Tony Hawk's Real-Life Willy Wonka

A desert train built for Tony Hawk leads into the strange and thoughtful world of N. D. Austin, a designer of real-life experiences.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Roman Mars?

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• 0:36Speaker 01

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• 1:04Roman Mars?

  99% Invisible is presented by Acura. Curating and designing the perfect experience takes meticulous craft, an obsession with detail, and a love for innovation. Just like museum designers, Acura carefully considers every detail to curate the most engaging, exhilarating, and rewarding experience for drivers. That craft isn't always something you can see, but it's something you'll feel, that flutter in your heart, the engine roars. Every Acura is designed with deliberate intention around how people actually use the vehicles, and that is precision-crafted performance.

• 1:48Roman Mars?

  This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. If there's one thing we like here at 99PI, it's serendipity, those little unexpected moments of magic that puncture the plazas of everyday life. But why leave serendipity to chance? What if you could design serendipity into someone's life or some other magical experience to make a better world? Well, our friends at Death, Sex, and Money found someone who does just that. He calls himself an experienced designer, but that title might undersell him a little bit. To quote the great Tony Hawk...

• 2:25Speaker 02

  He's fucking Willy Wonka.

• 2:27Roman Mars?

  And the equally great Anna Sale at Death, Sex, and Money would like to introduce him to you.

• 2:39Speaker 03

  Skateboarding legend Tony Hawk hosted a podcast with radio personality Jason Ellis.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Hey, everybody. It's Jason Ellis and Tony Hawk, Hawk vs. Wolf, greatest podcast of all time in the history of the universe. What he said about our podcast...

• 2:52Speaker 03

  On an episode last year, Jason asked about a recent trip Tony had been on.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  You were in the desert. Okay, I'll explain. Let me, let me, let me take it from the beginning. There's a guy I know that I've become friends with in New York, and he creates experiences. And when I say creates experiences, I cannot do it justice of what he is capable of and what he has put together for people.

• 3:17Speaker 03

  The guy who helped Tony is named Indy Austin. But if you're thinking high-end party host or wedding planner for rich people and celebrities, you've got the wrong idea.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  I went to his place in New York. The last time I visited, we were just talking about other stuff, and I said, would you, would you consider doing something from my office? Because we have a, we have a holiday thing every year, but kind of running out of ideas. Yeah. He's just like, what can we work with? And I said, well, I'd like to do something that is relatively close, but if we have to drive a little bit, that's fine. Mm-hmm. And those are the only parameters I gave him. I don't know what he has, what he's planning, right? And so we have our weekly meeting, and everyone's there. And then there were all these gifts on the desk, which was not, not the usual, like, holiday gift exchange. Yeah. And so I get instructions, like, open the gifts. So we open the gifts.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  There's, it was like a shovel, a pickaxe, a first aid kit, there's a locked briefcase, and a set of keys. We look outside, and there's, there's this passenger van, and then I just get a location. Yeah. We just start driving out to the desert, and we are driving, I mean, signs are like, no motorized vehicles past this point, government property. And then we, we go around this corner, and there's a train.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  Indy and his team built a five-car train from old parts. It ran on abandoned tracks on public land in the Southern California desert. It was whimsical, a piano player on one car, a bar car, but at the center of the experience was a ceremony. Like most of the things Indy designs, at some point, you encounter a personal challenge that cuts you to the quick. Tony said there were some relationships among his colleagues that needed mending. When the train was far out, Indy gave the team a bottle of whiskey and told them to bury it and make a promise.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  We go bury this bottle that we made a pact about. If one of us passes away, like, we're gonna go find the bottle and share it.

• 5:26Speaker 03

  In this episode, I talk to Tony Hawk and the train builder, Indy Austin, who has designed hundreds of experiences, from scavenger hunts to coming-of-age rituals and funerals. And for me, talking to Indy about the origins of his work and the meaning behind it all was transformative. Prepare to be wowed.

• 5:48Speaker 04

  My job as a designer of experiences is just to place stepping stones. So I'm creating a whole scenario of some type, but it's just a series of stepping stones. Story results out of that, but it isn't a story I'm telling. It's something that happens personal to you.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  This is Death, Sex, and Money.

• 6:11Speaker 03

  The show from Slate about the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more. I'm Anna Sale.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  Tony Hawk first bonded with Indy Austin over their love of rare whiskeys. Before Indy designed an experience for Tony, he hosted Tony and his wife at his tiny bar, which seats two guests. It's made to look like a toll booth you'd find on the highway.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  So he's at the sort of the toll booth side of it, and then you're where the window would, would be, but the window's behind you, and he has this whole selection of bottles and stuff behind him, but it's, I mean, it's tight. Like, the three, yes, there are three people in it, but there's no room for anything else.

• 7:08Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, and I imagine in your, in your work and in your life, you've been around a lot of people who do things a little differently. Like, what is it, when you think of him and what he's able to dream up, do you think that, like, what is it that he allows himself to, to do that other people just don't? Like, what, what makes what he does special?

• 7:33Speaker 02

  I think he, he works outside the limits, well, firstly, of, of, of the law.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  Uh-huh.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  And of any sort of limitations of what you think, where you think you can go, what you think you can be involved with. I think it's more that element, that he sees a landscape or, or a city, and he sees it for possibilities and opportunities to, you know, oh, what if we could get up there?

