The Tim Ferriss Show - #467: Dustin Yellin on Making Art, Weaving Madness, and Forging Your Own Path

Episode Date: September 25, 2020

“I don’t worry about inspiration as much as system overload.” — Dustin YellinDustin Yellin (@dustinyellin) 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. 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).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! Wealthfront pioneered the automated investing movement, sometimes referred to as ‘robo-advising,’ and they currently oversee $20 billion of assets for their clients. It takes about three minutes to sign up, and then Wealthfront will build you a globally diversified portfolio of ETFs based on your risk appetite and manage it for you at an incredibly low cost. Smart investing should not feel like a rollercoaster ride. Let the professionals do the work for you. Go to Wealthfront.com/Tim and open a Wealthfront account today, and you’ll get your first $5,000 managed for free, for life. Wealthfront will automate your investments for the long term. Get started today at Wealthfront.com/Tim.*This episode is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I’ve been using ExpressVPN since last summer to make sure that my data is secure and encrypted, without slowing my Internet speed.A great way to ensure that all of your data is encrypted and can’t be easily read by hackers is by using ExpressVPN. All you need to do is download the ExpressVPN app on your computer or smartphone and then use the Internet just as you normally would. You click one button in the ExpressVPN app to secure 100% of your network data. Use my link ExpressVPN.com/Tim today and get an extra three months free on a one-year package!***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

It's a beautiful, beautiful facility. So if and when you can check it out, I highly recommend. He and his incredible work have been featured by media and organizations worldwide, including the New York Times, Artforum, Vanity Fair, and TED. Okay, so here we go. The next paragraph will make a lot more sense if you first go to DustinYelen.com and look at psychogiography or Google Dustin Yellen psychogiography 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 photo montage 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 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 psycho-geography. 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 going to mispronounce a bunch of stuff here. Could be

Amore Pacific, A-M-O-R-E, 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 or 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. You can find him again on Instagram at Dustin Yellen or at dustinyellen.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 Yellen. This episode is brought to you by Xero, Z-E-R-O, the world's most popular fasting app. Long-term listeners will know that I take fasting very seriously. I've studied it. I've practiced it. I do three-day fasts. I do seven to 10-day fasts every year,

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applied. One last time, zerofasting.com slash Tim. 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. It 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

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That's expressvpn.com slash Tim. One more time, check out expressvpn.com slash Tim to learn more. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement 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 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.

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check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seen an appropriate time. I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal end nostalgia. The Tim Ferriss Show. Dustin, welcome to the show. Thank you.

Very happy to be here. 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. Well, I actually don't remember. I was in Colorado. I had 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. 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 car that I paid for with my own money. So, you know, you're going to have to give me some cash, which I then spent on drugs, sex and rock and roll and

just went bananas. 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, so 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 Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and having my own sort of woodstock in 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 going to live on this island. And then that kind of at some point scared me because I was like, whoa, I'm so detached from what I once knew. And then I went back to Colorado and met that crazy physicist.

So we're going to get to the crazy physicist. I want to leave that just as a cliffhanger for folks for a second. Let's go back to the swatch watches for a minute. In 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. I mean, honestly, your bio is just hilariously fascinating and almost unbelievable to me. At some point later, 30 years later, you end up somehow breakdancing in Jay-Z's 2013

Picasso baby video. I mean, it's hard for me to even connect these, but where does the hustle come from? The entrepreneurial hustle that I think has served you well in a whole lot of different areas? You know, I don't know where it comes from. I think perhaps it was always there. I have no idea. I guess it's in my DNA. I don't know. Do your parents or any siblings have similar programming, that type of entrepreneurial make something from nothing? Both my parents have a bit of that. And I've had it, I guess. I mean, and my ma left my pub 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. 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? 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. 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 wild. And then, of course, I think my father was completely horrified and my mother was just praying I would get through it. So let's segue back to physicists. So how do you meet this physicist and who is this person? You know, it was very unusual circumstances. I returned from Thailand to Colorado. And this woman that I was very fond of and dated 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 so again, getting introduced to all this new stuff. And I told her I wanted to meet him. And I met him. And he was maybe the first adult to turn me on to

cultural lighthouses like Pablo Neruda or Dostoevsky or 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 was watching him because he was trying to make free energy. So he was really, really out there and also really, really brilliant. And that made me really, really interested to learn from him.

