once I come out of this, I'll be able to give, like I want to talk to, so what I see in our time is even what we talked to you about in sure. It's just like I used to be for Carrell Painter and now you're Liberty Mutual. It's a chill in for Liberty and State Farm now. Seriously, it's just a guy.
Listen, I want to, I've inspired to create as much benefit for all the people out there from this strategy as I possibly can. And I've been learning so many things, so many important things, both spiritual and logistical from this, that are all things that I wish that I would have known as well. Greetings, future fossils. Androids Jones is an amazing artist, but also someone who I consider a friend and an old friend, and this episode is found, a conversation that in some ways, I think exemplifies future fossils more than possibly any other episode of this show to date.
I'm deeply grateful to Andrew and to Lucid News for putting us together. I was already planning to talk to Android again on the show, but life happens. And the conversation we ended up having because Fay from Lucid News hit me up and asked if I wanted to report on this turned out to be truly one of the most rich and vulnerable and profound discussions I think we have ever had on this show. I know a lot of people are going through big, big changes right now, and I hope that this discussion helps you navigate those changes.
But before we get going, I want to thank everyone supporting this show on Patreon or Substack. I can't make up my mind, but I appreciate your following and your remuneration. This is an enormous amount of work for someone with kids and another day job, and I love this show and I'm glad that you all are helping me get it going. Shout outs to new members, Jake Ruiz, Kate, Natalie, Matt, Melvin, Kushni, Henry Andrews, Arlen Slacks, Jeffrey Mulecki, Nith Self, Kerry Hart, you're awesome, I appreciate you.
Everybody who's been reviewing the show, thank you, and if you haven't, please do. I love your feedback and even if it's critical, I appreciate it. And with that, here you are, Android Jones. So how are you, man?
In this moment, yeah, it's good, and this presently. But in general, I'm probably better than average, if you average like the last 10 years average, surprisingly considering all the things that have been happening in the past few weeks. You're at peace? I don't know, peace.
I think peace is a little lofty. I am as fully engaged in this process as I can be, and that feels good, that feels meaningful, it feels like a lot of the things that have been happening have been in the past. It's been like a week, almost like a week and a half. I just feel like there's been so many dramatic, undergone so many different dramatic transformations that they saw the value of the things that I've learned in the way that it's been changing my perceptions of things.
Like I'm very, I'm turning that corner where I'm really grateful for, I don't know if I'm totally at acceptance yet, but I'm becoming more grateful for, I'm definitely grateful for all the things that I have and I'm starting to, I think just see a bigger picture through this insight and all the things that have happened and I think it's made me realize that I was pretty much like unaware of, so always a good thing. All right, so for folks who need a narrative, like what actually, what happened to you? It's like they're just open to the recent narrative, I don't know how far we want to, we can go back further later on, but as far as the present. You're burned, burned down, that's the critical node.
Yeah, full, so given what I gave you the story time, so for a time it would have been, I actually feel like it was last a week before last Wednesday, I believe that would have been like 18th, I wake up in the area in Colorado and I'm an independent artist, so I work from home and I have this kind of one of my prized material, studio, castle, like my castle, great skill, fortress, of creative solitude is this big barn studio which I put a lot of energy into and it's out of all the business, it's my spaceship, I navigate as we travel through the universe and I go there every day and we're from like nine to five to make art and work on projects and do all the things and I wake up Wednesday morning at three kids, so probably one of my three children probably woke me up maybe around five, five, 30, get up, you make coffee, shower, get dressed up to the whole routine of the care and nurture of three children and a wife which can never don't loom it and it's snow the night before so I went out to shovel the driveway and I had my headphones on, I was probably lasting some slayer, my headphones like full volume, shoveling like six inches of snow, as you do, shoveling the six inches of snow down this long vertical cement driveway and at the bottom the driveway is about halfway done and I sense a bit of a disturbance, I look at the top of the driveway and I see my wife and she's got like our a 14 month year old baby, like inner arms and she's yelling and waving, try to get my attention because I'm immersed in slayer and I can see that words come out of her mouth and then I take my headphones off and the three words that I feel, what kind of words could have been still that much there and be like barns on fire and in that and that was like the moment that my reality started to dramatically shift into a, it's the whole new simulation so I get my truck, I start it and I drive like a maniac and I only live an hour and maybe not an hour, I live like a mile and a half away from my studio and as I race like onto the highway, I get on the main road to where the barn is and as I turn this curve, you live in the foothills here in lines and to my left, like to the north, there's gonna be like a large, it's kind of like a mountain, I guess it's the beginning of the foothills and I turn the curve and halfway there, I can see this like black towering pillar of smoke, like violent smoke coming out over the horizon and that's my heart was already racing but that was my first indication that this is, it's hard to interpret like the barns on fire, the corner that could be on fire or if they could be part of it, but when I saw the energy of that smoke, I knew that this was, it was new level of seriousness and so I race down there and I pull up around, I take it back way because I can see there's already a couple first responders and there's even a fire truck behind me and so I take this two different routes to barn access to the property, so I take the dirt road for the orchard and get up to the barn and it is fully engulfed in flames and we've got some videos on our Instagram people want to see some of the disaster porn of it but it's a 40 by 30 foot square foot footprint with a 20 by 40 secondary level on top and there is fire being expelled from every door and every window and I can't even get within 15 feet of it without suffering like serious burning pain and so it was at that point where there was nothing that I got tons of fire extinguishers, all my firefighting gear was actually inside the barn, I've had this real fear of wildfires, I'm sure many people have for the past few years so I had a lot of preparations, I've done lots of preparations for that but I never really prepared for a fire that started from within and yeah I think that it sort of struck me, lots of things occurred to me but definitely was that sort of moment of total helplessness, there's nothing I can do, there's nothing I can run or grab and yeah that was, as I'd say that was the moment I began to sink into the season of my own abyss. So before we venture into the abyss, I've heard through the grapevine that the cause of the fire was some batteries? Well it's totally it's totally undetermined right now, the investigators, we met with the investigators last week because we have to be like a full inspection of the site and based off just the amount of debris so it got fired, the fire people that amazing we have incredible first-of-the-fire firefighters within the lion's lung want hygiene that arrived on the scene, they focused their efforts on making sure that nothing that it didn't touch, we have an apple orchard, there's my mom's house is on the property, they did a really great job making sure the fire didn't spread anywhere else and but they let the fire pretty much just, that they let the structure burn into its own footprint and continue burning, so it's a pretty difficult situation for a friend investigator to figure out what the cause is, he might need a couple weeks and like a cherry picker to go through the debris and figure it out, this is as far as I burned my father and built years and years ago and my father passed away in 2013, I inherited it as a studio and so I've been in my space and it's just interesting, I've never had a close call, there's never been anything sparking up, I have extinguishers everywhere and so there's never been, it's always been a fear but it's never been an incident and so I have no idea what and nobody does now based off of what the one of the fire marshals I believe on the scene had told me he asked him questions like other general classes, I think like the usual things like that you have like a space heater on, if you leave a fire going where there are candles, I didn't have any of those things, if there was lots of extension cords and I've been around electricity a lot, I'm pretty good about not leaving anything up with a high-average plugged in, but he did say like did you have any power tool batteries there and that just got my attention because I'm a, some people know me, I'm just like a red slut for the Milwaukee brand of tools and I might have had 12 to 18 different batteries in or around the barn at that time in various stages of charging and he did mention that he seen in this last year like over 100 fires started in shops because these batteries can discharge and explode or if the damage battery you leave on a charger, it definitely is concerned that I was totally unaware of that because of COVID, just I think a lot of batteries manufactured last year, with COVID and shipping delays and lack of resources that some of the companies have had to, about corners on batteries, but like I said, it's total speculation that could have been that, but regardless, it is I'd say that nothing bolts it exactly why it started is still totally unknown. Yeah, earlier you foreshadowed a prequel to this that you said you were willing to go deeper, was there in the way that you've come to make sense of this, is there more like behind this event?
