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Moments of the Unknown - 028
Recorded: May 5, 2025 Duration: 0:57:18Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, crypto enthusiasts explored the evolving landscape of art and NFTs, emphasizing the importance of community, collaboration, and personal growth. Key insights included the significance of building relationships with artists, the impact of climate trends on lifestyle choices, and the ongoing need for innovation in the crypto space.
Full Transcription
We're alive!
We're alive!
We're alive! The world is so busy.
It is so busy.
I love you.
These are the moments of the unknown.
Good morning. Hello, Deez. D-E-D-E-D-Z. How are you today?
Good morning.
Can you hear me?
Ethan, can you hear me?
Yep, I can.
Did we lose D's already?
Is he a speaker?
It says he's a listener here.
It says to me he's a speaker so let me
invite him to co-host or speak
morning Deez he did not lose me I had to leave my car. It wouldn't disconnect from the car Bluetooth.
Okay, how's it been, man?
It's been good. We got another beautiful rainy day out here in Ohio.
But I couldn't go for a walk and enjoy it nonetheless.
We have a beautiful rainy day here in New York as well.
It's been raining for a week straight. It's kind of sad, but...
We need the cleanse.
We're almost at the end of it.
I think after Wednesday, it's turning around.
Man, it's been such a long time since we've connected and chatted,
and it's such an honor to have you here, bro.
We go way back to early Punk's days.
You were one of my first collectors,
and I listen to every single one of your podcasts, so it's really awesome to turn the tables on you and have you here as our guest.
God, spend a minute, man. I hope all is well.
I know last year you were traveling all over the world, and every time I talk to you, you're in a new city.
That was crazy.
And it's nice to see you back in the states for a little bit
yeah well the reason for traveling was was to work on this big project and it's extremely hard to like
go from time zone to time zone every two days and be present online as best as i could be but also
like focusing on the videos and you know meeting, meeting people around the world. And yeah, and I'm grateful that I could just be home for a year every day and do this.
So it's both, you know, the combination of seeing everywhere and just when that's all done,
you just want to go nowhere and you just want to be in one place.
So it's kind of an interesting feeling to have gone through both this past two years.
Yeah, I feel that on a mini scale when I travel for like two weeks I'm ready to go home for six months and not do it again. So I can't imagine a year. I'd probably have died
Probably died about two months then
If you can make it past three you won't die, but it's extremely difficult to
You know, I don't die, but it's extremely difficult to, you know,
I don't even know how we even achieved this.
It must have been all the LSD or just the art that was fueling the whole, you know, when
you're, when you make something, you're just driven by that feeling and like nothing can
stop you.
It's something as tiring as, you know, traveling, but if it empowers you and if it gives you
that energy, then, you know, then it worksowers you and if it gives you that energy then you know then it
works for you rather than it exhausting you yeah we're also lucky like we have such a global friend
base that i'm sure everywhere you went like you knew somebody somehow even in like remote corners
of the world there's always somebody somehow on twitter that like that's the beautiful
that's the beautiful thing about this you know even twitter and i really rely on twitter because
every single day i was gming from a different city and no matter where we were you know it could
have been cambodia it could have been easter island there was always at least one person
that responded and we always met with that person.
And we were just getting, like, guided every day by people in every city.
So I feel like if you're underutilizing this tool of being globally connected,
especially as a portrait photographer, in my case, you know,
it was just the best way to meet people.
Also, you know, we shot a lot of strangers.
But having said that like it we we
were guided a lot of along a long time but enough about thing i realize every time i'm in a new city
i'm just like i can just tweet that i'm here it's people show up and those people are the people you
want to connect with because they're watching, they're there, and it gives you that ability and open space to open your horizons, you know, versus traveling to New York, where I'm sure you have a lot of friends.
But, like, when you travel to, like, the middle of, you know, Zimbabwe, you want to meet that one person that says, hey, I'm here, let's chill.
I haven't been there yet, but I get that for sure.
When I was in Zimbabwe, we actually had a home invasion,
which was pretty scary, actually.
Like, were you staying at, like, an Airbnb, or what's the...
Like, not a hotel?
No, no, no.
So I have this shaman that I work with from Peru
who does, like like sacred healings in
different parts of the world with this cactus medicine and they do tours also like psychedelic
tours around the world and he was like my personal mercenary guide spiritual guide in south africa
because that's where they're from so he took me me all over Africa and he's like the perfect person you'd want to travel with. He took me into the Congo and
we saw gorillas like eight hour trek. But before we got to the Congo, we were in Zimbabwe in the
middle of Zimbabwe and he set up this, you know, rhino thing that we were on. And the guy who set
up the rhino thing, the wild rhino trekking uh gave us his apartment because
he had an apartment from his family and you know we stayed at that apartment and during the night
you know i was you know sleeping but the shaman was awake he heard like drilling or like buzz saws
sawing away at the window of the metal frame that protected us and I
guess I had to go pee at 2 a.m. so I went and turned the lights on and peed
and then I apparently I scared them away or that there were people in the house
and then he got it like a bat and went to the window started like hitting hitting
at them but yeah that would have been a very that would have we probably would
have lost all the film, honestly,
if they had gotten in the house.
