Hello, boys and girls, this is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show, where it is my job to deconstruct world class performers, interview people from all different disciplines, to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, etc. that you can use. My guest today is a mad man, Dustin Yellin, and you may not have heard this name, but by the end of this conversation, you'll definitely look him up.

Dustin Yellin, Wii lined on Instagram at Dustan Yellen, is an artist who lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is the founder and director of Pioneer Works, a multidisciplinary cultural center in Red Hook, Brooklyn, that builds community through the arts and sciences to create an open and inspired world.

It's a beautiful, beautiful facility. So if and when you can check it out, I highly recommend he and his incredible work have been featured by media and organizations worldwide, including the New York Times Art Forum, Vanity Fair and Ted. OK, so here we go. The next paragraph will make a lot more sense if you first go to Dustin Yellen dot com and look at psychogeography or Google Dustin Yellen psychogeography and look at the images that all having been said, drawing on both modernism and the sacred tradition of hinter glass painting, Yellen primarily works through a unique form of three dimensional photomontage in which paint and images clipped from various print media are embedded within laminated glass sheets to form grand, pictographic allegories, which Dustan calls frozen cinema.

But wait, there's more. These totemic and kaleidoscopic works often plumb the history and fate of human consciousness within the Anthropocene. Again, that might not sound like it makes any sense, but it makes a whole lot of sense. If you look for Dustin Yellen psychogeography. And we will do our best to also include a photograph of one of those at Timna blog if you just search his name. Dustin's art has been exhibited at or with the more Pacific Museum.

I'm going to mispronounce a bunch of stuff here. Could be a more specific Amauri Museum, Brooklyn Museum, City Museum Collection, Collection, Solo, Corning Museum of Glass, the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts Museum. They'll do it. They Bellus artists out this I'm not sure SICAD or Scabbed Museum of Art, Tacoma Museum and Creative Time, among many others. He holds an honorary doctor of Humane Letters degree from the Savannah College of Art and Design.

You can find him again on Instagram at Dustan Yellen or at Dustin Yellen, NORCOM Whitefly and and also at Pioneer Works. Doug, please enjoy this incredible ride, this roller coaster through the mind and psyche and life of Dustin Yellen. This episode is brought to you by zero zero, the world's most popular fasting app, long term listeners will know that I take fasting very seriously. I've studied it. I have practiced it. I do three day fasts.

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At this altitude I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question now? It is. Cybernetic organisms living tissue over metal embryos go to Paris, so. Dustin, welcome to the show. Thank you. Very happy to be here. You are one of my favorite Mad Men I've been following ever since we first met at Pioneer Works and was blown away by your art, blown away by your storytelling.

I remember this family going with my crazy Bulgarian assistant director of editorial with you on a little tour of your studio. And it seemed like your life story was just the most incredible, eclectic mix of things.

And I thought we would start and we're going to go down all sorts of roads. But let's start with. You dropping out of high school, and my understanding is that you end up hitchhiking around New Zealand and I was curious how that came to be.

Well, actually, I don't remember. I was in Colorado. I dropped out of high school. I for some reason couldn't connect. To the system of education and I just wanted out, so I tried to persevere and then I left and I turned 18 and I had to bet with my mom where if I didn't do any drugs or alcohol or smoke cigarettes or anything until I was 18, I would win this battle. And she was going to give me a car, basically.

But when I was 16, I hustled Swatch watches, actually, and I made some money on my own and bought my own car. So when I turned 18 and I said, look, I won the bet, but I already have a car that I paid for with my own money.

So, you know, you're going to have to give me some cash, which I then spent on drugs, sex and rock and roll and just went bananas and doing copious amounts of hallucinogens at a very at 18, which is maybe good because a lot of these kids, you know, don't know what they're doing and they're 12.

So so it was cool. And and then I just decided to get out of Colorado, kind of picked them up and went to New Zealand and just started hitchhiking and through Australia hitchhiking as well. And I hadn't been very cultured as a kid. And so I was like a late bloomer. And at 18, here I am on LSD for the first time, listening to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and having my own sort of Woodstock in my my mind is of hitchhiking through these countries.

And it was pretty crazy and getting exposed to all this weird stuff through people I met on the road. And then I ended up in Thailand on an island, um, lots of mushrooms. They put them in your omelets. And I was like, this is paradise. I'll never leave. Why would I ever go back to what I knew before? I'm just going to live on this island. And then that kind of at some point scared me because I was like, whoa, I'm so detached from what I once knew.

And then I went back to Colorado and met that crazy physicist.

And so we're we're going to get to the crazy physicist. I want to leave that just as a cliffhanger for folks for a second. Let's go back to the Swatch, watches for a minute and doing homework for this.

It seems like you had the hustle from a very young age. And I read that you used to busk as a break dancer. I don't know if it was on the Venice boardwalk or somewhere, but it a little kid. You take this boombox out and flash forward.

I mean, honestly, your bio is just hilariously fascinating and almost unbelievable to me.

At some point later, three years later, you end up somehow breakdancing and Jeezy's 2013 Picasso baby video. I mean, it's hard for me to even connect these, but where does the hustle come from? The entrepreneurial hustle that I think has served you well in a whole lot of different areas.

You know, I don't know where it comes from. I think perhaps it was always there. I have no idea. I guess it's in my DNA. I don't know.

Do your parents or any siblings have similar programming, that type of entrepreneurial? Yeah, I think make something from nothing. Both my parents have a bit of that and I've had it, I guess. I mean and you know, my mom left my pup when I was five and took me to tell you about Colorado. And she's a single mom at that point, always on the road, working and hustling herself. So I kind of raised myself since I was five, it feels like.

And so there was a lot of just having to figure it out, whatever it may be, I think. Was your mom supportive of your various that want to call them schemes, but the various moneymaking operations from it seems like a really early age, you should know about them? Yeah, yeah.

My mom was always very supportive. She was very not around, I think, in my youth, but also very supportive of my whatever it may be. You know, I think everyone got a little bit more nervous when I kind of dropped out of high school and then when I turned 18 and got pretty, pretty wild in.

And then then, of course, I think my father was completely horrified and my mother was just praying I would get through it.

So let's Segway back to physicists. So how do you meet this physicist and who is this person, you know? It's very unusual circumstances. I returned from Thailand to Colorado and this woman that I was very fond of and dated. Introduced me to where she started telling me about this physicist and that he was brilliant and that he was working on environmental sciences and the damage from the Gulf War and and was trying to make free energy like Nikola Tesla. And of course, I didn't know who Nikola Tesla was at the time.

So I'm now learning who that is and and that he worked with Buckminster Fuller and I didn't know who that was and started learning about Bucky Fuller. And so, again, getting introduced to all this new stuff. And I told her I wanted to meet him and I met him and, you know, he was maybe the first adult. To turn me on to cultural lighthouse's like Pablo Neruda or Dostoyevsky or, you know, Tesla, all these different things and reading and music and kind of just teaching me and I was obsessed.

So I asked him if I could study with him. And he kind of tried to discourage me not to because he said that that would be dangerous because the government, you know, was watching him because he was trying to make free energy.

So he was he was really, really out there and also really, really brilliant.

And that made me really, really interested to learn from him. He finally accepted me to learn from him. And we would have just conversations and do mushrooms and LSD together and just have these long conversations. And then he basically he was like putting me into a closet on a saline solution bed with the court's crystal on my chest listening to whales.

And he was like, look, I think I killed you. You're going to think your dad you're going to think I'm a pathological murderer and that I've killed you. Don't you worry, it'll pass. And he would inject me with ketamine.

And I didn't know. This is a straight up altered state.

This is a great movie and kind of got messed up the second half because it got sort of obsessed with primordial regression opposed to progression. But William Hurt did a great job in that picture and that was, I guess, loosely based on John Lilly's life.