• 8:11Speaker 03

  It kind of reminds me of, like, how I think of skaters, like, you know, scanning the landscape for where they can skate.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, you see the world in a totally different perspective.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  Seeing things from a different perspective for skaters and for Indy sometimes involves trespassing. Indy has been known to create speakeasies in water towers, hotel basements, and once for Tony Hawk, in the San Diego sewer system.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  And then we go down, and there's this entire passageway under the street that I, I don't know existed. And then we walk below San Diego for a couple miles.

• 8:57Speaker 03

  Uh-huh.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  So we're in, like, we're, we're the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  And, you know, the fact that I, sure, I facilitated in the sense that I paid for it, but also, you know, that I tapped his resources and his imagination. He's fucking Willy Wonka.

• 9:20Speaker 03

  Like Willy Wonka, the experiences Indy designs can be dangerous. Like, once he helped a wife of a well-known author recreate a kidnapping scene from one of the author's books. They also can reveal something about your character. According to Tony Hawk, Indy helped a high-profile couple after infidelity.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Some big hip-hop artist, I'm not sure who or what they, who was at all, created this whole experience because he wanted to apologize or make up to...

• 9:53Speaker 03

  Indy did not want to talk about this job.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  And at every turn, she had to make a choice.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  And Indy also designs rituals for things we all go through, like a coming-of-age ceremony for a 13-year-old boy. They stranded him alone on an abandoned island with a backpack, food, and a flare. And he designs funerals. That's really where it all started. I met Indy Austin in our Slate offices in New York City back in June. It doesn't take that long to learn. He is obsessed with locks and keys and scanned spaces that could be used for experiences. Like, when we gave him the key card to give him access to the bathroom, he took his time to see where else in the building it would work. When he came back, he said sneakily, "This opens so many doors."

• 10:44Speaker 03

  When we sat down to talk for the interview, he presented me with a present, a little metal thing that was about the size of a credit card with different grooves cut out. He had to explain to me, "I could use this to pick all kinds of locks."

• 10:59Speaker 04

  I brought this to give to you in a way to show you that I'm giving you permission to unlock something.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  Oh, okay. Oh, okay.

• 11:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. Or, well, if we're gonna unpack...

• 11:12Speaker 03

  I thought you were just letting me break more rules.

• 11:13Speaker 04

  Great. Oh, that's great. So, but here's the thing, I don't, I don't want to tell you that in advance, that that's what's happening.

• 11:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:19Speaker 04

  That's just how I, that's where that is coming from in me.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 11:23Speaker 04

  And this is exactly how I, this is a great example of how I work, which is, I won't normally tell you what I think it means to me. I'll let you have your own experience of it. But to me, I'm thinking, "Okay, if I'm gonna talk to someone I don't know and let them ask me a bunch of questions I don't know, how am I approaching that?" And my approach is, "I'm gonna see if we can unlock something." I don't, or, you know, "We're gonna get in."

• 11:45Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 11:45Speaker 04

  "I don't know what it is, but maybe there's somewhere we go." That's great.

• 11:48Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 11:49Speaker 04

  My pleasure.

• 11:52Speaker 03

  Will you describe what you do?

• 11:55Speaker 04

  I call myself an experience designer, which, of course, immediately makes people ask, "What is that?"

• 12:04Speaker 03

  It almost sounds like a tech job. It sounds like a user experience job.

• 12:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a good smokescreen. There's no formalized field that is experience design for real-world, in-person things. So, we don't have a convenient container for it yet.

• 12:26Speaker 03

  Isn't that interesting? Like, we have a word for performance art.

• 12:30Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 12:30Speaker 03

  So, if there's like something artificial, an artifice, happening in real life, we have that word. If it's an event, we have an event designer or event planner. But experience is different because it's... Well, how is an experience different from an event?

• 12:49Speaker 04

  So, one way of saying it, you could say that, like, every, every event is something that you can experience if you're being present for it. But a thing that I'm always trying to make is something that isn't just an occurrence out there in the world, but is an occurrence inside you in a way that matters to you personally.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  The first thing I want to know about, of all of the different things that you have designed, can you tell me about designing experiences around funeral rituals? Like, how did you, how did you first work on some kind of ritual for celebrating the life of somebody after they were gone?

• 13:37Speaker 04

  So, I grew up near a town in Southeast Alaska, where a little village in the islands that had very powerful funeral traditions. My parents are, my mother's playing the piano, and my father's playing the cello, and I'm singing. And these funerals would go on for many, many hours, be really long. So long that a meal would be served in the middle of it. People would be taking naps. Then there would be dancing. Then there'd be more music. Then there'd be really long speeches. Then there'd be even more speeches. Then speeches would come after the speeches. And then there'd be more music. And like, we might sing several times throughout this and then just be like hanging out in this, you know, giant funeral tradition.

• 14:14Speaker 03

  How should I understand, like, the faith tradition that these funerals were a part of? Where the, like, how...

• 14:20Speaker 04

  That village that I grew up near is a Clincket Native Village. That's the, the tribe is Clincket. And it is probably about 80% Native, maybe.

• 14:33Speaker 03

  Is your family indigenous?