Which is pretty insane.
Is that the most dangerous scenario
you found yourself in
over the years?
When we were by the gorillas,
we almost got attacked by the gorillas.
Okay, at least it was a gorilla, though.
Like, that's slightly different than another human being.
Yeah, I mean, there was, like, five dudes outside the window, and they were breaking into houses and shit.
But there's no, like, gun to protect you.
It's, like, baseball bat was the weapon of last resort there.
We didn't have any weapons.
Damn. We were just armed by the grace of god and seems like they didn't have any weapons either or they weren't willing to use them which
is good i think i think we were just we were we were aware of what the dangers and and protected
by higher powers gotta Gotta love it.
Well, I'm glad nothing bad happened
other than a couple scares.
Do you have any PTSD from that?
Do you have any, like,
no, you're not, like, sitting around in New York
thinking you're hearing things?
Well, you know, I've gone through my share
of break-ins in New York at gunpoint,
like, back in, like, 2014.
And, you know, it's a funny funny thing every time I do a 365 project someone always tries to break in the house and steal
all the thing like the first time I did the birthday project I was living with like five
guys in Bed-Stuy and we were like the first uh you know people in the neighborhood moving into
that part of Marcus Garvey and Bed-Stuy.
And we had this like duplex with five guys. And most of those guys were always throwing house
parties and who knew what kind of people were coming over during art school. But at one point,
this guy, while I was at school, all my roommates were home, came to the door dressed as a detective
and he busted open the door with a gun. gun well my roommate let him in after knocking and then hit him in the head with the gun
came in the house they thought we were drug dealers they thought we were selling cocaine
and stuff so they were like where's the drugs where's the drugs and then they went to my room
because I had weed at the time there and luckily I had all the weed with me but uh they tore my room apart and like all the
all the place where I had my weed was with all my 365 polaroids from the birthday project where I
hid the weed in there and and I was like scared as hell that they took those bags because they
did take bags to carry shit out of the house with that they robbed from my other roommates.
But luckily they dumped out all the Polaroids on the floor.
And I had every single Polaroid
and they just took my weed
and all my roommates rent money.
They didn't find anything
because we didn't have anything.
But the crazy thing about that, dude,
a week before i took acid and it i think it was not good because like i had these shakes and i was going
really paranoid and i was looking out the window every five seconds for like two hours but i felt
something was off and i felt i looked at my front door and I saw this
wave of energy blast through the door, like explosive. And I was like, what the hell was
that? And that's the same energy I saw and felt a week later when they actually did bust down the
door in the room. And I saw it like non-temporally, you know, I saw it before it happened in a weird
way. Thanks to that experience. But, you know,
there's a lot to unpack there. But to connect that story with this story, again, I have all the 365
Super 8 films with me because I carried it around the world. There's nowhere to develop it.
I had all the cartridges. I had 100 100 cartridges and who knows if they would have took
in my pelican case filled with the cameras and whatnot and thankfully they didn't they didn't
get in so i always have these run-ins with thieves trying to like steal the art thinking it's drugs
i mean it's good that they uh they don't want the art they're just like give me the drugs
if only they knew they're not uh yeah they're not doing research on who they're actually trying to
steal from they're just going off the vibe yeah have you ever had a deal with anything like that
no um honestly i think the closest we got was like people late at night when you're walking alone in a busy city coming up to you with like weird vibes, but never any guns or direct threats.
So I can't really luckily relate to that yet.
Hopefully you never do.
But I'm also a guy who has a gun in every room and like expect someone to show up to his house once a week and try to extort
them and I'm ready to shoot somebody if I have to so it's great. It's a great headspace to be in.
Well now people know not to fuck with you. They'll get shot on your lawn.
Yeah, that's one thing that is nice about Ohio. We have castle laws.
So if you show up and I deem you a threat and I claim it's self-defense, then I can legally shoot you.
All right. Well, I'll let you know if I ever come visit.
I don't want to give you a surprise.
That's not what I'm saying.
But, Deez, I don't want to delineate i want to
this show is about you and um i really want to learn more about you and you know just take the
next 15 minutes to share more about you know i know you love video games and sports and how did
you fall in love with art like where was your first moment you really fell in love with art it was completely accidental honestly um growing up you know closest art museum we had that was
like somewhat decent was the cleveland museum of art and we went there on like a few field trips
as kids but um i didn't really ever appreciate it when we'd go there. It would be more like, oh, this is awesome.