There is, there's a lot there, I think and that's really I feel that's when something like this happened, my initial hit when this happened, it was like my brain wasn't able to calculate the deep loss of it is an artist, 20 years of terabytes of the hard drives that I'd been going through all these, like I've had all the hard drives over 20 years and I began putting them in like people kit and triple kit, backing everything up, all the recent work, like all the eight flat files of original artwork, elegant cases of sketchbooks that go back maybe like 15 years and all of this Oh, no, there's a lot of there's a lot of tech in there. There's obviously all my machines and computers, drawing instruments full, like my library of like art books and just all the treasures and trappings of someone like me who is a bit of maximal materialist has collected over time to see all of that in this just explode in this orgy of energy. I know you like language, something that's helped me as far as when I refer to it and I think about the language we use is important. Yeah, saying things like a barn is to get destroyed or it burnt or you know, what I've come with the way that I refer to it now and one of the reasons why it was such a devastating loss is that in my mini universe, I feel like the barn itself represented with all of the energy in there.
It was the highest concentration of the information of me and it was on a material level. It was like my greatest like material and emotional quantum entanglement that I had and I had worked on and developed and was very proud of. And so what I was really going through in that moment was witnessing decoherence of my quantum entanglement and the decoherence is when when information is released back into the environment. And so it was my great event, I think it's the great decoherence of Android Challenge.
Interesting. I just to add this little piece of, treating this as if it were a normal conversation I would have with anybody. I just, last year, interviewed astrobiologist from Columbia University of Caleb's Sharf. You wrote a book about the data home.
The data home is what you're talking about. It's the material instantiation of everything that humans have outboarded in books, etc. Since the advent of us, like taking a piece of our minds and etching it into something, the data home has grown and grown and its causal pressure on us has grown as well. And now, as Caleb argues, now we're at a point where the predominant human activity is to cultivate and feed the data home of humankind.
It's this in a way, like this is related to Richard Dawkins' idea of the extended phenotype, like the idea that the Beaver Dam is a part of the Beaver or the spider web is a part of the spider. But yeah, man, it's interesting how most of us think about the, it's weird because we have, I think, putting intuitions about this. On the one hand, in the modern world, we think of ourselves as discrete in some kind of way. This is me.
I am. I'm over here. In another way, when you rack up the amount of energy required by us to go through a day, physicists Jeffrey West has made the point that the human body actually extends into all of the servers that we're using remotely and all the supply chains and everything, and that when you plot the metabolism of mammals from like a mice to elephants, as soon as the middle there, but it all falls neatly on a line. But the humans, modern humans, are the flesh and blood only consumes maybe like 90 watts of energy a day.
But the whole human, the whole cyborg is 11,000, which is like a Tyrannosaurus or five Tyrannosaurs. It's insane. I don't know. It's interesting to think about all this in terms of, because I think a lot about life and fire and how each of us is a flame.
And I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I'm getting out here, but just that you are the other version of the other intuition is that we are, my phone is a part of me, that piece. And so I think most people listening to this or reading this can relate to having been locked out of cloud storage or losing a drive or whatever and feeling like they have a stroke or something, feeling like a part of them has gone. Yeah, I like the way that you put it. Each of us, we are our own expression of our life is that cultivation of our individual data that then interacts collectively with all the data.
And as an artist, like it was, what I felt in that moment, it really didn't, I don't want to over-promotize it because the good news is everyone's okay. Nobody was hurt, nobody was injured, which is really fortunate. But there was a, some of the feelings that arose in that moment, there was a feeling of a part of me dying because so much as an artist, you, I'm the active art, like the work that was in all those originals, in all those sketchbooks, that's the focused love and the crystallization of my consciousness and my life force. And so in a way, I can try to think that we can keep mortality by infusing and burning our spirit into these things.
And it's the hope that not only do they represent, but they represent thousands, tens of thousands of hours of my life and the best part of my life. Having that eco here into nothing, a big part of me felt like I was at the first day, I think the first one of the hours there, I'd wake up in the morning and I felt like I was a ghost, just haunting my own life. And it almost, it's almost worse than just death, a lot of it, it felt like my life, all the time that I put into these, all the energy, all of that stored, that investment into a potential future that I thought would be beneficial. It felt like all of that was erased.
And I was, I felt so less than, I'd never felt less or more diminished than in that moment. And just with any type of deep, three of those initial stages, you're dealing with the shock and the denial and the fear and the guilt and the anger. And my initial hot take was just honestly thinking that I was smited by God, like what entity had I offended? And where did I go wrong to deserve this kind of punishment of this magnitude?
There was a lot of that within the shock. There were moments of, I did some capturing of myself with the poem, just taking videos and just because I just wanted whatever was happening, I just wanted to record that. So I knew that whenever this was something I would never forget, and it's always nice to have an evidence of it, I do remember thinking that I am an optimist, an apocal optimist. And I did consider looking at the bright side of things that like losing this material thing.
And this kind of loss is not even on the level of losing. My heart, my biggest fears of losing, someone that I cared about or someone that I loved or any suffering happening, like my family or friends. But on a material level, like this was, one of my greatest fears was I would lose all of this data and this information, I would lose the barn. And there was something semi comforting of I carried this fear for so long.
And now this was happening, don't have to be afraid of this happening anymore. Like when the worst thing you thought happens, it's just like with the rigor Kipling, it's like the success and failure of both like impostors, you can treat the same. But this was the whole level of, it's not the worst thing that ever happened. I did like when I found out my father died, like there was a lot more screaming and gnashing at peace.
But there was something just about the absurdity of how huge this fire was and how I went from just zero to 60 from, like I said, living my best life, shoveling snow, listening to Slayer, to watching just like the opening credits of this like real time, total ego death, resolution with in front of us this live studio audience that was, yeah, they took a while just with the inertia of that to kick in. And yeah, I'd say like the first 24 to 48 hours was obviously like the most, the most stating period. I think like after just observing the fire for three hours and running around trying, there's maybe like 20 different firefighters there. I think I was driving all of them crazy because I just tried to direct them or still because they take my car fired everything around the barn at a big outside workshop and compost toilet and some outbuildings that were all totally charcoal now.