He finally accepted me to learn from him and we would have just conversations and do mushrooms and LSD together and just have these long conversations. And then he, basically he was like putting me into a closet on a saline solution bed with a quartz crystal on my chest, listening to whales. And he was like, look, you're going to think I killed you. You're going to think you're dead. You're going to think I'm a pathological murderer and that I've killed you. Don't you worry, it'll pass. And he would inject me with ketamine. And I didn't know. This is straight up altered states. 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 scientists that I was working with. And I'm having these crazy out-of-body experiences where I'm leaving my body in this sort of pure consciousness state, and I'm becoming one cell in my arm, and then I'm one star, and then I'm fractalized into billions of little pieces, recombobulating, 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 to New York. How so? How did those send you to New York? Well, this blew my mind because I'm making these crazy paintings. I'm making art constantly at this point. When did that start? Sorry to interrupt, but when did the artwork start? Well, I mean, I always made weird shit, but I never really thought about it as anything. I would make little drawings, or I'd make things out of rocks and sticks and things I found in the forest, which actually I've been doing all week this week, so nothing's really changed in a long time.

So I guess I was always doing that. But by the time I was 17 or so, I was like, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to make art. And I didn't really know about art history yet. I mean, I might have known who Andy Warhol is or Picasso or Matisse, but I really knew nothing. But art felt like the greatest freedom because it felt like something you could, it was completely free. You could invent whatever and you were never limited to the thing you invented because you could go and invent something else. And then after I met the physicist, I became obsessed with the

sciences because I was like, holy shit, this whole world is a hallucination. Everything's been invented. Therefore, we can just build some crazy utopic vision of what we think it should look like on this planet. And so the art became almost like the voice and the science became like the tactic or something. I don't know. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think that are you saying the art was sort of the inspiration or the muse and the science was the sort of means by which you expressed whatever had around. And if you could get everybody around a fire, then you could start to build these more complex systems, which could be scaling clean energy or, you know, various new forms of political systems. Now, you 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 high salt content,

it's like half your body is kind of suspended. I wasn't actually in the baths like John Lilly. I was on a saline solution bed in a dark room. Oh, I see. All right. That's a lot safer. Okay. A similar feeling, but a lot safer, precisely. Yeah. Now, during those experiences, you said that some of what was imparted or experienced led you to New York. How is that? Well, I think I was feeding, if you will, these enormous delusions of grandeur where I'm like,

everything is possible. 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 going to, that's what's going to 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. That's where people were, because I was in a small town and the kids were drinking beer on the mountainside, talking about hockey. And I was like, I need to get the fuck out of here. And how did you then find your way or fund your way, both, I guess, at that time to New York,

right? How are you making ends meet? I went there without really knowing anyone or anything and found a, you know, and my mom was very generous. And she said, look, I'll help you with putting like a very cheap roof over your head. And then you need to figure it out. So I went there and found like, I basically rented through, I think it was like Craigslist or the Village Voice. I found a room. It was more like a closet from some dude in Soho. And I lived in this little tiny room and he was very generous and gave me another room to make paintings in. And again, I was young and wild and I was just making these crazy abex. I didn't

even know what abex, abstract expressionism probably was at the time. But looking back, I was making these weird abex paintings and renting this little closet room from this guy and out every night like a wild man and somehow talked my way into these bars and places. At the time, it was a place called the Bowery Bar and a place called Spy. And I don't know, I was very lucky because I met all these amazing people right off the boat, so to speak.

A lot of them are still in my life today. So yeah, I don't know how that happened. I just, I met people right away. Well, I mean, it sounds like you went to the action and then you sort of entered yourself as one of the lottery balls in that spinning container of a thousand other lottery balls and bumped into a lot, which would be viewed as serendipity, but you kind of engineered it by going to the center of the action. What year, roughly, do you recall when you got to New York? 94, I think.

94. All right. And when did you first feel like, and maybe you felt this all along, but from the standpoint of keeping you afloat financially, when was the first inkling that you felt art could do that for you? Well, in my mind coming to New York, I thought, oh, of course, it would be so easy. Once I got to New York, that wasn't the case. And talk about hustle. I mean, I'd be like, buy this painting for me, $2,000, $2,000.