We can not sit in school all day type thing.
And it wasn't until in my 20s, really,
I see you had some art installations, had some cool stuff going on,
cool stuff going on but i still didn't really fully appreciate it and uh i thought it was like
but I still didn't really fully appreciate it.
too snobby and esoteric if i'm being honest like a lot of the stuff i would see it and just be like
like i don't get this why is it worth you know so much money um like seeing a picasso in person
and just not really grasping any historical relevance or
context and just being like people are paying millions of dollars for this like
the fuck are they doing um and then sometime you know in 2020 after defi summer
somewhere around after i bought my first punk but before pop shot took off like the first
time i was ever exposed to like having a conversation with artists um it was me just
buying pepe art that i thought was funny um because it was some of the first art i saw that
was like number one accessible and number two i like it like always been a pepe fan
um so i was on rareable because i had known about rare pepes but i didn't really understand
counterparty and i didn't want to touch like my bitcoin or move it to counterparty to buy shit
so i was like kind of turned off by that and rarible was just you know i can use eth from defi summer
to buy shit the same wallet and it's like super low stress you know
i don't anytime i use bitcoin i was just not
so how did you go from that to like amassing a
an incredible collection of most of all the artists that
are active today like i i you know i love those posts you do when you scroll through your gallery
and i'm just like holy this guy has literally everything so how did you go from like
picasso to being like gertrude stein of nfts it was a lot of um spending time in the punk's
discord and just talking to people and a lot of spending time in the Punks Discord and just talking to people.
And a lot of times it wasn't talking to the artists directly themselves,
but more the collectors who really championed certain artists.
Back then, I mean, it was a lot of like the same five or ten artists.
It was obviously like XCopy.
People was the first open edition i i ever minted um because that was like late 2020 for me um you had like the hackatow and coldie fans
and like the early super rare fans and then sometime when i met you around oh it was it
like between january and March of 2021?
I don't remember exactly when it was, but you were one of the first artists I talked to directly outside of Snowfro.
Snowfro is always a weird thing for me to classify, because my version of Snowfro was more of a friend and collector and not an artist,
because he was just like the resonant
dad in the punk's chat who helped everybody and he wasn't super talkative about any of his own
stuff it was much more of like everything else he was collecting and what he liked about it
um so if you count snowfro he was probably probably the first one. But then you were the second one. You were the person who kind of taught me in a way that things that aren't just art I laugh at could have value.
Really? I didn't even know that.
One of ones.
I was much more into collecting art blocks and stuff because it was gambling.
Where you didn't know what you were going to mint.
And you were gonna mint and you
were just like fuck it like what if i get a rare whereas like i don't know i bought my first couple
twin flames it was not like i was trying to get a rare like there was no like randomness or luck
to it but it was like of all the 100 you know i like these few the best um and that was like one of the first times i was
like picking out something not because it made me laugh or not because i thought i could like um
gamble on the rarity because it was unknown but it was like i just like kind of like these and
then you were so active um there are very few people who were as uh active and doing as much marketing and networking as you were um especially back then
like right i felt like you were in the punks chat just as much as i was well i just want to say bro
i'm so grateful for that initial support just by you and all the punks and i am grateful that you
did bet on me and i hope it paid off and like gave you so much more than it gave me
and you could support so much more artists from from those sales and I'm just I'm just grateful
for that journey because you know when you believe in someone at 0.5 ETH or 1 ETH that you never know
where it's going to go and you know you you don't want to be part of the consensus you want to create
the consensus and you know inspire other people to see what you see.
And I think that's the beautiful journey of being a collector and being the
artist that, that gets to be shared amongst, you know, the crowd.
Yeah. There was very little expectation of profit.
It was much more just like,
this is the most active guy in the chat who's putting out a collection and
like, I like the idea behind it
there's a few of them i really like and then obviously had some really good luck with the
market that year and probably all the ease i got from selling my twin flames went back into other
artists like i was um in 2021 just putting most of my profit that was expendable just straight back in.
So let's talk about where everything's at now and what kind of advice would you give to artists now?
Because even for myself, no matter whatever success we've had in that year,
it's like every day in this space or even in the art world, as time moves on,
it feels like you always got to start from zero.
You know, it's such an interesting place to be.
And how do you reconnect with people and how do you share that new work and how do you, you know, show advice would you give an artist who is starting
over today to to be enter this space in a way where they can make an impact or how has your
you know view changed in the few years and how you even collect art so my view has changed a bit
where i think back in 2021, especially with photography,
I had this idea that a lot of people coming in to the piece in general, like a lot of
photographers I was connecting to, they were making art for like 5, 10, 20 years.