And and John knew the scientist that I was working with.

And and I'm having like so I'm having these crazy out of body experiences where I'm leaving my body in this sort of pure consciousness state and I'm becoming one cell in my arm. And then I'm one star and then I'm, you know, fractionalized into billions of little pieces ambulating. And then the more I would do it, I could navigate through what I guess I perceive to be consciousness. And I had all these crazy visions, which I felt like kind of is what set me.

To New York, how so, how did this send you to New York? Well, you know, this, like, blew my mind because I'm making these crazy paintings. I'm making art constantly at this point.

When did that start? Sorry to interrupt, but when did the artwork start? What a weird shit. But I never really thought about it anything.

You know, I would make little drawings or I'd make things out of rocks and sticks and things I found in the forest, which I actually I've been doing all week this week. So nothing's really changed in in a long time.

So I guess I was always doing that. But by the time I was 17 or so, I was like, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to make art. And I didn't really know about art history yet. I mean, I might have known who Andy Warhol is or Picasso Matisse, but I really did nothing. And but Art felt like the greatest freedom because it felt like something you could it was completely free. You could invent whatever.

And you were never limited to the thing you invented because you could go and invent something else. And then after I met the physicist, I became obsessed with the sciences because I was like, holy shit, this whole world is a hallucination. Everything's been invented. Therefore, we can just build some crazy utopian vision of what we think it should look like on this planet. And so the arts, the art became almost like the voice and the science became like the tactic or something.

I don't know. Yeah, I think so.

I mean, I think that. Are you seeing the art was sort of the the inspiration or the muse and the science was the sort of means by which you expressed whatever had been kind of intuited or received by you. Is that what you mean?

Yeah. And I think I was really obsessed with clean energy. And like the 60s, even though we were in the nineties, I was getting obsessed with Nikola Tesla and I was getting obsessed with this idea of of that we can make clean and free energy.

And therefore, I felt like the art was almost the bonfire. You know what? You could get people around and if you could get everybody around a fire, then you could start to build these more complex systems, which could be scaling clean energy or, you know. Various new forms of political systems. Now you you said that some of the visions are experiences when you're in these Sailin Barth's, right? So people can imagine if you float in the Dead Sea because of the high salt content.

Let's like half your body is kind of suspended.

I wasn't actually in the bath like like Zhongliang. I was on a saline solution bed in a dark room.

Oh, I see. Right. That's a lot safer. OK, I'm feeling better. A lot safer. Precisely. Yeah.

Now, during those experiences, you said some of what was imparted or experienced led you to New York. How is that?

Well, I think I was feeding, if you will, these enormous delusions of grandeur where I'm like, everything is possible, you know what I mean? Like, I could do anything.

And I'm in a small town in Colorado and I'm obsessed now, you know, I'm like, I'm going to make art and I'm going to that's what's going to be my medium is making things out of nothing. And so I basically reduce the idea that the only way to do that was to go to New York City. That's where the artists were. It felt like, you know, that's where that's what people were, because I was in a small town and the kids were like drinking beer on the mountainside, talking about hockey.

And I was like, I need to get the fuck out of here.

And how did you then find your way or fund your way? Both, I guess, at that time to New York. How are you making ends meet? I went there without really knowing anyone or anything and found a you and my mom was very generous. And she said, look, I'll help you with putting like a very cheap roof over your head and then you need to figure it out. So I went there and found like I basically rented through.

I think it was like Craigslist or The Village Voice. I found a room. It was more like a closet from some dude in Soho. And I lived in this little tiny room and he was very generous and gave me another room to make paintings in. And again, I was young and wild and I was just making these crazy ABCs. I didn't even know what ABCs abstract expressionism probably was at the time. But looking back, I was making these weird adex paintings and renting this little closet room from the sky and out every night like a wild man and somehow.

Talked my way into these bars and places at the time, it was a place called the Bowery Bar and the place called Spy and I don't know, I was very lucky because I met all these amazing people right off the boat, so to speak, that a lot of them are still in my life today. So, yeah, I don't know how that happened. I just I met people right away. Well, I mean, it sounds like you went to the action and then you sort of entered yourself as one of the lottery balls in that spinning container of a thousand other lottery balls and bumped into a lot, which would be viewed as serendipity.

But you kind of engineered it by going to the center of the action. What year roughly do you recall when you got to New York?

Ninety four, I think. Ninety four.

All right. And when did you first feel like and maybe you felt this all along, but from the standpoint of keeping you afloat financially, when was the first inkling that you felt Art could do that for you?

Well, in my mind, coming to New York, I thought, oh, of course, it would be so easy once I got to New York. That wasn't the case. And talk about hustle. I mean, I'd be like, buy this painting for me. Twenty two thousand dollars. No, no. I'll buy the painting. A thousand dollars. Thousand dollars for five hundred bucks. Buy that painting. I get to eat some food. Come on.

You know, I was crazy. And then and then I'd be like if someone didn't want the painting I'd be like just take it like just take it. Because I thought to myself, well if they take it and they hang it on their wall and 20 people see it and 19 of them can't not stand it, but one person likes it and asks about it, maybe then maybe it would become a plague.

Did you say a plague? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Because it's like a plague. It's like a disease art. You know, if I could get rid of one person, if we put something in a room and 50 people don't like it, but the fifty first person loves it and wants one and they get it and then they do the same thing in the next 50 people don't like it, but one person sees it and they get one over a lot of time that can really, you know, get you going.

And that's what I would do. I would just hustle. I was wild. I'd be doing fucking what do you call my cartwheels and somersaults through the bar. And I had, like, long hair and beards and beads and like, I you know what I mean? I was I was out there. I was meeting people who were also teaching me like that's where I got my education really was from the people I was meeting.

How many pieces of artwork would you guess you gave away for free or close to free? Dozens. Hundreds? A handful.

I don't know. Multiple. Dozens. Yeah, I don't know. Fifty one hundred. Who knows. I mean, and some of that stuff will like a appear nowadays or someone will call me out of the like.

I have this painting from ninety five and I'm like you fucking burn it you know, like oh good on them for holding onto it. So, so, so ninety four. Ninety five I've thought about.

Actually this is from a conversation I had with a friend named Graham Duncan when he was on this podcast and he talked about swimming in this metaphorical river. And on one hand you have kind of hyper on one shore, one side you have this like hyper rigidity, OCD, et cetera.

And on the other side you have chaos and serendipity and psychosis. Right. You have these two extremes and you can swim down the middle, you can swim to either side. And sometimes people get, like, lodged on one of those shores. This is leading to a question about Zelda. I don't know if this question is going to make any sense, but know who was Zelda and why did you have to rescue her? Does this question make any sense?

If not, I can I can do so.

I was obsessed with F. Scott Fitzgerald and and then, of course, Zelda Fitzgerald and. Yeah. And so for some reason, I was having what one could call a mild psychotic break. And I had this moment where.

I thought that. Everyone knew each other, that everyone was almost playing a joke on each other, that they didn't know each other, almost this idea of the seven daughters of Eve, where we all came from, the same mother, but now there's billions of us. And then I thought everyone was pretending not to know. So I would walk by a restaurant and I would wave at everybody thinking like, hey, everybody. And they would all look at me weird.

And it was very weird. And I was adding up things. So like, if I saw you, Tim, I'd be like, Tim T equals 20. I is whatever it is, M is 13 and I'd add up your name. And I thought there was this like numerical meaning and and I was filming all this because I had traded a drawing for a little handycam. I think that's what they were called the cameras. I was filming everything by myself, just whatever I was doing.

And I had this moment where I was writing all over my paintings. I thought everybody knew each other and I went onto a boat. There's a have you seen the video, the Crack-Up? No, I haven't seen the video. I just read about it.