No, no, no, buy the painting, $1,000, $1,000. $500, 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. Cause 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, then maybe it would become a plague. Did you say a plague? Yeah, yeah, yeah, because it's like a plague. It's like a disease art. If I could get really one person, if you 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 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 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, cartwheels and somersaults through the bar. And I had long hair and beards and beads. You know what I mean? I was out there. I was meeting people who were also teaching me. That's where I got my education, really, was from the people I was meeting. How many pieces of artwork would you guess you gave away for free or close to free? Dozens,

hundreds, A handful? I don't know. Multiple dozens? Yeah. I don't know. Maybe 50, 100? Who knows? Some of that stuff will appear nowadays or someone will call me out of the blue and be like, I have this painting from 95 and I'm like, can you fucking burn it? Good on them for holding on to it. Oh, no.

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

If not, I can give you. I was obsessed with F. Scott Fitzgerald and then, of course, Zelda Fitzgerald. And so for some reason, I was having what one could call a mild psychotic break. moment where I thought that everyone knew each other, that everyone was almost playing a joke on each other that they didn't know each other. Almost this idea of the seven daughters of Eve, where we all came from the same mother, but now there's billions of us. And then I thought everyone was pretending not to know. So I would walk by a restaurant and I would wave at everybody thinking like, hey, everybody. And they would all look at me weird.

It was really weird. And I was adding up things. So like if I saw you, Tim, I'd be like, Tim, T equals 20. I is whatever it is. M is 13. And I'd add up your name. And I thought there was this numerical meaning. And 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. Have you seen the video, The Crackup?

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 onto the Forbes boat. And I'm like, this is my boat. And the guy's like, what are you talking about? Like, this is my boat. And I kind of thought like, this is my world. And he was like, what are you talking about? Are you related to the Forbes family? And I was like, yes, directly. F-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 realized I was bananas and then he kicked me off the boat

and then I this was like on Chelsea Piers and then I walked over to the Chelsea Piers golf range where they hit the balls you know and I literally just in the night time by myself filming walked onto the field and started kicking the golf balls

and walked up to the guy driving the vehicle used to pick up the balls. And I said to him, and I used the wrong words because I said, I need to reprimand your vehicle. You were trying to say requisition, I guess. Totally. The guy was like, are you crazy? I'm like, no, 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. And then 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 to let the kids use the frogs and the dinosaurs and the microscopes. And 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 Crack-Up, which was like a

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 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, 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. 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 it was amazing so alright so amazing is definitely one word there are many descriptors one could use

the video the crack up and then it makes sense well I'll check out the video to those listening I suppose a few at least would think to themselves, holy fucking God, that is terrifying. Two questions for you. Number one is, was that out of left field, psychotic break? Was it precipitated by something? So that's number one. And number two is, have you ever gone so far to the shore of chaos and psychosis that you've scared yourself? 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 also just say like, oh, well, 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. 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?

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

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work, 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 12-year-old boy. And you're telling this story that completely captivated and mesmerized, I want to say this 12-year-old boy, and the parents were just not sure what to make of it. And I thought the whole thing was hilarious because you're telling a story about, I want to say LSD and swimming from one place to another, or I can't recall exactly, but does that ring any bell at all? Something involving swimming and hallucinations?

Let me think. I mean... something involving swimming and hallucinogens? Let me think. 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. 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 also in 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. 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 you seem to be a fan of a werner hartzog there are certainly others but like 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 oh well there's so, 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 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—the infinite detail in our existence is so vast that if you can be aware of it and process it, then somehow you might be able to describe it, and then that could become a captivating story. And if you put yourself in those places often, it becomes a great medium, I guess. So I'm constantly throwing myself into the depths of the Amazon or papua new guinea or africa or all kinds of weird places always like i'm 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 anybody, a musician, a writer, a data scientist.