Most of it starting on Instagram, some of it pre-instagram but they had
never minted stuff before and the stuff that they were minting was like their best work from a you
know 10 plus year time period of their life and i thought that if i could buy some of their early
work that i deemed to be like some of their best, it would be harder for them to reproduce work of that quality in shorter timeframes in the future.
Like surely they'll make better work over the course of their life. But the fact that
they hadn't really had a way to get it out there and make it viable for for so long and then there was like kind of this um i'll say flood but like
there's a big rush of people who were minting some of their best work back then so i was just
trying to buy like my favorite stuff from my favorite people but today it is a lot different
it feels like you know there's probably a tenth of the collector base that existed back then, if not smaller.
And you just have to like, I talked to Xerox about this and he always put this idea in my head, but he was like, you know, creating art is kind of a disease at the end of the day. For the quote-unquote real artists,
it's not like you can turn it off.
It's like everything you look at is through the lens of
how do I make art about this?
Or how does this add to whatever story I'm trying to tell?
And those have been the artists I've been trying to
collect from more as time goes on. and less of the artists who like, you see them come around every few months, when things might look a little better, drop something and then like kind of disappear.
It's like I try to like bet on the people with the disease, rather than the other stuff I see.
rather than the other stuff I see.
I think my advice for artists is really just like,
follow your heart and just keep creating things.
And you have people like,
recently it's been kind of fun to watch,
but like Modest is somebody who's been like making art
every day for like two years or something.
And it wasn't until the last like month or two
that people really caught on to him and this space is so small and it runs off you know memetic desire
so much that it only really takes um a little bit of momentum to to completely change your trajectory
and sometimes um the trajectory shifts and like things pick up and then they slow down again.
And it's like, if you do get the lucky trajectory shift, you have to have enough grounding to know,
hey, this might not last forever and I shouldn't completely alter my lifestyle to whatever the last month or three months of sales have been.
whatever the last month or three months of sales have been.
So I think that was a problem I saw a lot in 2021,
where people who hadn't made a lot off their art
up until that point,
made hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars.
And instead of padding a nest egg
and making sure all their taxes are covered,
they're moving moving into you
know massive studios or living in a penthouse or like buying a g-wagon and you're just like okay
man well you know you might not be able to drop another open edition that makes a million dollars
like ever again um but i think a lot of people made the mistake of changing their lifestyle up too much.
But in terms of connecting with people, for me it's a little harder these days because
I'm just a lot less on Twitter, not hosting spaces nearly as much.
So it's harder for me to connect with people through text.
I really have to talk to over voice or um see you in
person so it's it's harder for me to connect with people whereas like back when we met i was spending
12 hours a day in punk's chat so even though i maybe didn't hear your voice for a couple months
like i felt like i had to know you just from thousands of messages
like i'm not doing that anymore so so did you channel all that connectivity energy into your
new podcast because i you know i love listening to them every time they launch yeah and yeah just
just like that's they're really well done and you really go deep into every direction. I kind of, how do you do that?
The podcast became what Twitter spaces were,
but it's a lot more intentful.
Like I got to a spot with Twitter spaces
where I felt like in a way people were just trying
to use me to promote whatever they wanted to promote.
And I was getting too much like incoming stimuli
to deal with it and it was too hard for me to you know quote-unquote vibe check people
correctly before like giving them a platform and I realized after probably like August or September
2021 that like I had to stop doing what I was doing at least in the way i was doing it and the podcast is just like the natural evolution of the twitter space but with the
ethos that like less is more um probably don't record more than like 25 or 30 a year because
they're all in person but um i try to be pretty intentful about the guests we have
and the conversations we have so it's's more like some of those early spaces.
I still have the space we did with Cast in 2021 on Spotify.
It's like a five-hour long space where I was talking to you and you told me to bring up
Cast.
And we ended up talking to Cast for a couple hours and we brought up a whole bunch of other
at the time felt like
relatively unknown uh artists but you know a lot of them blew up um it's like trying to recreate
that but in more of like a timeless conversation setting rather than like a ephemeral space um
because back in that summer I was like paying my friend to like sit on the space and record them
because the way to download your archive to record them was like super buggy and you never
knew what space was what it was just named after a hash so when i would export my archive i would
just have like 25 gigs of fucking audio files that i didn't know what to do with and i didn't
want to open them all up and figure out what was but so and and people can mint your podcasts i i noticed after i collected the whole set yeah yeah we just do um
we've experimented with different price points like we started out like a 20 season pass that
got you airdrops um from artists who were on the pod and then i quickly realized that like
i was self-selecting guests for the podcast who might drop art with
us and that just felt completely unintuitive and like not what i wanted the pod to be long term
so then we um talked to claire silver on an episode and i realized like i could just fuck
around with ai art and make uh the podcast art myself and then that way i could bring on any guests you know doesn't even have to
be an artist and then i don't feel like shit at the end of the season i need to like get three or
five of the guests to commission an art piece for us um so that that was kind of the evolution of
the mint and then we went to the pods.media mints where it's like a dollar to mint an episode because
i didn't want it to be 20
bucks i just wanted it to be as cheap as possible um that way if you want to support us for literally
one dollar you can i think that's amazing man because like you put so much support into so
many people and you know this is your art this is your craft is you know crafting the conversation
i think you know i think i love the way that you
could collect a podcast you know imagine if joe rogan was doing that from when he started like
i feel like this is where we're at and collecting content yeah and i like i don't know if it's
obvious but i take the art super seriously and i only put out things that like i'm really happy
with um some of them take me like 20 hours a week if I'm really pushing myself.
