#467: Dustin Yellin on Making Art, Weaving Madness, and Forging Your Own Path

“I don’t worry about inspiration as much as system overload.” — Dustin Yellin Dustin Yellin (@dustinyellin https://www.instagram.com/dustinyellin/) is an artist who lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is the founder and director of Pioneer Works https://pioneerworks.org/, a multidisciplinary cultural center in Red Hook, Brooklyn, that builds community through the arts and sciences to create an open and inspired world. He and his incredible work have been featured by media and organizations including The New York Times, Artforum, Vanity Fair, and TED. Drawing on both modernism and the sacred tradition of Hinterglas painting, Yellin 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 Dustin calls “frozen cinema.” These totemic and kaleidoscopic works often plumb the history and fate of human consciousness within the Anthropocene (see examples here https://dustinyellin.com/). Dustin’s art has been exhibited at or with the Amorepacific Museum, Brooklyn Museum, City Museum, Colección Solo, Corning Museum of Glass, The Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Museo Del Palacio de Bellas Artes, SCAD 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. Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront http://wealthfront.com/Tim! 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For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, and many more. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  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, et cetera, that you can use. My guest today is a madman, Dustin Yellen. And you may not have heard this name, but by the end of this conversation, you'll definitely look him up. Dustin Yellen, Y-E-L-L-I-N, on Instagram, @DustinYellen, 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

• 0:45Tim Ferriss?

  work have been featured by media and organizations worldwide, including The New York Times, Art Forum, Vanity Fair, and TED. Okay, so here we go. The next paragraph will make a lot more sense if you first go to dustinyellin.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 hinterglass 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 Dustin calls "frozen cinema." But wait, there's more. "These totemic and kaleidoscopic

• 1:29Tim Ferriss?

  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 tim.blog, if you just search his name. Dustin's art has been exhibited at or with the Amore Pacific Museum, I'm gonna mispronounce a bunch of stuff here, could be Amore Pacific, A-M-O-R-E, Museum, Brooklyn Museum, City Museum, Collection, Collection Solo, Corning Museum of Glass, the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Bellas Artes, I'm not sure, SCAD, or SCAD Museum of Art,

• 2:14Tim Ferriss?

  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, @DustinYellen. Or at DustinYellin.com, Y-E-L-L-I-N, and also at PioneerWorks.org. Please enjoy this incredible ride, this roller coaster, through the mind and psyche and life of Dustin Yellin. This episode is brought to you by Zero, Z-E-R-O, the world's most popular fasting app. Long-term listeners will know that I take fasting very seriously.

• 2:53Tim Ferriss?

  I've studied it, I've practiced it, I do three-day fasts, I do seven to 10-day fasts every year, and I take it super seriously. The science, I think, is in. There is increasingly more and more literature pointing out the many benefits of doing even short periods of fasting. And now Zero is helping millions of users around the world unlock healthier, longer lives by harnessing the power of fasting. It's been downloaded millions of times, like I mentioned, 4.9 out of 5 stars on the Apple App Store, as an example, with more than 200,000 ratings, probably more than 300,000 ratings at this point. And up to this point in time for me, for years, when I've had questions, for instance, do

• 3:37Tim Ferriss?

  artificial sweeteners count? Can I consume those even though perhaps they might spike insulin levels a little bit? What about heavy cream in coffee? If I remain ketogenic and I'm not adding any glucose to my diet, so to speak, is that okay? What about the difference between, say, a 16-hour fast versus 72-hour versus seven-day? What do we actually know? How much of this is just old wives' tales versus real science that we can point to? I would always call, or text, or email Dr. Peter Attia. Peter Attia, my friend, he's been on the podcast many times, and he is now Zero's chief medical officer. So he has an entire library of Q and As and questions and advice, all the kind of stuff

• 4:19Tim Ferriss?

  that I couldn't give anyone else access to, people now have access to, which is incredible. So Kevin Rose, my buddy, created this app initially in 2016, and it's turned into an incredible community and an incredible collection of how-to and tracking capabilities. So whether you've been fasting For years or just getting started, Zero equips you with exclusive videos from people like Peter Attia, personalized fasting plans, and advanced health data to keep you on track. Listeners of this podcast, that's you guys, can get 30% off a one-year Zero Plus subscription, which gets you all sorts of goodies. So I would highly recommend checking it out. Get a full year's access to content and fasting plans developed by the medical experts I trust,

• 5:00Tim Ferriss?

  like Dr. Peter Attia, and save $20. Just visit zerofasting.com/tim to get your exclusive discount. That's zerofasting.com/tim and your discount will be automatically applied. One last time, zerofasting.com/tim.

