Vince Kadlubek, Revisited: Agency, Exploration, Discovery

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I’m Charlie Melcher, founder of the Future of Storytelling. You’re listening to the FoST Podcast. For today’s episode, I wanted to revisit one of my favorite episodes about immersive experience with Vince Kadlubeck, co-founder and director of Meow Wolf. If you know anything about immersive entertainment, you know about Meow Wolf. They’re the artist collective that’s gone from dumpster diving from materials in Santa Fe to having multiple, highly successful permanent venues for their imaginative and wonderful worlds across the United States. When Vince and I spoke for this conversation, Meow Wolf had just opened their second location at AREA15 in Las Vegas. Today, they’re up to four locations with a fifth on the way. Millions of people have enjoyed going down the rabbit hole. That is a Meow Wolf exhibit and keep coming back for more. I have little doubt that Meow Wolf’s longevity and success has a lot to do with the core principles that Vince shared with me in this episode, such as prioritizing, exploration, embracing the third dimension, giving audiences agency, and the power of imagination. With each new iteration of Meow Wolf, these key ideas have remained consistent and powerful for audiences of all ages. Vince and the team at Meow Wolf have come up with a blueprint for creating popular, large scale immersive experiences with staying power. I hope you enjoy this revisited conversation with Vince Kadlubek.

Charlie Melcher:

Vince Kadlubek, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the Future of StoryTelling Podcast. Thank you for being here today.

Vince Kadlubek:

Yeah, thanks for having me, man.

Charlie Melcher:

Hey, I hear that there’s a new Meow Wolf adventure coming in Las Vegas. That is awesome.

Vince Kadlubek:

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 amazing.

Charlie Melcher:

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 whatever the sort of quick version of the description of it?

Vince Kadlubek:

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 walkthrough 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 an 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.

Charlie Melcher:

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?

Vince Kadlubek:

Internally, we are probably 200 people full-time, just on the Meow Wolf side. And then you have 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 ecosystem of Meow Wolf, I would say, is about 1,000 people making these exhibitions. And then you have the contractors, 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 I 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 coordination necessary.

Charlie Melcher:

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.

Vince Kadlubek:

Yeah, no, totally. Yeah, it’s like a science fiction novel that you get to walk inside of. I think that that’s probably the best way to think about it, but you don’t have to follow the story 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, just be there as like an observer, like you might at a park or something. The most important quality of the 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 alternate reality environments that encourage exploration and discovery. So art and 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.

Charlie Melcher:

I remember in your FoST 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 imagination deficit.

Vince Kadlubek:

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 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.

Charlie Melcher:

Even more so now during socially distant COVID time, right? We’re all just in our own little home offices.

Vince Kadlubek:

Exactly. And so I think when we get out of this pandemic and we’re back out into the physical world, my hope is that it’s seen as a blank canvas for artists, creatives, programmers, to paint on and to create a more interesting life outside of our houses.

Charlie Melcher:

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. You opened up the House of Eternal Return, is the name of it, in a bowling alley in Santa Fe. Tell us, just quickly, how well that did and what the response was.

Vince Kadlubek:

You know, when we were putting together that project, we had anticipated that Burning Man people would show up, that your artists, creative folks would show up. That the Instagram people would show up. But we didn’t expect that everyday soccer families from Amarillo, Texas, or from Lawrence, Kansas, would be driving to Santa Fe to come and visit this exhibition. That was above and beyond what we anticipated. And so we were thinking like, 125,000 people per year or so. 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 Santa Fe is tiny and we’re getting 500,000 people a year through the exhibition.

Vince Kadlubek:

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, that feels like it’s for the masses, it’s for the kids. And that’s the interesting thing about immersive art too, is 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. It’s like, we’re comfortable with that idea. You’re born inside of a very immersive space known as a hospital. You walk inside of grocery stores, which are very strange immersive spaces. So we’re comfortable with walking into a subspace and having to adapt. Whereas, walking up to a painting or walking up to a sculpture that’s on a pedestal, that’s a very esoteric experience that not many people know what to do with. And so by doing immersive work, you’re automatically lending to people’s history, and experience, and comfortability.

Charlie Melcher:

I always think about this idea that we are meant to be three-dimensional human beings. 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 all of 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 friendly and not friendly. And so much of our storytelling and so much of our media, for a very long time now, have really been two-dimensional. It’s been 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, well, really an experience economy, or experience storytelling economy.

Vince Kadlubek:

We don’t experience life on paper. We don’t experience life with a controller in our hands, 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 Meow Wolf 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 ones stringing together the story.

