this is for another 10 years, 20 years.

So that's the takeaway from the book is with technology,

we have to really give this stuff room to breathe and grow.

I say the same for AI.

I know there's a lot of danger in that right now,

but it's the same.

Be very slow to judgment with what's going on and just be there to monitor and observe.

I was actually really impressed by a lot of my friends as Web 3 and NFTs were happening.

They were watching a lot of people make money around them that were like,

I'm going to sit on the side of the river and just watch and wait for my turn to jump in.

And some of them never did, right?

And some of them just waited a year for things to kind of cool off a bit.

But I think that's the right approach, not only to tech, but to people also.

Everyone is so quick to judgment with everyone now.

Oh, you made one mistake.

We're going to cancel you or we're going to write you off or designate you as this kind of person.

And it's not even allowing room for nuance.

It's just allowing room for people to grow and make mistakes.

Technology and science is all about making mistakes,

correcting, getting closer and closer to truth, which you never quite achieve.

We should be doing that with people too,

but we abbreviate them all the time and we stunt them in our minds and say,

this is what that person is.

Now I can move on to the next one.

Like we're collecting them as JPEGs.

And people evolve and they live and they grow and they change.

They become different.

We have to allow people to become different.

Yeah. The being slow to judgment, you know, I think another way maybe to look at that is

take your time to develop some nunchi, right?

Like some awareness of the room and the space before you make any snap decisions.

And I think that undergirds a lot, as far as I can tell,

a lot of the success that you've had in so much as you take your time to develop that room feel,

that ecosystem feel, and you play the long game, right?

So it's not about milking Disney for all it's worth with 10 consecutive releases.

It's like, no, the function of this is not to create revenue, it's to create noise.

And that is because this is step A in a process that I think with some reliability,

we can oversee for the next year, two years, five years.

And then if doors open that are interesting, fantastic, but there's a long-term plan.

And what I would say to people also who are listening is that

if you're competing for the short-term home run, you're competing against everybody.

I mean, just about everybody.

But if you play the long game, I actually think you can more reliably snowball your way into

outside success just by having a longer time frame.

Because you are going to have less competition, you're going to make fewer impulsive decisions

driven by short-term incentives because you're like, I'm going to focus on this small thing that

I can impact today with the confidence that if I continually do that each day and have some form

of a plan, there will be a cumulative effect, right?

You just seem very good at playing the long game.

And I suppose what I want to echo is that that's a, I think that is a trainable skill.

Yeah. And unfortunately, it's getting further and further away from young people's minds.

Everything is so immediate and gratification-wise,

just emotional intelligence-wise.

Everyone wants everything now because the way that social media is set up and the way that trends

develop is that they kick off overnight.

Even if that happens, you have to know that that's the moment, right?

It's ephemeral. And if you want to build a career, if you want to have a lasting and meaningful,

longevity-based job or life, you have to pace yourself.

You have to think about the next thing.

You have to look 10 to 20 years down the road.

I know that more than ever now, just because how fast 20 years went,

everyone's in such a rush to get to that success.

And I'm like, guys, it's been 20 years. I've barely begun.

And 20 years are going to go again. It's just going to fly.

So it's okay. Just take your time. We're going to get there.

You don't have to be so impulsive with all the decisions you're making.

Yeah, time's going to move plenty fast.

And there will come a time when you wish it moved a lot more slowly.

So in a sense, I'm borrowing from friends who are former military,

but slow is smooth and smooth is fast with, say, reloads with weapons,

but it also applies to so many other things.

It's like, if you rush, moving fast is going to lead to costly mistakes.

And there are times to buckle down and focus and sprint.

I'm not saying never sprint.

But I've been really impressed with your ability to pause, right?

When you have a visceral response to something,

and as was the case with, say, Web 3 and NFTs,

you're like, ooh, let me take that as a cue.

Let me take that as a cue to say, wait a second.

Okay, that's a strong response.

Strong responses are interesting.