And was I had this surrender to the fact that there's nothing I can do to make this better. I was really lucky. I just recently started doing kickbox, picking kickboxing lessons and so I had a kickboxing class at noon. So I arrived at the fire at 830 in noon.
I'm punching a heavy bag as hard as I possibly can. And I got a kickboxing. There's no silver bullet to healing and processing, processing grief, but as far as like the anger stage, and I'm so grateful for kickboxing and being able to just hit a heavy bag with left and right hooks for an hour. So I feel like that's been a really help process a lot of at least that element of the nonlinear grief has an outlet to it, which is awesome.
There's a piece of this that's evident in the way that you talk about this, but I want to unpack it a little bit more with you, which is you are a, I don't know what the right word is, recognized, I guess. I was just a notorious that it's not as pleasant as I'm hoping, but you're an acknowledged, it's like an odd. And so when you talk about ego death and when you talk about this stuff, it's interesting because when people talk about there are, they say you die twice, you die when you die and then you die when people forget you. This barn is the data colony of your ego empire.
One of the comments they call the library of Android, Andrea. Like Alex, Alex, and this is my digital Akashic record of me for sure. But yeah, but that's just the thing, right? Is that like anyone who takes that stuff seriously knows that what we're trying to create with the machine is an evolution or an emanation or a projection of what's actually going on.
The Akash did go up in flames. All of that stuff is still there in that sense. And even mechanically and materially speaking, like the I know that sketchbooks are irreplaceable. I got heard you lost some like hardware crypto wallets, which sucks.
That's actually we can get into that. There's a silver lining on that one and then some good, just some solid advice for any of the crypto grows up there. Yeah, let's get to that in a second. But first I want to, I want to just at the same time, this came, I don't know if this should go in the final cut, but like Lee, I looked not online and I realized that and maybe you know more about this than I do that Ben Ridgway is social media profile, so I'll disappeared.
No, that's new to me. Ben Ridgway erased himself from social media. And I was like, is this a response to the AI art thing? Is he hoping that he doesn't, that he's like hermit crab back into the shell?
I don't know. That would be an interesting theory. I don't know why suddenly the only people that are posting his work are Threda. And that's the only place you can find his stuff on social media.
His accounts, his professional accounts have all vanished. I haven't asked him about this personally. But it was strange because I was like, for whatever the reason, it's like that you're still indexed on Google search, like you're still there. You're still in your case, it's the same kind of thing.
It's like everyone who has ever copied a piece of your work. Like the M. Kevin Kelly talks about the internet as a great copying machine. It's like all that stuff is like echoes of you or the waves of you are still out there, but there's not a center is what we're not the center, but like the middle layer is what disappeared.
I'm curious to hear you think. Yeah, it's definitely the like greatest hits are out there. And it would be beyond my means to eradicate that from the contemporary data set. But really, it's like a lot of what I lost where the it's the things that nobody's ever seen, like all the B sides, all the B tracks, all the process.
I'd for any finished piece, there could be 500 megabytes of layered files and process files leading up to that finished point that I gave up on it, all the working things. The textbooks were definitely like so many of those things I realized that I think I was the only person even had eyes on them. And we like to predict ourselves in the future. There's always going to be I had plans or projects or I'll make books that these one day or this could go.
These of our efforts, most would be the original army dragon that I had in this with Sony. And that was a piece that I was kind of at my kids in here. That was upstairs. That was what that one stung a lot.
But yeah, it's and there's been a lot of bartering. I've gone over to it's just like we I'm such a hoarder and it comes to like my own data and saving things and backing things up. And to the point where it becomes burdensome, like I had so many different hard drives that I was transferring over into a raid, just trying to find a file would take me days, sometimes to go through all of it. And I don't think there really is a great piece of technology for going and archiving and organizing all different sorts of 3D files to PSD, the tips, the JPEGs, the details and OBJs.
There's just so many forms that data takes. But I have found that too, which is there is perceived value that I have, but I also have to understand that I do in the world of business and options. There's this idea of there's a principle, like there's this entitlement principle that we also tend to overvalue the things that we own. So you never want to be the highest bidder on something on an auction for more than a week because the longer you're the highest bidder, the more you think you own it.
And in those last three minutes, the more you're willing to over spend on it because you've given it more value because it's something that you've owned. So there's like a perceived value of these things and what the reality is. And you never know those things. And part of my work now is seriously just letting go of that.
And there's definitely spikes where I remember something that was in there. And there's a little pain points. But every day I'm getting more comfortable with the idea of surrendering to the acceptance of all these things. Decoherence.
It's nice about the decoherence is that also think that that energy is out there at the universe. I did joke with some people and ask why the fire started. And I think it was there was so much latent, creative potential being stored there that the bar made just spontaneously combust. I was just like dragging on this mountain of my own gold and whatever.
That's exactly the image I had. You're reading my mind in this conversation. I'm reading yours. I don't know what's going on here.
But clearly there is something about the dragon horrid. Right. And but then also the this issue of I'm curious to what degree you feel and maybe it's a little early to even say this. But what degree you feel liberated from.
Yeah. Just because just to make to anchor it in a personal thing. I've been working on an album for over 10 years. I've been working on a book for about the same amount of time.
There are these painful pregnancies of creation in a way. If all that stuff were to go up and smoke today, I would feel both devastated by the inability to consummate all of that. Yeah. But then also relieved that I'm no longer required to.
I would be free to start something else. And so I'm curious for you in the space that this has made, what are you are you attending to the saplings growing up in this? Or are you what's that piece of it for you? Yeah.
And kind of make sure that I'm there's a distinction of whether the way I feel like this, if it's just another faces me rationalizing and bartering with a loss or if it's authentic or not. But there is absolutely a release within this. There's a deep grief that if you take the kind of the metaphor that all of you are going off of the pregnancy metaphor, that barn had tens of thousands of like my little babies in it and all those babies are gone. All those babies are decohered.
And there were some beautiful babies in there and there were a lot of stillbirths. There were a lot of mutants. There was a lot of babies that the world was never going to see. And maybe you can understand like from an artist, like it's really even if you have a bad drawing, something feels wrong about burning it or throwing it away.
And so there's a certain weight to all the terrible jpegs and drawings and sketches that the world was never going to see. And I was carrying them on from a place of feeling obligated to my connection with it and an unwillingness to let that go. So there's a lot of that. And so to be free of all of that, the good and the bad, yeah, I've never felt lighter in this.
My friend's hobby, he lost his studio in the Ashland fire. He told me, I guess like we both won a Buddhist merit badge that we never asked for. And there is that. And there's a lot like a tool like I'm such a materialist.