So it's a way for me to put out art with zero expectation at all, which is really important.
Like I never really want to like sell art, but I do want to have art I've made live on chain so that
in the future I can look back and be like you know here's
actual provenance of me putting something out in 2022 or 2023 or 2024 or 2025 or whatever
um and then i also have these like additions that i just let people claim for free who've
been collecting them since the first one i did like i think three years ago now
or two years ago um so that's another way i just like put out art to get it on chain but i don't
want to make any money off it i just want to have the provenance of hey at this point in time i was
making art and putting it out into the world and it's like just more important to have that time
stamp and the proof rather than like try to make any money off the art itself it's about it's like just more important to have that timestamp and the proof rather than like try to make any money off the art itself.
It's about it's about what you're contributing. Right.
And and I know we're at the top of the half hour here.
So I wanted to give you know, I want to be mindful of your time and everyone who's listening.
I have no time on it. I'll be around the park for like another hour or so.
I'm down to keep talking.
Cool. Well, we'll let ethan um ask
a question oh wait i think he just dropped out um my co-host ethan uh who did the music for my
project um he traveled with me around the world uh ethan would you do you have any questions for
d's yeah first can you guys hear me yeah i can hear you okay perfect um hey these just wondering um i i
also have seen i'm pretty new to the space i'm a friend of justin's and traveled with him and did
the music and so just sort of burgeoning on the space here but um i have seen in the past year
the videos of like your collection and stuff and it's so impressive
even from someone that is entering the space so i'm just wondering what do you hope people feel
when they see your collection and say like 100 200 years from now
that's uh it's a good question i don't think i've ever really thought of it that much honestly i
hope people look at it and they think um you know wow this guy has good taste across a wide variety of
uh genres and not just like a one trick pony who only bought like x copy or people or only
photography because i think um i have a very wide range of art from a very wide range of artists, like, you know, things that were free to mint or a couple dollars
versus, like, you know, Sam Sprat skulls or punks or whatever.
They're, you know, a little more than a couple dollars.
So I don't know in 100 or 200 years what people will look at it and think,
but I hope they look at it for the breadth of the collection,
not in just terms of variety of art, but in terms of artists I've collected from and not just like the five most expensive pieces in it, because it's really not about that.
And other than that, I just like really get a kick out of sharing the gallery.
And I've been buying a bit less art over the last year or two.
Also, it just comes down to like
with less money to buy art with because i'm making less money because like 2021 was an anomaly where
we made millions of dollars off of jpegs and like you know last year we did our second best year but
it was uh you know maybe 20 as good as 2021 was so just don't have the uh capital to keep re-injecting money back in um
but i do this thing where like i take how much money i've made i subtract taxes from it and
then whatever that number is um i take like 10 of it and throw it in a side wallet and that's a lot
of what i collect with um over time so i've been doing that for a while and that has helped me just like continuously
buy things i like and know that hey i can afford this or like oh hey i can't actually afford this
um yeah i hope people like at it and they they look at it for the whole collection and not just
like the top five things they see and i try to make it at the top here what it's pinned at the top here
just in case if anyone wanted to see yeah i try to make it so that like it flows really well i've
put a lot of thought into how each section goes into the next section both from like palette
perspective but also themes and themes based on some of the artists as well rather than just like themes of
the art itself so i've put a lot of time into that thing it's it's by far the um most time i've put
into any like art curation because it's it's this point i think it's like maybe 90 of my collection
I think it's like maybe 90% of my collection.
It's pretty close to like everything.
Every time I go through it, I'm like,
oh fuck, I'm missing this thing I bought four years ago
and it comes back to me.
But for the most part, it is a pretty comprehensive view
of everything I've collected.
The only thing I think that's missing
is like some of the ordinals I've bought of it last year.
But other than that, it's missing five art pieces from ordinals.
So not a crazy amount, but it has everything else.
So about your collection, what kind of advice would you give to someone
who wants to amass a collection of emerging artists?