There's this video where I accidentally filmed a psychotic break and I go on to the Forbes boat and I'm like, this is my boat. And the guy's like, what are you talking about? Like the boat? And I kind of felt like this is my world. And he was like, What are you talking about? Are you related to the Forbes family?

And I was like, yes, directly F or B. S. And he kind of he listened for a little while and he gave me a tour of the boat until he realized I was bananas. And then he kicked me off the boat. And then I this was like on Chelsea Piers.

And then I walked over to the Chelsea Piers where golf range, where they hit the balls, you know, and I literally just in the night time by myself filming. Walked onto the field and started kicking the golf balls and walked up to the guy driving the vehicle used to pick up the balls, and I said to him and I used the wrong words because I said, I need to reprimand your vehicle.

Your driver's a requisition.

I guess the guy was like, are you crazy? I'd like you to understand I'm having a party on this field and I need this vehicle and so jump on the back. And so he literally held the camera, jumped in the back under the balls. And I started driving and I tried to drive the vehicle up into the outside of this area. And of course, he grabbed the keys and brought out the managers. And I tried to convince them they weren't having it.

And so I left. And then the very next morning, I went into Central Park under the same idea that everyone knew each other. And I never forgot because I was talking to everyone as if they were family. And I started talking to this guy and having a long conversation in the park. And then my memories, my memory serves me right. He tried to kiss me and that freaked me out and I ran. So now I'm running through the park and I go to Belvedere Castle.

I don't even know if I knew what Belvedere Castle was, but I go to the castle in the park and I climbed it and I scaled the castle and the police came and got me down from the castle. And they were so nice. They were like, what are you doing up there? And for 15 minutes, the police were really nice. They were like trying to. And I was like, I have got to say, I'm looking for love.

And they were trying to understand what love was. And like I have, you know, and I was demanding that they opened up this castle because there were classrooms in there to let the kids use the frogs and the dinosaurs and the microscopes and the the police. And I had a very nice 15 minute conversation where they were really trying to understand my motivations. And finally, after 15 minutes, they were like, you're under arrest. They threw me on the ground.

I peed in my pants. They took my book, which was F. Scott Fitzgerald The Crack-Up, which was like a book from nineteen forty five published on New Directions of essays that Edmund Wilson, his editor, put together.

And they took my book. They put me in Central Park Prison. I'll never forget they took my shoelaces. Then the ambulance came, took me to a hospital. My my two best friends, who are both no longer with us, came to try to get us out, get me out.

And I wouldn't leave the hospital because I was in this weird merita that this is what I was supposed to be. And my friends were going, I'm like, no. And literally they're arguing with my best friends. And they were like, get out, let's go. And then for some reason, I wouldn't leave. Then another ambulance took me to a full lockdown. I'm writing all over the walls like my numeric codes. And finally, it's like the whole thing in the movies with the glass and the little pill cups.

And finally I was like, OK, I'm ready to leave and not leave pan out. I was like, No, no, I'm. Well, you're like Mel and my parents who had not been on an airplane together in I don't know how long I got to get flew from the West Coast and they got me out. It was so all right, so amazing is definitely one one word there.

There are many descriptors in the video, the Crack-Up, and then it makes sense. Well, I'll check out the video to those listening, I suppose a few at least would think to themselves, holy fucking God, that is terrifying. Two questions for you. Number one is, was that out of left field psychotic break? Was it precipitated by something? So that's number one. And number two is, have you ever gone so far to the shore of chaos and psychosis that you've scared yourself?

Hmm, good question. I don't know what was the cause of this, I think I mean, one could there's a long time ago so one could point to a surplus of hallucinogens. One could just say, like, oh, wow, I was having such a fun. Like, life was so good. It was a dream. And I got so enmeshed into the dream that the dream sort of interconnected us all. And even at the time, I don't think it scared me because I was I thought it was real.

And since then. I mean, I should have probably scared myself a few times, but not so bad. I think it's good to shake it up a little.

You see, you've never been worried about losing your tether to this reality and really just ending up in a psych ward for years or decades. You've never had that concern? No. Why is that? No idea. I think I just I just never I was never there, you know how people are manic, manic depressive. There's something that one can be one day that I'm just manic. I see I provided a great fertile soil to make work. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show.

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Tim, you told another story I recall during this first tour of your studio or as marveling at your work, which which people have to look up and certainly visit your Instagram account, which is just at Dustan Yellen. But there's this family or a mom and dad and their son.

And I remember you ended up we were all standing in a circle at one point. And you're telling this story that completely captivated and mesmerized. I want to say this, like 12 year old boy and the parents were just not sure what to make of it. And I thought the whole thing was hilarious because you're telling a story about, I want to say LSD and swimming from one place to another or I can't recall exactly. But does that ring any bells at all?

Something involving swimming and hallucinogens?

Oh, let me think. I mean, and if not, it's OK. It's by one of a hundred stories. I just remember more the audience reaction and the facial expressions more than anything else.

Well, I don't know. I mean, I definitely I've come closest to death, swimming once to a bird sanctuary. I was born to a bird sanctuary. And then I am also in the book US in Panama. And I was spear fishing for hamlets. And we were on a beach with a few scientists and I got swept away. I was told not to swim. I should have listened, but I don't think I was on any hallucinogens either.

So I don't recall almost drowning because of hallucinogens, but I have definitely almost drowned.

OK, that's perfectly good as a way of getting to the question, which is how did you develop your. Abilities as a storyteller or maybe a better question is because that's always a tricky one. Like what makes a good storyteller, right? I know you seem to be a fan of Werner Herzog. There are certainly others. But you are a good storyteller in your mind. What makes a good storyteller? And are there any people who stick out as really good storytellers?

Well, there's so many I wouldn't even know where to start. Vernors, an amazing storyteller named F. Scott Fitzgerald Murakami. I wouldn't even know where to start with storytellers. There's so many. But I think perhaps being curious is a great place to start. And trying to be fair, this is another place where you just want to inject the entire civilization into your neural networks as fast as possible all of the time. So whenever you're conscious, there's more than you could possibly input.

I mean, even right now, while I'm speaking to I'm looking at a mountain, I'm looking at hundreds, probably thousands of trees. I know that there's a river about one hundred yards in front of me in a valley, even though I can't see it.

I've been on that river every day looking for rocks.

There's just so you know, the infinite detail in our existence is so vast that if you can be aware of it and process it, then somehow you might be able to describe it. And then that could become a captivating story. And if you put yourself in those places, often it becomes a great medium, I guess. So I'm constantly throwing myself into the depths of the Amazon or Papua New Guinea or Africa or all kinds of weird places, always like I'm kind of a bit of an explorer.

And then the things you see and the things you experience, you describe. And I think that people are like planets as well. So you could say the same thing for a person. Right. And all of their experiences that you could describe. If you think about, you know, any anybody, a musician, a writer, a data scientist. I love that answer the question, you know, it's kind of secondary if what you say answers the question, I think if it's important, I'll I'll come back to it.

It's more of a prompt. When I say I'm I'm just kind of like a Buzz Lightyear pulled all that's trying to keep things moving in certain directions or any direction. But the observation that you made about sort of the detail of reality makes me think of Aldous Huxley in Doors of Perception, talking about the mind as a reducing valve in insomuch as we're optimized to fight, fornicate fli basically.

And that on some level you can imagine hallucinogens allowing, dropping or widening the aperture of your reducing valves so that you're you're seeing a lot of what is that's literally just said what I always say.

I even said it to someone like yesterday. I said almost every 72 hours, which is if I'm speaking about hallucinogens, I say exactly that. It's literally imagine your aperture is opening up and therefore, more light, more color, more sound is coming in. Have you found anything outside of hallucinogens to help you to widen the aperture so that you can?

Absolutely. I mean, when I'm drawing, you know, people have been trying to get me to meditate and I think I've done it, but not in a traditional sense. And a lot of folks would say meditation will take you very much to the same place.