And I had been aware for a while too that I don't know what the turning point was, but we all have a relationship to the material objects that we covet and collect and possess. And I there's with all those things, there is a burden to that. And I think what this experience really has done is it's really, it's given me a whole new perspective to explore my relationship with material, physical world, with tools, what's really really the value of it is the amount of introspection that it's inspired around me analyzing those relationships and those strategies and all the different decisions I made. And because so many of it says, I think I make when it comes to like my studio and what I'm making or what I'm collecting or what I think is valuable, what I'm holding on to, I feel like sometimes a lot of those decisions are even almost like spontaneous in that moment.
Like there's sometimes it feels like there may not have been a lot of thought to having these things. Like I know things are valuable. I've always, I've got an apocalypse off the list, but I've always had, I've always carried a great deal of fear in my whole life fear of death, fear of like annihilation, fear of disaster and impending disaster and a lot of those things and supplies that I kept in that barn were my just futile hedges against impending doom. Whether that be like prepping apocalyptical supplies, I'm a gun guy, I had a lot of ammunition in there that went off in a really dramatic fashion, lots of extra medicine and masks and like I was planning, like the barn had everything I need to hold off a zombie apocalypse for a significant amount of time for the world to go into its next phase.
And those were all hedges I had against the world that I was really afraid of in a world that I didn't feel safe in. And so to do not have that and to realize that all the energy that I put into beating that fear. And I think the only reason I would acquire these things is because it gave me at least I can be afraid of something, but I'm afraid of something and I buy something that makes me less afraid of that. It feels like it's one manageable way of dealing with it or putting it off into the future.
And so to have to realize that all those bands that I made were for nothing and whether or not I would ever need them or not need them, but all the energy I put into that was for not, was pretty eye-opening too. So man plans and God's laughs. There's nothing less than realizing that you can never prepare for everything that's going to happen to you. Like I said, I was always great for wildfire and all of my firefighting, air and pants and face masks and respirators and gloves were all inside the barn in my wildland firefighting box.
It was exactly was by one of the doors because I thought the barn gets on fire. I'll be able to get this from a female girl. Just realizing the cow-thoodle and how unsuccessful that strategy is definitely inspired and encouraged a new outlook for the future. So there's a couple things here.
One is fight club. And just when you're talking about the weight of all this stuff, just in passing. But then the other one is when I saw you at boom in 2016, I was reading William Irwin Thompson's The American Replacement of Nature. He has this passage in there about the prophet versus the pastoralist.
And he says, it's one of those famous, there's two kinds of people thing, right? And those of us who are attuned, the prophets, those of us who are attuned to the whispering on the wind or whatever, who are thinking about or committed to the transcendent struggle to live as though we are the pastoralists, the farmers, the people that that coop. And it's such a thing because I've heard you talk about this. You and I have this in common.
I think maybe you vastly, the amplitude for you maybe even more so than I, I don't know. I respect you a lot for having reconciled these things in a way. I, near as a international travel and constant motion, came to a screeching halt when I had kids. I did not manage to thread the needle and keep touring and doing festivals with my family and all the stuff as you did.
And I respect you immensely for it. But at the same time, I hear you talk about the last interview you had with Michael Philip on Third Eye Drops talking, the days back when you were just living out of your solar powered box truck deal with your little mobile renegade base, the Barn on Wheels kind of thing. Yeah, the speaker is super sure. Yeah.
And there's a tension in these things that I think is, I'd love to, it's anyway, William Irwin Thompson says that when the prophet tries to plant stakes and put up fences, God appears as the moving world wind. So it's just what you said is just like, there is this man plans God laughs. There is always this unknowable thing about it that reminds us, I don't know. Now it's an enemy that you are going to lose to every time.
And I think there was a new awareness of, I don't sometimes like the utter pointlessness of investing so much energy into hedging my fears against a unknown potential given birth to my imagination that I feel like I was doing almost, it was such a part of me that it was a lot of the actions taken towards that were totally unconscious. And I think a lot of it too that wasn't just about trying to save off, like the end of the world. I've definitely had a lot of my ideas, I've matured a lot over the years around that. But I think a lot of it was also the, at least like the art on a level represented a, like my hedge of an investment to take care of my children and my family.
Like I'm not a metaphor, I'm not a big savings guy, I'm a real blue, I have a very fluid relationship with energy, I'm very in the moment, and I try to do my best to make it rain and support my family and my team and the community around me. But I always be one that believed it like investing in myself and the work that I was doing would be something that would work itself out in the end and others definitely. I think that the feelings I had in that first 24 hours was there was a diminishment, but there was also just feeling. So naked and exposed, it's like when you have your territory is taken away, all the tools I have to fix problems are taken away.
And now I have a bigger problem than ever. And I'm the broken thing that needs fixing. It was just this, like the cascading of all of this grief. And I think this is like part of that, part of the story that I'm really interested in focusing on too, is like I had within that first 24 or 48 hour period, like I had never felt this level of depression regret anger with myself or they're not backing things up or using a fire to all those different things that naturally come up and tear the fear of what am I going to do, what comes now, there's no template to how to recover from something like this.
And not knowing what to do and having three small children that depend on me and having my employees and having everything. I had never, yeah, I guess I always, I'd always taken a lot of pride in being able to support myself and to be in a place where and to support other people and to help other people and to be on the totally opposite side of that equation was so foreign to me that it was hard for me to contextualize and make sense of it. It was such a new of an alien feeling and it was living, just being able to live the terror that I had worked so hard to avoid within that would be mentioned before as I'm one that has, I'm a person that's voluntarily gone through many simulated psychosychoeygo death trips and what those experiences out. It was very much, there were similarities, but there was a realness to this one.
There was like an existential dread and reckoning. It wasn't like anything I'd ever experienced before and the confusion that came out of that and simultaneously that's, I feel like it's also a grief is this really nonlinear thing and it's a friend John had told me that it's actually more of a condition than an emotion. The way that it comes up from just moments of just like there's one day where it's like all I could do was just cry just like week around like maybe 24 hours for that to take hold. So there's this fear and there's the sadness, but basically long story short, I felt like this experience reduced me to just like the smallest atomic element of who I thought that I was and what it did because I was stripped of all of my tools, all of my protection, all of the meaning and agency that I built so hard to build up.
