Have you felt lately that the joy is dead? Well, on the section of the internet that I'm on, there seems to be this agreement that the idea of joy itself died somewhere in the last 10 to 15 years. You know, joy as a value was something that we used to design for people, companies, artists would build joy in as an essential component of whatever they were making, but then something changed. Some people blame the internet. Some people blame COVID, VID. Some people blame politics, but almost everyone seems to agree that life feels different. It feels distinctly less joyous now than it did just a little time ago. For me, that feeling reached its peak. In 2020, I was living in San Francisco. The entire city was locked down. There were wildfires, so the sky turned orange. The news was deeply, deeply depressing on just so many levels. There was just sadness all around. It was a very dark place to be. And then all of a sudden, these little pockets of joy started to pop up all over the city. There were these murals of honey bears and they were on almost every city block. And it, it, I know it feels silly to say, but it was beautiful. And it was awesome. Every time I'd see one of them, I'd just be a little bit happier, just have a little bit more joy in my life. And the artists that made them did it because he loved the way that those honey bears used to make him feel when he was a kid at the supermarket. And he just wanted his city, my city, but our city. To have that feeling of joy baked in, and for this great act of practicing joy, that artist Finch became both beloved and reviled in San Francisco. A lot of people felt like he was insane enough about the issues, about the real stuff, as if there was any shortage of that, but that's how people felt. And I think that in a deeply joyless world, just practicing joy alone can be a bit of an act of rebellion. And that man, that artist Finch is an incredible, rebellious, disruptive ambassador of joy. I could not be more excited to have him on this podcast. And with that, I bring you Finch from We Funder's office on Mission Street in San Francisco. This is warm intro. So Finch one of the things we do on the podcast when we're preparing for this is our producer Gwan and I, we'll sit down and we try to, we'll go deep in the world of whoever the guest is, and we try to arrive at one sort of central question. Sometimes it's a word or one story that kind of keeps coming up for us. And I've been, I, I want to get your reaction on this, but I, the word that I kept thinking about for the last, you know, 72 hours that I've been in Finch world is the word joy. And your relationship with it, your arts relationship with it, what I believe you did for the city are doing for the city. I want to take this back and I want to kind of put this in the context of your life. Describe to me, to the degree that you can what did your childhood home feel like? What did it feel like to be in the, in the Finch household growing up? Yeah, so I had a fairly regular Midwest middle class upbringing. So, my father worked in sales, my mom worked in a hospital. We lived in the suburbs of St. Louis. When people say they're from St. Louis, they mostly mean the suburbs actually due to some poor tax decisions that the city made in the seventies. You know, like it wasn't like you'd see in the fifties movies, but I still was able to ride bikes around. You know, pretty normal. Like we'd go camping. I'm an Eagle Scout. We'd go to grandpa's house for the 4th of July, shoot off firecrackers. So I wouldn't say it was totally idyllic. I mean, my parents divorced when I was about eight which wasn't the best of, of not on the happiest of terms maybe. But, you know, formed two households and was fine from there. And yeah, my parents focused fairly heavily on education and so, I got to go to some of the better schools in St. Louis and that, you know, obviously charted a pretty good path for me out to Stanford out here. But I kind of had the impression as a kid that I had a job and my job was to do well in school and if I did my job and I can kind of do whatever I wanted, which is kind of how adulthood works too. It is, yeah. And so I don't know where I got that idea. I don't think that was explicitly expressed to me, but. The policy was definitely like my mom would be like, what are you doing upstairs? I'm like, whatever. Playing a video game. She's like, is your homework done? Yep. Okay, good. You know, like, are your grades good? Yeah, mom. Okay. Do whatever you're doing. What I'm surprised by is how much I could, I would define my reading of your career as just that is like work really fucking hard. I've, I've always found you to be one of the hardest working people in the art scene. Work really fucking hard and do whatever the fuck you want is I think that combination of yeah. If you're doing a good job, everything else can, can go to help. And I just, I don't know if you feel that way, but I, I, as a, a fan and observer, I've always said that Yeah. If I were to, my first instinct on how to map that on in my current life is that if you run a reasonably good art practice Yeah. Then there's basically excess profits that you can plow into Horribly unprofitable, but fun projects. Yeah. Like everything for Burning Man or anything in public space pretty much is not a good business. Yeah. And so, you know, I'm fortunate to have been able to structure something where the two things can work together, where one can support the other and I don't have to stress