• 14:34Speaker 04

  No. No, no. My, my, my family is a classic American Catholic combination of Irish and Italian. In the 70s, my parents decided they wanted to move out to the woods, which was a thing that was happening a lot at that time.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  Kind of like a back-to-the-land tradition, like hippie sort of infused vibe? In your family?

• 14:57Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 14:58Speaker 03

  Okay. And this is the community you grew up in?

• 15:00Speaker 04

  Yes. Yeah.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  How many people?

• 15:04Speaker 04

  Usually about 60, 70 people, something like that.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  And just small?

• 15:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:08Speaker 03

  How many kids were around?

• 15:09Speaker 04

  Not many. Most of the time, a lot of the time when I was a kid, it was just me and a lot of adults or...

• 15:14Speaker 03

  So, this is a huge part of your life? Because then, if there's a lot of older people in the community, I mean, there were, funerals were part of what happened?

• 15:22Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  In life. You showed up. You were a part of this ceremony. You had a role to play, but other people played other roles.

• 15:31Speaker 04

  I mean, if you think about it, there's more funerals than there are weddings. But actually, let me tell you, let me skip ahead to adulthood. Like, I didn't know I was gonna like, I don't know, that funerals would continue to be important. I mean, it's amazing. Everyone we know dies at some point, and/or you do first. So, funerals are a really important part of your life. But like, do you spend a lot of time thinking about, like, all the funerals you're gonna attend of all the people you love? You wanna spend time thinking about, like, all the fun stuff you're gonna do together. So, I went to a funeral. It was for a friend of mine who died young. And his mother was kind of running the funeral. And I think, in her grief, what made sense to her

• 16:14Speaker 04

  was to have this funeral be all about Jesus. It was a super-Jesus-centric funeral, which maybe makes sense if Jesus is your thing. It's what made sense to his mother. But as his friend, sitting in the audience, I remember being horrified at how this didn't actually honor him. Horrified, he was like a, you know, a vowed atheist. And he would have been horrified if he'd seen what we were saying in his name. And I didn't blame his mother. It made sense where she was coming from. But I just remember thinking, "Oh, my God. But this is such a missed opportunity to actually honor who this person actually was and who he was for who he was."

• 16:59Speaker 03

  The first funeral Indy ever designed came a few months after his friends. He got a letter from a woman who was dying, and she wanted help to plan her funeral. After talking, they decided that she would like to throw a big party after she was gone. It was simple and special. Over the years, Indy's funeral planning has gotten more elaborate, like the one for a lawyer in New York City who had brain cancer.

• 17:25Speaker 04

  This man wrote me, and he said, "I, I don't have any family members. I have like one cousin somewhere who's been... Everyone else in my family is gone. I have no immediate family. But I have a board game group. And it's five of my buddies. And we've been playing board games ever since we were in college." And he said, "The first weekend freshman year, in our freshman-year dorm in college, we all met and started playing board games. And we've been meeting now every year since. And we spend one weekend of the year and we all get together. At this point, they're all scattered around, but they get together and play board games." And he said, "I'm gonna be the first one to die, and those guys are gonna miss me.

• 18:09Speaker 04

  But they're not gonna wanna like, go to the cemetery with a shovel of dirt and, I don't, you know, or whatever that is." He was like, "So, the normal stuff doesn't make any sense. Can you make something?" I was like, "Absolutely. We can absolutely make something." So, he lived maybe another, another six months, I think. And the next, at the next board game night after he died, the five friends gathered. It was, that was also here in, in New York. And a messenger came to the door with a box.

• 18:50Speaker 04

  And they opened the box and inside there was a game. It was a board game. I would say it kind of looked like, it sort of looked like a monopoly board in that it was square. You unfold this cardboard thing and it's square and there's spaces around the outside and you have little pieces and some dice and their cards and sort of, if you're picturing the face of a monopoly board, it's kind of what it looked like. But as they started to play, it became the game mechanisms of every board game that they had played together over the years. A little piece taken from every different board game. And as they drew cards, it became stories of their time together.

• 19:35Speaker 04

  And as they went around the board, they went backwards through time and backwards through all the games that they'd played over the years, all the way back until by the end of the board, they were back in their freshman year dorm, meeting each other for the first time on that first night. And when they were done playing the game, the end state of the game was the final instructions were fold up the board and put it back in the box. And there was a secret compartment in the bottom of this big wooden box. And in the secret, secret compartment, there were his ashes and a collapsible shovel. And his, and his final, his final wish was that they take the box into Central Park

• 20:20Speaker 04

  in the middle of the night and dig a hole under this particular tree and bury the box, which you're absolutely not supposed to do. And that's what they did.

• 20:28Speaker 03

  The whole box that included the board game?

• 20:30Speaker 04

  Yes, they played the game one time and then it was buried with him.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  Do you feel comfortable sharing like what the process was of making that with him? Like how you sat with him, you gathered the stories, you thought about the mechanisms of the different games with him?

• 20:50Speaker 04

  Yes. He was, he was, he was in pretty good shape. And, and so as soon as we came back to him and I said, I think the thing is a game. Like what is your funeral? Obviously it's a game. So what is this board game? And it was his idea that it was all the games that they'd played. And so we, we took game mechanic, he, he made a huge list of all these games and we kind of placed them by year. He was like, okay, well, this game came out in this year and we tried it for the first time and we hated it. And here's why we hated that game. It was terrible. I was like, great, we can use that. We're going to use that piece. Or this other game, we keep replaying this one over the years because actually it's really good. Okay, well, let's take some of the mechanisms of that.