• 5:22Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by ExpressVPN. I've been using ExpressVPN since the summer of 2019. It is a super simple and reliable way to make sure that my data are secure and encrypted without slowing my internet speed. So for instance, I use public Wi-Fi all over the place. Might be at a Starbucks, it could be at a restaurant, sitting outside somewhere to work. I travel all the time and ExpressVPN is an easy way to make sure that I am not getting my packets and data sniffed and viewed by other people. All you need to do is download the ExpressVPN app on your computer or smartphone and then use the internet as you normally would. You click one button in the ExpressVPN app to secure 100% of your network data. Of

• 6:07Tim Ferriss?

  the many VPN solutions out there, ExpressVPN is one of the best on the market. It's super easy, super simple, and I use it personally. In addition to protecting your data, you can also use a VPN to unlock movies and shows that are only available in other countries. So you can unlock content. This is actually a very, very good use case and super helpful. ExpressVPN hides your IP address and lets you control where you want sites to think you're located. You can choose from almost 100 different countries. So just think about all the Netflix libraries that you could go through. If you love anime, use ExpressVPN to access Japanese Netflix, for instance, and be spirited. Spirited Away, one of my favorite movies, by the way, Spirited Away. But it's not just Netflix.

• 6:49Tim Ferriss?

  ExpressVPN works with any streaming service, Hulu, BBC, iPlayer, YouTube, you name it. There's never any buffering or lag and you can stream in HD with no problem. ExpressVPN is also compatible with all of your devices, phones, media consoles, smart TVs, and so on, so you can watch what you want on the go or on a big screen, wherever you happen to be. So, consider protecting yourself with the VPN that I use and trust. Visit expressvpn.com/tim and get an extra three months free on a one-year package. That's expressvpn.com/tim. One more time, check out expressvpn.com/tim to learn more. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement

• 7:34Tim Ferriss?

  that supports whole-body health. I do get asked a lot, what I would take if I could only take one supplement? And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So, what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole-food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So, take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So, learn more, check it out, go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink A-G-one, the number one.

• 8:19Tim Ferriss?

  Drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half-mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 8:33Speaker 02

  No, I would have seen an appropriate time.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 8:50Tim Ferriss?

  Dustin, welcome to the show.

• 8:51Speaker 02

  Thank you. Very happy to be here.

• 8:53Tim Ferriss?

  You are one of my favorite madmen. 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 slash 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.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  Well, I actually 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 a bet with my ma where if I didn't do any drugs, or alcohol, or smoke cigarettes, or anything until I was 18, I would win this bet. 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, I said, Look, I won the bet. But I already have a

• 10:23Speaker 02

  car that I paid for with my own money. So 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 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 it was cool. And then I just decided to get out of Colorado. Kind of picked a map 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

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and having my own sort of Woodstock in my, my mind as I'm 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 on 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 gonna live on this island. And then that kind of at some point scared me because I was, 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.

• 11:48Tim Ferriss?

  So we, we're, we're gonna 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 breakdancer. I don't know if it was on the Venice Boardwalk or somewhere, but as a little kid, you would take this boombox out and flash forward, you're, I mean, honestly, your, your bio is just hilariously fascinating and almost unbelievable to me. At some point later, 30 years later, you end up somehow breakdancing

• 12:32Tim Ferriss?

  in Jay-Z's 2013 Picasso baby video. I mean, I, 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?

• 12:45Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:54Tim Ferriss?

  Do your parents or any siblings have similar programming? That type of entrepreneurial?

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think.

• 13:01Tim Ferriss?

  Make something from nothing?

• 13:02Speaker 02

  Both my parents have a bit of that and I've had it, I guess, I mean, and you know, my ma left my pa when I was five and took me to Telluride, 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.

• 13:34Tim Ferriss?

  Was your mom supportive of your various, I don't want to call them schemes, but the various money-making operations from, it seems like, a really early age? Did she know about them?

• 13:43Speaker 02

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

• 14:10Tim Ferriss?

  So let's segue back to physicists. So how do you meet this physicist and who is this person?

• 14:18Speaker 02

  You know, it was very unusual circumstances. I returned from Thailand to Colorado and this woman that I was very fond of and dated,

• 14:32Speaker 02

  introduced me to, or 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 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 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.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  To turn me on to cultural lighthouses like Pablo Neruda, or Dostoevsky, 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

• 15:53Speaker 02

  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 a quartz crystal on my chest, listening to whales. And he was like, "Look, you're gonna think I killed you, you're gonna think you're dead, you're gonna 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 straight up Altered States.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  It was 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 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, you know, pure consciousness state, and I'm becoming one cell in my arm, and then I'm one star, and then I'm, you know, fractalized into billions of little pieces, re-combobulating.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  And then the more I would do it, I could navigate through what I guess I perceived to be consciousness, and I had all these crazy visions, which I felt like, kind of, is what sent me-

• 17:33Speaker 02

  To New York.

• 17:34Tim Ferriss?

  How so? How did those send you to New York?

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Well, you know, this like blew my mind because I'm making these crazy paintings. I'm making art constantly at this point.

• 17:44Tim Ferriss?