Charlie Melcher:

We had on the show recently, on our podcast, Yoni Bloch from eko, and his company does branching video very beautifully, and it 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 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 a left or right. 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 formerly known as the audience, has to do with the fact that you’re not one creator or a couple of creators, but you’re actually, as you 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.

Vince Kadlubek:

That’s a really good observation, Charlie. I think nobody wants to be the dictating voice in a collaborative project like this. And so because of that, I think we leave this 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 themself what this could be or what anything else could be. It’s an active role in the storytelling. And I think that that’s critical for us.

Charlie Melcher:

And do you hope, then, that people leave your experiences more empowered to create their own lives, to create their own stories, to reimagine the world that they want to inhabit?

Vince Kadlubek:

We’re 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, and the term transformation, and to me, transformation, your perception is shifted. You’re different coming out than when you went in.

Vince Kadlubek:

There is a moment at the House of Eternal Return that I use that 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. Cause 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 out in the world.

Charlie Melcher:

And I think it ties to this child mind, right? It ties to this—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’s new, everything is something that we’re learning. We come at everything with a 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.

Charlie Melcher:

That just reminds me of that amazing TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson. This 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 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 sixth graders. And at this point they asked 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. And 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.

Vince Kadlubek:

You have an analytical mind that analyzes what has happened and then uses the data from the past, what has happened, to determine the present. And that’s an analytical mind, and it’s an important mind, because it helped us survive through evolution. Like, 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. And so you need to be able to learn from the past to make determinations today.

Vince Kadlubek:

But 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. So, “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… You know, the default identity is created through past-based experiences. And there’s the imagination and the creative process. The creation process shifts you from “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.

Vince Kadlubek:

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.

Charlie Melcher:

So I can’t wait for Meow Wolf education or university. I can’t wait for Meow Wolf housing. I want to live there. I’d like to pre-order an apartment in Meow Wolf housing. I’m sure apartment is not the right word.

Vince Kadlubek:

Yeah. We need a city. I’d love to have a city at some point. Get like, a few thousand acres, and be able to have our own development. I think that that would be incredible. Through wayfinding 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, you know, scattered around multiple cities. The major exhibition spaces could be in Vegas, Denver, and Santa Fe. You could start to kind of piece together a gaming map that is location-based, but interconnected through a mixed reality wayfinding platform, essentially.

Charlie Melcher:

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 the digital analog world?

Vince Kadlubek:

I think it’s a combination of 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 an interconnected world of experience.

Charlie Melcher:

Just so much opportunity. And I guess it’s going to probably really flower as we get the all clear from COVID. So it could be some months yet.

Vince Kadlubek:

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? That’s going to be an important question. So you’re going to have to create things out in the world that are worth leaving the house for. Plus, I mean, the decimation of traditional retail, and the decimation of movie theaters, and stuff that was already on its way out. And now it’s kind of just like 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. There’s not really programming for it.

Charlie Melcher:

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 twenties was a direct response to the Spanish flu of the teens. The all clear came, and what did we get? What we know of as the roaring twenties. What’s going to be our version of that? It’s going to be a really interesting.

Vince Kadlubek:

Well in the roaring twenties, I mean, the most successful experiential industry that we know of came out of that, which was the amusement 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 that Meow Wolf can show success in Vegas, Meow 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.

Charlie Melcher:

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 MBA. That this might be the source, where parents encourage 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 oil or auto or tech, but by artists and storytellers and creators.

Vince Kadlubek:

That’s would be a dream, right? 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. 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.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, this has been an incredible conversation. It’s 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.

Vince Kadlubek:

Yeah. Thanks man. Yeah, same. I mean, I hope that when people go through Meow Wolf and they experience what we’ve created, especially like artists and groups of artists, collaborators, people realize that they can do this too—that 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.”

Vince Kadlubek:

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. 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, a paradigm shift in immersive art. You know, I’m just so proud of the team for what they’ve accomplished. It’s remarkable.

Charlie Melcher:

Thank you, Vince, for being on the show. And thank you, Meow Wolf, for being the source of amazing imagination and creativity.

Vince Kadlubek:

Thanks man. Appreciate that.

Charlie Melcher:

I’m Charlie Melcher, and this has been the Future of Storytelling Podcast. Thanks for listening. To stay in the loop on all things immersive, from location-based installations like Meow Wolf to tech-powered experiences on the Apple Vision Pro, please consider signing up for our newsletter, FoST in Thought. It’s our monthly bulletin on the latest and greatest in storytelling and technology, and it’s completely free. For those of you who want to dive even deeper, you should consider joining the FoST Explorers Club, our annual membership community. You can learn more about both at fost.org. The FoST Podcast is produced in collaboration with our talented production partners, Charts & Leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.