• 21:34Speaker 04

  We ended up with a thing that was so complicated, I, there's no way I could ever play it or you could play it. You had to be the people.

• 21:41Speaker 03

  These game dudes.

• 21:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, you had to be this, these, these board game, you know, like mega board game nerds who really knew all the intricacies or who could remember, be like, oh, that game we played back in 2004, that was a terrible game and here's why it sucked. Oh yeah, we're going to use that. And, you know, then that's a good example of it being particular and peculiar for them. But because also like, I wasn't there.

• 22:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:08Speaker 04

  I only know about.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  You sent it via messenger.

• 22:10Speaker 04

  Oh, yes.

• 22:11Speaker 03

  You never met.

• 22:11Speaker 04

  No one else is there.

• 22:12Speaker 03

  You didn't get to witness them playing the game.

• 22:14Speaker 04

  That's correct. It wasn't for me, it wasn't for anyone else. That's a good example of like, sometimes you're making a thing and you aren't supposed to be present for it. That's fine. I don't need to be there. Like, it's for the people it's for. Maybe that sometimes includes me, but a lot of times it doesn't.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  I want to go back now. I want to be able to understand a little bit more of the through line of, so you're a child in a very small rural community in southeastern Alaska. Did you have the sense as a child that you weren't going to stay there when you grew up?

• 22:52Speaker 04

  No, no, I, you know, I was in a world that was a complete and total world. What I didn't know was that my parents were world builders and I was living inside a world that they had built.

• 23:06Speaker 03

  Can you tell me what you mean by that?

• 23:07Speaker 04

  Sure. I grew up inside a performance. That was my parents' performance of the end of the world. So it was, the reason they moved to Alaska was because the apocalypse was coming and they were going to prepare for the end.

• 23:30Speaker 03

  Coming up, Indy talks about the ideology in his parents' doomsday cult and what it took to leave. When you left, did it feel like you were running away?

• 23:42Speaker 04

  No, no, it felt like failure. It felt like I failed. I had my whole community and my family and all my people and I couldn't make something for them or I couldn't meet them where they needed to be met.

• 24:02Speaker 03

  This is Death, Sex and Money from Slate. I'm Anna Sale. Indy Austin says his family was part of a cult called The Move. It's a nondenominational Christian group founded in the 1960s around the idea that the end times were coming.

• 24:19Speaker 04

  It was every piece, it was every part. Sometimes it was brimstone, sometimes it was fire, sometimes it was the government, sometimes it was, it was everybody, it's everything.

• 24:28Speaker 03

  You grew up in a, in a, in a strong, closed system with a, with a particular worldview and there was a lot of fear. Is that right?

• 24:38Speaker 04

  Yes, that is a great observation. Yeah, that's a very fear-based perspective on the world.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  Did you feel afraid?

• 24:48Speaker 04

  I did not personally feel afraid.

• 24:50Speaker 03

  Is that what you thought, is that what started to kind of create the gaps?

• 24:56Speaker 04

  Well, like when, when, when you're a kid, you're not like looking forward to everything ending. Everything's beginning and you're like, how do I start stuff? And what do I, like, I want to make things. That feels like a beginning and that's a very different perspective than, so I was always aware that I didn't share my community's perspective on how to look at the world because I wanted to start things and I felt optimistic. I don't know why exactly, but I felt optimistic about maybe making things.

• 25:33Speaker 03

  Was there a break from you, between you and that community at a certain point?

• 25:37Speaker 04

  Oh, absolutely.

• 25:38Speaker 03

  Like a, like a discreet break or was it a long drawn out?

• 25:42Speaker 04

  Both, both, but there was a, yeah, there was a discreet break. There was a, yeah.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  How old were you?

• 25:48Speaker 04

  I was 17 and then I went back when I was 19. And I said, you know, I'm going to give it six more months. I'm going to try. I don't, why isn't this working for me? Why can't I do it? And I see a bunch of other people can do it. Why can't I do this?

• 26:03Speaker 03

  All your people.

• 26:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:04Speaker 03

  Like your people you love.

• 26:05Speaker 04

  Those are my people, this is my family. Why can't my family do it and I can't do it? What's wrong with me? That's what it felt like. And I went back, I spent six months. I committed to six months. I said, I'm going to go back, I'm going to try again. And I'm going to commit to six months to make sure I know that I'm not just like following some, you know, bad mood that day. On, by day two, I knew it wasn't going to work. But I spent all six months because I'd committed to it. And I was like, I'm sticking this out. And then I left and then that was the last, that was the last time I, yeah, that was, then, then I really left.

• 26:41Speaker 03

  Where did you go when you left?

• 26:46Speaker 04

  The first thing I did is I got, you know, got a job with the Forest Service. Classic Alaska job. A great job. We were flown to work every day in a helicopter, was hiking around the top of mountains. It was an awesome job. And then, you know, I went to some of the nearest places. I went to Anchorage for a little bit. I went to Anchorage, Alaska a little bit. I went to Seattle for a bit and, you know, not, not too far away places I could find a job. Turns out, growing up in the bush means you have lots of handy skills.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're not useless.