  When did that start? Sorry to interrupt, but when did the artworks start?

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I always made weird shit, but I never really thought about it as anything. You know, I would make little drawings or I'd make things out of rocks and sticks and things I found in the in the forest, which I actually I've been doing all week this week. So nothing's really changed in in a long time. Um, 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 gonna do. I'm gonna make art and I didn't really know about art history yet. I mean, I might've known who Andy Warhol is or Picasso or Matisse, but I really knew 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

• 18:29Speaker 02

  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 utopic 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.

• 18:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think that maybe are you saying 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?

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think I was really obsessed with clean energy in like the 60s, even though we were in the 90s, I was, you know, getting obsessed with Nikola Tesla and I was getting obsessed with this idea of of that we could make clean and free energy. And therefore, I felt like the art was almost the bonfire, you know, which 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.

• 19:47Tim Ferriss?

  Now, you, you said that some of the visions or experiences when you're in these saline baths, right? So people can imagine if you float in the Dead Sea because of the, the high salt content, it's like half your body is kind of suspended.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  I wasn't actually in the baths like, like John Lilly. I was, I was on a saline solution bed in a dark room.

• 20:06Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I see. All right. That's a lot safer. Okay.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  Feeling, but a lot safer, precisely.

• 20:12Tim Ferriss?

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

• 20:19Speaker 02

  Well, I think I was feeding, if you will, these enormous delusions of grandeur where I'm like, everything is possible. Do you know what I mean? Like, I could do anything. And I'm in a small town in Colorado and I'm obsessed now with, you know, I'm like, I'm going to make art and I'm gonna, that's what's gonna be my medium is making things out of nothing. And so I basically reduced 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 where people were. Cause 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.

• 20:59Tim Ferriss?

  And how did you then find your way or fund your way, both, I guess, at that time to New York, right? How were you making ends meet?

• 21:08Speaker 02

  I went there without really knowing anyone or, or anything and found a, you know, and my ma 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, or the Village Voice. I found a, 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 abex. I didn't even know what abex, abstract expressionism probably was at the

• 21:49Speaker 02

  time, but looking back, I was making these weird abex paintings and renting this little closet room from the sky and out every night like a wild man and somehow.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  Talked my way into these bars and places. At the time, it was a place called The Bowery Bar and a place called Spy. And I, 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.

• 22:27Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 22:49Speaker 02

  Ninety-four, I think.

• 22:51Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 23:06Speaker 02

  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, $2,000, $2,000. No, no, no, buy the painting, $1,000, $1,000. Fuck, 500 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, you know, it would become a plague.

• 23:52Tim Ferriss?

  Did you say a plague?

• 23:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it's like a plague. It's like a disease, art, you know? If I could get, you know, really, one person, if we put something in a room and 50 people don't like it, but the 51st person loves it and wants one, and they get it, and then they do the same thing, and 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 them? Like 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.

• 24:37Tim Ferriss?

  How many pieces of artwork would you guess you gave away for free or close to free? Dozens, hundreds, a handful?

• 24:46Speaker 02

  I don't know. Multiple dozens. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe 50, 100. Who knows? I mean, some of that stuff will like appear nowadays, or someone will call me out of the boot and be like, I have this painting from 95. And I'm like, can you fucking burn it? You know, like, oh, God.

• 25:03Tim Ferriss?

  Good on them for holding on to it.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  No.

• 25:06Tim Ferriss?

  So 94, 95, 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 rigid, 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.

• 25:48Tim Ferriss?

  This is leading to a question about Zelda. I don't know if this question's going to make any sense, but who was Zelda? And why did you have to rescue her? Does this question make any sense? If not, I can, I can give.

• 26:00Speaker 02

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

• 26:22Speaker 02

  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, I is whatever it is, M is 13.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  And I'd add up your name and I thought there was this like numerical meaning. And, and I, I was filming all this because I had traded a drawing for a little handy cam. I think that's what they were called, the cameras. So 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 on to a boat. There's a great, 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, this is boat. And I kind of thought like, this is my world.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  And he was like, what are you talking about? Are you related to the Forbes family? And I was like, yes, directly. F O R B E S. And he kind of, he listened for a little while and he gave me a tour of the boat until he realizes I'm, 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 nighttime 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.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  And I said to him, and I used the wrong words, cause I said, I, I need to reprimand your vehicle.

• 28:43Tim Ferriss?

  You were trying to say requisition, I guess.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Totally. Well, the guy was like, are you crazy? I'm like, no, no, you don't 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 onto the balls. And I started driving and I tried to drive the vehicle out 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.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  And then my memory, if my memory serves me right, he tried to kiss me and that freaked me out. And I ran. So now I'm like 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'm, I've got to say, I'm looking for love. And they were trying to understand what love was. I'm like, I have, you know, and I was demanding that they opened up this castle because there were classrooms in there

• 30:13Speaker 02

  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's The Crackup, which was like a.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  The book from 1945, 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 narrative that this is where I was supposed to be. And my friends are like, fuck, we're going, I'm like, no. And literally, I'm 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.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  I'm writing all over the walls like my numeric codes. And finally, you know, it's like the whole thing in the movies with the glass and the little pill cups. And finally, I was like, okay, I'm ready to leave. And they were like, you cannot leave. And I was like, no, no, I'm ready to go. They're like, no. And my parents, who had not been on an airplane together in, I don't know how long, got to get, flew from the West Coast and they got me out.