about, oh, hey, I'm gonna go, you know, launch the Finch Museum and staff it eight hours a day for three months but not charge anybody or sell anything. Right. Yeah. It's like, cool, I can do that because you know, I've set up something else, somewhere else that, that can support that. And yeah, it's sort of buying your freedom. With you know, with part of your art practice. And then using that freedom, we had a, we had on this really incredible Michelin star, chef Harrison Cheney. And that's a theme that you see with chefs too, is a lot of chefs. The, the Michelin Star restaurant, the two star restaurant that's the passion project. Mm-hmm. And the Vegas offshoot Yeah. Exists so that that can continue to, to live in peace. But I want to I'm curious about something. If I were to, again, going back to this idea of I walk in, in the St. Louis suburbs I walk into the Finch family living room. Yep. Am I seeing art on the walls? What is the Oh, yeah, that's a good question. So the answer is yes. And it wasn't, I didn't understand until college that this maybe was unusual. So my mom's house, my mom's family collects maybe more like pastoral paintings. Landscapes like Norman Rockwell Rivers. Yeah. Not quite as I don't wanna call it Norman Rockwell kitschy, but that was the first word that came to mind, though. I love Noman Rockwell. I would love to own a Norman Rockwell. Let's be clear. He's awesome. Yeah. But no, Rockwell hate. Yeah. No Rockwell hate. But yeah, so pastoral things. My mom's family also collected some Native American artifacts. You know, as a kid we would, when we'd be on road trips, we'd go to reservations or whatever, and then, you know, they'd be selling kachina dolls or little stone carvings. And my, my father, when he remarried, married an artist. A sculptor. And so I both had a sculptor, a working artist who had supported herself before she and my father from her art in the household. So that proved to be perhaps useful for my career, but also not like fancy artwork, but we had a there was an Ellsworth Kelly print that we had in the house. There's actually an, an early John Cave. No, sorry, is it, is it John Cave? I'm gonna say it's John, but I could be wrong. Nick Cave. Nick Cave. Here we go. I'm sorry Nick. You know, he's now, I, you know, I saw him at, at the SF om o with his sound suits. But like way before he was doing that, he, you know, he did a piece,'cause he's from Missouri, that, that they had very bizarre piece, actually. It was like human hair stretched over a pulley. But there was at least modern art things that they had. And you know, no one else is famous as those two names in the household, but sort of modern art. And so I got kind of jux a juxtaposition and exposure to those two. Dude, my parents, the only art we had up were free calendars mm-hmm. That like local realtors would give us. So by that measure, I think that's actually more people. Yeah. That's, that's a lot of art. That, that is a, that is a very healthy, also just range of art to grow up with. Do you remember the first artist that I, I'm really fascinated by this one moment that happens in, I think every creative's life. The first artist that just gets you between the eyes and just, it nails you and you know, that you, you feel differently about this thing than you've ever felt about any other art? That's a good question. So the first thing I remember, which maybe is the same as the answer to this question, is there was a sh exhibit in the St. Louis art museum, and I dunno if you know his work, it's the Blown Glass. Mm-hmm. You've seen it. Yeah. It's, or he is one of the world's most successful artists. Yeah. You've only seen it even if the name doesn't ring a bell. And so it's all these really beautiful, beautifully made glass pieces. And he, he lost an eye at one point in a, a glass accident, and so he doesn't blow the glass himself anymore. Wow. And he is a great quote, which is when I stopped back and was, you know, from having whatever the pipe in my hands that I blow the glass with, he said, I like the view much better from back here. Huh. Because now he has like 30 people who work for him or whatever. Yeah. And so his work gets translucent and there was a, a hallway between two rooms where a bunch of the pieces were placed above and then there were lights above that, that shone light through them. Yeah. And so the ground was all lit up. And that's the first memory I have of seeing a piece of being like, oh, sweet. This is awesome. How old were you? I don't remember. Six, maybe. But that's probably the earliest thing I remember being like, oh wow, this is, this is pretty sweet. And it was it at all on your radar around this time, you know, the, the Santa Fe hospital worker and a, a salesperson growing up with a, you know, healthy diversity of art at home. Was there any self-conception you had of yourself as, as an artist, or was that Yeah, so I, I have two answers to this question. I think maybe most relevantly was that, especially on my mom's side of the family, everyone did something. So my grandfather, and you could call it craft maybe more than art, but my grandfather car carved more functional things, but he'd occasionally would do something more artsy. And then my aunt made, you know, my hand drawn Christmas cards and dioramas and things, and my mom did glass beating. So there wasn't a sense of, you know, and my stepmom was a professional artist. So I didn't have the sense that there are those people who are artists and there are us