• 27:15Speaker 04

  No, and turns out everyone needs something built or made somewhere, so.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  Wait, like what?

• 27:20Speaker 04

  Like, you know, I, I got a job renovating apartments and it turned out they really liked me because I could do almost every single piece of the thing. I could replace windows, I could replace the trim, I could paint the thing. I was like, well, I can swing a hammer and I wasn't like, this is my life. But I was like, this is the next thing.

• 27:42Speaker 03

  Did you, in your, in your twenties, did you find yourself sort of gravitating to different systems to try them out, like churches or?

• 27:50Speaker 04

  No, not really. I, I mean, I briefly, I would occasionally eyeball other systems briefly. But very briefly, I wasn't like, I'm now lost without that system and have to get found or get saved or have some whole structure. I was like, I'm just going to move without the structure and find out what happens. Because I was curious about that. I was like, am I just immediately going to start murdering and raping people without a system? What's going to happen? Am I, is that, turns out, no.

• 28:30Speaker 04

  Just because you don't have a system doesn't mean that there isn't some built in, you know, human sense of, of, of what is right in the world or what is right for you. And it turned out.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  But there are some rules that you'll break.

• 28:47Speaker 04

  Oh, lots, absolutely, lots of rules. But the rules are mostly made up and the rules are mostly something we get to choose about. And I feel that that's not like a burden to navigate. I feel like it's a privilege to get to navigate that and to get to play with. So most of the boundaries that we have in the world are, we've all sort of collectively agreed or agreed to not think about them. We're really good at.

• 29:16Speaker 04

  I'm really good at just being a river that carves a course. And once we have a deep channel, you just keep flowing in the same channel of thought that you've always flowed in. That's super easy to do. I didn't want to be stuck in the river. I was like, how do I, how do I find the edge and climb up and stick my eyes over the edge of this channel that my mind has carved? How do you get out of your own mind in your own space? And the answer to that for me was through generosity.

• 29:48Speaker 03

  Okay, tell me about that.

• 29:50Speaker 04

  I found that I hadn't, I felt really powerless when I was, so for example, when I was leaving my community, I felt really powerless. Or at other times in life, I felt, often felt very powerless. And in those times, I found that one of the things that really worked for me was to act with generosity towards things that maybe didn't deserve the generosity. Someone you hate, if you can be generous towards them, or someone who hates you, if you are generous towards them, they have no power over that part of the thing that you control. You, weirdly enough, are outside of all of their jurisdiction when you're acting with generosity.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  You're taking your power back by giving away things.

• 30:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, yes.

• 30:40Speaker 03

  Can you give me like a concrete example of when you first started to see like, oh, this is a hack here. If I can figure out how to be generous in this interaction or this relationship, like what was one of the first things you, where you gave it that name?

• 30:58Speaker 04

  Okay, I think I can, I think I can name, I think I can name an early example. I had, I had a moment in my early twenties where I was with a group of friends and I was tired of my problems or being, feeling stuck in my head. And I found that making a generous surprise for my friends was, I don't know why I initially started doing that, but I think I did that because I was just curious. I was like curious to how they would react. So first there was curiosity. And then my friends experiencing the surprise and me seeing their joy at being, having something small but generous made for them.

• 31:42Speaker 04

  Like that made me realize that the entire time and process that I'd spent making this little surprise for them, that was all time in which I was like really alive. I think we call that flow state. I wasn't worried about my problems and I wasn't in any state of fear. And so there was a moment where the house that my parents built in the wilderness of Alaska, that was only meant to last five years because the end was coming, started to fall into the swamp. The foundation rotted because it was just a bunch of stumps. My father built the house, it was built on a bunch of stumps.

• 32:27Speaker 04

  Well, 25 years later, the stumps were rotting and the house was falling into the swamp. And that was a moment where I wasn't on speaking terms with my parents, but I decided that, I was like, you know, here's the thing I can do. I can go back and put a foundation under their house. And that is an act of generosity that I can do that they won't have any control over how I get to give and what I'm giving.

• 32:55Speaker 04

  And that's the only way I know to like work on repairing our relationship. And so I spent a summer, that was the first time I went back to Alaska, and I spent a summer crawling through the mud under my parents' house, dragging giant beams into the trenches, jacking the entire house up and then pouring the cement foundation and setting the house back down on the cement.

• 33:18Speaker 03

  Personally rebuilding the foundation of your family home.

• 33:21Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  It's very on the nose.

• 33:39Speaker 03

  Coming up, Indy finds a home in New York City. And he tells me about a current project he's working on. It's one that has sparked a lot of conversations for me around the dinner table. How would you feel if you found out that your friends were paying for someone to secretly create good luck for you for six years?

• 34:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, we had a lot of long conversations about what the ethical boundary was.

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• 34:50Speaker 05

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• 36:23Speaker 03

  Indy Austin moved to New York City in his late twenties. He said he was immediately attracted to the energy and also to the sense that there were places to uncover and to infiltrate, boundaries to be played with.

• 36:36Speaker 04

  I'd never been to a place where I was like, oh, there's a space here to make something. I think part of the exploring what this place is as a foreigner to the city definitely is just physically moving around through the city. But part of it is exploring what people's norms and rules are. And it's very interesting to see who cares about what. And so on some streets, it doesn't matter what buildings are on the street. There's like an eagle eyed old lady sitting in the window. Oh, you're right, you know it.