• 31:47Speaker 02

  It was amazing.

• 31:49Tim Ferriss?

  So, all right. So amazing is definitely one, one word. There, there are many descriptors one could use.

• 31:55Speaker 02

  The video, the crack up, and then it makes sense.

• 32:00Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 32:30Speaker 02

  Good question. I don't know what was the cause of this. I think, I mean, one could, it was 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, 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, sure, I've probably scared myself a few times, but not so bad. I think it's good to shake it up a little.

• 33:10Tim Ferriss?

  So 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?

• 33:22Speaker 02

  No.

• 33:24Tim Ferriss?

  Why is that?

• 33:26Speaker 02

  No idea. I just, I just never, I was never there. You know how people are manic depressive is something that one could be. One say that I'm just manic.

• 33:41Tim Ferriss?

  I see.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  And provided a great fertile soil to make work.

• 33:49Tim Ferriss?

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• 34:30Tim Ferriss?

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• 35:19Tim Ferriss?

  You told another story I recall during this first tour of your studio where I was marveling at your work, which, which people have to look up. And certainly visit your Instagram account, which is just at Dustin 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 this 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 bell at all? Something involving swimming and hallucinogens?

• 36:02Speaker 02

  Oh, let me think.

• 36:06Speaker 02

  I mean,

• 36:08Tim Ferriss?

  If not, it's okay. It's probably one of a hundred stories. I just remember more the audience reaction and the facial expressions more than anything else.

• 36:15Speaker 02

  Well, I don't know. I mean, I definitely, I've come closest to death swimming. Once to a bird sanctuary, I was swimming to a bird sanctuary. And then I also in the Bocas in Panama, I was spearfishing 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 time. So I don't recall almost drowning because of hallucinogens, but I have definitely almost drowned.

• 36:48Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. 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?

• 37:19Speaker 02

  Oh, well, there's so many, I wouldn't even know where to start. Werner's an amazing storyteller. I mean, 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 fearless 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 you, I'm looking at a mountain, I'm looking

• 38:04Speaker 02

  at hundreds, probably thousands of trees. I know that there's a river about 100 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.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  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, anybody, a musician, a writer, a data scientist. I don't know if that answers the question.

• 39:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, 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 just kind of like a, you know, Buzz Lightyear pole doll 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, right? In so much as we're optimized to fight, fornicate, flee, basically. And that on some level, you could imagine hallucinogens allowing, dropping, or widening

• 39:57Tim Ferriss?

  the aperture of your reducing valve so that you're, you're seeing a lot of what is.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  That's amazing. You literally just said what I always say. I even said it to, to someone this, like yesterday, I say it 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.

• 40:22Tim Ferriss?

  Have you found anything outside of hallucinogens to help you to widen the aperture so that you can?

• 40:29Speaker 02

  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, 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, 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 incomprehensible mysticism that is inherent in the very fact that you can experience

• 41:13Speaker 02

  or be conscious of any experience is the same as.

• 41:18Speaker 02

  Potentially, you know, in taking in a hallucinogen.

• 41:22Tim Ferriss?

  For those folks listening, and I wonder this too, who are saying to themselves, this guy's fascinating. His stories are incredible and I've no idea whatsoever how he is not self-destructed. 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?

• 41:51Speaker 02

  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 shit is so good. Don't die, don't die, motherfucker. Get one more day in there.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  So I've been very lucky and I'm very grateful for that. I think I'm also very cautious, 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,

• 42:47Speaker 02

  but by just being open and curious, which is, I think, the great way for how people learn is by just being curious.

• 42:56Tim Ferriss?

  I totally agree. And I'm going to dig a little bit more, well, I'm going to dig a lot more 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 I'm looking at this quote from a Vanity Fair piece from 2015, and this

• 43:38Tim Ferriss?

  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

• 43:45Speaker 02

  Tom Rice, amazing writer. Yeah, you gotta meet him.

• 43:50Tim Ferriss?

  I'd love to meet him. 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?

• 44:08Speaker 02

  Well, sure. I mean, I'm, I think 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 Tim'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 fucking amazing, incredible,

• 44:52Speaker 02

  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, meta fucking cloud.

• 45:17Tim Ferriss?

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

• 45:27Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's to 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

• 45:42Speaker 02

  Dreaming that how do we help realize everybody's dreams together in some collective orgy of dreams?

• 45:50Tim Ferriss?