And the second part of that question is,
and this might be very difficult for you to answer,
but what piece in your collection specifically,
which artists or maybe a couple you can name,
do you feel are so underrated and deserve more light in their work?
That's a good question.
So the first part of that is
what advice would I give to another collector?
And that would be really be patient
and take the time to get to know
the people that you think you want to collect from.
I think a lot of times in this space,
things feel like they're moving so fast and the medic
desire is in the driver's seat.
And we start to think, well, if I don't buy this in the next 30 minutes, I'm never going
to have a chance to buy it.
And a lot of times, you could set a timer for three to six months into the future, and
the hype on whatever thing that is hyped today
will be significantly down.
And you could probably get something you like
for a cheaper price while also using that time
to actually get to know the artist a bit more
and figure out like, is this someone I really like?
Is this someone I really want to support long-term?
I think we have a really lucky
opportunity in this space to get to know just about every artist like there's been less than
five artists who I've tried to get to know and they've just like ignored me or blocked me or
tell me to fuck myself um which is pretty good whereas like I've got to know hundreds of people.
And I think that connection is what makes it really easy to hold on to a lot of their work.
In terms of people who are underrated, man, that's a really good question.
I feel like everywhere I look, I feel people are underrated.
Like which piece in your collection do you scroll
and you're like, damn, that one?
You always come back to that one.
You're like, why isn't those artists, you know,
being seen more?
I don't know.
I feel like this, just like we did with Kath, right?
Like, let's do it again.
And maybe I'll start, right?
Let me set it off.
Because there's an artist in this audience
that I noticed, and their name's Emily Nicole
with the Squiggle Fuzzy.
And they just released
this amazing project where it's, you know, it's an Art Blocks project, and you get a vinyl record,
and I think, you know, I work with Ethan a lot, and he's going to release his new album soon,
and maybe Ethan and Emily can connect on the music, but I think, what is this space about,
if not connecting people, where you know you can create together or bring attention to just in the easiest way of sharing their art and I've been
sharing their art all week and I think you know if you like vinyl music analog and if you like
generative art and you want to spend 70 bucks she's a great person to support I never spoke
to them or met them but I just you, from afar and you see the work,
I just think it's cool.
And hopefully that people
see that too.
I feel that. Yeah, so
I need to familiarize myself.
I missed that art blog shot, but
I'll give you some names off the top of my head
of, like, people I think who
are pretty underrated
by the space, even if they have had bigger um
successes at one point like one of the first people who comes to mind to me is jisoo um
aaron ricketts i i really love his photography um i think brooke and ben brooke de donato and ben
are like some of my favorites in their kind of own lane.
I think we're at the point now where I can't say Summer is underrated anymore.
But maybe Sam Cabot, like I love her work and feel like it really sticks out in my collection.
In terms of like illustrators, I always will feel like Pop Wonder is a little underrated,
even though he had a couple crazy sales back in the last bowl.
I absolutely adore looking at his work on my walls.
I love Neil Burnell's Woodlands, all of Jay's work, Juvish Jay.
He's also one of my favorite people.
TJ Thorne and the way he works with water it's like super fucking unique and i don't see anybody care nearly as much about water
as him and he has me looking at water completely differently uh joey or cowboy killer he um
has some really hard-hitting pieces in my collection. If you look at the piece looking in a small window with a ghost
that looks like it's either hung itself or ready to hang itself.
That one always makes me stop and look at it a bit more.
I love Alien Queen's work. It sticks out like a sore thumb.
She's been killing it lately.
You know what? You just made me realize something
how can we find artists like this you know how do you curate your feed to even get these new
artists that you haven't been exposed to and you're starting to like like how do you get them
on your feed the best way that i found artists is just from other artists like i feel
like a lot of times there's like probably less than 20 collectors that when they talk about an
artist i actually look at it from the lens of them appreciating the artist first like them trying to
pump their bags um like somebody like bat soup is like somebody who when he talks about an artist
there's no pretense of him trying to pump a bag.
It's just him talking about something he genuinely likes.
Whereas, I feel like a lot of these collectors come from more of like, oh, you should buy this because it's going to go up.
So I tend to weight the opinions of other artists I like more than other collectors.
Like Zaid always has good recommendations on artists
always talk to die and xerox about artists they see um you know just anytime an artist makes a
suggestion about another artist it weighs a little more heavily than um when other collectors do it
so i would say like follow your favorite artists.
And a lot of them share art they like.
Like, almost every artist I feel like I follow
is sharing other people's art they like.
Somebody else I didn't mention, but I think...
I think we lost you for a second there.
Ethan, can you still hear me?
Hi, guys.
Can you hear me?
Deez, I don't think we can hear you
I think uh I think we're getting
rugged by the twitter here
yeah
um we'll just wait a moment Sorry guys, I'm not sure what happened, but if you can hear me, can you put a heart up?
