DIY and the Flow Code: How Punk Culture Built the Startup World

Welcome to the stage author, journalist, and founder of the Flow Research Collective, Stephen Kotler, and award-winning fashion designer, John Varvatos.

Hello, hello, hello.

What's up, fuckers?

Who just came here?

Nobody moves.

Nobody gets hurt. Who just came from the mushroom conversation down the hall? Not a— okay.

And now for something completely different. We want to welcome you to a fairly strange talk, how the kids that nobody wanted invented the world we're all living in. It's a punk legacy. Strange presentation where a peak performance expert, myself, and a fashion designer, my friend John, up to explain how a somewhat forgotten period in history had an incredible influence on culture, entrepreneurship, and as you'll see, all of our lives.

And at the center of this forgotten period is a familiar heartbeat, the rebel spirit, the anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment spirit that pervades entrepreneurship, essentially the reason We're all on this boat, ship, ship.

What are we talking about? Take a look. You know, guys going crazy. There was this feeling that something had to happen that was more amazing to look at, more aggressive to listen to.

We had to do something because the grown-ups were fucking this up big time.

We're gonna do what we want, we're gonna play the way we want. We're frustrated. Basically, we're all gonna go to jail if we didn't find something worthwhile to do.

Hello.

You were dangerous. You'd turn into a little monster.

I just wanted to shock people out of their normalcy. My life goal was just to be able to buy food.

We didn't know how to write fucking songs. We didn't know there was keys. I'm gonna pick up a guitar. I don't care if I can't play. We made it up as we went along. Everything was about being a damaged male, and we were just supposed to be, like, dancing and having so much fucking fun to it. You were going to something that was physically dangerous. There were riots all the time. Hey, man. Pow! What the fuck?

Oh, you're a friendly. I'm sorry. Are you okay?

It was something to be disdained, you know? And the press just made it worse. There was no hope of ever being successful. We very much wanted to be in the mainstream. We didn't want to be seen as sellouts. For us to sign to a major was like blasphemy.

So I don't know how many people here intimately know Stephen Kotler here, but he's a really special guy and a relatively new friend of mine that we share a lot of love for punk music, for sure, punk culture, but I've learned a lot from him over the last few months as we've kind of talked about kind of the history of it and also how it's transcended over generation to generation. So Stephen's a New York Times bestselling author. He's written over 14 books. Stephen, any books you wanna talk about here?

Not really, but I've written 14 of them.

And he's a punk rocker from Cleveland. You know, I grew up in Detroit, definitely the home. Thank you, thank you. Definitely the home of punk rock. Cleveland thinks because they have the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that it has some feeling for punk rock, but they don't really. Other than Stephen, there wasn't really anything authentic about Cleveland.

So this is my friend John Varvatos. You might have bought cocaine from him over the years.

From time to time.

Time to time. He's a fashion designer, he's a music producer. He claims to be from Detroit, but I haven't seen any proof so far. He launched the Varvatos brand back in 2001, Designer of the Year 4 times. And in 2008, he purchased the old CBGBs, the kind of— Leased it. Leased it? Sorry, leased it. It had been shut down for a couple of years. He rebooted it, turned it into a store, a museum, and there's been over 150 free concerts there to celebrate punk since then.

Trying to keep live music living in the Bowery of New York City.

So this is a classic textbook definition of punk for those of you who might not be familiar. This is how the dictionary would define it. This is actually Wikipedia. But the lived experience that Don and I went through, punk was really sort of an antidote to the kind of lack of honesty and authenticity and the stifling conservatism, especially that was in the Midwest at the time. It was that cure for that dead-before-you're-deadness that was everywhere we looked. Punk had this incredible energy, this incredible life force. It was truthful and was about hard realities. What was most important to me is nobody cared where you came from, how you looked, or who you wanted to fuck. The only thing that mattered was authentic self-expression, creativity, doing real shit in the world and not just talking about it. Now, being a peak performance expert, I think about things often in terms of neurobiology, neuroscience, psychology, things along those lines. And I wanna talk a little bit about some of that as it relates to punk. And the first thing I want to say is, as John pointed out, it's a short-lived movement, but it was also nothing new. So in psychology, they talk about the rebel spirit. The idea is that rebellion is coded into our genome from an evolutionary basis. The reason is to preserve the genetic line, you need to separate brother from sister, right? Incest will crush the genome and the genome will die out very quickly.

Was this just in Cleveland, the incest thing, or?