  Now, 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 deplete it? What led you to that?

• 46:02Speaker 02

  I don't know if there's any great, specific schism 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 gonna 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, you know, 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,

• 46:46Speaker 02

  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, I would 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 sculptable and, you know.

• 47:12Tim Ferriss?

  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's 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?

• 47:34Speaker 02

  I feel that every day, Tim. Oh, 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 onto 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 gazed 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

• 48:15Speaker 02

  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's just so much. If I said to you, "I'm just gonna read poetry," shit, "I'm just gonna read Japanese poets for the rest of my life," that in itself would, I could spend 100 years doing just that, or just watching French films, or just, you know, learning about specific plants. There's so much to learn and to be exposed to and

• 48:58Speaker 02

  to remember, which I have a very hard time doing, that constantly I'm in system overload. And so when someone, I always get that question, "Well, what inspires you?" You know, like, "Who, what painter, what?" I'm like, "Fuck, man, I'm inspired by everything. I'm inspired by being conscious right now of 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

• 49:38Speaker 02

  possibly maybe perceive, and you know, Huxley's a great example, 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.

• 50:19Tim Ferriss?

  What have you found? To help, if anything, with system overload because for you as someone who fuels 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've found to be helpful for preventing complete overwhelm?

• 50:47Speaker 02

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

• 50:59Speaker 02

  I like, I like to, those three things I like a lot. Love to make love. There's a lot of things I think that could help one to, yeah, like somebody got me 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 10 zillion other possible things I could be watching.

• 51:38Tim Ferriss?

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

• 51:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I often recommend a movie called Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog. I highly recommend that and many of Werner's movies.

• 52:13Speaker 02

  There's a great movie that's really funny. I don't know if you've seen this movie, Tim, called Bad Boy Bubby.

• 52:18Tim Ferriss?

  No, I have not. I like the title, though.

• 52:21Speaker 02

  Australian movie, 1993, I believe, Bad Boy Bubby. That's a cool movie. Another movie called The Color of Pomegranates. I can never say his name. Parhajinov. He's an Armenian director.

• 52:36Speaker 02

  You know, I love Hal Ashby's being there. He also made Harold and Ma. I mean, Jesus, movies. There's, you know, Claude Cabral is a great French director. You know, obviously, Kubrick. Watch all of Kubrick's movies and Tarkovsky's movies. And Tarkovsky wrote a great book about filmmaking called Sculpting in Time.

• 53:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Sculpting in 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?

• 53:14Speaker 02

  Not only that movie, but there's a great documentary about the making of the movie called Burden of Dreams.

• 53:19Tim Ferriss?

  Burden of Dreams?

• 53:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, by Les 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.

• 53:52Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it sounds also a lot like building Pioneer Works.

• 54:00Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 54:18Tim Ferriss?

  And it's spectacular, but that is not how things began. Can you describe it for people?

• 54:25Speaker 02

  What it is now?

• 54:26Tim Ferriss?

  Or? Yeah, what it is now and then rewind and talk about what? Well, you can do neither or what it was and what it is now, or what it is now and what it was. However, you want to approach it.

• 54:34Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I think it was just a hallucination and a dream. And it's 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 in 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 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 subliminally, or somehow this was a way for me to incarnate what I wished to be

• 55:19Speaker 02

  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, as 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, you know, 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, it's an institute with a mission.

• 55:57Speaker 02

  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, it means 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, you know, somewhere between a school and the learning center and a museum and a community center. And, and I don't know what it's, it's a, 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.

• 56:41Speaker 02

  When I say culture, I have to circle sciences because a lot of folks don't think about science as part of culture.

• 56:47Tim Ferriss?

  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 walked through again. How big is this space?

• 56:59Speaker 02

  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, and it's about 27,000 square feet inside and about 20,000 square feet outside at its current footprint. We're, we're, we're, 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.

• 57:44Speaker 02

  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, but it's not big enough. We need, you know, we need a place for a democracy and equality program, which is going to require 10 people and narrative arts program, which, you know, so every, right now it's, it's, uh, yes, it, it doesn't, you know, we, we do about 75 residencies a year where we're giving space for free to scientists and artists and writers, et cetera. Uh, so we need more, more place for the residents. So I don't know if that, it feels tiny.

• 58:25Tim Ferriss?

  Let's, let's go back to, as I've read you describe it, uh, the original shithole. No windows, no floors, no stairs, no utilities.

• 58:36Tim Ferriss?

  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 was the pitch? What?

• 58:48Speaker 02

  Persevere.

• 58:50Tim Ferriss?

  I know, but 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?

• 58:59Speaker 02

  Well, I would say a few different things. You know, in the beginning, I was, or for a very long time, even in the beginning, I was just giving away all my money. So if I sold a sculpture, like, and I would beg people, 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 ideas.

• 59:25Tim Ferriss?