Sorry, guys. I'm not sure what happened.
But if you could hear me, can you put a heart up?
Cool. I'm trying to get Ethan back as a speaker
so we could play the music
and then close out the show.
I just can't hear anything.
Ethan?
I'm on as a speaker.
Okay, cool.
I can't hear D's
So we're gonna have to just
Start playing the music
Okay, cool
Thank you guys for being so patient with us
I know it's a tough thing to go through here
So thank you guys for sticking through it
So Today's shot was shot just a
couple hours after yesterday's shot and um so it was we had had the you know this awesome sushi
meal the night before and then we're with kataru here um and i'll let justin explain how the pikachu got into the mix but we we had
gone to this awesome bar that was like underground in um shinjuku and and there was like wall the all
the walls were covered with cds and cassettes and and there's like a booklet that you could go through
and so we were just selecting songs and it was so fun and then so i just the sound that i chose
just rem just uh represented the feeling of that night with kataru and it was my first time in
japan you know the first 24 hours i'd been in Japan so it was all just exciting and electric
so that's what the sound I was going for here I'll play it now
yeah cool well just before i jump into it i wanted to see if d's was was still here if he's
if you're speaking how long was i talking how long was i rugged for because i was just walking and
talking two minutes oh yeah what
was the last thing you heard me say the last thing i heard you say you were about to go into detail
about artists i mean artists sharing artists and then whatever you were saying after that
uh is what got lost okay i i was just going on a long ramble about how uh i thought a lot of collectors talk about their bags in a
not earnest way where they are talking more from the perspective of you should buy this because i
bought it and i think the price is gonna go up and not like you should buy this because i bought it
because i love the artist and this piece and here is why um and then i went on another ramble about why i don't make
lists anymore which is probably unimportant but uh yeah the tldr was like you make a list and you
make like 10 or 20 people happy and then you piss off 100 people you didn't put on the list so i
just like stopped making lists so so sounds like that's cool it sounds like the best way to discover
new art and maybe whoever's listening
who's an artist, and I'll try to do better at this myself, let's find one to three artists a day to
reshare. It's just a repost. Something simple. Criticize the work in a positive or negative way.
I just think exposure through retweets are such an underrated tool.
And it's such an easy button to press.
I'm trying to start using it more myself.
But I think whoever is an artist in this room, like, you never know what people you could be supporting just by sharing.
And, you know, I like to collect as much art from other artists as possible as well.
And, you know, I just hope we all can do our best to help each other.
Because it seems like collectors take our input more seriously
than collectors to collectors due to the financial, you know,
interest in it where we just genuinely like the art and aesthetics.
So I think there's an advantage to using our eye
and community
help to just share others' work.
And I'm going to start doing that more
if I've not been already.
But we are getting at the top of the hour
here. And Ethan did
play his song.
And Deez, I hope next time you visit New York
we could have some pizza or something.
I had some spots to show you.
We're going to close this showdown.
But before I do, there is a fun little story about today's video.
And if you haven't seen what this project is about,
every day we're sharing a new video from around the world through Super 8 Portraiture.
And Ethan scores the sound for each portrait
based on the person or the space that we're in.
So for this shot, I chose UDs for this piece particularly
because of Pikachu and you're always sharing Pokemon.
And I share that interest with you.
I used to play RuneScape and Warcraft and Pokemon also
when I was younger.
And I love RPGs.
So I thought, you know, the best way to honor my friend D's would be, you know, having the only Pikachu shot in the project.
And at the time, I was worried about, like, copyright infringement on Nintendo characters.
So I was like, how do I make this Pikachu without it being Pikachu and I thought
you know what the shape and color
might be the giveaway and I just wanted to be
experimental here
with all the lights and shapes and colors
and I won
this Pikachu
if you've been to Japan
you know that there's these vending machine
spots, arcades
all over Shinjuku.
And we had like 15 minutes to kill before the midnight
because we shoot these portraits sometimes at midnight
just so we could enjoy the full day
and have a stress-free day of not needing to find someone.
So we went to a vending machine.
And I remember when I was a kid in the 90s,
my mom would go to these vending machines
and win on the boardwalk like she was obsessed with this stuffed animal and winning these cranes
for some reason she always won and I think she passed down those powers to me because the first
try I just put the crane over the Pikachu's head and it pulled it right out and I was like you know
I'm gonna give this gift to kotaro because he's gifted us
such a beautiful night and incorporate it in the shot and i thought with this this beautiful of
giving back to someone who's giving his time to us uh was a beautiful you know way to connect
because no one really speaks english uh in japan so we were just connected through our phones
translations and the gifts and the time we were spending.
So that's how this portrait came to be.