Mainly Cleveland. He's not funny. Nobody much likes him. The fuck are you laughing at? Rebellion is a way to prevent incest, technically. More importantly, it confers a fitness advantage. Rebellion feels good. There's a ton of dopamine that comes up when we rebel. Is a motivating force, and risk and danger are triggers for the optimal state of consciousness known as flow. So every generation wants to out-rebel the next generation. This is known as the rebel instinct. This is also why when rebellion starts out in the middle of the 20th century, you get the beatniks. They have funky uniforms, they're wearing leather jackets, they've got white t-shirts, little berets. The next, the hippies come along and the clothing and the hair gets way more flamboyant. Punks are next, and it goes from funky hair and funky clothing to actual body modification— earrings, chains between noses and ears, things like that. Grunge comes next with the rave culture at the same time. Now we've got body modifications, scarification, much more extreme. Today we're seeing it in the trans movement. People are rebelling by having sex changes. The next step, what is It seems to be the cutting edge right now. Cyborg culture at the cutting edge of this. We're seeing people implant technology in their bodies. And the far extreme of this, where this is probably heading in about the next 10 years, human-animal hybrids. We're seeing a lot of like underground geneticists using synthetic biology and those tools to give people cat's eyes or actual human tails. So the question at the heart of this is if— is—

So why, if punk was such a nothing new to so many people, and the first wave of it was so short-lived, at least the wave from the '70s, does it continue to have such a big impact on culture?

We're gonna answer that question in a couple of parts. If I can advance the slide.

Yeah, part 1 is the history of punk with focus on its influence on music and entrepreneurship. And then part 2 will be a set of punk values that explains why the movement had such an outsized impact.

To set the stage before we walk you through the history of punk, you have to understand that punk emerged at a time that was extremely difficult. A lot of the problems that we face today were also there at the birth of punk. A couple of things were different. Back then, absolute stifling social conservatism, saccharine pop culture, vapid '70s rock, Foreigner, Journey, REO Speedwagon. Punk was also a reaction against the hippies. The hippies came in peace, love, we're gonna fix everything, and it was a fucking failure. Absolute mess of things. So punks came after that with this core distrust of hippies, of the media, of telling the truth. There was all kinds of gender issues and racial issues and class warfare and environmental devastation and war, terrorism. There was violence and rebellion at home and soul-crushing poverty around the world. This was the cauldron that birthed punk.

We're gonna walk you through the history of punk.

You gonna tell them this is the early years or no?

I think you wanna take a look at what's up on the screen though.

Okay, fair enough. Oh, let's go, hey, oh, let's go, hey, oh, let's go, hey, oh, let's go.

So punk was a derogatory catch-all for a lot of things, ranging from pop punk of bands like Blondie to the new wave bands such as Talking Heads to the loud guitar sounds of the MC5 from Detroit.

I'm sorry, where?

Detroit.

This was the same era that actually birthed the DIY movement. So the do-it-yourself movement that underpins entrepreneurship traces its roots back to the punk movement. Why is that?

Because there were no outlets for this kind of music, so these artists created their own record labels, they recorded their own albums, or cassettes at the time, they distributed themselves, And they booked their own tours. They advertised their own albums and shows and tours. They created their own magazines. Stephen, from that period, created— what your first magazine was?

Called Penumbra. Nobody would hire me because I had dreadlocks down to here, and I couldn't get a job anywhere, so I had to create my own magazine so I could build a career as a writer.

And they created their own fashions, which was really the beginning of DIY in clothing.

And political movements. There was Rock Against Racism, Riot Grrrl, the White Panther Party, which we're gonna talk about a little bit later. The more interesting thing is a lot of internet culture came out of punk. So the hippies get a lot of credit for inventing Silicon Valley, right? Information wants to be free. This was Steve Wozniak's motto, Stewart Brand's motto. But while the hippies wanted information to be free, Punks figured out that while information wants to be free, attention is really expensive. And as a result, the punks co-opted tools of communication. They started putting up posters all over to advertise their albums and their concerts. This was the very first time anything like that happened. We saw punk graffiti. Punk zines, which was a movement that I was a big part of, came next. This was a way for punks to tell other people about about the scene. And this is all the stuff that later builds into what we today think of as social media. Now, to explain punk's total impact, we have to do a small left turn back into psychology and neuroscience.

Only he can talk about this.

Well, I was going to talk about fashion later. I'm not supposed to talk about that stuff?

