Vince Kadlubek

[MUSIC] >> Hi, I'm Charlie Melcher, Founder and Director of the Future of Storytelling. And I'd like to welcome you to this week's episode of The False Podcast. If you're listening to this podcast, then I imagine you're already familiar with Joseph Pine and James Gilmore's concept of the experience economy. That is the idea that consumers today are more interested in paying for unique experiences than they are in paying for goods or services. People's desires to participate in their stories, to have experiences rather than passive consumption is evident in the growth of immersive entertainment attractions, such as theme parks, escape the rooms, live action role-playing games, immersive theater, and more. A few people have as much credibility in this field as my guest today, Vince Cadleback. Vince is the co-founder and director of Meow Wolf, an artist collective and entertainment company that produces large-scale immersive installations. With the help of an early investment from author George R.R. Martin, Meow Wolf has transformed from a group of down on their luck artists, dumpster diving for materials into one of the four most players in the developing experience economy. Their first permanent installation, the House of Eternal Return, opened in Santa Fe in 2016 and quickly became the hottest tourist attraction in all of New Mexico. With their distinctive artistic aesthetic, their focus on interactivity and their surreal sense of humor, they've become a genre onto their own in the immersive entertainment world. Now also raising hundreds of millions of dollars from investors who see their brand of immersive storytelling as the next step in the evolution of entertainment. In mid-February, Meow Wolf opened their second permanent space, the Omega Mart in Las Vegas. At 52,000 square feet, it's more than double the size of the House of Eternal Return, and it's the product of hundreds of artists and creatives working together over three years. With this ambitious leap onto the national stage, Meow Wolf is now poised to elevate themselves from a surprise success in a little town in New Mexico to a formidable power in the world of entertainment. But Vince's ambitions extend farther than that. He believes that Meow Wolf can not only change entertainment, it can change the way that people imagine their own futures and that of the world around them. It's my great pleasure to welcome Vince Cadlubak to the future of Storytelling Podcast. Vince Cadlubak, it's such a pleasure to have you on the Future Storytelling Podcast. Thank you for being here today. Yeah, thanks for having me, man. Hey, I hear that there's a new Meow Wolf adventure coming in Las Vegas. That is awesome. Yeah, it's been a long time coming. It's crazy that it's actually right around the corner. We've been working on this project now for, I would say, about three and a half years. And so to finally see it get to doors open is just like amazing, yeah. For the handful of people, and I don't think there are too many of them out there, but who might not know what Meow Wolf is, or might not have had the pleasure of going to the House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe, could you just give us like whatever the sort of quick version of the description of it? You're going to ask me the hardest question first, okay, got it. What is Meow Wolf? Meow Wolf is an art production company that produces large-scale, immersive, multimedia, walk through exhibitions. So we have a permanent exhibition in Santa Fe. It's the first permanent exhibition that we've opened and we opened it back in 2016. And it's called House of Eternal Return. And it's 18,000 square feet. It's like immersive, multimedia storytelling, interactive, climbable, crawlable, explorable adventure of art and psychedelia inside of an old warehouse. And so now after opening that, it was really successful. So now we're opening Las Vegas, which is our second permanent exhibition. We will be opening our third permanent location in Denver later on in 2021. When you see the amount of work that goes into what you guys build, I mean, we're talking about a massive group of artists and creators, right? I mean, how big a group is Meow Wolf? Internally, we are probably like 200 people, like full-time, just like on the Meow Wolf side. And then you have like a project management team, which is another 30 or 40. And then you have a bunch of contracted artists that are locally based. So artists in Vegas, artists in Denver, that aren't part of the full-time team, but we are working with them. So if you add them up, then you're talking about another 300 people or so. The overall sort of like ecosystem of Meow Wolf, I would say, is about 1,000 people making these exhibitions? And then you have the contractors, you know, you have people who are actually building the walls and building the stairs and building the buildings that we're going inside of. And so consider them part of the team as well. So yeah, they're massive, massive projects. I mean, basically they're like micro psychedelic amusement parks, you know, the same kind of, the same kind of like coordination necessary. Yeah, you use the word exhibit, but I really think of them as this immersive experience. I've always tried to describe it because it's almost beyond normal terms. It's like a science fiction fantasy novel come to life in three-dimensional artistic explosion. I don't know. Yeah, no, totally. It's like a science fiction novel that you get to walk inside of. You know, I think that that's probably the best way to think about it. But you don't have to follow the story, you know, either. It's not like it's so story driven that there's a beginning, middle, and end. I think the most important thing about Meow Wolf experiences is that once you enter the experience, it's up to you. It's entirely up to you. You can run around and play like a kid. You can read every piece of text. You can just sit down and people watch, you know, and just be there as like an observer, like you might add a park or something. You know, the most important quality of a Meow Wolf exhibit or Meow Wolf experience is that we provide agency to the guest. And then the agency leads to exploration. The exploration leads to discovery. And so we create environments, alternate reality environments that encourage