Nature. I mean, just you know, I've been out here hiking every day in the river.

I think being conscious for take the hallucinogens out of it completely, but somehow just being conscious of of where you are in the world and what you are in the world and the complete in comprehensible mysticism that is inherent in the very fact that you can experience or be conscious of any experience is the same as potentially, you know, in taking in a hallucinogen for those folks listening.

And I wonder this to you for saying to themselves, this guy's fascinating, his stories are incredible. And I've no idea whatsoever how he is not self-destructive, like how he has managed his life or had it managed in such a way that he's become a super successful artist. What would you say to them? Is it just a miracle that you've had like you've kind of rolled snake eyes a thousand times, or is there more to it?

Well, I think I don't know is what I would say. I would say, yes, I've been extraordinarily lucky, lucky, lucky. Every day I'm like, just don't die this just so don't die.

Don't die, motherfucker. Get one more day in there.

So I've been very lucky and I'm very grateful for that. I think I'm also very conscious. You know, I'm not doing lots of hard drugs. I'm not you know, as I've gotten older, I'm slower to jump in a crazy wild ocean. If I don't know that I could actually swim in it or into a river if I think that it's going to take me down.

So I've been very lucky. But I also think. Yeah, I think you can dive into the infinite complexity of our. Existence and not and do that by not just rolling snake eyes every time, but by just being open and curious, which is I think the great way for how people learn is by just being curious. I totally agree.

And I'm going to dig a little bit more.

Well, I'm going to dig a lot more in just because part of what I try to do in these conversations is to tease out the some people don't like this term, but like the superpowers or idiosyncrasies that allow people to break the normal molds of society and achieve unusual things. Right. Which you have done demonstrably, objectively. You have done that. One thing that came up as I was reading were quotes describing you as anti-competitive. And I'm wondering if maybe that's a gingerbread trail worth following and thinking about.

And, you know, I'm looking at this quote from a Vanity Fair piece from 2015, and this comes up a few times elsewhere also. But it mentions a friend of yours. Is it Tom Rice? I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly, but it's is winning.

You got to meet him.

I'd love to meet him. And he and his quote is, Dustin loves everyone else's creative egos. He's learned the magic formula, which is that if you're competing with other creative people, you're just depleting your energy and destroying yourself. That's really interesting. Can you comment on that? I don't know if it's accurate, if you consider it accurate, but can you speak to that?

Well, sure. I mean, I'm a I think that that that the species is pretty incredible. And I just the way I'm inspired by nature constantly, I'm inspired by people and people are part of nature. And so when I fall in love with. Well, like Tom's books is a great example and Tom is a great example, but, you know, you could go just down the list and line of incredible souls making amazing drawings and paintings and movies and records and math problems and all of it.

All of that stuff to me is is fucking amazing, incredible magnetic. Material that can help propel you through the world. So.

I just want to get turned on more and more and more to all the cool potential that can be unleashed by certain combinations of I don't know if it's neural activity or if it's, you know, a fucking Clough's stimulation.

Yeah, what form if it's the right term, does a.. Competitiveness take like what does that look like to be anti-competitive in the art world?

Well, I think it's embrace and love your community and to help your community realize their dreams, not just your dreams. And if you can make your dreams part of. Dreaming that how do we help realize everybody's dreams together in some collective orgy of dreams? Is that driven by optimism and idealism? Is it driven in part by just finding that a better way to increase your energy as opposed to depleted? What led you to that?

I don't know if there's any great specific schism that that led me there, you know, except that sort of corny, silly idea that there's like love and fear, like we can all love each other, we can all fear each other.

And it seems so simple like we can all come together and say, look, we're going to figure out how to be stewards to this planet together and create great clean technologies and great responsible ways for eight or 10 billion people to live together. Or we could create conflict and I guess competition and territorialism. And I feel like the idea of a country which is kind of arbitrary and new and religions and sort of different ways in which we draw lines around thought and can maybe create ceilings for us.

So but for me it's a very much as I would a guess, a natural natural state that we should just all love each other and build the world that we want to inhabit, because the entire thing is just malleable and sculptural.

And, you know, I have another quote that I'd love to fact check, see if it's accurate, first of all. But second, just to hear you explain it, if it makes any sense, because it stuck out for me. And that is from a New York Times piece. And the quote is, I don't worry about inspiration as much as system overload. I don't know if you remember saying that if you did, but what does that mean?

I feel that every day, Tim. What does that mean? I feel it every fucking day. I feel it right now.

I'll give you an example. I'm making sculptures right now out of rocks and I love rocks. And I go up the valley and I go on to a river where there's, I guess, probably millions of little rocks. And as I'm looking for the rocks. In the hot sun with my head sort of gaze down at the ground, I say to myself, holy fuck, there are so many rocks, how could I possibly.

See them all at the same time. And then distinguish which ones will fit together in order to make something out of them. And I could say the same thing about people or places or pretty much anything that there is just so much. If I said to you, I'm just going to read poetry shit. I'm just going to read Japanese poets for the rest of my life. That in itself would I could spend one hundred years doing just that or just what in French films are just, you know.

Learning about specific plants, there's so much to learn and to be exposed to and to remember which which I have a very hard time doing that constantly, I'm in system overload and. So when someone I know, I always get that question, what inspires you, you know, a whole lot pain or whatever, I'm like, fuck man, I'm inspired by by everything. I'm inspired by being conscious right now. The fact that we can have this conversation, that's a fucking miracle.

And really it is. And then so but if you play that out and you like are kind of trying to till the soil to be aware or as we said earlier, open our apertures, and the more and more you open your apertures, the more and more you possibly, maybe perceive.

And Huxley is a great example, an amazing, amazing brain, then how do you mitigate system overload? And so where my challenges have been, I think, is that I'm always trying to widen that aperture. And then at the same time I'm like, oh, but I should have some kids.

And wouldn't it be nice to, like, do things that happen in the world that maybe require a little closing of the aperture or something or something to focus because it feels like just this endless, infinite, awesome sea of possibility that is always where you are. What have you found?

To help, if anything was system overload, because for you, as someone who feels the world deeply and who willingly wants to widen and maintain the width of your aperture, this is just an ongoing, in a sense, like an onslaught of input.

So. What do you do what are what are some of the things that you found to be helpful for preventing complete overwhelm?

I like to draw and I like to be in the middle of nowhere and I like to smoke marijuana.

No, no. I mean, obviously, I like I like to hear those three things. I like a lot love to make love. There's a lot of things I think that can help one to. Yeah. Like somebody's got to meditate on a lake this week. That was pretty cool. Swimming can be good, I guess. Oh yeah. Watching, you know, things like I can watch a movie and it puts me in a world which then makes it so that I'm kind of living that world while watching it.

And therefore I'm not thinking about the ten zillion other possible things I could be watching.

You seem to have watched a lot of film. Do you have any favorite films or for people who don't know anything about film, if they're like Dustin, please guide me through the light or the darkness or wherever you want to do it, please.

Can you make some recommendations? Do you have any any films that come to mind that are films you've recommended a lot or watched over and over again?

Yeah, I often recommend a movie called Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog. I highly recommend that and many of Vernors movies. There's a great movie that's really funny, I don't know if you've seen this movie, Tim, called Bad Boy Bubby, but no, I've not. I like the title, the Australian movie. Nineteen ninety three, I believe. Bad Boy Bubby. That's a cool movie. Another movie called The Color of Pomegranates. I can never say his name.

Pathogen Officer. He's an Armenian director. You know, I love Hal Ashby's being there. He also made Harold and Maude I mean, Jesus movies. There's, you know, Clojure girls, a great French director.

You know, obviously Kubrick watch all of Kubrick's movies and Tarkovsky movies. And Tarkovsky wrote a great book about filmmaking called Sculpting in Time. Yeah, Sculpting Time.