I don't know if that answers the question. Yeah, that's kind of secondary if what you say answers the question, I think. If it's important, I'll come back to it. It's more of a prompt, what I say. I'm just kind of like a Buzz Lightyear pole doll that's trying to keep things moving in certain directions or any direction. But the observation that you made about 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 can imagine hallucinogens allowing, dropping, or widening the aperture of your reducing valve so that you're seeing a lot of what is-

That's amazing. You literally just said what I always say. I even said it to someone 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. Have you found anything outside of hallucinogens to help you to widen the aperture so that you can? Absolutely. I mean, when I'm drawing, you know, people have been trying to get me to meditate. And I think I've done it, but not in a traditional sense. And a lot of folks would say meditation will take you very much to the same place.

Nature. I mean, just, you know, I've been out here hiking every day in the river. I think being conscious, take the hallucinogens out of it completely, but somehow just being conscious 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 or be conscious of any experience is the same as potentially intaking in a hallucinogen. 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? Well, I think, I don't know is what I would say. I would say, yes, I've been extraordinary 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. So I've been very lucky and I'm very grateful for that. I think I'm also very cautious. I'm not doing lots of hard drugs. 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 do that by not just rolling snake eyes every time, but by just being open and curious, which is, I think, the great way for how people learn is by just being curious. I totally agree. And I'm going to dig a little bit more. Well, I'm going to dig a lot more 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 the superpowers or idiosyncrasies that allow people to break the normal molds of society and achieve unusual things, 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, because it 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 Tom Rice is winning. Amazing writer. Yeah. You got to meet Tom. 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? Well, sure. I mean, I think that the species is pretty incredible. And just the way I'm inspired by nature constantly, I'm inspired by people and people are part of nature and so when i fall in

love with well like tom's books is a great example and tom is a great example but you know you could go just down the list and line of incredible souls making amazing drawings and paintings and movies and records and math problems and all of it, all of that stuff to me is fucking amazing, incredible, magnetic material that can help propel you through the world. So I just want to get turned on more and more and more to all the cool potential that can be unleashed by certain combinations of, I don't know if it's neural activity or if it's, you know, meta fucking cloud. 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? 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 dreaming that how do we help realize everybody's dreams together in some collective orgy of dreams? 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? I don't know if there's anything great, specific schism that led me there, except that sort of corny, silly idea that there's love and fear. We can all love each other, or we can all fear each other. And it seems so simple. We can all come together and say, look, we're going to figure out how to be stewards to this planet together and create great clean technologies and great responsible ways for eight or 10 billion people to live together. Or we could create conflict and, I guess, competition and territorialism. And I feel like the idea of a country, which is kind of arbitrary and new, and religions and sort of different ways in which we draw lines around thought and can maybe create

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

my life. That in itself would, I could spend a hundred years doing, just that or just watching French films or just learning about specific plants. There's so much to learn and to be exposed to and 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? Like, oh, what pain or 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 possibly maybe perceive and you know huuxley's a great example, an amazing, amazing brain, then how do you mitigate system overload? And so where my challenges have been, I think, is that I'm always trying to widen that aperture. And then at the same time, I'm like, oh, but I should have some kids. And wouldn't it be nice to do things that happen in the world that maybe require a little closing of the aperture or something to focus

because it feels like just this endless, infinite, awesome sea of possibility that is always where you are. What have you found to help, if anything, with system overload? Because for you as someone who feels the world deeply and who willingly wants to widen and maintain the width of your aperture, this is just an ongoing, in a sense, like an onslaught of input.

So what do you do? What are some of the things that you've found to be helpful for preventing complete overwhelm? I like to draw and I like to be in the middle of nowhere and I like to smoke marijuana. 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. 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 films that come to mind that are films you've recommended a lot or watched over and over again? Yeah, I often recommend a movie called Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog. I highly recommend that and many of Werner's movies. There's a great movie that's really funny. I don't know if you've seen this movie, Tim, called Bad Boy Bubby. No, I have not.

I like the title, though. Australian movie, 1993, I believe. Bad Boy Bubby. that's a cool movie another movie called the color of pomegranates i i can never say his name parhajanov it's a he's an armenian director um you know i love hal ashby's being there he also made herald and Maude. I mean, Jesus, movies. Claude Chabrol is a great French director. Obviously Kubrick. Watch all of Kubrick's movies and Tarkovsky's movies.