And I thought it would be fun to share it.
But hey, Deez, is there anything else you'd like to share? Or you want any of the listeners to follow?
Or how can we support you and your podcast?
Yeah, nothing to do on my end.
The Mint's closed.
Currently planning the next season and not sure exactly what it's going to look like but um nothing for people to do listeners and just
be on the lookout for the next season when we drop it and if you haven't um listened to any
episodes or haven't given it much attention you We have like 75 IRL episodes filmed
over the last three years,
so you can go back.
And hopefully, most conversations are pretty timeless.
Some of them are definitely more market-based,
depending on the guest.
But if there's ever an artist or person
you're interested in
and you see them on the list of guests we've had, just
listen and see if you like it.
If you don't like it, message me and tell
me why you don't like it so I can make it better.
That's always helpful
as well. Other than that,
not really asking anything from anybody.
Just thanks for having me and it's always nice
to catch up with you. I'll be in New York
at the end of
June for the NFT shit so we'll figure out
something to do there let's do it man planning a little uh clothing drop again with the goons
there too so you uh missed out on a not drugs bag or you just want to buy more clothes that
we make together um we have some like more tie-dye uh the the theme is
more around like rejuvenation and spring like a lot of flowers a lot of blooming a lot of like
bright colors um the opposite of the last theme which was burnout which was a bit darker and more
muted so i gotta ask before we close, I got to ask,
because you've been an inspiration.
What made you stop smoking weed?
A couple things.
It was a combination of I lost a half million dollars farming blast,
and we've been trying to start a family for a while,
and there's no world where smoking a couple grams of rosin a day makes you a more fertile human being.
And I was just getting to a point where like I'd wake up in the middle of the night and pull out my shotgun and think someone was in the house.
And I would just sit there looking at a door that was never going to open, ready to shoot somebody who was never going to walk through it.
it was never going to open ready to shoot somebody who was never going to walk through it so there
was a couple mental breaks along with some health things where i was just like yeah we gotta like
put this down and uh we're almost a year in now so i think june 1st was the first day uh last year
so it's good that it's good that you know your limits i think it's important to know your limits
and and to work with yourself that way.
Sadly, I am not a very disciplined person.
There's a world where Dee's just smokes a couple of joints at night and it's all good.
But I don't have that ability to moderate myself.
If I do something, it's either I'm all in doing it for 12 hours a day or I don't do it at all um and I just you can't really be
that way with weed um it was different when I had like monetary um like there's a point in my life
where like smoking was relatively expensive and I couldn't afford to do it as much as I wanted to do
it but after making money in crypto and basically being able to smoke
whatever i want whenever i want with no real thought about the cost of it that was where
it started to become a problem uh because then i just had like no limit and no discipline and uh
yeah here we are i know what you mean man, I was not smoking for like eight months. And then just one day this winter, you know, I was editing late at night. I was like,
my body's telling me I need to smoke and maybe I should listen to my body. And that's, that I was
just going to be this one time. And you know, you hit that joint and then I'm still buying quarters
of like sour diesel. And it's like, fuck's it's a slippery slope man like you're like
oh i can control it it's good and then the next thing you know you're smoking three to five grand
worth of rosin not smoking rosin thank god because that shit literally like singes my brain cells but
a joint here and there won't kill you that's where i was i was was like 99% concentrates. Um, you know, smoking a joint did nothing.
So yeah, we just had to stop. I'm glad, I'm glad that that's working out for you, man. And I'm glad
that, you know, you're, that is discipline. You haven't been smoking. So you do have that.
Well, I can, like, it's easy to just stop something completely it's more the discipline of like trying to
moderate it like that middle ground of you know i can't smoke all day but i can smoke a little bit
like that's not a thing it's either i don't smoke anything or like i'm high before i pour my coffee
in the morning uh it's tough impossible for me to find a balance. These days, it's after 4.20.
These days, it's after 4.20 p.m.
I could smoke.
I'm like, I'm not going to smoke during the podcast.
I'll be paranoid.
Whatever.
But after 4.20, a few joints.
But is there anything else D's or Ethan would like to ask for?
We got to wind this down at some point.
Nothing here for me.
Ethan?
Just thank you so much, Deez, for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
This has been the longest show,
and this has been the show that had the most people,
so I just want to say thank you for fucking showing up
and the audience of all our friends and familiar faces.
Thank you for spending the time with us.
And,
you know,
I hope we all learn something or,
you know,
can do something to support each other.
And I think that's why we're all here in the first place.
So thanks everybody.
D's have a great day.
Definitely.
I'll,
I'll treat you to some pizza when you're here and I'll keep listening to
your podcast.
Thank you,
man.
Looking forward to seeing you in a couple of months.
Thanks for coming.
Ethan,
throw on our song.