It's that sort of devastation that I feel enabled me to take a deeper look at these new feelings and emotions that I was having in order to try to reconcile them as very fortunate that I'd been seeing a therapist on to be like a monthly eight I've been seeing him for a few months now and I feel like when I started seeing him it was really just like preventative maintenance therapy just like my wife and I see a therapist relationship she sees one it's just good to have someone just to talk to that they pay them to like not give you bad advice when you just talk about things and I felt that like we didn't have a lot to work on at the time and I'm going into his office and just balling my eyes out just like collapsing on his couch for the first he'd never seen me in a state like that and it was really working with him. He really was a really grateful for him. He was like the soundboard that allowed me to talk through the things that I was feeling and in that deep place of surrender I realized that once I surrendered to like that this is broken and I can't fix this by myself. I have no like in a thing like I have no safety net I've created no safety net that has insulated me or will save me from this as an handsome friends of mine that were very supportive that encouraged me to do a start like a fundraising campaign to see if I got to speed and that was I'd say in a level of in like my Maslob scale if losing all the things and all my art and all that I thought value it was like at the top level fear like asking for help and hand handling on the internet to help me was like right underneath that fear and so to have this one and the option is to like second thing I've been the most afraid of doing yeah that was a trip I was talking to my therapist like what it really I asked them about you know I've been to that what is the fear like why does the idea of asking for help I feel so repulsive like why is that so scary and what's behind that and what's interesting is that that really created and a lot of these and a lot of the I wasca circles and ceremonies there's a lot gives you a place where you can go into past and history and things and sometimes in those days there's so many things going on it's hard to really focus this grief put me in a place where it really removed a lot of the other distractions and I felt like I had even a deep opportunity to go inward into my life and things that have happened to me and what became really immediately clear this is one of the things I was working on the therapist is that when I was so I on in my story I'd say this is the second major existential ego death near death trip that I've had and the first one I had when I was 11 year old boy I was here in Colorado and I had a I really really grew the scar from but I had a major brain surgery when I was 11 and it came on out of nowhere similar circumstances there was no explanation or logical reason for why it happened but it was a really impactful and deep type of life threatening event that I had to it plays out in my memory like an alien abduction of just one day you're things are okay day two you can't make sentences day three I'm getting cat scans I'm going through machines and catheters and die and your head shaved and I'm on a table and they're drilling like four holes into my skull to take a chunk out and heal my face down but regardless that was like my first major spiritual crisis where something really scary happened to me out of nowhere and my whole world got turned upside down all of my thoughts of concepts of mortality and that the world is safe and that I do spend 11 years trying to get a feel for how you're gonna navigate the world and then all that gets flipped upside down and for me I remember that it was actually the recovery phase of that was where I experienced a really specific type of trauma and that was all these people that I know now like these classmates and parents of classmates that would come to the hospital to visit me and my recovery and the recovery from recovery is my operation like that it's my whole when you peel your face off there's a lot of really extreme bruising there's this huge scarred and a hairy more I remember looking at a mirror not even just being like having a Frankenstein's monster moment just being so horrified about what I was seeing I could remember people that had the best intentions coming to visit me and coming with flowers or with cards because they cared and they were trying to show me love and show my family support but I always remember that like they couldn't especially that it's my age it was really hard for just reflexively when they would first look at me I'd see the look of just like hair in their eyes and they were probably seeing the fear of what just happened to them or their kids but I hated it I really recoiled from it and I began to really resent any of the help people were given me and I would go to the mall I remember the first time I was able I was well enough to go to Crossroads Mall with my mom to do some shopping and seeing like the way it would look at me and point and whatever they were saying the 11 year old made a real decision there that like I don't like the world I don't trust the world and it really was the world of like my imagination and my sketchbooks and drawing that I retreated to because I knew the horizontal and the vertical of that world and as an artist one of the perks is you spend a lot of time by yourself and because I was just that was like my journey towards healing which wasn't a full healing it was actually just triage was really like a fundamental aspect of like why I developed my talent into what it is wasn't I wasn't I didn't go to it to heal I just went to it because it was the only thing that I was able to feel some inkling of this is a world that I can control and feel safe and to realize that was it was this thing and we also realized this is something I think that the big insight that I'm I feel I'm excited I think share because the more of so many other artists the more I realize that there's actually it's one of the deeper that you can dig into yourself and your own personal truth despite everybody goes through trauma trauma is universal but the experience that each of us has and the conditions are very unique but sometimes the deeper that you dig there's more common ground that actually comes up and what I realized is as far as like my relationship with love with Asimba help with interacting with people or giving I developed a strategy for giving and receiving love through the creation of art I was able to express my love through art as like a gift of appreciation I could put my love into a thing on my own terms I could give that love in the form of card to my mom or an image or a book other and then I would receive love through the adoration of this external thing that I made totally unconsciously and the last 30 years of my life has just been a consistent on that strategy and looking back I feel like it's actually pretty on some levels there's a pretty brilliant strategy on a lot of ways and what it's made me realize is that art as an application and I can say for myself and I think there's other artists that would be able to have some empathy for this it's like a visual artist in particular I feel like it's actually like one of the safest ways to send to express and receive love from other people I feel like that's a lot of what I was doing because when you make something it's a way of interacting with a friction of love on your own terms because you're putting this thing out there and people appreciate that and put energy into that but if they don't like it it's okay because it's not you and we work so hard to make these pieces of art so amazing because we want to make it impossible to reject it's funny because it's so good yeah because yeah I'm fond of telling people that I think it took me years to realize this but what I came to understand about the decision to paint at concerts and festivals and I think I don't know if this is true of everyone but it certainly seems to be true of a lot of the live painters I know is that they didn't know how to just be in that space they didn't know how to just go to a party like I grew up with a sketchbook in the corner of the room if I didn't have or if I didn't have that or a guitar in my hand or something like and then that provided a buffer that gave you something that you're doing so you can be interesting if people want to come talk to you cool otherwise you don't have to you don't have to go mingle you don't have to put yourself out there in this kind of way yeah it's like waging a proxy war with like your own heart and the world through the day home yeah through the day to home like love a rejected day to home because it doesn't feel you're not as impacted by it and I guess with life meaning it's interesting I remember when I first started doing live digital paintings digitally like on tour concerts and shows there is I think there's a bit of distinction because there is I remember there was a lot of vulnerability getting up on stage and like hugging in my way, I'm on my computer because you could totally fail and so there is a bit more one-to-one relationship there than just posting a piece of art and waiting up for it to accrue like comments or likes but either way I think the big strategy is the same it's there was a disconnection from it ultimately it was a coping mechanism and a strategy that worked pretty well for a while but in the end what I also realized is that it was a real it's a real handicap too but those sort of walls up and put those sort of defenses up in order to feel safe and so when I was at a point where that was so many greatest fears was like man I've been and these are all things I've just been realizing in the last 10 days is that the reason the barn was so powerful losses was like this is what I was my strategy was all of this art that I'd released eventually or put into books or things like this is why people care about me and this is why I love because I've been using the projection of