Get into the neuro shit right now, okay?

I'm here for the neuro shit. So the real engine of the punk movement and the real engine of the DIY movement is actually a state of optimal performance known as flow. If you're not familiar with flow, flow is an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. It's any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. You get so focused on what you're doing on the task at hand Everything else just starts to disappear and melt away. Self-consciousness, our sense of self gets really, really quiet. The voice in your head, that inner critic gets really, really quiet. Time passes strangely. Sometimes it'll slow down and get that freeze frame effect from an animation of a car crash. Much more frequently, just get so sucked into what you're doing that 5 hours go by in 5 minutes. But throughout all of this, all aspects of human performance go through the roof. Now flow is ubiquitous. All humans can get into flow. Everybody in this room can get into flow, but for reasons that we're going to get into in a second, the combination of high-energy DIY rebel spirit at the heart of both punk and entrepreneurship turn out to be engines for flow. So why is this important? For starters, I want to talk a little bit about what flow actually amplifies. So the numbers that you're looking at, they come from different studies done by different teams of people. Motivation and productivity soar in flow. That 500% above baseline number comes from a study done by the business consultancy McKinsey. They spent 10 years going around the world talking to company leaders. They found the average that leaders in flow are 500% more productive than out of flow. Learning and memory soar when we're in flow, 240 to 600%. That 240% number comes from the US Department of Defense and their research on soldiers in flow, and they found that learning and memory accelerates that much. One of the reasons punk had such an outside impact is because punk experiences tend to produce flow and they tend to get seared into our memory. More importantly for the DIY entrepreneurship side, creativity and innovation soar in flow, 400% to 700% depending on whose data you're looking at. Happiness, well-being, overall life satisfaction, meaning and purpose purpose are all underpinned by flow. In fact, when psychologists now define happiness, flow is baked into the foundational discussion of happiness. If you are interested in getting more flow and why did punk and DIY entrepreneurship produce so much flow, it's because flow states have triggers. These are preconditions that lead to more flow. Essentially, flow follows focus. The state can only show up when all of our attention is in the right here, the right now. So that's what all these triggers do. These are psychological terms that affect our neurobiology. So novelty, which was at the heart of punk and DIY entrepreneurship, complexity, unpredictability, risk, creativity, and more specifically the pattern recognition underneath creativity. When you link two ideas together, that produces the neurochemical dopamine, which drives focus. We've all had this experience. Experience, right? You've done a crossword puzzle with Sudoku, get an answer right, that little rush of pleasure you feel afterwards, that's dopamine. One of the interesting things about the creativity and pattern recognition with punk is it produces a feedback loop. So creativity will drive you into flow, and flow amplifies creativity, and it spirals from there. Next thing that happens with flow is there's a shared collective version of a flow state. Known as group flow, team flow. There can be interpersonal flow, two people talking in a flow state. John and I fall into a great conversation, 5 hours go by and we haven't noticed. It's interpersonal flow. But you can also have flow at huge scales, the kind of thing that happens at rock concerts, right? We go to a concert, you merge with the band, everybody's clapping in sync, feels like the audience is completely together. Punk really tapped into it, but they took it a step farther because punk destroyed the line, the barrier between audience and performers, right? Punks wanted to be part of the tribe, not on stage, and they let everybody else get on the stage. Stage diving, mosh pits, much more participatory. In fact, one of my favorite punk shows ever was the Revolting Cocks show that I saw in Cleveland.

How many people raise their hand know the Revolting Cocks?

Okay, anybody? Handful? Okay. Early industrial punk band. Early industrial punk band. Same Al Jorgensen who also formed Ministry, which is a little more familiar to a lot of people. But if you showed up at the Revolting Cocks wearing lingerie, you could sit on the drummer's lap and play the drums throughout the show. Men, women, dogs, cats, children, trans, didn't matter. If you wore lingerie, you got to sit on his lap and play the drums during the show. And this turned punk into a real engine for flow. And as you can see, DIY entrepreneurship is a real engine for flow. So you put them together and you actually get a peak performance movement. It's not, by the way, just punk. Anytime you see a culture of innovation—Paris in the 1920s, the Harlem Renaissance, Silicon Valley—all cultures of innovation are built around flow triggers, because this is how we do innovation and optimal performance, but punk, because the music itself and the DIY entrepreneurship melded together, it produced this tremendous engine for peak performance.