  How close, how close to verbatim was that? I mean, would you actually, was that the sentiment? Or would you actually say that and just endear yourself because you get zero funds?

• 59:35Speaker 02

  No, I'd say it, but sweetly and somewhat ironically.

• 59:43Speaker 02

  And I believed it. I was like, look, if you could buy a piece of art from 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, 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?

• 1:00:28Speaker 02

  And I thought that would take a decade.

• 1:00:30Tim Ferriss?

  Let me pause for one second. So you said giving stuff away. So that you have on one hand, the well-funded capitalist pigs, as you put it, right? I guess.

• 1:00:40Speaker 02

  We, they're, they're good people.

• 1:00:42Tim Ferriss?

  I'm just fucking, I'm fucking around. I'm fucking around. I mean, but like very wealthy, like 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?

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  No, no, no, I'm not. I'm selling the art to people. But like, let's say a collector comes in the studio and this happened. I'm like,

• 1:01:06Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, you're giving, you mean the proceeds of that back to Pioneer Works?

• 1:01:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Like, please buy this sculpture because we will get water heaters.

• 1:01:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yep, I see, I see.

• 1:01:16Speaker 02

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

• 1:01:24Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, got it.

• 1:01:25Speaker 02

  And so I would say in the beginning, that helped jumpstart the project. And then, you know, somebody was like, you need to start a nonprofit. I didn't know what that was and a board of director, you know? And, 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, you know, Gabriel Floran's the artistic director, who's, who's, you know, like my brother and Jana Levin, who, who I know you know, who's like my sister. And, you 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 Pioneer Works

• 1:02:07Speaker 02

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

• 1:02:13Tim Ferriss?

  I like that. That's really a beautiful metaphor and visual. How do you, and, and maybe the answer is somebody else does it, 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?

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:03:30Speaker 02

  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, PW's really working well now and there's incredible brain trust and group involved that it's working. And I'd say that I, I mean, it wasn't tenable. By, by the seventh year in or eighth year in, I mean, I was giving tours, five, six, seven tours a day. And, and you know, people will come to see my art in 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.

• 1:04:12Speaker 02

  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 worn out by like being the showman of like, and this is what we're going to do here and what we're going to do a, 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, you know, I was like driving my, and it was, it worked, but it, it got to the point where it was like, I'm going to fucking die. This is not tenable.

• 1:04:43Tim Ferriss?

  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 like get your head screwed on? What did you do?

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  The key, the key, the key is the people. And so our incredible board of directors and advisors and staff, it's all on them. Do you know what I mean? I'm just another little cock in the wheel or whatever. So, you know, again, I have to take my hat off to Gabriel and to Jana and to Tommy, who's 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, some that aren't there. Daniel Kent, who's our incredible director of design, who's so talented. It's really just the people. And that's the whole thing. The idea is great, too, but it's the people.

• 1:05:45Speaker 02

  And maybe those things comblebulate. Because, you know, if you bring a musician on, and I've, this happened so many times, where friends of mine who play music, they would come there for the first time, where 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 a seat 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

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:06:43Tim Ferriss?

  We're going to come back to Maria. Because there's a question I want to ask you 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, early in this conversation, you're hustling, you're giving away art for free. You're like, a thousand, forget a thousand, 500. No, no to 500. Okay, 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 I'm not sure what you would call them, patrons, customers buying artwork in many cases for hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece.

• 1:07:29Tim Ferriss?

  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, right? Because it's, it seems like, you know, 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?

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  I think it's accumulative. I think it's, it's, it's so many, many little things because, you know, I remember when I first sold a picture or whatever for, you know, a thousand or 5,000 or 10,000, or maybe even 25,000. And I was like, holy fuck, I just got $25,000. We're going to Sizzla, motherfucker. This shit is crazy. Like, I can't believe how lucky I am. I just made some shit and people paid me for it. That being said, you know, that it's like relative. Now I sell something for $25,000 and it doesn't even move the needle because I have a big, big studio and operation and

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  crazy projects I'm working on. But I would say it happened over, you know, 25 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?

• 1:09:07Tim Ferriss?

  You're talking about a piece of work, a project?

• 1:09:09Speaker 02

  A work, yeah. 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 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 tear 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?

• 1:09:55Speaker 02

  Light art works, right? With cars, right? Like, it's learning. It's like, or an AI is learning your, that's how art really works, right? You just keep learning.

• 1:10:04Tim Ferriss?

  Now, for a lot of people, the majority of artists, though, 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 decisions. So I do want to ask, and I'm going to ask about the psychogeographies or psychogeographic 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.

• 1:10:48Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 1:11:04Speaker 02

  Well, we're talking specifically about the psychogeographies?

• 1:11:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:10Speaker 02

  They are, they're meant to be this installation that's taking me, I don't know how long until I finish it, 10 or 15 years, of about 120 humans that are kind of like, if you think about the Terracotta Warriors, they're, 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, of a, 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

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  tens of thousands of images that I'm finding from 100 years worth of books and magazines, mixed in with paintings and drawings on the layers of glass. So.