this art as a way of receiving the appreciation and love from other people but because it was this satellite I was also I wasn't ever it's a safe way to play but the stakes aren't as high because I wasn't really receiving it or wasn't really fully embracing it because I have this thing in between me and the emotions of other people so I feel like the reason that I'm feeling good now and not huddling in a fetal position crying over all the things that I lost is that through this through the surrendering to how just totally felt that I was forcing me to be co-interspective and realizing why asking for help was so terrifying and then realizing that when you ask for help you know I've learned so much about help so much about asking for help and so much about giving and that the key for asking for help or the key to as far as like the relationship between when there is a gift in giving to someone we give a lot we like to donate it feels great to give as an art it feels great you're always giving I'm not expecting something in return for every piece of art that I make there's a there's an effective transaction that happens there that's accidental but learning the gift when someone's giving to you that the best the way to um because that's not used to like having gifts I really I really focus on what are the dynamics of giving and receiving is that the gifts that you have to them and what my therapist said he's like the gift that you gave me today was your vulnerability like having you come into my office crying is nothing would have made me like feel that I had more meaning in my life and to fix you he's been waiting for that I thought our sessions were pointless I'm like I'm not getting any breakthroughs here for the last couple months these things we have something to work on and okay with a huge help and have that's the fixer wound I'm sure those people tend to be like folks that had to grow prematurely to take care of their parents or that kind of thing like they need that they need that to feel themselves yeah yeah and I think that was really because yeah I wasn't very I did not see vulnerability as a it was not like a real that was not a really high priority for me was to be vulnerable in front of people and it was all this 11 year old kid boy that was scared and made this strategy for how to operate in the world and found a way to give and receive love that felt safe and it worked up until this certain point and it's just it's really what really just blows my mind is like how I thought a lot about trauma just like the accumulation of trauma like how I've been listening a lot of like the more most effective so trauma is what happens to you it's what happens inside of you it's how you make sense of the world after that thing happens at trauma it's the meaning that you give it and it's your how it's the way that you disconnect from your authentic self and I really disconnected from the potential of my authentic self when I was a boy and underwent all this and what this I feel like with this event with this trauma did in particular is it reduced me to a point that allowed me to see with their eyes the like where a lot of this trauma snowball started its initial momentum and I don't know what would have what would have inspired that kind of a deep introspection about this so it's been really it's been really incredible like I will constantly or have a 40 for all the homey hard drive support that I lost but the person that this has turned me like the process that I've gone through and that's so that's one part of it that's part of the story but the other where the story really changes I was convinced the first day that like and this is my legacy I'm the guy that built all this up and it all burnt down like I'm the artist that lost it all I'm cautionary tale I'm the warning like my fate like I've been building everything up to a crescendo of this ultimate material failures where I thought that I'd made my footnote in history to go from there get to the point we reduced where I have to beg the internet and everybody for help which is something I've never done before I've never asked for help and to then acknowledge what are the psychological components of how I wired myself did not want help how do I repair that how do I make myself vulnerable and open to receive the help it were those were those are all the things setting the stage to see what I've experienced in the last like 10 days is the most extreme the most like astounding response of love and thought and energy and donations and comments from people that have been in my life that I could have ever imagined like the amount of love that has been directed my way in this last week is totally been beyond my imagination and to be in a place where I feel like I can and I'm still learning on how to receive that love but now that it really took me not having this third party proxy battalion in the way of managing it just letting it come and witnessing it is it's been it's been one of the greatest gifts that I've ever experienced in my life just as a human being the things that it's done for me on a personal level like what it means as an artist like the amount of the ability of just the acknowledgement of it I've read through thousands and thousands of people's comments and I had no idea that I had that kind of impact on people and I never would have known that if this didn't happen to me it's like the it's like the antithesis of like method is salesman kind of a thing I get to like you see and it's hard to put it in the words what it feels like but I've never the kinds of emotions I felt like they're only comparable to the feeling of like when I acknowledge that my daughter let me for the first time like it's the biggest it's the most like heart mind-blowing heart-blowing kind of experience that I've ever had and it just keeps happening and it's and the most I feel like I've never felt this enlivened and inspired like even in the michaels podcast I think I made a comment it was like I'm tired of reinventing myself I don't like doing this over and over I need a way to use words and here I am I've never been more excited about reinventing myself and I have this fresh slate and through so many people's generosity I have the resources to buy whatever tools that I need to make this happen but even beyond that it's like the big I feel like the biggest shift is that this scared little when I think about how trippy it is with the things that made me it's like I was a scared weird little kid that didn't like the world that like spending his time by himself like drawing weird things and in high school I found psychedelics and found another reason to spend more time by myself making trippy things I think that led to someone that put his art out there and is able to have that impact but that person too because I was still carried so many of those wounds so many of those feelings if not feeling safe that I always had to take an extra amount of energy to hedge myself from the fact that the night is long and full of shadows I've never felt safer than I do now I never knew that I have this cosmic insurance plan of all the connections and relationships and meaningful points of contact that I have like I never knew that to any of those things I never knew that those things existed for me and to know them now and to have that it's like I've always been such a I feel like the love that I expressed that I focus on if that's a very nuclear love it's like I'm loyal to my family they come first I keep my wife my kids my team and I'm very good at taking care of them but I've and but I've always been a very individual like the barn was me it was like my dad built his very Jones my dad built it I turned into what it is I work by myself I make my art and I've been there it's a very me oriented thing and I've never felt more inspired to really be to serve a larger collective because now whatever we build all of my art supplies like this pencil and this sketchbook this was somebody's five dollar donation and this was someone's twelve dollar donation like all of the tools of my manifestation is directly from the community it is supporting you so everything I do forward is a we it's a collaborative project born from hair and trauma and rebirth from love and generosity and vulnerability and like my my therapist said I was telling the story he's like this sounds like a victory for the human spirit and like it totally is it completely is like it's a worst this is not like the new this is the new worst best thing to ever happen to my life and if you would have told me 10 days ago that this is going to be the best thing that happened to you I might have used my boxing skills by you at that moment if that's what you were to say but life is just life is wild life is really so I'm going to just wild stuff over here our film so last question for you I have so many more but you have more time I know you're dad too but I said you're two hours a two hour window oh god I wish I could make sure for my side I did my my wife is at the taproom with my kids probably losing her mind I'm sorry yeah but I want to ask you I got there's actually two things maybe we can get them real quick one is you said cosmic insurance plan barn insurance like that did that happen and that's related to the treasure piece right did you totally fair question and so the bar who burnt down in 2008 was originally built in like 76 I did that one for the 2008 my mom is the owner of that barn and so she is he did have there's insurance for the structure of the structure of it insurance one of those things where you know the cost of building a barn today versus 2008 are obviously really different things business wise I'll tell you I'm learning a lot about the intricacies of insurance like once all the dust settles I'd love to anything like maybe I can do a YouTube video on just teaching artists about how they should be insured based off the mistakes I made of not being insured the insurance is a really complicated thing there are some things in place like we definitely realize that