Let me take a closer look at this to figure out why there's such a strong response.

And then you found these opportunities and have had these successes you've learned along the way.

And I think people should check out the new book.

It's sitting right here as a beautiful, elegant cover.

NFTs are a scam.

Slash NFTs are the future through FSG.

Oh, my God, so jealous, you bastard.

I have two tattoos.

One is my wife that Mr. Cartoon did like 15 years ago.

And one is the FSG logo that's on my arm.

Oh, shit, oh, that's there.

There it is.

Yeah.

Wow.

And I actually just got this.

I've always wanted it.

Tattoos are hard for me.

Not that I don't want them.

They require a lot of time.

And I just don't want to give it any time.

It's always like a six-hour process.

I don't want to sit there for six hours and do it.

But when FSG signed me for my first book deal and now my second one,

it was the pinnacle of my entire career, which is weird to say because I come from streetwear

and I'm known for a streetwear brand and they don't think of me as an author or a writer.

But to know my writing and to read my material is to really understand me.

When I design and I create clothing, it goes through so many other people's hands

and there's intermediaries, even all the way down to the production process.

But my writing is purely me.

And so once in a while, someone will come up and say,

I love you for your writing.

And I must feel good.

That feels like I'm naked.

I'm just so seen.

I can't explain any better than that.

Well, I'm excited for you, man.

You're getting a second bite of the FSG Apple.

And any other comments you'd like to add, anything you'd like to draw attention to,

BobbyHundreds everywhere, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok.

I have Substack also.

BobbyHundreds on Substack, BobbyHundreds.Substack.com.

My Substack is called Monologue.

If you like the way that my brain moves and the things that are on my mind,

I write there once to twice a week and they're very median verbose passages.

But I cover a breadth of topics from being a father to mental health to whatever is trending

in terms of fashion.

I talked at length about that air movie, also about being slow to judgment,

but it's all there and it just, it bounces around.

But there's the through line that you'll pick up on.

Amazing.

Bobby, what a pleasure.

So nice to hang.

Thanks, Tim.

This was a really big deal.

I'm going to get this tattooed next.

This is like a very big...

I didn't want to say it till the end, but when you asked me to be on the show,

I couldn't constrain myself.

I told so many friends of mine and I was like, I'm going to jinx it.

He's going to have to leave town for something.

Because every time I get this excited about something, it doesn't pan out.

And it happened.

Even this morning, I woke up, I was like, it's happening today.

And then you were like, see you at 9.30.

I'm like, oh my God, it's real.

I'm very enthusiastic.

Me too, man.

The excitement is mutual.

And you're just getting started.

I'm looking forward to seeing what's coming around the bend.

And for people who are listening, the book again,

NFTs are a scam, slash NFTs are the future.

Bobby Hundreds is the name.

Keep an eye on him.

I feel like this young guy has some promise.

Let's go in places.

And for everything we discussed, you can find links to anything and everything

that came up in the show notes as usual at tim.blog slash podcast.

And until next time, be just a little bit kinder than you think is necessary

to others and to yourself.

And hold back on that quick judgment just for a pause.

Pause can be magical, can be powerful.

And thanks for tuning in.

Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off.

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my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.

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It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos,

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Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.

Keywords

Bobby Hundreds, The Hundreds, NFTs, Collaboration, Korean Wave, Fashion industry, Web3, Asian immigrant, Streetwear, Branding

People

Bobby Hundreds, Frank Ocean, Kendall Jenner, Hailey Bieber, Gigi Bella Hadid, Jay-Z, Rick Rubin, Kanye West, Larva Labs, Michael Jordan, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Minjin Lee, Neil Strauss, Brad Pitt, Joan Didion, Paris Hilton, Rob Wolf, Seth Rogen, Stan Sakai, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Steven Spielberg, John Arbuckle, Jim Davis, Bill Watterson, Young Kazi, Machine Gun Kelly, Rita Ora, Azilia Banks, Olivia Munn

Companies

Adidas, Disney, FTX, Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, LG, Samsung, Daewoo, Nike, Converse, OpenSea, StockX, Grailed, The Hundreds, American Apparel, Tommy Hilfiger, Verizon

Organizations and Institutions

Artists Rights, Harvard, Korean government, Netflix, Magic trade show, Navy SEAL teams, Team USA weightlifting, NFL teams, FBI sniper teams, Warp Magazine

References

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Brought to you by Wealthfront high-yield savings account, Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating, and LMNT electrolyte supplement.