• 1:12:04Tim Ferriss?

  So 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 a analogy here. For anyone who's a Star Wars nerd, or at least saw 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 per se, but suspended in the amber, 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

• 1:12:47Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 1:12:57Speaker 02

  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, right? I just take like a window, piece of glass, and I draw on it. And I cut up my homework, let's say, or 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 a architecture, you know, from Bauhaus, 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.

• 1:13:40Speaker 02

  But within relationship to what I did before and then again and again and again. And the next thing you know, you have thirty 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 psychogeographies that you're discussing, or we're discussing are about three thousand pounds each. So, and, and I've made works that are up to like modulated in twenty four thousand pounds or whatnot.

• 1:14:21Tim Ferriss?

  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, right? I mean, if you're standing on the sides, it's 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 twenty feet away, where you think it's quite one thing or resembles a melting person or any number of different, 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

• 1:15:05Tim Ferriss?

  is yet again, something completely different, at least to the beholder. How did that start? How did the psychogeographies start?

• 1:15:14Speaker 02

  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 psychs?

• 1:15:22Tim Ferriss?

  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 we'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 psychogeographies, and let's go with whichever you like.

• 1:15:44Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Well, 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 one. But I mean, really, all this was experimentation and action. And, you know, 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 is I love amalgamations and I love bringing things together. And Pioneer works as that with people, right? But with artwork, you know, I used to, or 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 in the relationships between those pieces.

• 1:16:27Speaker 02

  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 bee got stuck and poured more resin. And then I decided to make these sort of boxes of resin, Joseph Cornell inspired. I love Joseph Cornell, 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,

• 1:17:08Speaker 02

  and I got obsessed. And I did that for some time and created lots of botanical looking drawings in 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.

• 1:17:28Tim Ferriss?

  The resin was going to kill you just because it's, is it toxic? I don't know anything about resin.

• 1:17:31Speaker 02

  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 the psycho geography 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.

• 1:18:15Speaker 02

  I'm trying to make things that like a fucking meteor hits the earth and, you know, maybe one of the things that's left on, you know, you dig it out of the dirt, this 3,000 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.

• 1:18:50Tim Ferriss?

  I dig it. 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? Right? 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 or up and coming artists making?

• 1:19:26Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:20:11Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:20:27Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:20:50Speaker 02

  No, yeah, of course. You gotta be able to die for it.

• 1:20:55Speaker 02

  Quite literally, in a way, you gotta 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.

• 1:21:21Tim Ferriss?

  What would happen if it bankrupted your studio? What would you, how would you feel and what would you do? Would it just be destiny and then you'd figure, become a short order cook? Or what would, what would happen?

• 1:21:31Speaker 02

  I'd probably go like, I don't know, become like, yeah, go live in a fucking tropics somewhere and live off of coconuts. Seriously, I'm always like,

• 1:21:41Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:21:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would be so concerned. 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. In the past, where there would be astronauts, there's animal headed humans.

• 1:22:21Speaker 02

  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

• 1:23:02Speaker 02

  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's 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 and 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 super tanker sinking, which is connected to another project. And there's,

• 1:23:46Speaker 02

  there's animals coming out of the super tanker as an allegory to the ark.

• 1:23:52Tim Ferriss?

  So I just want to pause for a second and tell people, go to Dustin Yellen dot com or at Dustin Yellen on Instagram, and this will make a lot more sense.

• 1:24:02Tim Ferriss?

  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, brainpickings.org. 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 I, please tell me if I'm barking up the wrong tree, but.

• 1:24:47Tim Ferriss?

  Does that question bring anything to the surface for you? It seemed like this was something worth plumbing the depths of a bit.

• 1:24:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I mean, I mean, I'm an old man now. I've lost a lot of people, but when I was young, young, 25, 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.

• 1:25:34Speaker 02

  And I'm not sure that when the body dies or 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 too, you and I have, let's say 50 summers left.

• 1:26:10Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:26:10Speaker 02

  Well, fuck 50 summers is like lunch.

• 1:26:13Tim Ferriss?

  For sure.

• 1:26:13Speaker 02

  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 has really informed, maybe losing, you know, someone, the closest person to me at such a young age, I think really it changed the way I see the world completely.

• 1:26:41Tim Ferriss?

  Does that obsessing over death? And I'm asking as 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 a kind of snap of the fingers and kick in the ass like, hey, homie, let's get moving. 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?

• 1:27:17Speaker 02

  I think it's probably the latter is, 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 the rest of my life. And I think there's, it's posited some, 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.

• 1:28:02Speaker 02

  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 changed.

• 1:28:26Tim Ferriss?

  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 segue, but from the sort of sublime to the maybe ridiculous, how did you end up dancing in a Jay-Z video? Is that even a real thing?

