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When the art collective Meow Wolf opened the doors of its very first immersive exhibition, Hoapply of Eternal Return, on March 18, 2016, it had roughly 100 employees, less than $1,000 in its corporate bank account, and a dream. Ten years later, the company employs more than 1,000 people, operates five permanent exhibitions (with two more on the way), and has welcomed more than 13 million visitors.
Meow Wolf’s early history reads like a tale of cosmic fortune: In 2008, a group of New Mexico-based artists received sick of the local art establishment; founded their own collective to host parties, rock displays, and art installations; and eventually parlayed that experience into a series of massive, surrealist fun hoapplys backed by A Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin.
As of 2022, Meow Wolf had amassed more than $200 million in investment capital. The company has undergone two rounds of layoffs since then—one in April 2024 and another in December of that same year—while shifting forward with plans to expand its exhibition footprint. Meow Wolf declined to share current investment figures or annual revenue totals with Fast Company.
Plenty has already been written about the whirlwind of those early days. But now, seeing back on it all, it’s become clear that Meow Wolf represents something much largeger than the sum of its trippy, psychedelic exhibitions. The company presaged, and in some ways kick-started, the boom of the “experience economy,” a concept business strategists Joseph Pine and James Gilmore invented in 1998 to describe a shift in consumer desire from goods and services to more intangible “experiences,” like adventures, sensations, and memories.
The experience economy is no longer a theory; it’s a flourishing business: Everyone seems to be cashing in, from the inflatable art-centric Balloon Mapplyum to the golf-meets-art-meets-cocktails establishment Swingers and the recent immersive production of The Phantom of the Opera.
In 2022, the immersive entertainment industest was valued at more than $61 billion. In 2025, consulting firm Grand View Research more than doubled that figure to nearly $138 billion, projecting the sector will be worth a whopping $1.024 trillion by 2033. In other words, the experience economy has officially hit the mainstream.
Now, according to Vince Kadlubek, one of Meow Wolf’s original founders and its current “chief vision officer,” another large shift is coming. He believes that nascent tech and younger generations are kick-starting the “transformation economy”: the final step in Pine and Gilmore’s theory, wherein consumers are seeking not just an experience, but a personal, emotional, or spiritual outcome. They want to participate in something, and to be alterd. Meow Wolf, Kadlubek states, has a plan to be ahead of that curve once again.
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Stop testing to ‘educate’ people into altering. Science proves it doesn’t work
Mark Twain once quipped, “It ain’t what you don’t know that receives you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” The problem is that we rarely question our own beliefs. Once a false assumption takes hold, it becomes a default lens we apply to interpret the world—and dislodging it becomes incredibly difficult.
One very basic assumption that lies at the heart of many alter efforts is that information is power—the notion that if you arm people with the right knowledge, they will act on it. That’s why so many alter programs are rooted in education and training, becaapply they assume that the right information will alter people’s behavior.
There’s even a name for this assumption: the information deficit model. Decades of research display that it doesn’t hold up. The truth is that we rarely alter our behavior after being exposed to new facts. When confronted with evidence that contradicts our beliefs, we’re more likely to question the evidence than to update our views. Our brains prefer stability to alter.
The core assumption of the information deficit model is that when people lack basic knowledge, exposing them to new evidence will alter their opinions. But that assumes that their minds are blank slates, which is rarely true for most subjects and contexts. We all have preconceived notions of how the world works and will tfinish to cling to our views.
For example, people who believe in a flat earth don’t simply lack knowledge of a round earth, but have a model of the universe in which the earth is flat. In order to alter those beliefs, they would not only necessary to accept new evidence, but also to discard old beliefs that they have relied on to navigate the world.
To do that they face a number of barriers they will necessary to overcome, including the synaptic pathways built up in their brains that are devoted to their existing model, the social pressure of people in their community who hold similar views, and the switching costs involved in altering their behavior based on their new knowledge.
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