And Tarkovsky wrote a great book about filmmaking called Sculpting in Time. 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? Not only that movie, but there's a great documentary

about the making of the movie called Burden of Dreams. Burden of Dreams? Yeah, by 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, to get out of the jungle, they have to carry a boat over a mountain, which I think is just a great metaphor for what it's like to be alive. Well, it sounds also a lot like building Pioneer Works. Can you just describe how did Pioneer Works, for people who don't have any idea, no visual in their mind of what Pioneer works is, maybe you could just tell, describe what it is and then describe what it was. Because I've visited in person and it's spectacular, but that is not how things began. Can you describe it for people? What it is now?

Yeah, what it is now and then rewind and talk about what... Well, you can do neither. What it was and what it is now or what it is now and what it was. However you want to approach it. Well, I mean, I think it was just a hallucination and a dream. And it's... Genesis, I think, is no... 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 together like why wasn't and i again didn't go to high school i didn't go to college and so maybe subliminally or sublimely or somehow this was a way for me to incarnate what i wished to be or wish to experience at some point but but i didn't i never understood why isn't there a place where just everybody's together trying to think about how we build this world together? So it started very much as just an obvious question, I guess. Like, why doesn't this exist? And when I was younger, I started having roommates and I'd have a loft with lots of people playing music and reading

poetry and kind of together. And I sort of had these primitive versions of this naturally. But I guess, so what is Pioneer Works now? It's an institute with a mission, and I don't know if institute's 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's basically like, how do we use arts and sciences to bring people together to build the world they want to live in? And now it's somewhere between a school and a learning center and a museum and a community center and I don't know what. 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 I'd say it's a learning center, a cultural center. When I say culture, I have to circle sciences because a lot of folks don't think about science as part of culture. How large is it? My subjective experience was feeling that it was vast when I walked through and walked through again and then had two glasses of wine and walked through again. How big is this space?

It's so funny because when I got the building, it was an ironworks 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. Get the building and we'll take the art later. I was begging everybody. And it almost didn't happen. And when I first went in the building, I was like, this thing is giant, like you're everybody. And it almost didn't happen. And when I first went in the building, I was like, this thing is giant, like you're saying. And it's about 27,000 square feet inside and about 20,000 square feet outside at its current footprint. We're going to be adding some things. And it felt massive. Now it feels absolutely tiny. Now I walk in and I'm like,

fuck, we have no room. We need five more classrooms. We need to triple the size of the tech department. The science area needs to be twice the size. We need to build recording studios. We have a tiny recording studio, but it's not big enough. 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 yes, 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. So we need more, more place for the residents. So I don't know if that, it feels tiny. Let's, let's go back to, as I've read you describe it,

the original shithole. No windows, no floors, no stairs, no utilities. 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 perseverance was...

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? Well, I would say a few different things. 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. 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 gave zero fucks? No, I'd say it, but sweetly and somewhat pardonately.

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 so for years I did that. If someone wanted to buy my art, I'd be like, look, I'm glad you like this art, but look at this crazy project we're building. And I gave away everything. I mean, I almost bankrupted my art studio every few months because I was just keeping it going barely. And

then, you know, water heaters, stairs, floors, roof repair, whatever it took to get the building inhabitable. So that was like the first stage was just like, can we get this building safe? And I thought that would take a decade. Let me pause for one second. So you said giving stuff away. So you have on one hand, the well-funded capitalist pigs, as you put it, right? I guess, you know. They're good people.

I'm just fucking around. I'm fucking around. I'm fucking around. I'm fucking around. But you know, 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? 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. Oh, you're giving – you mean the proceeds of that back to Pioneer Works. Yeah. Like, please buy this sculpture because we will get water heaters. Yep. I see. Please buy this piece of art and we might get some windows.

Things like this. Got it. got it and so i would say in the beginning that helped jump start the project and then you know somebody was like you need to start a non-profit 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 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 Florence, the artistic director, who's, you know, like my brother, and Jana Levin, who I know you know, who's like my sister, and, you know, family, and like all these incredible people who, you know, what used to say and I used to think of it and I still do is Pioneer Works is just a table. It's just a table. And it's like whoever's at the fucking table is making it work. I like that. That's really a beautiful metaphor and visual.