• 1:28:42Speaker 02

  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 would give me like, 15 bucks over the few hours. And then like, I moved up to linoleum, which I thought was cool. I do not know how the Jay-Z video happened. I mean, he's cool. I'd like to actually have a coffee with him at some point.

• 1:29:08Tim Ferriss?

  So, well, hold on. So do you literally just not have a recollection of how you got filmed? Or like, how does that happen?

• 1:29:15Speaker 02

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

• 1:29:24Tim Ferriss?

  Oh 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, right, to get a message, an image, a question, a word, whatever, out to billions of people, what might it be?

• 1:29:50Speaker 02

  You mean an image or a word or something?

• 1:29:52Tim Ferriss?

  Could be, could be anything that you want to convey to billions of people. Anything at all, non-commercial, hopefully.

• 1:29:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I would 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.

• 1:30:42Speaker 02

  And we're all made of the same stuff and we're all sharing the same stuff. So why on earth are we, you know, deploying capital at such a scale to defense opposed to education or healthcare? Why are, 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.

• 1:31:08Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned earlier the tanker and you said that connects to another project. And I remember you sharing a couple of slides, I think it 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? Lest they think it's all about window sandwiches, although that I love, love, love, love those, that work. What is the other tanker project?

• 1:31:39Speaker 02

  A supertanker moves 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 supertanker, which is a boat that moves oil around. And it started to be at like 1,200 feet. It's not as big anymore, but it'll still be the largest lift 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

• 1:32:22Speaker 02

  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 was where you 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, love, that's what probably, you know, I love Fitzgallardo pulling boat over a mountain. I'm now trying to take a boat the size of a building and put it on its nose.

• 1:33:07Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:33:13Speaker 02

  It's the size of the Statue of Liberty. And yes, it's a, it's a monument to the end of fossil fuels. It's like a monument to the look, we can power the earth with water and with sun and with, you know, various other technologies if we can, if we can scale them.

• 1:33:31Tim Ferriss?

  Where might The Bridge be?

• 1:33:33Speaker 02

  I can't say, I can't say.

• 1:33:35Tim Ferriss?

  All right, we'll keep it under wraps for now. I'm using the royal we since I have no fucking idea, but TBD.

• 1:33:40Speaker 02

  It's a really cool project. I'm working with, you know, B R K Ingles is an amazing architect and I'm working with Arab engineering and I'm working with all these cool people who are helping me to realize this dream.

• 1:33:50Tim Ferriss?

  That's incredible. Just a few more things and this has been so much fun. So I'm looking at a quote from thecreativeindependent.com 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 mantra or idea that I've done nothing. You know, I've accomplished nothing. I've done nothing and the page is 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 or is that intermittent? How do you think about the I've done nothing blank slate? Is that accurate?

• 1:34:34Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:34:59Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:35:20Tim Ferriss?

  Do you find that intimidating, overwhelming or invigorating or something else? Right? Because 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.

• 1:35:37Speaker 02

  No, I mean, I guess I probably have semblances of all of those feelings, but if anything, I feel the wonder and possibility.

• 1:35:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:36:26Tim Ferriss?

  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 Dustin Yellin, last name Y E L L I N, DustinYellin.com, PioneerWorks.org. 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. Is there anything else that you'd like to say before we close up shop on this first conversation on the podcast?

• 1:36:56Speaker 02

  Well, I wouldn't even know where to, 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.

• 1:37:39Speaker 02

  And we can all sort of support and love each other to keep fucking inventing the dream.

• 1:37:47Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:38:11Speaker 02

  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 him?

• 1:38:20Tim Ferriss?

  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'll be a transcript and all sorts of things, which you can find at tim.blog/podcast. Just search for Dustin, or Dustin Yellin, or Yellin, Y E L L I N. 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.

• 1:38:57Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found, or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered, it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read, and that I've shared with my close friends,

• 1:39:37Tim Ferriss?

  for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out, and just drop in your email, and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by ExpressVPN. I've been using ExpressVPN since the summer of 2019. It is a super simple and reliable way to make sure that my data are secure and encrypted without slowing my internet speed. So for instance, I use public wifi all over the place. It might be at a Starbucks, it could be at a restaurant, sitting outside somewhere to work.

• 1:40:21Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:41:05Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:41:48Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:42:05Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:42:50Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:43:35Tim Ferriss?

  So he has an entire library of Q and A's and questions and advice, all the kind of stuff that I couldn't give anyone else access to, people now have access to, which is incredible. So Kevin Rose, my buddy, created this app initially in 2016, and it's turned into an incredible community and an incredible collection of how-to and tracking capabilities. So whether you've been fasting for years or just getting started, Zero equips you with exclusive videos from people like Peter Attia, personalized fasting plans, and advanced health data to keep you on track. Listeners of this podcast, that's you guys, can get 30% off a one-year Zero Plus subscription, which gets you all sorts of goodies. So. I would highly recommend checking it out.

• 1:44:16Tim Ferriss?

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