• 37:20Speaker 04

  And she knows everything that's going on in the street and there's nothing like, she is watching. Other streets, though, no one's watching and no one cares. So I'd be like, why? And I couldn't always tell why, it wasn't obvious to me why one should be in one place versus the other. So, so number one, I was just like, who cares about what?

• 37:41Speaker 04

  And the moment you start asking yourself, who cares about what? You start seeing all the cracks and the gaps. And there are cracks in the care all over the city. And when you go into those cracks, that's where you find space to make transformation happen or space to bring some love and attention. And that love and attention is really transformative and really powerful.

• 38:08Speaker 03

  Do you remember the first experience that somebody offered to compensate you for that you did?

• 38:14Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 38:17Speaker 04

  No one's ever asked me this question. I think it was this guy who came to a friend's birthday party where I had done a tiny little photo scavenger hunt thing, a little miniature version of these scavenger hunts that we would do, where we'd get a bunch of friends together and we'd do these photo scavenger hunts where everyone gets a little disposable camera and 10 captions to photos that don't exist yet.

• 38:42Speaker 04

  And then we'd send them out into the city and then all congregate back at somebody's apartment and go through all the photos.

• 38:48Speaker 03

  Oh my God, how fun.

• 38:49Speaker 04

  So like an example would be, a caption would be like, look how many fit in here.

• 38:56Speaker 04

  Something like that.

• 38:59Speaker 04

  And this guy came to one of these things, just a fun thing we're doing for friends. And he was like, can you do like a birthday party? And I said, no, I don't think so.

• 39:12Speaker 04

  I'd love to hire you to do this birthday party. I said, I don't, I don't think so. But maybe there is something you need that I could make. And then we talked about it and it ended up that what he really wanted wasn't a big birthday party. He really wanted to do something special for his girlfriend. And I was like, I can help you make a really good gift. But that process, I didn't know I was doing a design process. I was just having a talk to figure out what the thing was. But that actually turned out to be what a design process is, where you spend time with someone to actually learn what they really need, or where they wish to end up, or how they want the people to feel when they're done. And usually people can answer those questions.

• 39:56Speaker 04

  Usually people know, oh, I want my people to feel this kind of way. Or I hope, my hope is this kind of feeling. And almost always you can engineer a path towards that state.

• 40:11Speaker 03

  I live in the Bay Area and I hear the word design a lot around.

• 40:16Speaker 04

  Can we find a better one?

• 40:18Speaker 03

  Well, I think the thing that I'm sort of struck by after hearing you talk is, as a designer, like you are, how different the manifestation of what you design, what it is, because you have generosity at the core, instead of designing for clicks or growth or, and, and so it makes me curious just how you, when you're around like tech people who talk about design and I imagine you think about design thinking and a lot of that comes out of the tech world, are they people with whom you feel camaraderie?

• 41:02Speaker 03

  Do you feel like you're on the other side of the fence from them because you don't share sort of fundamental values? How do you feel?

• 41:13Speaker 04

  Oh, I am fundamentally part of the resistance.

• 41:15Speaker 03

  You are?

• 41:16Speaker 04

  Oh, absolutely. Yes. Like.

• 41:23Speaker 03

  Do you feel like you're studying their tools to like be part of the resistance?

• 41:27Speaker 04

  No.

• 41:28Speaker 03

  No.

• 41:28Speaker 04

  No, their tools are not very useful.

• 41:29Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 41:30Speaker 04

  No, their tools are about getting. I don't know. I, I'm, I'm not Amish. I use, I use a phone when I need to, or I'll use tech as necessary, but there's very little of use to learn about tools that are attempting to get, I think, for me. I, I almost never feel inspired by tools that are designed to capture your attention, to take something from you, to convince you of something. I grew up with weapons-grade attention capturing tools, and so most of the tech stuff doesn't resonate for me.

• 42:13Speaker 04

  If it had any generosity at its core, or any connection to beauty, maybe there'd be something there. But most of the tech stuff that comes out of the Bay Area is remarkably uninterested in beauty and remarkably uninterested in creating something generous in the world.

• 42:39Speaker 03

  Did you have to figure out, this is a crass question.

• 42:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:41Speaker 03

  But I'm just curious.

• 42:42Speaker 04

  Go.

• 42:43Speaker 03

  Having, having done it as a way of caring for your community, or the way that you socialized, and then it becomes something that you're selling, how did you figure out your rate?

• 42:53Speaker 04

  Number one, I'm not selling the thing. People are coming to me and asking me to do something for them, so I'm not like.

• 42:59Speaker 03

  You're not out hustling.

• 43:00Speaker 04

  Or it doesn't, the hustle's very different. It doesn't work like that. Like, I'm not like specifically attempting to get a lot of new clients. I'm trying to make work for the people that I can really make a difference for. And that isn't everybody, and that won't, and it shouldn't be. One time, I once gave someone, I once told someone that I thought what they really needed was to go on a cruise, take a Disney cruise.

• 43:24Speaker 04

  And it was, I think it was true. It was truly what I actually.

• 43:26Speaker 03

  Designed, but in a designed experience.