Let's grab one of them. So you mentioned Fitzcarraldo first. Why do you recommend that movie to people?

What is it about it? And not only that movie, but there's a great documentary about the making of the movie called Burden of Dreams. Burden of Dreams. Yeah, by less blank. But Fitzcarraldo, I mean, it's just this ultimate metaphor of this human who wants to bring the opera into the depths of the Amazon and the sort of trials and tribulations of what that means. And in the course of the film, they to get out of the jungle, they have to carry a boat over a mountain, which I think is just a great metaphor for what it's like to be alive.

Well, it sounds also a lot like building pioneer works.

And can you can you just describe how did Pioneer works for people who don't have any idea? No visual in their mind of what Pioneer works is maybe you could just tell describe what it is and then describe what it was, because I've visited in person and it's spectacular, but that is not how things began. Can you describe it for people what it is now or. Yeah. What it is now and then rewind and talk about what you can do, neither what it was and what it is now or what it is now and what it was, however you want to approach it.

Well, I mean, I think it was just a hallucination and a dream. And its genesis, I think is no is no, I don't I don't think it was like this great idea that I think every kid and every art school probably had similar sentiments of like, why isn't there a place where I can go where there's writers and scientists and artists and musicians and filmmakers all together in a building, sharing ideas, thinking together and and dreaming together? Like why wasn't and I again, didn't go to high school.

I didn't go to college. And so maybe subliminally or sublimely or somehow this was a way for me to incarnate what I wished to be or wish to experience at some point.

But but I didn't I never understood. Why isn't there a place where just everybody's together trying to think about how we build this world together? So it started very much as is a. Is just an obvious question, I guess, like why why doesn't this exist? And when I was younger, you know, I started having roommates and I'd have a loft with lots of people playing music and reading poetry and kind of together. And I sort of had these primitive versions of this naturally, but I guess so.

So what is Pioneer works now? It's an institute with a mission, and I don't know if institute is the right word, but its mission is to build community through the arts and sciences to create an open and inspired world. So what does that mean? I mean I mean, it's basically like how do we use arts and sciences to bring people together to build the world they want to live in?

And now it's somewhere between a school and the learning center and a museum and a community center.

And I don't know what it's it's a social experiment that I think could end up being a great model as a learning center. And I don't like to use the word school because it feels like it puts you in something that is old and not necessarily functioning in its current state. So so I'd say it's a learning center, a cultural center. When I say culture, I have to circle sciences because a lot of folks don't think about science as part of culture.

How large is it? My subjective experience was feeling that it was vast when I walked through and walked through again and then had two glasses of wine and walk through again.

How big is this space?

It's so funny because when I got the building, it was an iron works built at the end of the Civil War and I had to beg everybody around me. I couldn't afford the building and I was begging everyone and collectors were like, look, here's a half a million dollars. You know, get the building and we'll take the art later. Just I was begging everybody and I almost it almost didn't happen. And when I first went in the building, I was like, this thing is giant, like you're saying, and it's about twenty seven thousand square feet inside and about twenty thousand square feet outside at its current footprint, where we're going to be adding some things and it felt massive.

Now it feels absolutely tiny. Now I walk in and I'm like, fuck, we have no room. We need five more classrooms. We need to triple the size of the tech department. The science area needs to be twice the size. You know, we we need to build recording studios. We have a tiny recording studio, but it's not big enough. We need you know, we need a place for a democracy and equality, a program which is going to require ten people and narrative arts program, which, you know, so every right now, it's it's yes, it doesn't.

We do about seventy five residencies a year where we're giving space for free to scientists and artists and writers, et cetera. So we need more, more place for the residents. So I don't know if that it feels tiny. Let's go back to as I've read you describe it, the original shithole.

No windows, no floors, no stairs, no utilities. Yeah.

And you're trying to gather millions of dollars. That's a hard pitch, it would seem. And so what worked? What got the money? What what was the pitch? What what person was.

I know. But you can you can persevere and bang your head against the wall with a shitty pitch and it will not work. But it did work. So what happened and why did it work? Well, I would say a few different things, you know, in the beginning, I was there for a very long time. Even in the beginning I was I was just giving away all my money. So if I sold a sculpture like and I would Begbie, I'd be like, You want to buy a piece of art, you disgusting capitalist pig.

I'm not selling you any art. Help us do this thing. People don't need objects.

People need idea how close how close to verbatim was.

I mean, would you actually it was at the sentiment or would you actually say that and just endear yourself because you get zero if not say it, but sweetly and somewhat adorable.

And I believed it. I was like, look, if you could buy a piece of art for me for a couple hundred thousand dollars, well, then you could help us with this bigger dream, which is not about me or my art, but about a lot of people. And and so for years I did that. If someone wanted to buy my art, I'd be like, look, I'm glad you like this, Art, but look at this crazy project we're building.

And I gave away everything. I mean, I almost bankrupted my art studio every few months because I was just keeping it going barely. And then, you know, water heaters, stairs, floors, roof repair, whatever it took to get the building inhabitable. So that was like the first stage was just like, can we get this building safe? And I thought that would take a decade.

Let me pause for one second. So you said giving stuff away. So you have on one hand the well-funded capitalist pigs, as you put it. I guess, you know, either they're good. I'm just fucking I'm fucking around.

I'm fucking around, like, very wealthy merchant class. Right. Or like merchant aristocracy.

Then you have everybody else. Who are you giving your art away to during that period of time and why are you giving it away? No, no, no, I'm not. I'm selling the art to people. But like, let's say a collector comes in the studio in this happened.

I'm like, oh, you're giving. You mean the proceeds of that back to Piner? Yeah. Like, please buy this sculpture because we will get water heaters. Yep. I see.

I buy this piece of art and we might get some windows I got.

So I would say in the beginning that helped jumpstart the project and then somebody was like, you need to start a non-profit. I didn't know what that was and a board of directors. And I would say at its very best, what Pioneer works is now and maybe always was and will be is an amalgam of souls. It's a group of people. It's like Gabriel Florens, the artistic director, was was like my brother and Janna Levin, who I know, you know, who's like my sister and know family and like all these incredible people who you know you know what I used to say and I used to think of it and I still do is is tiny is just a table.

It's just a table. And it's like whoever's at the fucking table is is making it work.

I like that. That's really a beautiful metaphor and visual.

How do you and maybe the answer somebody else does. I have no idea. But you strike. Well, you don't strike me. You are a manic artist and you love making art. How do you balance that with the managerial responsibilities? Does it drive you fucking nuts to do that kind of stuff, or is there some way you think about it? How do you integrate that if you do?

Well, I would say that. A couple of different ways. One, I'm lucky, I mean, the last decade has been really challenging to do both, but I try not to think of it as both. So I think of Pioneer works as a social sculpture. I just think of it as another artwork. And I think and the way I try to measure some of the success of that artwork is that my obsolescence is my success. So the sooner that I can be obsolete and the thing works really, really well, then I know I've done my job.

And here we are a decade later. And I think there's some some truth where I can kick it and this thing is going to flourish. Thirty six months ago, that would not have happened. So I would say that me not being there and it working really well is success. And I think of it as an artwork that's helped me to do it for so long. I will say it's I'm at a new place with it because we're really working well now and there's incredible brain trust and group involved that it's working.

And I'd say that I mean, it wasn't tenable by the seventh year in our eighth year. And I mean, I was giving tours five, six, seven tours a day.

And, you know, people come to see my art and my studio and I'd be like, let me show you this other thing. And by the time I'd done my fifth tour on a Friday, I'd be like crying.

I'd be like, here's where the music studio is and we're going to build the observatory.