How do you, 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? Well, I would say that a couple of different ways. One, 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 truth where I can kick it and this thing is going to flourish. 36 months ago, that would not have happened. So I would say that me not being there and it working really well is success. And I think of it as an artwork. That's helped me to do it for so long. I will say I'm at a new place with it because PW is really working well now and there's incredible brain trust and group involved that it's working. And I'd say that, I mean, it wasn't tenable. By the seventh year in or eighth year in, I mean, I was giving tours, five, six, seven tours a day. And people would 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 i'd be like this is where the music studio is and we're gonna build the observatory

you know i was like so worn out by like being the showman of like and this is what we're gonna do here and what we're to do a gap year, a post high school and a post college gap year. And then we're going to raise funds to do, do more like kids programs. And then we're going to fucking, we're going to get another, but 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. So what were,

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? Or did you just take a break from it all for a period of time to get your head screwed on? What did you do? 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 cop in the wheel or whatever. So, you know, again, I have to take my hat off to Gabriel and to Jana and to Tommy,

and who's our director of technology, and to Tiffany. And there's just so many people over the years, some that are still there, some that aren't there, Daniel Kenter, 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. And maybe those things combobulate. Because if you bring a musician, and 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 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. And Maria Popova and all the fucking amazing, talented, magical souls that are coming and going inside of this vessel. The building is nothing. It's a fucking bunch of bricks. It's bullshit without those people. We're going to come back to Maria because there's a question I want to ask you that 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, 1,000, forget 1,000, 500, no to 500. Okay, take it for free. 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 a piece. What were some of 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 seems like, you've used the word untenable a few times in this conversation, but you got to a point where it was very tenable. If you wanted to make really good art and sell it for what for a lot of artists would just be a tremendous, unthinkable sum of money, you can. What were some of the things that happened or that you did to get from where you were to where you are?

I think it's a cumulative. I think it's so many, many little things. Because I remember when I first sold a picture or whatever for $1,000 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 sizzle, motherfucker. This shit is crazy. I can't believe how lucky I am. I just made some shit and people paid me for it. That being said, 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 crazy projects I'm working on. But I would

say it happened over 25 years, a little bit at a time. And at the end of the day, I think it's the work. I try to ask myself three questions like, can I live with it? Will I go to sleep next to it each night? You're talking about a piece of work, a project? A work of art, yeah. Can I just live with it? Can my kids live with it? No, I don't have any yet, but if I did. And how will I feel about it in 100 years? 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 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 the way, what is it called? LIDAR works, right? With cars, right? Like it's learning. It's like, or an AI is learning. That's how art really works, right? You just keep learning now for a lot of people the majority

of artists so they never get to maybe these phase shifts where even in 20 years 30 years they're able to command attention that i guess then translates into and i'm not going to obsess on these prices i'm just using it as a proxy for the work that you've done and decisions. So I do want to ask, and I am 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 start there, and then I'll go to the next question. But could you describe, because they are unlike anything I have ever seen anywhere. I mean, there's nothing that I can think of that is remotely similar. And you might have some type of reference, but I don't.

Can you describe what these, as one example of the type of work that you do, what do these look like? If somebody were to walk into your studio and behold these things, what do they look like? Well, we're talking specifically about the psychogeographies? Yeah. 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, uh, I kind of think of them as consciousness or something or of, of, uh, 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 often within a psychogeography, you'll have tens of thousands of images that I'm finding from a hundred years worth of books and magazines mixed in with paintings and drawings on the layers of glass. So- 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 an 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 and convert it into multiple layers of glass and take the culture and consciousness of Han Solo and use it to replace the imprint of his body with the constituent parts of that. I know this might sound strange, but that's kind of the visual in my mind as I recall it. But could you maybe just describe the form factor and how much it weighs, what the size is like? Sure. I mean, one 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 when I cut up my homework, let's say, or I cut up an encyclopedia,

and I glue little pieces, a little human with a head of an elephant, you know, next to an amethyst crystal next to a piece of architecture from Bauhaus or whatever. I'm just rambling. But my point is I'm cutting up little pieces of paper and drawings, and I'm putting them on the layer of glass. And then I add another piece of glass on top, and I do that again, but in relationship to what I did before. And then again and again and again. And the next thing you know, you have 30 windows on top of each other and all the drawings Mark making and all of the pieces of paper and collage on every single layer in concert together make up a psychog geography or tell a story. And then I glue them together with a glue that has the same refractive index. And the psychoregionographies that you're discussing