• 43:28Speaker 04

  I thought, this is actually what you should do. They were like, no, but what, shouldn't, what? Are I supposed to want the artisanal bespoke thing? And I was like, oh, I don't know. I think actually you'll get everything you need from that cruise. They had a great time on the cruise.

• 43:41Speaker 03

  Do you, when you are approached by, by paying clients, like, how much work do you say no to? And is there a pattern to what you say? Like, I don't need to do that.

• 43:53Speaker 04

  I don't think there's any real pattern, but I have some personal formulas or something, or like criteria, which is not always necessary, but I have them if I need them. So sometimes someone comes to me and they want something, and it's not clear to me if it's something I can contribute to or not, or I don't know what the path in is yet. And so then I start asking myself some questions, or I can ask them some questions. So for example, I know just off the bat that I'm very motivated by generosity. I love place, so things that arise out of place are really potent. Intimacy is very important to me, and I love making intimate experiences, even if they're large scale.

• 44:35Speaker 04

  So sometimes we make something for thousands of people, but there'll be real intimate moments in it. And of course, transgression.

• 44:44Speaker 03

  Transgression.

• 44:45Speaker 04

  If people are willing to transgress. Doesn't have to mean physically. I think trespassing is really easy to point to because it's very photogenic. More complicated to talk about is other kinds of transgression. So.

• 44:56Speaker 03

  Like what?

• 44:57Speaker 04

  Emotional transgression, or perhaps consent transgression.

• 45:04Speaker 03

  An experience Indy is working on now plays with consent. In 2019, he was approached by a group of friends.

• 45:13Speaker 04

  This woman came to me and said, I've got a friend who is really depressed, and she has really terrible luck. Is she depressed because she has terrible luck, or does she have terrible luck because she's always depressed? Well, chicken, egg.

• 45:31Speaker 03

  They asked Indy to make their friend a party. It seems like the first experience people usually ask for, and the one Indy says no to the most frequently, is a party. Indy thought about it and proposed something different, to focus on changing how their friend perceived her life.

• 45:50Speaker 04

  I think the way to do this is long-term. So if we made some luck occur in her life, in some respect, it feels to me like luck is actually just pretty mechanical and procedural. And for example, like if you had an uncle who like had some good connections to the thing, and your uncle was just like, hey, I got you hooked up with the thing, the tickets to the thing, you'd be like, wow, I'm so lucky. But like, no one else has got that uncle. You just happen to have the uncle. Wow, that's great. But that's like some coincidence you can't control. But maybe I could pretend to be the uncle for this person and hook him up with some stuff.

• 46:34Speaker 04

  And maybe it would have that sensation of feeling like you're really fortunate.

• 46:38Speaker 03

  Things are going your way.

• 46:39Speaker 04

  Maybe.

• 46:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:41Speaker 04

  I'm only guessing, but I said, if you will commit to funding this for six years, I'll commit to doing it. And what we'll do is we'll make serendipity, good luck, happen in the life of your friend.

• 46:58Speaker 04

  But you can't tell her that you're doing this to her. Until year six, you have to decide. And then you have to decide whether you tell her or don't tell her, and how. And then the, the very first thing, the very first thing we did, they were like, she has a terrible job. Her boss hates her and is horrible. And she's a designer who's working with this company that like was awful. You've heard of them and they suck.

• 47:31Speaker 04

  And her friends were like, she's too depressed to get a new job. Like, and she doesn't believe that like anyone would hire her, blah, blah, blah. I was like, that's gotta be so easy. I was like, we can fix that. Of course, I didn't know what I was talking about, but they knew that.

• 47:47Speaker 04

  I'm making something for the first time and it's new for me, and it's new for you. We're both going into a journey into a thing that we, neither of us has done before.

• 47:54Speaker 03

  Agreeing to try.

• 47:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:55Speaker 03

  You don't know what the outcome will be. Yeah.

• 47:58Speaker 04

  Well, we have, we have an outcome we're shooting for. I was like, this is super logistical. We find, hire the person who rewrites her resume and makes it like look good. You can just hire that person. And then we made sure that the resume got in front of like the people who needed to see it, and those people forwarded it to some other people. And eventually, one day, she just gets a call from this company. It's like, hey, we saw some of your work. We think you look cool. Want to just come talk to us? Okay. She went and, she went and talked to them. They were like, you're great. You're hired.

• 48:29Speaker 03

  It's interesting because that could be perceived as care, and it can be perceived as like manipulation.

• 48:37Speaker 04

  Yes. Okay. So now you're getting into some of the ethical and philosophical issues here. So is it, or at what point is it no longer caring to make a surprise for someone that you're lying to them about? And people do this all the time, where you're making a special surprise. And so you're not going to tell them what's happening on their birthday, on the special thing. But then what happens if you extend that for two years? And now you're keeping a secret for two years. What happens if you extend that for six years? Is it still okay? Is it past, is it beyond some boundary for you?

• 49:17Speaker 04

  And also, what happens when she finds out? Is she going to think that all her friends really love her? Or is she going to think that all her friends are super manipulative? How's it going to read? One of the things I decided was that I didn't ever want to do anything to her. We can make opportunities available, but if she doesn't bite, then maybe it wasn't for her. We've done some, you know, we did some amazing things for her. It was really.

• 49:43Speaker 03

  How many years then?