in an immediate like I run a business like we've been paying insurance for almost like seven or eight years on things but we have realized that we've been dramatically under insured for what we have we had some the wrong types of insurance in place but like I said once I come out of this I'll be able to give like I want to talk to our so I see some on our time it's even what we talked about insurance I used to be for Corel Painter and now you're literally mutual some ceiling for Liberty and State Farm now that's seriously it's a good lesson I want to I've inspired to create as much benefit for all the people out there from this strategy as I possibly can and I've been learning so many things so many important things both spiritual and logistical from this that are all things that I wish that I would have known as well and speaking of the shilling the one company that I am now like I've I haven't had any interaction with them so far I recorded like a YouTube video just on my own for them last week but yeah during that day like the first the one silver lining that happened the day of the fire so that the fire is happening it's raging the first responders are like this is probably gonna burn for the 12 hours before you can go in and get everything anytime I get close to the fire they're like kind of back me out of the way so as I participate in NFTs I like crypto I'm gonna fan of crypto I wish I had more of it I don't have that much of it but what I had I took off the exchanges maybe eight or nine months ago with all of the all of the exchange shenanigans that are happening I'm a big believer in the not your keys not your coins philosophy I think everybody should take if you got it on Coinbase or Binance or whatever like it's what you do and that's yeah it's so irresponsible to do that and so I did that and so I took it off the exchanges I went with treasure I got like a little treasure wallet and so part of when you take your off the exchange you then you're responsible for your your passphrase which is a 24 24 words just what is your passphrase and I remember as I was checking out they had some like add-ons and they're like these two different middle wallets that you could buy is 100 bucks and it's like oh that looks cool that's probably a good idea so I just bought that thing too and it's that on my desk or if I did this save it is eight months ago I probably sat on my desk for seven months just gathering dust it's once I opened it I was like oh how do I do this I'm like oh this is actually really complicated not really complicated but this is really it's going to take two hours it's really going to be not fun to do this like you have to take the first four letters of each word and punch out these little tiny metal letters and then I'd use like an airbrush needle and insert it into this little folding metal wallet and I have double checker they're all in the right way there's no spelling mistakes and it was like maybe a week before the fire happened I was in my studio I was supposed to be working on something and the one thing I didn't love about the barn is just endless rabbit holes and distractions and projects to work on so if I remember not feeling like I want to be making art there's always something to do and for whatever reason filling out the middle cresor wallet ass phrase happened to be like how I chose to express my procrastination that day and I sat down I just finished drawing so put on my drawing table and it really took me probably two hours I'd like take a break in the middle like it's really like exhausting work but I did it it was so funny because it's very un- it felt very uncharacteristic but it's like I did it's like okay good I feel good I did a thing today I check a box like I made some slight measurable difference in whatever by doing this thing today and yeah so when everything was burning I remember my safe was on the top floor and then I put it in a safe even mine my passphrase was just a laminated piece of paper and has been for like the last decade in the same safe and I did this a week before and as soon as the firefighters left the first thing I did because everything is gone there's no piece of paper remain anything it isn't solid steel is like anything aluminum is a puddle like heat was so intense and I remember the safe was on the top floor and so it fell right into the middle of everything so I didn't have a lot of I've never stressed out this product so I wasn't holding out a lot of safe in it working but as soon as the firefighters left I ran in there I figured out where the safe would be based off the flickering to the other things and I dug through and I found the safe and even the safe at the corner of the safe was like melted and it was used into the solid thing and went over a grinder I grinded that so I'm a bitch open and like the whatever I had that's safe before all the contents were nothing but unrecognizable ash but like the metal it's called a bill photo like bill fold but puddle instead of her total it's a cute name hundred bucks I opened it up and I could read every letter on that thing and so out of all because I think crypto is like it's such an industry that's so plagued by false promises and scams and rug pulls and shitty things as any of my friends that I've prepared I mean it's just thing that they just get one of these things because I guess it wasn't a lot like I'm not a guy that that saves a lot of money I'm always reinvesting even all the NFT money I reinvested into like gear and supplies and things that burn in the barn but I will say that the thing is interesting about it is that you get these things because you're like oh it's a responsible thing to do but I didn't realize this what I buy it is that if heaven forbid you ever need its features to be useful but on the day that you need those features to be useful they are the most useful because it's in the context of everything else that you thought was useful is burnt so I'm just I'm a lifelong fan and a shill they're not this is not a pain or some measure but just straight up it's an awesome thing and yeah all my my friends that I put up a hundred bucks in a couple hours and if you think it's like oh we're good now oh cool like it wasn't that kind of a realization unfortunately but in the midst of all of the tragedy to have one little win at the end of the day it just made the day it made all the suffering of that day just like slightly more indorable so yeah there's some practical rest and then put it in safe because if it's not in the safe you're never gonna find it and put it on the second story if you have more than one story so you don't have all your debris collapsing on top of it just such basic things but like I said I was just it's so ridiculously auspicious and lucky that just happened to be a thing I did a week before is this because of the 11 year old trauma you just you don't believe in like cloud storage like it's like a it's a little bit of that I guess I mean clouds for the data like you wouldn't step down you know that that would never won't keep your he thought it the whole point of having your passphrase is you have it's you have a copy of it right there are all this stuff like this is just like I'm not gonna pay those bastards or maybe I really hacked not really and I don't care about a lot of like my visual data like all my high-res images are out there on the cloud oh another something I did not mention though I think that is a stupid or we cut off is what's funny is that a day before this happened I thought the biggest thing I was the biggest bad that I was worrying and fretting about and what I thought was the biggest existential threat to my career was image generation artificial intelligence and so it was and I think why we were recently going to talk in the first place we didn't talk about it at all which is making that'll keep being an issue for a long time just as well yeah but I will I'll say this you know what I mean it was really great to have that one knocked down several pegs in my my scalar priorities of what I'm worried about not that because I thought I was so worried about it and I definitely do think that it does present a very existential threat to our active living dynamic of creativity in this moment particularly for new artists like we could but that's a whole of the talk we can talk about like very of lots and lots of concerns and ideas around it but I will say that what this experience has taught me is something that I had drastically undervalued and overlooked was that as an artist I felt like I was very threatened by I think any artist that puts time and develop a craft is threatened by a machine that makes art better than you times faster than you it's very obvious too that's a very concerning real threat and if you just look at the finished product it's hard to argue with that but what I realized through just that the love and the outpouring of support from everyone out there is that art is a lot more than the impact of the final product and the reason that I have so many people out there that care for me that are concerned about me that have reached out and have supported me is because of the authenticity of the connection that they've made to my art and the art that I make which is really interesting the second art that I make comes from an extremely vulnerable place when I'm in my castle on my machine with my waycom I can go really deep into my psyche and really deep into the medicine and pull out and go into really vulnerable places to pull these things out and I feel like that's the power of why people connect with my art and that kind of authentic connection that connection you make with people that you make with people that support you that you make with your community that's something that an algorithm will never be able to make nobody's ever going to fund midger even like stable diffusion couldn't even reach by smash the unstable diffusion kickstarter we annihilated that there's it's going to take a lot for someone for no matter how good the art is and this is also just something