exploration and discovery. So an art, you know, art and like really imaginative spaces, imaginative architecture really contributes to the opportunity for exploration and discovery. And that's the core of it. That's the core of everything that we do. I remember in your FOSS film, you talked about the important role of imagination and even mentioned the idea that you felt like we were living in an age where there was a imagination deficit. Yeah, like a crisis of imagination. When we start as a kid, everything is unknowable, unknown, and everything is then discoverable because the world is unknown, the world becomes discoverable. And the imagination is activated because you're in the process of engaging with the world and anything can happen. But then once you start to like create the knowable universe for yourself as you grow up and you create this identity, this sense of place, what you like and you don't like, what's the right way and the wrong way, all of these definitions, all of that discoverability goes away. And the sense of possibility goes away as well because you end up getting stuck within a knowable universe, a predictable universe. Even more so now during socially distant COVID time, right? We're all just in our own little home offices. Yeah, exactly. And so like I think, you know, when we get out of this pandemic and we're back out into the physical world, you know, my hope is that, you know, is that it's seen as a blank canvas for artists, creatives, programmers to, you know, to paint on and to create a more interesting life outside of our houses. I love the part that you're saying about how predictable everything has become. I think that the work that you do and that Meow Wolf does helps to remind us of the possibilities. It literally helps to let us think that there's a world that we can create for ourselves. We opened up the House of Eternal Returns, the name of it, in a bowling alley in Santa Fe. Tell us just quickly how well that did and what the response was. You know, and we were putting together that project. We had anticipated that Burning Man people would show up that like your kind of artist, creative, folks would show up that the Instagram people would show up. We didn't expect that like every day soccer families from Amarillo, Texas or from Lawrence, Kansas would be driving to Santa Fe to come and visit this exhibition. That was like above and beyond what we anticipated. And so, you know, we were thinking like 125,000 people per year. And what we ended up with was 500,000 people per year coming through the doors. And that's in a city of 70,000 people. So like Santa Fe is tiny, you know, and we're getting 500,000 people a year through the exhibition. It's the most popular attraction in the state of New Mexico. But it's presented in a way to the public that is accessible, you know, that feels like it's for the masses, it's for the kids. And that's the interesting thing about immersive art too is like, immersive art is accessible because you're walking inside of a room. And we have a lot of history as humans walking inside of rooms. Like we're comfortable with that idea, you know, you're like, you're born inside of a very immersive space known as a hospital. You know, you're you walk inside of grocery stores which are very strange immersive spaces. Like, so we're comfortable with like walking into a subspace and being and having to adapt. Whereas like walking up to a painting or walking up to a sculpture that's on a pedestal, that's a very like esoteric experience. And not many people have no know what to do with. And so by doing immersive work, you're automatically like lending to people's history and experience and comfortability. I always think about this idea that we are meant to be three-dimensional human beings. Like we're we don't live in a flat land of two dimensions. We live in three dimensions. Our senses are built to be able to interact, to have a sense of balance and depth and smell and you know, all these subtle things that go into helping us understand where we are located and what's around us and what's safe and what's what's friendly and not friendly and so much of our storytelling and so much of our media for a very long time now. Really been two-dimensional. It's been like I'd either on a printed page or it's in a box which is a screen and that's not really how we interact with the world as a human species. And so I feel like this type of storytelling is really so much more natural for us, so much more organic to us as a species and we're just beginning to really delve into it. I mean the work that you do, stuff that we've experienced in live action role-playing games, larps, even the current fads for escape the rooms or immersive theater. It's all part of a, well really an experience economy or experience storytelling economy. We don't experience life on paper. We don't experience life through you know with a controller in our hands, you know as a video game. We experience life through walking around, interacting with people and making choices, having agency. And so what we're trying to do with Miyawolf is we're trying to actually eliminate all of those unnatural operational limitations and just present an environment for people to interact with. The story is to be chosen by the audience member. You can learn about stuff but at the end of the day you're the one streaming together the story. We had on the show recently on our podcast, Yoni Block from Echo and his company does branching video very beautifully and enables people to make choices as they're watching videos or commercials or films. And we talked a little bit about the changing nature of being the author where you had to make some peace with sharing agency with the audience, with the people who are participating in your story and how that's uncomfortable for a lot of people. Although Yoni did make the point that it's not giving up control. It's providing many different paths for people to kind of get to the same place. And I wonder whether you feel, because here you've given almost an infinite number of choices when people come into your spaces and there isn't just like left or right, there's anything you want to do in here goes. And I wonder whether you think that some of the ability to open up so many possibilities, so much agency for the people