• 49:45Speaker 04

  Six.

• 49:47Speaker 03

  When's the decision?

• 49:48Speaker 04

  Almost, almost. Very soon.

• 49:51Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 49:53Speaker 03

  Do you want them to tell her?

• 49:55Speaker 04

  I don't think I get to want one way or the other way. I, I don't, or I don't want to have to want. I don't want to have to, yeah, I think it isn't my decision and it shouldn't be. And I don't, and I know if I start wanting, I might unconsciously start influencing them one way or the other, and I don't want to steer them. They have to decide what their friendship, how their friendship works, and what that looks like, and, and what that means for them.

• 50:19Speaker 03

  Have there been?

• 50:24Speaker 03

  When you think back on your body of work, have there been unintended consequences that you just didn't foresee as a designer?

• 50:34Speaker 04

  Always. I think always.

• 50:36Speaker 03

  And are there any that sort of haunt you?

• 50:41Speaker 04

  Oh, absolutely. But the ones that haunt me the most are like,

• 50:50Speaker 04

  like the ones where I lost friendships, where I feel like we went through this experience together and some part of how we grew in going through this experience made us grow apart.

• 51:06Speaker 04

  Also, there's another unintended consequence that I think I experience a lot, which is

• 51:12Speaker 04

  it's so good. People want more of it and don't know to like not want too much of it, because how do you draw that boundary exactly? And so people are like, hey, can we stay here always? Can we be here forever? Or can we have this all the time? Or this was so good, what if this is what I do forever? And this is the thing. So I think sometimes the only difference between some of my work and what I realize my parents were doing is that I have end states and end time and end dates on my things. Everything I make ends. That's why I love the magic circle. That's why I love the space in which the rules are different and the rules are particular. And then we go in there, wherever that is.

• 51:54Speaker 04

  We describe the boundaries of the thing. Now, I'm talking about experience design theory. But anyway, we go in there, we spend some time in there, and then we come back out.

• 52:03Speaker 03

  When you say magic circle, I'm like, what does that mean? What are magic circles? You're reminding me of, when I was a child, I went to summer camp and I was one of those kids who just bawled the last night of summer camp because I didn't want it to end. But of course, the reason it was precious was because it was ending.

• 52:22Speaker 04

  Much like human life.

• 52:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:24Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 52:24Speaker 03

  Like, I can't remember the last day of third grade or fourth grade or sixth grade, but I can remember the physical feeling of like hugging my, you know, tent mates and bawling and just like appreciating what it was we shared because it was ending.

• 52:39Speaker 04

  That's very human. Often in my tiny bar, my little three-person bar.

• 52:45Speaker 03

  Toll booth bar, right?

• 52:46Speaker 04

  Toll booth, yeah. Often in the tiny three-person threesome toll booth, you know? We have a magical time together. We have some really good cocktails. And there's just the three of us. And you're like, I don't want to leave. I want to stay here. This is actually perfect. And I empathize with that. And I also think it's really important to not spend the rest of your life lost, trapped inside the...

• 53:14Speaker 03

  The toll booth.

• 53:15Speaker 04

  The toll booth.

• 53:23Speaker 03

  That's Indy Austin, an experienced designer living in New York City. And thank you to skateboarder Tony Hawk for being game to talk to us about Indy too.

• 53:36Speaker 03

  This episode was produced by Zoe Azulay. Thank you also to Jeremy S. Bloom and Stefan Zenuck. You heard a little of the music Stefan composed to accompany Indy's experiences, one in the sewer, another on a tugboat. The rest of the episode, as always, was mixed and engineered by Andrew Dunn. Cameron Drews is also on the Death, Sex and Money team. Daisy Rosario is our senior supervising producer. Mia Lobel is the head of Slate Podcasts and Hillary Fry is Slate's editor in chief. You can support the production of our show by joining our membership program, Slate Plus. And I hope you will if you haven't already. You get bonus episodes of our show and other Slate shows like Decoder Ring and How To.

• 54:19Speaker 03

  And you also can listen to Slate's full podcast catalog ad-free. Subscribe directly from the Death, Sex and Money show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or visit slate.com/dsmplus to get access wherever you listen. Our theme music is by the Reverend John Delour and Steve Lewis. If you're new to our show, welcome. We're glad you're here. Find us and follow us on Instagram, @deathsexmoney. I write a weekly newsletter. You can subscribe to it at annasale.substack.com. And you can reach us anytime at the show with voice memos, pep talks, questions, or critiques at our email address, [email protected]. We love hearing from you.

• 55:04Speaker 03

  Indy also told me that for one day in his life, he worked a desk job. It didn't last long.

• 55:11Speaker 04

  I went to a temp agency and they're like, okay, fill out this form and then you are just going to be on call. Got a job where for one day I went and sat at a desk in the front of this some really horrible booze company that was selling this pink vodka. And I spent a whole day sitting at this desk in front of a phone that never rang. No one came in. No one wanted this vodka.

• 55:35Speaker 04

  I went back to the temp agency and I was like, I think I'm in the wrong place. I did that job one day. As I left that job, they gave me a bottle of the pink vodka. They're like, you haven't tried it? I was like, well, I haven't been clubbing lately.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  I'm Anna Sale and this is Death, Sex and Money from Slate.

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