or we're discussing are about 3,000 pounds each. And I've made works that are up to like modulated in 24,000 pounds or whatnot. 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 20 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 is yet again, something completely different, at least to the beholder. How did that start? How did the psychogeography start? Well, I mean, I guess I should just go backwards a little bit with the work. I don't know. You mean like how did I start making work in layers or just the psychs? 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 one example. So it could be layered art if that precedes

the psychogeographies and let's go with whichever you like. Oh yeah. And then we should, I mean,'s go with whichever you like. Oh, yeah. And then we should, I mean, 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 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 very much interested in the relationships between those pieces. And I was making a collage many years ago out of pages of a dictionary that I was ripping up, an Agnes Martin, who's an artist, grid of dictionary pages. And I started pouring resin on the thing, and I saw an optical quality and a 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 I took the objects out, and I started just making these dendrite drawings, almost invented specimens, and I got obsessed.

And I did that for some time and created lots of botanical-looking drawings and layers of resin. And eventually, I tried drawing a human in the layers of resin, and I was starting to get shows, and the resin was going to kill me. So I switched over to glass. The resin was going to kill you just because it's, is it toxic? I don't know anything about resin. Yeah, it's toxic. And I was scaling the work and I was in masks all the time and it wasn't a fun way to work, but I was actually developing a language that I was really connecting to. And so I switched over to the layers of glass and that allowed me to change my mind and edit and go back and forth because with the resin, I could only go backwards. I could never change my mind. So it was really a series of accidents.

And the psychogeography is really, 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 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 So like frozen movies, they tell stories through collections of ideas. 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? Let's just assume they have some talent of some type and they have some passion. Let's assume those two things just to try to constrain it. What are some of the

mistakes that you see aspiring artists or up-and-coming artists making? Well, I don't know. 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 or getting too obsessed with one period in art history that moves them and then sort of trying to emulate or build off of it too much opposed to again finding out what is in the bottom of their brains.

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

making the thing. How much of that is dependent on being willing or even embracing of living a very simple life, 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 got to pay my rent. I got to have X, Y, and Z shoes. I can't live on ramen every day, et cetera. Is that a piece of it or am I just- No, yeah, of course. You got to be able to die for it. Quite literally in a way, you got to just be like, this is the thing. 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, it took me a couple of years. And I almost bankrupted my studio to make it. And I do that constantly. I'm like, I don't give a fuck about anything but making the thing. What would happen if it bankrupted your studio? 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 i'd probably go like i don't know become like yeah go live in a fucking tropic somewhere and live off of coconuts seriously i'm always like you know if it were anyone, I'd be like, ha ha ha. I mean, I am laughing, but I'm laughing in part because I can totally fucking imagine it. Yeah. I'd be so content, 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, 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. 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'sisyphus moment in the past underneath the ocean where the animal headed humans are pushing a boulder to capture a sea monster in a cave. That same moment'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 into the present simultaneously, where there's these weird narratives on the sea, and there's a supertanker sinking, which is connected to another project.

And there's animals coming out of the supertanker as an allegory to the arc. So I just want to pause for a second and tell people, go to DustinYelen.com or at DustinYelen on Instagram, and this will make a lot more sense. Not that it doesn't make sense, but they might think to themselves, holy shit, this guy's done a lot of acid, which is also true. But it's a lot easier to absorb visually in a sense, although I like the description. I want to harken 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 please tell me if I'm barking up the wrong tree, but does that question bring anything to the surface for you? It seemed like this was something worth plumbing the depths of a bit. Yeah, well, I mean, I'm an old man now. I've lost a lot of people, but when I was young, 25, I lost my best friend who was my my mentor and teacher was a teacher and uh I think that completely affected me for the rest of my life um 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 exist simultaneously and somehow you can access it. 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 system overload. Well, if I think about right now, how many summers left do I have? Call it 50 for the sake of the conversation.