So after all that flow, we're gonna flow right into the '80s all the way up to about 2000, which were characterized by mashups with different types of music between different types of musical genres.

The classic example being Anthrax and the Rebels Without a Pause. Repeat to you, Anthrax and Public Enemy. And yo, Scotty, what we gonna do, G? Bring the noise! That was probably the first major mashup, but it went on from there and impacted a ton of different genres.

Yeah, mashup from that period, it continued to spread its influence influence. You had bands that created other new genres through there. You had pop punk, you had punk metal, you had punk grunge, punk hip-hop, punk goth, surf punk. And then bands out of it, pop punk, when you think about it, Green Day, Blink-182, Sum 41, and punk metal, which was Metallica.

Metallica covering Misfits songs. Yeah. Was probably the height of that.

Punk music also at this time became much more commercial, at least commercially available. I don't think anybody intended it necessarily by writing those songs to make them so much more commercial, but because MTV was launching in the early '80s, A lot of punk videos, which were really interesting, and the filming of them were very low budget but very interesting, were played on MTV.

And it wasn't that MTV itself, the corporation, had any love of punk. It was that the VJs themselves all came out of that era. So Martha Quinn, one of the first major VJs on MTV, was dated for a really long time the lead singer of the Dead Boys, Steve Bader. So MTV had a huge hold on this. Wasn't just MTV. In the late '80s and the early 1990s, punks took over a bunch of different cultures. Punks took over media, publishing, sports, and art. So what happened was punks started putting out zines, back in the '70s and the '80s to tell other people about the music. Mac Publishing showed up in 1984, was the first self-publishing software. Punks were the first people to learn how to use it because they'd been putting out magazines for years and they adopted this new software and figured it out. And then in the early 1990s, if in the era before the internet, magazines were essentially the internet before there was an internet. And if you were an entrepreneur and had a lot of money, the really cool thing to do in the early 1990s was start your own magazine. But once these people started their own magazines, they had to hire people, and the only people who really knew how to put out magazines were punks. So you ended up with punks coming in, starting tons of different magazines. So that's where it starts. MTV plays a role, but we also see— there we go— punks taking over sports. So this is the birth of action sports, which were all deep punk rock subcultures, skater punks, that you're looking at my friend Glen Blake behind me, who was a punk rock skier. And the reason all this happened in action sports is we got all these video cameras that started showing up and getting cheaper in the early 1990s. And action sport athletes figured out they could make a lot of money by just throwing themselves off cliffs and doing really, really dangerous things. But the only people who wanted to do it were the punks who had no other choices and nothing to lose. So a lot of the foundation of action sport culture came out of the punk movement. And it's still amazing that all these sports have now become Olympic sports. So we've gone from deep subcultural punk sports all the way to kind of mainstream Olympic sports at this time. We also saw the same thing happening in the art world. So I helped start in the early 1990s something called Antimatter was in San Francisco, was the largest performance and video art gallery in the world, essentially a punk rock art collective. The alternative circus movement shows up at this time. Everything that builds into Cirque du Soleil starts out in the punk movement.

So this brings us to the later years, and they're primarily defined by the internet's influence on culture, and also commercialization of punk at that point in time. Yeah, that's punk coming to the masses. There's a couple hundred thousand people there in South America for that show. But the internet made this subculture visible. It was always hidden under the subways, and today, at that point in time, it really became very visible to the world. And before the internet, weird punk rock kids from Michigan, Idaho, Ohio, California, wherever, they were super isolated. And it was dangerous for some of those people to look out of place. But MTV made it safe. Made it cool, made it funny to have hair in the suburbs.

The internet took all the different punk tribes and you saw this really cool cross-pollination of culture. There's a classic example being Rick Rubin had Johnny Cash record old punk songs by guys like Nick Cave, and suddenly country was punk and Cash was famous again. But we also start seeing mashup subcultures. Cultures where they're taking London punk looks, mixing it with sort of Japanese new wave, California punk sexuality attitudes, and you end up with these crossover hybrid cultures that are really, really interesting, and it goes global, as you can see. Now, this is also the era where punk sort of starts to leak deeper into culture. So cyberpunk, the early writings of William Gibson, Movies like Blade Runner come out of this era. Those are all deep punk culture. We get in writing, we also get splatterpunk. So Clive Barker and a lot of the torture porn films that are sort of now making their way trace back to the punk roots. The birth of VR came out of punk subcultures in San Francisco. And today, by the way, these pants are what happened if you look up punk clothing on Amazon. They're the first thing that pop up. So it's now gone sort of everywhere, but you also have really cool designer brands that are built out of these traditions. Brands like Mastermind and Acronym came out of here. That covers our history of punk. The next thing we want to talk about are a series of punk values, and more importantly, the lived experience of the values, because the name that we called the values versus how they actually played out in the real world were a little bit different. But the really important thing is the values that we all lived in that era have become prevalent today in culture, as you'll see.

