Bad at Sports Episode 903: Jake Nickell & Lance Curran of Threadless

This week on Bad at Sports, Duncan MacKenzie and Ryan Peter Miller cruise their way into a murder mansion fever dream with Jake Nickell and Lance Curran, two of the minds behind Threadless—the Chicago-based t-shirt empire that helped invent crowdsourced artwear before we’d marketed terms like “creator economy” or “drop ship.”

What begins as a nostalgia trip (setting the stage for how the business developed through DIY screenprinting and forum culture) quickly becomes a deep dive into ethics, art careers, AI disruption, licensing chaos, and why having your work sold in Hot Topic definitely still counts as making it.

We unpack:

• The founding of Threadless on a secret art/code forum

• Shifting from screen printing to digital on-demand

• Working with artists, bands, and comic book creators

• Parody vs. IP theft (and WTF the DMCA is)

• Building safety and anti-hate moderation into a global platform

• Why Chicago still rules

• And why Punch Nazis continues to be a top seller

Along the way, we also discuss vending machines, Karl Marx, Cheetos, the Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference, and what happens when art school turns into a startup.

And, importantly, how capitalism can be leveraged using Foucauldian power for artists—rather than for their subjugation.

Jake Nickell is the founder of Threadless, and a pioneer in crowdsourced design and artist-first merchandise models. He started Threadless in 2000 while still in art school.