You too. You and I have, let's say, 50 summers left. Right. Well, fuck, 50 summers is like lunch. For sure. It's so fast. It's so quick and finite. 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 yeah, death has really informed maybe losing someone, the closest person to me at such a young age, I think really it changed the way I see the world completely. Does that obsessing over death, and I'm asking 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 kicking 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? I think it's probably the latter is like, look, the rest of your life is fucking almost over so you better get into it now you know what i mean like this is it there is nothing else but to this fucking minute this hour and i have a hard time i think thinking about forever or like for the rest of my life and and i think there's it's posited some of some challenges probably in in maybe why I haven't started a family yet, or maybe I need to start a family right away, or making decisions in interpersonal relationships, I think it's challenged me because I'm like, this is it.

Like right now, I could literally be gone in 12 hours. It's completely plausible. And therefore, I want to open up the aperture, and maybe that's through meditation, or maybe that's just through listening and being quiet, but I want to open up the aperture as much as possible all of the time and feel as much as possible all of the time. Because the way that I feel right now could be gone or completely changed. 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? I literally know it. I mean, it's true that I used to break dance on venice boardwalk like when we were living there for a heartbeat and i would fucking yeah 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. So do you literally just not have a recollection of how you got filmed? Like, how does that happen? I actually don't know. I got a phone call. They're like, show up at this place. I didn't know what the fuck I was doing.

Oh, God. I feel like there's 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? You mean an image or a word or something on a billboard? Could be anything that you want to convey to billions of people. Anything at all. Non-commercial, hopefully.

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

You mentioned earlier the tanker, and 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 I love, love, love, love that work. What is the other tanker project? Super tanker 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 super tanker, which is a boat that moves oil around and it started to be like 1200 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 almost like a monument to the end of fossil fuels and we're coding it so that safely let's say a million or a million and a half visitors can go take elevators through the boat up to the top of it and then get to an observation deck which is made of the bridge which was where you used to control the ship from hence the name the bridge also double name and uh through the experience of visiting this monument you'll learn about uh the history of energy and potentially the future 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, I love Fitzcarraldo pulling a boat over a mountain. I'm now trying to take a boat the size of a building and put it on its nose. So it's like a Statue of Liberty with the liberty being freedom from fossil fuels, or at least that's the… It's probably the size of the Statue of Liberty.

And yes, it's a monument. Look, we can power the earth with water and with sun and with various other technologies if we can scale them. Where might the bridge be? I can't say. All right, we'll keep it under wraps for now. I'm using the Royal We since I have no fucking idea, but TBD.

It's a really cool project. I'm working with Bjarke Ingels, who's an amazing architect, and I'm working with Arup Engineering, and I'm working with all these cool people who are helping me to realize this dream. That's incredible. Just a few more things. And this has been so much fun. So I'm looking at a quote from the creativeindependent.com. And the paragraph is attributed to you, 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 planet that we share, I certainly feel like I've done nothing. I mean, because if anything is possible, then think about how much we can do together. Then what I've done in the past, and if the past is no longer now, then therefore I've done nothing. So I kind of feel that way all the time. Do you find that intimidating, overwhelming, or invigorating or something else? 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. No. I mean, I guess I probably have semblances of all of those feelings, but if anything, I feel the wonder and possibility of what we can make as a species together or as an individual,

that it's all possible, right? It's like if I look at a white piece of paper and then four hours later, there's a drawing there, there was nothing and now there's something. And this idea between nothing and something is really interesting because if you look at cities and technologies and all of it, there was nothing, and then there was something. And so we really do have that capacity to create absolutely anything all of the time. Dustin, I think that is a great place for me to stop my inquisition of questions. So fun to reconnect. People can find you on Instagram at Dustin Yellen, last name Y-E-L-L-I-N, dustinyellen.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? 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 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 uh you know in a way that is equal and just and we can all sort of support and love each other to keep fucking inventing the dream. I like that. It's inventing the dream. It's not finding the dream, right? Because you can each day, like you said, choose to create something from nothing. And it certainly helps when you have the right people at the table, as you put it, which I think is a beautiful metaphor. And to do that, you have to sometimes go out and invite those people, find those people, which is, I think, a common thread throughout a lot of the adventures that you've had. Oh, I'm the weird guy who, in New York City, even going down the street, I'm saying hello to everybody. And they're looking at me like,

what's wrong with him? 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 forward slash podcast. Just search for Dustin or Dustin Yellen or Yellen, 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. 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 for

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