formally known as the audience has to do with the fact that you're not one creator or one or a couple of creators, but you're actually, as you've said, several hundred creators who are all collaborating to make many, many different rooms, many different possibilities, almost an endless array of options for your guests to create their own stories in. That's a really good observation, Charlie. I think like nobody wants to be the dictating voice in a collaborative project like this. And so because of that, I think we leave the story a lot more open for exploration and for interpretation. We don't want people to just be consumers. We don't want them to just sit in a chair and be bombarded with our story. We want them to also be producers of story. We want them to fall into a place where they're inspired to now imagine for themselves what this could be or what anything else could be. It's an active role in the storytelling. And I think that's critical for us. And do you hope then that people leave your experiences more empowered to create their own lives, to create their own stories, to re-imagine the world that they want to inhabit? Or at that point where we're thinking, how do we create transformational experiences for people, not just an experience? And I've thought about this a lot in the term transformation. And to me, transformation, your perception is shifted. You're different coming out than when you went in. There's a moment at the House of Eternal Return that I use as an example. There's a refrigerator that is in a kitchen. And it looks like a normal kitchen and it looks like a normal refrigerator. But when you open the refrigerator, you can walk through it and it's one of the portals into the other dimension. Because they're inside of a normal house. They look at a normal refrigerator and they open the refrigerator and they realize that it's something completely different than what it should be. I think in that moment, people also realize that the world can be different than what it's supposed to be and that they can be different than what they're supposed to be. It's a very psychedelic trope. It's like going down the rabbit hole. If you can provide people with a context that is familiar and then break that context with possibility, they then start to realize that they have possibility within themselves as a person and out in the world. And I think it ties to this child mind. It ties to the kind of what you referenced this before to this way. As children, we look at the world because we are, as you say, open to all possibilities. Everything is new. Everything is something that we're learning. We come at everything with our kind of openness and awe and we learn over time to shut that down. We learn to not question things, to take things as they are, to fall in line. That just reminds me of that amazing TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson. His famous TED talk is literally one of the most popular ones of all time where he refers to a classroom and a group of kids. I think it's like first graders and the teacher asked who can sing and everybody raises their hands and who can draw and everyone raises their hands and who can dance and everyone raises their hands. Because as children, they think they can do all these things. Then they check in again with maybe it's like six graders. At this point, they ask them who can draw, who can dance and who can sing and almost nobody's raising their hands because they've learned that they're not experts at these things and therefore they think they can't do them at all. It's just a sign of that kind of child mind that we need to be able to have an imagination or creativity as we look at the world fresh. An analytical mind that analyzes what has happened and then uses the data from the past what has happened to determine the present. That's an analytical mind and it's an important mind because it helped us survive through evolution. There was a tiger behind that bush yesterday and so I need to remember that and not go over to that bush today to avoid that tiger. You need to be able to learn from the past to make determinations today. The more interesting capability for humans is that we could shift that and we can actually determine who we are not based on the things that have happened to us in the past but by the choices that we make going forward into the future. I am not who I have been, I am who I am becoming is like the shift and so much of our identity is that the default identity is created through past-based experiences and there's the imagination and the creative process, the creation process shifts you from the past. I am what I have been into, I am what I am becoming, and puts the power into every choice. So now every choice moving forward is the determining factor for who I am, rather than these things that have happened in the past that I have no control over anymore. That to me is the creative process, the creator process, the creation process, where people are opened up to the power of their own choice. And that happens through imagination, that happens through imagining who you can be, imagining what can happen, and then taking the steps to do it. So I can't wait for Meow Wolf education or university. I can't wait for Meow Wolf housing. I want to live there. That's-- I'd like to pre-order an apartment in Meow Wolf housing or I'm sure apartment's not the right word. Yeah, we need a city. I'd love to have a city's SM point. Get like a few thousand acres and be able to have our own development. I think that that would be incredible. Through wave-finding technology, through augmented reality, headsets, I mean, we're going to be able to connect a network of like-minded creative experiences that all sort of sit within the same experiential universe. You wouldn't necessarily have to build all these things right next to each other. It's like the massive apartment complex could be in Austin. Coffee shops could be every-- scatter around multiple cities. The major exhibition spaces could be in Vegas, Denver, Santa Fe. You can start to kind of piece together a gaming map that is location-based, but interconnected through a mixed reality wave-finding platform, essentially. You're thinking this is actually in a gaming engine, or this is more like AR on top of the world, so you're wearing glasses