Bobby Hundreds (@bobbyhundreds) is an artist, designer, and storyteller based in Los Angeles. He is best known as the co-founder and chief creative officer of global streetwear brand The Hundreds. He is also behind the Family Style Food Festival and the NFT project Adam Bomb Squad. Bobby is also the bestselling author of This Is Not a T-Shirt, a memoir about his life and how he built a brand around community.

His new book, NFTs Are a Scam / NFTs Are the Future, about his two-year journey into Web3, will publish through Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Please enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront! Wealthfront is an app that helps you save and invest your money. Right now, you can earn 4.55% APY—that’s the Annual Percentage Yield—with the Wealthfront Cash Account. That’s more than eleven times more interest than if you left your money in a savings account at the average bank, according to FDIC.gov. 

It takes just a few minutes to sign up, and then you’ll immediately start earning 4.55% interest on your savings. And when you open an account today, you’ll get an extra fifty-dollar bonus with a deposit of five hundred dollars or more.  Visit Wealthfront.com/Tim to get started.

*

This episode is also brought to you by LMNT! What is LMNT? It’s a delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink mix. I’ve stocked up on boxes and boxes of this and usually use it 1–2 times per day. LMNT is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low-carb, or Paleo diet. If you are on a low-carb diet or fasting, electrolytes play a key role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness.

LMNT came up with a very special offer for you, my dear listeners. For a limited time, you can get a free LMNT Sample Pack with any purchase. This special offer is available here: DrinkLMNT.com/Tim.

*

This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep! Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover is the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced (and user-friendly) solution on the market. Simply add the Pod Cover to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature.

Go to EightSleep.com/Tim and save $250 on the Eight Sleep Pod Cover. Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia.

*

[05:49] Signing to the prestigious Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG).

[07:21] Bobby's black sheep origin story.

[11:13] When art entered the picture.

[13:52] Who was Abram Edelman?

[27:59] The double life of a parent-pleasing law student and clandestine artist.

[31:45] The Hundreds: from early days to 20 years on.

[44:47] The cosmic intervention of WARP magazine.

[52:02] Japan.

[55:27] The Korean Wave.

[1:08:05] Getting on the radar of tastemakers.

[1:13:44] Collaboration over competition makes a movement.

[1:18:32] Curating creatives assisted by nunchi.

[1:30:03] Necessary disconnections.

[1:41:22] Korea's a creative hotspot today. Where should we look next?

[1:43:38] Rolling with the tides of fickle fashion.

[1:53:47] Collaborations, corporations, and the reason for limited editions.

[2:05:07] The current state of The Hundreds.

[2:11:32] Frank Ocean maintains the mystery.

[2:13:02] Getting collaboration deals without almost being sued or selling out.

[2:18:54] Hermit north stars.

[2:24:50] How to make $7 million in 40 minutes with NFTs (sort of not really).

[2:29:48] Making NFTs more useful than just another set of playing cards for wannabe day traders.

[2:39:21] Why did Bobby write NFTs Are a Scam / NFTs Are the Future?

[2:42:54] Charles Manson vs. SBF and subcultural security.

[2:48:10] Notable Web3 innovations emerging.

[2:51:45] A rumble over royalties and a counterintuitive lesson about collectible value.

[3:10:17] Recommended reading.

[3:12:13] Bobby's billboard.

[3:18:50] Two tattoos.

[3:20:18] Parting thoughts.

*

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Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.

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