You know, I was like, so wonderful. I like being the showman of like and this is what we're going to do here. And we're going to do a gap year, a post high school and a post college gap year. And then we're going to raise funds to do do more like kids programs. And then we're going to fucking we're going to get another. And I was like driving my and it was it worked. But it got to the point where it was like, I'm going to fucking die.

This is not tenable.

So what we're I mean, if so, you're having this dark night of the soul where you're crying about the new art spaces as you're giving a tour. Were there any changes that really moved the needle in the right direction for you? Did you or did you just take a break from it all for a period of time to get your head screwed on what you do? The key, the key, the key is the people and so are incredible board of directors and advisers and staff, it's all on them.

Do you know what I mean? I'm just another little pop in the wheel or whatever. So, you know, again, I have to take my hat off to Gabriel and to Jenna and to to Tommy. And I was our director of technology and to just so Tiffany and like there's just so many people over the years, some that are still there are some that aren't there. Daniel Cantare, who's our incredible director of design, is so talented.

It's really just the people and that's the whole thing. The idea's great, too, but it's the people. And maybe those things come by because, you know, if you bring a musician and have this happen so many times we're friends of mine who play music. They would come there for the first time or I'd be meeting a musician and showing them around and they'd be like, holy fuck. This is this is like I've dreamed my whole life of a place like this.

I cannot believe it exists. How can I be part of this? How can I help? I want to sit at the table. And so. You know, the way they say like minded people attract each other, the fact that all of these crazy disciplines are in one building and all of these crazy souls are in one building, that's what creates the gravity, you know, and all, you know, Maria Popova and all the fucking amazing, talented, magical souls that are coming and going inside of this like vessel.

The building is nothing. It's a fucking bunch of bricks. It's bullshit without those people.

We're going to come back to Maria because there's a question I want to ask you that that she actually suggested. I don't think she would mind me saying that. But first, we're going to get to that. But first, I want to try to connect some dots and flesh out some of your journey. So you mentioned earlier in this conversation, you're hustling, you're giving away for free. You're like a thousand forget one thousand five hundred. No, no.

To five hundred.

OK, take it for free. You know, you get from that point. And in passing, you mentioned something that I think is worth noting, and that is. Collectors or not sure what you would call them, patrons, customers buying artwork in many cases for hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece. What were some of the. The decisions or the influences that helped you to go from where you were to where you are in terms of commercial viability, because it's it seems like you've used the word untenable a few times in this conversation.

But you got to a point where it was very tenable. Like if you wanted to make really good art and sell it for what for a lot of artists would just be a tremendous, unthinkable sum of money. You can. What were some of the things that happened or that you did to get from where you were to where you are?

I think it's a cumulative I think it's it's it's so many, many little things because, you know, I remember when I first saw the picture or whatever for, you know, a thousand or five thousand or ten thousand or maybe even twenty five thousand. And I was like, holy fuck, I just got twenty five thousand dollars. I'm going to Sizzla, motherfucker. This shit is crazy.

I mean, how lucky I am. I just made some shit and people paid me for it. That being said. That it's like relative now I sell something for twenty five thousand dollars and it doesn't even move the needle because I have a big, big studio and operation and crazy projects I'm working on. But I would say it happened over twenty five years, a little bit at a time. And at the end of the day, I think it's the work.

You know, I try to ask myself three questions like can I live with it?

Will I go to sleep next to it each night? You're talking about a piece of work, a project like can I just live with it? Can my kids live with it now? I don't have any yet, but if I did. And how will I feel about it in 100 hundred years?

Like, will it still make sense to me in a system of objects or in a system of ideas? And so I honestly think that the work, just the work is the work. Like if you take away all the writing about the work and all the bullshit or all of it, and you just literally are left with the thing. Will that tell a story and will that move someone to maybe change their aperture or the way they see the world? It happens over just a very, very, very long time.

You learn from each thing you do. It's like it's the way like what is it called? Ladar works, right? With cars, like it's learning. It's like always learning your that's how art really works.

You just keep learning for a lot of people, the majority of artists. So they never get to maybe these phase shifts where even in 20 years, 30 years, they're able to command attention. That I guess then translates into and I'm not going to obsess on these prices. I'm just using it as a proxy for the work that you've done and decision. So I do want to ask and I'm going to ask about the psychogeography or psycho geographic sketches in a second, because I want you to describe them for people.

Actually, let's just let's just start there and then then I'll go to the next question. But could you describe because they are unlike anything I have ever seen anywhere. I mean, they are there is nothing that I can think of that is remotely similar. And you might have some type of reference, but I don't. Can you describe what these as one example of the type of work that you do? What do these look like? If somebody were to walk into your studio and behold these things, what do they look like?

Well. We're talking specifically about the psychogeography. Yeah, they are they're meant to be this installation that's taking me.

I don't know how long till I finish it, 10 or 15 years of about one hundred and twenty humans that are kind of like if you think about the terracotta warriors, they're meant to be this group of together. And they're kind of like I kind of think of them as consciousness or something or of, yeah, if you're taking if I took your brain and smashed it together and made a map of everything inside of it that you could read through images, that's what they are.

So, you know, often within a psychogeography, you'll have tens of thousands of images that I'm finding from one hundred years worth of books and magazines mixed in with paintings and drawings on the layers of glass.

So to describe the glass for a second just so people can paint a mental picture based on my recollection and please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm just going to use an analogy here for anyone who's a Star Wars nerd or at least saw a Return of the Jedi as an example, Han Solo Frozen. If you were to take something like that, stand it up so that Han Solo is standing on his feet persay but suspended in the chamber and then slice that into and convert it into multiple layers of glass and take like the culture and consciousness of Han Solo and sort of use it to replace the imprint of his body with.

The constituent parts of that I know this might sound strange, but that's kind of the visual in my mind as I recall it, but could you maybe just describe the form factor and how much it weighs, what the size is like?

Sure. I mean, one one way I try to describe it, like if I'm trying to describe it to a young person is I just make window sandwiches.

I just take a piece of glass. I just take like a window piece of glass. And I draw on it and I cut up my homework. Let's say I cut up an encyclopedia and I glue little pieces, a little human with the head of an elephant, you know, next to an amethyst crystal next to like a piece of architecture from Barkhouse or whatever. I'm just like rambling. But my point is I'm cutting up little pieces of paper and drawings and I'm putting them on the layer of glass.

And then I add another piece of glass on top and I do that again, but within relationship to what I did before. And then again. And again and again. And the next thing you know, you have 30 windows on top of each other and all the drawings mark making and all of the pieces of paper and collage on every single layer in concert together, make up a psychogeography or tell a story. And then I glue them together with a glue that has the same refractive index.

And and the psychogeography that you're discussing, we're discussing are about three thousand pounds each. So and I've made works that are up to like. Modulated and 24000 pounds or what? And it's, as you would expect, coming out of your brain and hands and work. It's trippy when you look at these because the experience changes depending on where you are situated and looking at. The piece of art, I mean, if you're standing on the sides, is quite a different experience.

I mean, it's almost a vanishing act compared to looking at it from other perspectives. And then there is the looking at it from 20 feet away where you think it's quite one thing or resembles a melting person or any number of the forest or stair steps within a human body. And then you get really close and you have the micro versus the macro experience, which is yet again something completely different, at least to the beholder. How did that start?

How did the psychogeography start?

Well, I mean, I guess I should just go backwards a little bit with the work. I don't know. You mean like how did I start making work in layers or just the SAIC's, whichever one you would like to tackle?

I don't mean to fixate on this as the exclusive representation of your work. I know you've done a huge, wide spectrum of work. I just think it's helpful since you're having a conversation with an artist for the listeners who are just hearing this, to kind of paint a picture of of one example. So it could be layered art if that precedes the psychogeography. And let's go with whichever you like. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. And then we should I mean, my the newest one you haven't seen I don't know if you saw The Politics of Eternity finished. That's a cool. But I mean really all this was experimentation, an accident. And I was making collages.