or a headset and you're interacting that way with a digital analog world. I think it's, you know, a combination of like, you know, curated directory plus ticketing app, plus Pokemon Go, plus AR headset, all anchored around physical locations. And so kind of combine all of that, and you start to piece together like an interconnected world of experience, you know? Just so much opportunity. And I guess it's going to probably really flour as we get the all clear from COVID, so it could be some months yet. But yeah, that all clear is going to be important. I think there'll be a pent-up demand for experiences. It's like the question, what's worth leaving my house for? You're down. Like, and there's going to be, you know, that's going to be an important question. And so you're going to have to create things out in the world that are worth leaving the house for. Plus, you know, I mean, the decimation of traditional retail and the decimation of movie theaters and, you know, stuff that was already on its way out. And now it's kind of just like, you know, nail in the coffin. And so there's also going to be an abundance of square footage out in the world that there's not really a plan for it. There's not really programming for it. One of the things I found so interesting that I learned through this pandemic was what happened in the last one. I never understood that the roaring 20s was a direct response to the Spanish flu of the teens. The all-clear came and what we get about what we know of is the roaring 20s. What's going to be our version of that? It's going to be really interesting. Yeah. One roaring 20s. I mean, you know, the most experiential, successful experiential industry that we know of, came out of that, which was the museum park, the theme park, came out of the Spanish flu. And like the first amusement parks were in the 1920s. They were getting out of their house, and now they're getting out of their house to do these crazy things and ride these crazy rides. And yeah, it's exciting to see what could be on the horizon. The big missing piece for us is going to be capital funding. The hope is, you know, that Miel Wolf can show success in Vegas, Miel Wolf can show success in Denver, that other private equity firms and other venture capital firms start to see that location-based entertainment is viable as long as you invest in the right artists, that you invest in artists. But I really do think in the way we've had this conversation, and the way you talk about the potential of creatives to reinvent the world and to do it in a way that's going to be so powerful for the people we used to call consumers, formerly known as consumers, I had this flash that creatives getting an MFA might become the new NBA, that this might be the source. People would where parents encouraged their kids to become artists and storytellers instead of trying to keep them from a lifetime of poverty, because it will become a place where real value is created and real careers and opportunities. I mean, how wonderful to think that maybe in the near future, the big economic booms won't be driven by, you know, oil or auto or tech, but by artists and storytellers and creators. - That would be a dream, right? The elevating the creative to the top of the chain is a real dreamy thought. With the technological advances that we're seeing, obviously, through our smartphones and then through spatial computing, the world is going to become a canvas that will be populated with creative content. Like the technology platforms are really set up to empower the creative and empower the imagination. As spatial computing starts to mesh every square foot of the world and create a canvas for artists to paint on, then it does just become about the creative mind. It just becomes about the imagination. Everything else is set up to support that. It's a good thought. I'm hopeful for that. I mean, I think we see it within our lifetime. I don't think we see it within the next 10 years, but I think we start to see it within our lifetime. - Well, this has been an incredible conversation. It's got given me great hope and excitement for the future. I can't wait to be able to come and experience Omega Mart firsthand when the all clear comes. And really what I can't wait for is just, Meow Wolf being able to spread its wings and share its collaborative creativity and imagination with the world on a bigger scale. - Yeah, thanks, man. - Yeah, same. I hope that when people go through Meow Wolf and they experience what we've created, especially artists and groups of artists, collaborators, people realize that they can do this too. Meow Wolf is not going to be able to solve for every market across the world and every available square footage. It's going to take artists to be able to do that. And so that's the hope is that there's inspiration coming out of it that says, "Okay, we can do this too. We can figure this out too." And yeah, Vegas, just to whoever's listening, please try to make it out to Vegas sometime as soon as you feel comfortable doing so. Like, I really truly believe that Omega Mart, which is our project there, is the top thing to see in Vegas. And that's saying a lot, but I really do believe that that's the truth. A paradigm shift in storytelling, paradigm shift in immersive art, you know, and just so proud of the team for what they've accomplished. It's remarkable. - Thank you, Vince, for being on the show and thank you, Meow Wolf, for being this source of amazing imagination and creativity. Thanks, man. Appreciate that. - I hope you enjoyed listening to my conversation with Vince. If you ever find yourself in Santa Fe or Las Vegas, be sure to go check out Meow Wolf. I guarantee you'll be glad you did. You can learn more about Meow Wolf and their newest project, Omega Mart, by visiting this episode's page on the future of storytelling website at www.fost.org or by following the link in the episode's description. Thank you for listening to the Future of Storytelling podcast. Produced in partnership with our talented friends at charts and leisure. If you haven't already, please be sure to subscribe to our show, give us a review, and share it with a friend. I hope you'll join us again in a couple of weeks for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please stay safe, be strong, and story on. (upbeat music)