The first value is radical individuality. You know, it's a tribe built from misfit broken toys. And like a lot of you, it really is, when you really think about the radical individuality, it's real. When I say a lot of you, it's really the rebels, the people who didn't want to walk the straight line with everybody else, didn't want to work for the corporate environment. So I look at most of you in this room being entrepreneurs, and that's where we start to connect what the punk culture has connected with all of you. Not mentally that way, but emotionally, how you've run your life, how you work through things. It's more about your own way of breaking the rules, for sure. So it's people who didn't fit into the normal way of working. And a great example of it is this quote from Joan Jett. It says, "Other people call me a rebel, but I just feel like I'm living my life and doing what I want to do." Sometimes people call that rebellion, especially when you're a woman. Radical individuality showed up in the punk fashion. So it was a time of be who you want, be your own person, but it scared the shit out of people when everybody was dressing like that, especially starting in the late '70s and as we moved all the way into the '90s. Vivienne Westwood, if you look at the screen here, I think she's on there. This store Sex was opened in 1976 in one of the high streets in London. And she did it with Malcolm McLaren, who was the manager, discovered, put together, the manager of the Sex Pistols. And it was the first totally DIY store. It was like they were making things themselves. They didn't use factories. People sewing in the back room. And this type of thing caught fire around the globe. We started to see those in San Francisco, in the Bowery in New York, in Japan, in Tokyo, those type of places. So, and today, you see, you go to the malls and you walk by and you see Hot Topic. And Hot Topic, or you search online punk fashion, And a store like Hot Topic, which has been around for multiple generations, continues to sell their version of what they think punk fashion is today.

Next value I want to talk about is sort of anarchy and anti-capitalism. Now, those values were definitely represented in the punk lyrics and in punk song protest movements, but really the way anarchy and anti-capitalism where punkism ended up manifesting was in DIY entrepreneurship, right? And this is everything we talked about already: putting out our own records, booking our own tours, publishing our own magazines, advertising. What comes out of that, punks start to figure out their way around the system. They start figuring out how the system itself works, and this allows punks to go bigger and bigger and bigger. The classic example being Green Day on Broadway. Sure, They're on Broadway and it's pure capitalism, but it's also like, wink wink, nudge nudge, holy shit, they let punks onto Broadway.

And then you have Billie Joe Armstrong, the singer and main songwriter from Green Day, starring in a Broadway musical that he wrote, which he was incredible. He starred for the first 6 weeks of the run. So even he, who was the ultimate punk growing up, realized that that it could be much broader than what he originally thought when he was 15 years old.

We also see punks going from sort of booking their own shows and booking their own tours and packing a handful of people into a van and traveling around the country into megatours. Lollapalooza is Perry Farrell's cross of punk rock and the alternative circus movement. That's where that starts. It gets even bigger with the Warped Tour, which is what you're looking at here.

Then you have somebody like Vans who is sponsoring it, so you have a big multi-billion-dollar corporation sponsoring— this is the first time you've ever had anything of that nature sponsoring a massive punk tour, which their attitude was, bring it to more people, it's the music of the people, bring it to more people. So as we think about punk in today's world, we think about people's job as a punk. We think about these images that are up on the screen here: Richard Branson, Woz, which was his partner— I'm sorry, Steve Jobs's partner. And even you think about people like Elon Musk. They're not only rebels, they're kind of misfits in the universe that they grew up in. They couldn't fit into trying to create these things within a normal structure at all. So they went out on their own. And this pirate flag that's up there, there's a story behind that as well.

Yeah, so when Steve Jobs actually wanted to build the first Macintosh computer, he left his normal company headquarters, rented a space behind the Good Earth Restaurant in Silicon Valley, a little warehouse space and put that pirate flag on a flagpole above the shop. And he used to say it's better to be a pirate than to join the Navy. And Branson himself ended up signing the Sex Pistols, right? Early Virgin Records.