I always loved collage. I always loved again kind of what we were talking about. How do you not have system overload? Maybe one of the ways I deal with the system overload because I love amalgamations and I love bringing things together and pioneer works. Is that with people? Right. But with artwork, you know, I used to still love to make paintings and collages and drawings and things out of rocks. I'm constantly putting disparate things together and very much interested the relationships between those pieces.

And I was making a collage many years ago out of pages of a dictionary that I was ripping up and Agnes Martin, like, who's an artist grid of dictionary pages. And I started pouring resin on the thing and I saw an optical quality and B got stuck and poured more resin. And then I decided to make these sort of boxes of resin. Joseph Cornell inspired. I love Joseph Quinnell like boxes with objects. And I started drawing in layers of resin.

And then I took the I saw something that looked almost biological and I took the objects out and I started just making these like dendrite drawings, almost invented specimens. And I got obsessed. And I did that for some time and created a lots of botanical looking drawings and layers of resin. And eventually I tried drawing a human in the layers of resin and I was starting to get shows and I couldn't the resin was going to kill me. So I switched over to glass.

The residue was going to kill you just because it's is it toxic?

I don't know anything about resin. Yeah, it's toxic. And I was scaling the work and I was in masks all the time and it wasn't a fun way to work, but I was actually developing a language that I was really connecting to. And so I switched over to the layers of glass and that allowed me to change my mind and edit and go back and forth because with the resin, I could only go backwards. I could never change my mind.

So it was really a series of accidents. And then the psychogeography is really, you know, I'm not even one I don't think that really connects so much to figurative art. So it's weird that I've spent a decade on a project like that. But at the end of the day, I'm just trying. I feel like I'm trying to make maps of consciousness.

I'm trying to make things that like a fucking meteor hits the earth. And, you know, maybe one of the things that was left and, you know, you dig it out of the dirt, this 3000 pound glass block, and it could really almost like a microscope slide. Like the DNA of our species can be told through images and through media that's been found and trapped and preserved and so like. Frozen movies, they tell stories through collections of ideas.

And they get. I dig it. You must have, because you are a very good teacher and explainer of things, and you mentioned earlier the window sandwiches and speaking to younger people, what do you think are some of the common mistakes that aspiring artists make?

Let's just assume they have some talent of some type and they have some passion. Let's let's assume those two things just to try to constrain it. What are some of the mistakes that that you see aspiring artists are up and coming artists making?

Well, I don't know, maybe maybe too much looking at what the people around them are doing, opposed to finding their voice through their experience and through their lens of life. And I think that might happen in art schools and or getting too obsessed with one period in art history that moves them and then sort of trying to emulate or build off of it too much opposed to, again, finding out what is in the bottom of their brains. That might be one thing.

I mean, something also I mean and also just knowing that it's not a job. It's like if if you think you can stop doing it to do something else, maybe stop. Like there's nothing else you can do. Never fucking giving up basically just like and always pushing and pushing and trying and not giving a fuck about what comes out at the other end really. But more about learning from the process of making the thing.

How much of that is dependent on being willing or even embracing of living a very simple life? Because I would imagine there there are some people out there who would say, I'd love to do that. But at the end of the day, I got to pay my rent. I got to have X, Y and Z shoes. I can't I can't live on ramen every day, etc.. Is that a piece of it or am I just.

No, of course, to be able to die for it, quite literally, in a way, you've got to just be like, this is the thing.

You know, and I've done that with the works, I mean, the last work I finished, The Politics of Eternity, which is only the third large work. Narrative work, you know, it took me a couple of years and I almost bankrupted my studio to make it, and I do that constantly, I'm like, I don't give a fuck about anything but making the thing what would happen if it bankrupted your studio?

What would you how would you feel and what would you do to just be destiny? And then you'd figure become a short order cook or what would what would happen?

I'd probably go like, oh, become like, yeah, go live in a fucking tropic somewhere and live off of coconuts.

I'm always like, you know, if it were anyone else, I'd be like, ha ha ha. I mean, I am laughing, but I'm laughing in part because I can totally fucking imagine it. Yeah.

I'll be so confirm, in fact that that life calls me constantly, but I try to do these really like the new piece, The Politics of Eternity was really cool.

It's got like a whole narrative where I'm trying to depict the past and the future simultaneously. And in the future there is astronauts inhabiting the world, if you will. And the past, where there would be astronauts, there's animal headed humans, if that makes sense to you and everything is mirrored. So in the future, they're building a rocket on the top of a mountain and in the same place in the past, they're building a totemic antenna to the gods.

So everything is mirrored, you know, the tunnels in the future are straight and modern and in the past organic and in the future, there's the same tree that's growing in the future is growing in the same place in the past or where there's a particle accelerator in the future, there's a cave of minerals in the past or where there's like a group Sisyphus moment in the past underneath the ocean where the animal headed. Humans are pushing a boulder to capture a sea monster in a cave.

That same moment is happening in the same place underneath the ocean in the future. But it's astronauts pushing a machine to capture data that's coming out of the sea and where the moon is in the future. There's the sun in the past and you've got Mars right in the middle. Splitting the worlds and the future in the past are also depicted by waterfalls falling in to the present simultaneously, where there's, you know, these weird narratives on the sea and there's a supertanker sinking which is connected to another project.

And there's there's animals coming out of the supertanker as an allegory to the ark says.

Want to pause for a second and tell people, go to Dustin Yellen Dotcom or at Dustin yelling on Instagram. And this will make a lot more sense.

Not that it doesn't make sense, but they might think to themselves, holy shit, this guy's done a lot of acid, which is also true.

But it's a lot easier to absorb visually in a sense, although I like the description, I want to hearken back to something you said, which was you have to be willing to die for it. And you talked about death for a moment. And that actually relates to the question that Maria Popova, for people who don't know who that is, she's the most prolific writer imaginable, very talented brain picking dog. She suggested that I perhaps explore the death of your mentor or one of your mentors.

I don't have context for this question. So please tell me if I'm barking up the wrong tree.

But does that question bring anything to the surface for you? It seemed like this was something worth plumbing the depths of a bit. Yeah, well, I mean I mean, I'm an old man now, I've lost a lot of people, but when I was young, a girl, young, twenty five, I lost my best friend and who was like my mentor and teacher was a teacher.

And I think that completely affected me for the rest of my life. And since then, I've lost a lot of people, including one of my mentors who was older than me. And I think when I was young, I was always obsessed with death. And I think I probably still am because I think of, you know, I don't know how time works. I think it maybe is that the past and the present and the future exists simultaneously and somehow you can access it.

And I'm not sure that when the body dies or we we die here, that it's all gone. I'm very much an optimist and think that maybe there's some semblance of it that we can still tap into because energy cannot be destroyed. I don't know how it works. I definitely have been obsessed with it always and still am. And again, back to that idea of over system overload. Well, if I think about right now, how many summers left do I have, you know, call it 50 for the sake of the conversation.

You two, you and I have, let's say 50 summers left, right. Well, 50 summers is like lunch for sure.

You know, it's so fast. It's so quick and finite. And and so I don't know if that affects my relationship to death, even though I think it might be infinite and that somehow I don't know how it really works. But but, yeah, death is really informed. Maybe losing someone the closest person to me at such a young age, I think really it changed the way I see the world completely does that obsessing over death.

And I'm asking is someone who really in the last few months has been thinking about death almost constantly. I'm curious to know what form that obsession has taken. In other words, is it heavy and foreboding? Does it lead to a depressive feeling? Is it just kind of snap of the fingers and kick in the ass like, hey, homey, let's get movin? You don't have that much time, so let's use this. As best we can, what is the sort of emotional tenor of that obsessing over death?