to keep in mind for new artists I do it's a for there's such a creative skids in between traditional digital artists and the non-AI artists and now there's these new sort of the new prompt engineer and artist there's a lot of friction there right now but something that I would advise for that these I don't very bother to me to never be suspicious of joy or to be less suspicious of joy so whatever I'm sure there's a lot of people out there that are getting a lot of awesome feelings from using image generators and that's amazing for them I'm really blue my to deny anybody anybody whatever joy that they can squeeze out of this reality not me that's amazing but what I would my prompt to those creators would be is to recognize is that it is going to be it's a if you're leaning on a piece of technology and algorithm to create this art it's going to be really difficult no matter how amazing the art looks if so much of the process is driven by the machine I think it's going to be a really challenging to be able to create an authentic connection with people and that's a and employing a medium is you know it's very core is in authentic it's going to be a it's going to be really challenging to establish that and I've learned this week how that establishment of that authentic relationship with people has been that's been my saving grace and that's been the most valuable thing that I have this whole time and I didn't even realize it until I needed it first of all that's amazing thank you second of all I have to be a cheeky asshole and we're going to find out that it was actually like stability AI got went back in time like the Terminator and burned out your barn you realize it was the same issue one of the one of the tech rose that I pissed off just to laser down orbital platform to be Android versus the machine no yeah man I think lucidity news wanted me to ask you what's next for you I feel like you've covered that but if you have any more to say about that just like where you had all these festivals lined up I'm sure I imagine you're still doing at least some of them yeah like what's you got this tea with people you're what is now yeah what's next immediately we're still yeah still you haven't changed any of our calendar if anything this kind of greased me up from different things immediate next is we're going to Costa Rica we're gonna be at Envision Festival give me some talks out there my other new side hustle is an art auctioneer and thankfully my auctioneer mallet happened to be like in my truck so my auction mallet is still unscathed I've been really big into auctioning off artists work and my work and other artists work that's been a really fun thing so we're gonna be auctioning off a bunch of work at Envision working out there there's a thing at physical called solfest we had we're probably going up there and doing some art and doing some visuals making art for them but ultimately like the next the new next is just like re-establishing my ground I'm slowly building up my arsenal of art tools and pencils and paper and so there's a lot of that which really interesting is like I really enjoyed being so light and having my little grasshopper Buddhist stage and I'm actually really apprehensive around and very specific about the new things that I want to acquire into my life so I just knew start building everything back up so I'm slowly building out my traditional art zone I'm going to convert this to my trailer called the command center we had that out at Burning Man I think in 2016 I think I'm going to convert that into my new digital studio it's going to take weeks for hopefully the insurance investigators come up with whatever reason they started a fire as soon as whenever they do that then the crazy cleanup begins which is going to be massive but I think it's going to be awesome it's good for me I'm calling just like the treasure hunting and we've had a lot of people in Colorado and a lot of support and if you're out there and you want to listen to cool music and hang out and meet cool people and dig through the carcass of like my entire body of work like you're invited to come out and help us I got plenty of work gloves but yeah first stage is taking before like the big backhose get there and just bulldoze everything into like trash trailers I want to go through and just find all the mangled like interesting pieces of metal and steel and debris and just all just like the wreckage treasures one I have enough charcoal to last me several lifetimes of I can harvest a lot of that charcoal for art materials but I've actually been getting into metal sculpting recently like I've been building up my arsenal for that and art wise I just it's so cliche but I just feel that within the wreckage of all the metal there there are all the building blocks that get bashed they just a sick ass metal phoenix out of that so that's one of the first like art projects I want to do we probably won't be able to build and I can't imagine we'll be able to really do any significant building until the spring even like we're trying to rewire power to some of the other outbuildings so we can continue doing printing and you can't even I can't even take a six inch trench with the ground being frozen early wire so I think as clean up as much as we can get things together set up some temporary structures and I think the summer is going to be a lot of the spring is going to be when the barn building starts we've had some really amazing a lot of my visions will also be determined by what we can and can't do with just like building codes and Boulder are not the most Boulder County something has not traditionally been the most generous and they're extending the building of things but we've been we've had a large dome that's been donated to us so ultimately like that so the micro of the macro the micro just there's little things that can't things up build Phoenix just get back to be able to produce art it's like the good old days like I did remind me to like you said like I had this huge castle like I used to make art in the back of a ox truck with a solar panel on top so oops I don't need too much to do that so I'm going to start minimal but the bigger thing that I see and this is an idea I've had pre-existing to this but now I'm even more inspired to do this it really is this we I'm more we've and I've ever been before it's a very it's a new thing and one of the ideas that we really wanted to do here is to have I want to be more beneficial more artists like the new tools that we're able to buy and invest like I want those to be tools that I can share and teach people with so we have some property that we've been talking about that you have a somewhere between a healing art studio and a maker's space is something like that's like the energy that comes out of my heart is there it's in like giving sharing I regret how many originals ran my possession that should have been out there or my friend should have had so like the big lesson for me is like this is that there's so much power in openness there's so much power and vulnerability and the gift is in the giving and I've been receiving so much and I'm so grateful for that and I can't wait to I can't wait to get beyond the other side and have the gift of being able to give that love and that energy out to people and just to contribute to the true royal process of a win-win energy manifold of retribution right on yeah cool thanks you Batman thank you I'm glad you're like this whole week I felt like I've been in this like this new zone of clarity I'm grateful for you and that I'm able to express these things now while there's still fresh before things it's like after a really great trip eventually things started calcified back into the original shape that it was most familiar with this is a pretty big decalcification of things like there is no there's no going back to that there's no going back to the way it was before and I'm only excited about that I'm so much more excited about who I am now and who I am becoming than the person I was and the things that I lost I don't imagine I'll ever see you sitting on a horde of dragon treasure again in quite that way but if you are not quite that I will remind you of this conversation I wouldn't take away quote I think I was in I think I just ended up on one of our fundraiser blooper reels of videos that get used but a week before this deal is that Ryan Parks reminded me of this it's a Ken Wilbur quote and it's the on the ladder the higher you climb the more the ladder sways and the barn that was I was on the tippy top of a super high awesome ladder and my ladder swayed and my ladder burned and my ladder decohered and I am not really excited about building a bigger taller ladder I'm definitely more excited about building a bigger wider more stable table that more people can sit at with me is where that's where my alignment and my compass is heading right now cool yeah I'll see you at that table yeah man come by for sure lots of seats on his side so he will try his roof faith and religion and exercise and ritual to get God to settle down with him and go along with his way of life the mystic however is not a moralist for motion complexity and an angelic demonic ambiguity in which one's enemy is also part of the divine manifestation in history are all part of the cosmic life on the other side of the fence home means a lot to more lists but the mystic is society's alien and is not allowed to have a home smaller than the universe anytime he tries to settle for less to settle down and set up places god appears as the moving whirlwind whirlwind thanks again for listening future fossils is an independent ad-free entirely listener supported program if you believe in the work that I'm doing you want help see it thrive into the unimaginable future then you can avail yourself of all the backstage goodies at patreon.com slash michael garfield or you can just leave a review at apple podcasts that's more helpful than you know reach out to me personally at michael garfield on twitter or instagram and have a wonderful yacht