Yes, so he started his record label in 1970, Virgin Records, and it was more of a progressive rock label. But even the Even the Sex Pistols, he saw something that was commercially viable more than what everybody thought was at the time.

The next value I wanna talk about was anti-racism. So it was very clear from the start that punk was incredibly inclusive. It was an us against the world mentality, but for anybody who shared those values and wanted to play, nobody cared what you looked like, nobody cared the color of your skin. And in fact, punks went out of their way to be inclusive. Here's one example. This is Alice Bag from the Bags: Punk has been portrayed as music by and for angry white males, but in its inception it was a rebellion against all rock clichés. Gender, ethics, sexual, and class taboos were all challenged by our early punk community, and that is a story which is not very often told. People of color, the queer community, women, all are present throughout the birth of punk.

And in the middle of that screen you see the White Panther Party, and that was— everybody at the time, I think, missed the misconception when that happened in 1967 when the riots were in Detroit and Watts and Cleveland. Yeah, in Cleveland and also in New York. When the White Panther Party came out, everybody was thinking that was to fight against the Black Panther Party that was fighting for black rights, but the White Panther Party actually came out to support, and they bellied up right against the Black Panther Party to support where the issues were in still fighting for black rights.

And early bands like the MC5 were a big part of the White Panther Party. For sure. When it comes to sexuality, so if you look in the upper left-hand corner, you're seeing a photo of Le Mer Vipère, which was the very first punk dance club in the world. It was in Chicago. Huge influence on Cleveland culture, Chicago culture. It was founded by a couple of drag queens. Drag queens. Nobody would let punks play anywhere, but the gay community embraced punks, and so the first dance club was started by a pair of drag queens. And so the culture I grew up in, in the Midwest, was very, very, very gender fluid for this reason. Next value I want to talk a little about is the anti-authoritarianism that was at the heart of punk. This shows up in a lot of different ways, But the most familiar way is this like deep humor and shock value. They wanted to knock people out of their complacency. These are a handful of examples. So on the right, in the far right, that's GWAR. In the middle, you're looking at the Misfits, so this is horror punk. And on the left side, you're seeing the more modern version of it in Slipknot or bands like Mushroomhead. But all of this actually gets its start with Iggy Pop. In Detroit. In Detroit. Iggy comes out on stage, he starts slicing himself up with razor blades and broken beer bottles. And because of the rebel instinct, because every generation needs to out-rebel the next generation, Iggy starts out by cutting his body. And next you end up with bands like GWAR running around with 50-foot penis cannons that are firing goop into the audience on stage. And it goes from there. I dated the manager of GWAR for a while in college, and her job was to move the penis cannon around the country, which was pretty damn funny.

See, we grew up a decade apart, so they had really progressed to having mobile penis units to be able to move around at that time.

Yeah, back in his day, the penises didn't get to move. That was the real difference. The last value I sort of want to talk about is existentialism. So punk was a true existential movement, meaning there was— nobody believed there was any meaning in the world, and the only choice you had was to make meaning for yourself. And the really cool thing about it is it worked, because punk and DIY entrepreneurship are engines for flow, and flow underpins meaning and purpose and overall life satisfaction. Satisfaction and well-being. What starts out as sort of a reaction against culture ends up saving a ton of lives as a result. And this brings us to punk today.

Yes, and this next band that's up there, they're from Wales, England, 15, 16-year-old kids who embody the true punk spirit as it originally was founded in the late '60s. '60s and early '70s, but you look at the kids around them as well. It's not just the music, and you'll start to really start to get the idea. So the real punk today, though, as you can see even with those kids on the street there, it's really defined and characterized by attitude. And I think it always really was in the end, but it's really come to a place where we understand it more. It's a mindset, it's an attitude. The real rebels today are yesterday's outsiders: women, trans, and entrepreneurs, that consciousness has hacked by microdosers, entrepreneurs who are now rebelling by using business to promote social, cultural, and environmental change. And today they have something that they never had in the past: access to capital.

Money came into punk and punk went everywhere, and we see examples in everything from kind of entrepreneurship of Elon Musk, the political activism of Greta Thunberg, and even old punk bands like the Misfits. The Misfits now don't have to tour. They do 2 stadium shows a year. They sell out the stadiums. These are bands that could barely sell out clubs back in our day, and now they're selling out 100,000-person Wembley.

And people come from all over the world to see them.

I'm allowed to say stuff about dick and fuck because this is like a punk documentary, right? As a way to close, you've been a lousy fucking audience. Fuck you and good night.