I think it's probably the latter is like, look, the rest of your life is fucking almost over, so you better get into it now, you know what I mean? Like, this is it. There is nothing else but to this fucking minute this hour. And I have a hard time, I think, thinking about forever or for the rest of my life. And I think there's it's posited some of some challenges probably in like maybe why I haven't started a family yet, or maybe I need to start a family right away or making decisions in interpersonal relationships.

I think it's challenged me because I'm like, this is it. Like right now, I could literally be gone in 12 hours. It's completely plausible. And therefore I want to open up the aperture and maybe that's through meditation, or maybe that's just through listening and being quiet. But I want to open up the aperture as much as possible all of the time and feel as much as possible all of the time, because the way that I feel right now may be gone or completely change.

So if we're looking at living your best life to sort of drop this in the beginning, this is going to seem like a very strange Segway. But from the sort of sublime to the ridiculous, how did you end up dancing in the video? Is that even a real thing?

I literally I mean, I did it's true that I used to breakdance on Venice Boardwalk, like when we were living there for a heartbeat. And I would fucking I remember like moving up, starting on cardboard and then, like, people give me like 15 bucks over the few hours. And then, like, I moved up to linoleum, which I thought was cool. I don't know, the video happened. I mean, he's cool.

I'd like to actually have a coffee with him at some point, but so do you literally just not have a recollection of how you got filmed or like how does that happen?

I actually don't know. I got a phone call I like, show up at this place. I didn't know what the fuck I was doing.

God, I feel like there's so many so many directions we could take that. Let me ask you this. This is a question that is sometimes a dead end. It's not always a great question, but I'll try it. And it is if you could put anything on a gigantic billboard, metaphorically speaking, to get a message, an image question, a word, whatever, out to billions of people, what might it be?

You need an image or a word or some. Could it be anything that you want to convey to billions of people? Anything at all? Non-Commercial, hopefully.

You know, I just want to try to get everybody to love each other, like get everyone to be a little bit more tolerant, a little bit more open, a little. You know, F. Scott Fitzgerald said that a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind simultaneously and still retain the ability to function so that if we could just somehow accept our differences as the the great glue that creates the complexity and miracle of what we experience.

So, I mean, that would be the thing I would try to somehow portray is to say that, look, all of us, every single one of us is experiencing the same thing differently. And we're all made of the same stuff and we're all sharing the same stuff. So why on earth are we deploying capital at such a scale to defense opposed to education or health care? Why or why? You know, why is our why is the world look the way it does when really it could be so, so incredibly dreamy if we all just decided together to do that?

You mentioned earlier the tanker and he said that connects to another project. And I remember you sharing a couple of slides I think was on a laptop related to this. But can you describe this other tanker project and just tell people what the vision and or the status is of this project? Let's do they think it's all about window sandwiches, although that I love, love, love, love, those that work. What is the other tanker project?

A supertanker move fossil fuels around. And I've been obsessed with this thing for years and now it's got a little bit of movement. But it's just this idea of how do you how do you bring awareness to getting away from fossil fuels? And I'm working on a project called The Bridge because it's a bridge from the past to the future of how we use and think about energy, where I'm taking a super tanker, which is a boat that moves oil around.

And it started to be like twelve hundred feet. It's not as big anymore, but it'll still be the largest. Lift it, I think, in history where we're taking a supertanker. And literally in one moment, we're pulling it up and putting it on its nose, basically, like almost like a like a monument to the end of fossil fuels, and we're coating it so that safely, let's say a million or a million and a half visitors can go take elevators through the boat up to the top of it, and then get to an observation deck, which is made of the bridge, which is where used to control the ship from.

Hence the name the bridge, also double name.

And through the experience of visiting this monument, you'll learn about the history of energy and potentially the future of how we can responsibly shepherd in a cleaner, safer way to power the earth. So, yeah, so that's the bridge, I'm basically just putting a supertanker on its nose again, that's why probably, you know, I love Fitzcarraldo pulling a boat over a mountain. I'm now trying to take a boat the size of a building and put it on its nose.

So it's like a Statue of Liberty with the Liberty being freedom from fossil fuels, or at least that's the size of the Statue of Liberty.

And, yes, it's it's a monument to the and the fossil fuels. It's like a monument for luck. We can power the Earth with water and with sun, with, you know, various other technologies.

If we can if we can scale them, where might the bridge be or. I can't say. I can't say. All right, we'll keep it under wraps for now. I'm using the royal ways since I have no fucking idea.

But TBD is a really cool project I'm working with. You know, Bjarke Ingels is an amazing architect and I'm working with Arop Engineering and I'm working with all these cool people who are helping me to realize this dream.

That's incredible. Just a few more things. And this has been so much fun.

So I'm looking at a quote from the creative independent dotcom. And the paragraph is attributed to you, I believe, and here's how it reads. But I try to wake up every day with this montre idea that I've done nothing. You know, I've accomplished nothing. I've done nothing. And the pages white.

Therefore, therefore, in my words, what's possible, what can be invented now, is that something that you constantly remind yourself of? Is that still the case? Where is that intermittent? How do you think about the. I've done nothing blank slate. Is that accurate? Absolutely, I feel that every day because it's true. I mean, until we've come to a place where there's more harmony and more equality and more justice and more thoughtfulness. On our planet that we share, I certainly feel like I've done nothing.

I mean I mean because if anything is possible, then. Think about how much we can do together then what I've done in the past and if the past is no longer. Now, then, therefore, I've done nothing, so I kind of feel that way all the time. Do you find that? Intimidating, overwhelming or invigorating or something else, I can imagine, some people would be so crushed under the formidable nature of that type of what they might view as a burden or obligation, that they just would be paralyzed.

No, I mean, I guess they probably have some answers of all of those feelings. But if anything, I feel the wonder. And possibility. Of what we can make as a species together or as an individual, that it's all possible, right, that it's like if I look at a white piece of paper and then four hours later there's a drawing there, there was nothing and now there's something. And this idea between nothing and something is really interesting, because if you look at cities and technologies and all of it, there was nothing.

And then there was something. And so. We really do have that capacity to create absolutely anything all of the time, Dustin.

I think that is a great place for me to stop my inquisition of questions. So fun to reconnect. People can find you on Instagram at Dustan Yellen last name. Why Eli and Dustin Yellen, dotcom pioneer Riksdag. I highly recommend people check out all of those. And of course, we'll link to everything we've talked about, the movies, the books, everything else in the show notes for people. So anything else that you'd like to say before we close up shop on this first conversation on the podcast?

Well, I would even know what I mean, read some poetry, think of this whole thing as a poem.

You know, realize that that all of our you know, I guess if people could just fucking come together and the injustices and the incomprehensible horrors that this species has created with some of also the great things on the planet in the past, like let the past let us learn from it, but know that going forward, we really, if we choose to, can build the world that everyone wants to live in together, you know, in a way that is equal and just and we can all sort of support and love each other to keep fucking inventing the dream.

I like that it's inventing the dream. It's not finding the dream. Right. Because you can each day, like you said, choose to create something from nothing. And it certainly helps when you have the right people at the table, as you put it, which I think is a beautiful metaphor. And to do that, you have to sometimes go out and invite those people, find those people, which is, I think, a common thread throughout a lot of the adventures that you've had.

Oh, I'm the weird guy who in New York City, even going down the street, I'm saying hello to everybody. And they're like looking at me like, what's wrong with you?

Well, Dustin, thank you so much for taking the time. This has been a lot of fun for me and I've learned a lot. So I really do appreciate it. And for people listening, as always, I will link to all the resources and there will be a transcript and all sorts of things which you can find at Tim Blog Forward Slash podcast.

Just search for Dustin or Dustin Yellen or Yellen, Wii Elyon and until next time, be safe.

Thanks for tuning in and see what you can do at this empty table of life.

And good luck.

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