who are not artists. And there's somehow some difference. There were people in my life who were doing arts or crafts you know, at a level that was meaningful to them that wasn't even vocational, right? Yeah. It was just a hobby and it, and it's fine to do it that way. And so I don't think I necessarily lost the sense that, oh, I'm I think a lot of these divisions, people have. Where they say, I'm good at math or I'm bad at math, I'm good at art, or I'm bad at art. Left brain or right brain. I think most of it is bullshit. Right? And it's just we get reinforcement through our childhood at what we are, maybe for random reasons, slightly better at, and being better makes you, you know, getting positive reinforcement and investing more time into something makes you better at it. And then the wedge grows over time. And so, you know, this is kind of comes down to the nature of verse nurture, but and I don't have an answer to that, to that question. Yeah. But I, but I do think there's a big element of sort of like reinforcement and and persistence. And so, you know, I didn't have a sense that, that I, I was an artist or not an artist. It was kinda like, cool, we, you know, we make things. Yeah. One, one thing I heard you talk about one time that really resonated with me was you talked about that moment that somebody that a child sees someone their age drawing better than they can draw. Mm. And how important of a, that that is the, that's when the ships diverge. Yeah. Right. Between the people that stick with it Spencer Eastman was mine. Man, that guy could draw a Spider-Man. Shout out Eastman. Yeah, yeah. Way better than I could. And so I stopped basically, and that would've been something like age eight. And I didn't get back into it again till probably age 13 or 14 when I had a buddy who was working on a video game. Yeah. And he's like a. Like a prodigy programmer and they didn't need a programmer and they needed art assets. And so I was like, cool, like I'll make art assets and I didn't really know how to do it, so I figured I would do stuff in Adobe Illustrator and some in Photoshop. And so I just started kind of working at it and there was nobody else doing digital illustration that I knew at age 14, so I was the best. Also the worst. But certainly the best. No, it's a great thing for your confidence to be, to be surrounded by friends that that suck at something and you suck a little bit less at it early on. That's what gets you started always. Mm-hmm. All the things I kept up with with life were just the things that I sucked at a little bit less than my friends were. Yeah. Yeah. At what point when, when you do this video game, mark does, did you do it under the name Finch? At what point does that,'cause I know it's a childhood nickname, but when does that appear? That appears in the seventh grade. So, yeah. So before this, but I actually had a gamer name that I used for the art and the gaming would've come, I dunno, when I got the gaming name, the gaming name was my a OL nickname back when I'm older than you. So you used to have to pick one name for a OL. Are you, are you comfortable sharing? Yeah. I wonder if you could track it. I love a whole nicknames. I wonder if you could track it back to me or not. Oh, okay. We can cut this out if if it's trackable. Yeah. I doubt it is, but so it was Roth mic. R-O-T-H-M-I-C. Okay. For a really hilarious name, which was in the sixth grade I was looking for. I guess that's about the time I would've gotten aim or whatever. Yeah. Was it sixth? Maybe it was fifth. And we had assigned to us a book that was rolling Thunder Here. My Cry. Mm-hmm. I don't remember anything about the book. I don't remember being at all meaningful to me, but I just saw the letters. Yeah. And I was like, oh, I like those letters. And I was like, let, just try adding a vowel. Yeah. You know, Roth C, you know, R-O-T-H-M-C, let's add vowels in there. It could be Roth Mac or Roth Mack. It you know, I got the first choice, which was an I, this is and that was it. This is something that I love about designers and artists. I remember one time my wife's an artist mm-hmm. And a designer, and I remember I was ranting to her about some piece of copy that somebody had written. I was like, this doesn't even make any fucking sense. Why is it shaped like this on that? And she was like, HAI designers are not reading the words, looking at the shape of the paragraph. Mm. And I, I love that you, the title meant nothing to you. Yeah. But you like the shape of it with That's, that's awesome to me. Tell me this, you you go from that and you end up you know, you fast forward, let's say some 11 ish years. And you had a bit Sanford Yeah. In San Francisco. Was that. Couple questions. One is I have to ask, I went to Berkeley. Mm-hmm. It's okay. I know. It's go bears this whole, the entire point of this podcast is for me to understand how I could have gotten into Stanford. Yeah. It's just all me picking at the, that wound. Actually, I can, I can give you the answer, please. Yes. The answer is that if the coffee had been a little better the morning your application got reviewed, you would've gotten in. Right. It's that level of Yeah. I, it's, I mean, there's so many kids who can make it there. Yeah. And you know, I can give some expo justification for YI got in, but it felt to me at the time, like it was kinda a crap shoot. You know? Like, I mean, I had great grades, I had great test scores. I went a really good high school, so the grades actually meant something. And then, you know, I, I had this experience on this video game. But you talked about that in your application. I mean, I had, I I I was like, I'm trying to plug everything I can baby. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that, that was the thing. The, the buzzword when I got in was Angular, which is you had to be both well-rounded and have something about you that was weird. Oh, like a little bit of edge. Yeah. Yeah. So some something strange. So I was like, cool, you know, I, I got the grades and the test scores, et cetera. But that's just like kinda table stakes. Yeah. And then Cool. I'm actually like, I actually did art for a video game that people actually played on the internet. Mm-hmm. Not a lot of people. Yeah. But, you know, you know, we had a community and I worked under distributed team before that was cool. So, so, you know, I, I figured this would be maybe my chance to write. You know, something that was, that made me stand apart. But even then, I, I, I really do think it was, it's about the coffee and man, I have a similar version like that for Berkeley, which is, I think you need to be well-rounded and you need to be all that. First of all, nobody needs my help in getting into Berkeley. You can get into Berkeley if you want to. Oh. It's a hard school to get into a lot of kids. Yeah. But the one thing this out, the one thing I felt like you really needed to get into work, Berkeley, the one thing you really needed was you needed to communicate at some point with the application that you cared deeply about the world. Yeah. Okay. And if that didn't come through your chances were me were like half as yeah. Good. But so you show up in San Francisco. Yep. You show up at Stanford. Yep. What did you, what did you feel about the city? Were you excited to be here? And especially, I want to hear what you, insofar as you even thought about it, what did you think of the art scene? What did you think of the way the city looked? So I'll say I, while, while I was an undergraduate and lived off campus for two years, I basically never went to the city. Right. Like, whatever, the Caltrain is fine, but Stanford is, you know, it's a big campus and it's you kinda don't need to go anywhere. And then I moved up here, not because I, I never lived in a city before. And not even that, I really wanted to, like Palo Alto's pretty sweet. And I was like, I mean, as suburbs go, this is, this is very surprising to me. This is a nice suburb because you're such a city guy to me. Well, when I got here I was like, oh yeah, there's like stuff to do. Yeah. Oh, I get it. But yeah, my friends were moving up and I liked having friends. And so I moved but I lived off campus for two years because I was really, I was graduating during the great financial crisis and a lot of people went back for a co-term, which is like a one year master's because they couldn't get jobs. And so I was like, well, I like having friends and my friends are here. So I just lived off campus. And yeah, I could see my friends. And then when they all eventually graduated, you know, a year or two later then, then we moved up. Yeah. And kinda moved up. And at the time, I guess I started seeing street art pretty quickly. I wouldn't say I was super, super art conscious, but what I felt then was that it was sort of like a statue of liberty in the sand moment where you saw that there had been people here doing street art, but there wasn't really a lot going on then. Yeah. So Jeremy Novi, the guy paints the koi fish had moved away, but some of his pieces were still around. But the Barry McGees and the Market Kill Galls and the reminisce and Rigo and kind of the mission school people. They'd all moved into art museums, art galleries, you know, Marin, Los Angeles. Right. They'd sort of had worked their way out of doing the, what I would call street art, what they might call graffiti. Our terms may differ, but what, what I would call street art, they'd kind of, had worked their way out of it. And, even people like, you still, there's still a mural scene that was, going fine. But even like kinda the last generation of muralists your Chad Hasegawa and your Victor Reyes and your Apexer, like, they're active, but they weren't, like, they moved into galleries too. And, you know, they, they'd sort of come up, come up from the streets and work their way into a real living. They, maybe they have kids now, they have responsibilities, and so they're, you know, have to balance their extracurricular, outdoor activities, whatever. Mm-hmm. And so, I don't think that there's an artist named declared Bandersnatch. She may or may not have been active then. I think maybe it was a little bit before she got started, or I just wasn't that aware of her. And then again, a couple things here and there, but, but it didn't really feel like there was much to me. But, but you could see that there had been stuff like, you're like, okay, cool, that there has been. And I was aware of stuff from the internet at that point. I was already aware of Banksy and Invader and, you know, shepherd Ferry and kind of the, the. Upper tier of, or the whatever, the most successful, oh, this would've been right after the So Shepherd ferry for, for people that don't know, he did obey, right? Yeah. He did obey but around that time that you, you show up here Yeah. He did the Obama Obama Hope poster, right? Yeah. And that's the one that everybody knows. Yeah. When was that election? Was that oh eight? That would, that was oh eight. Yeah. Yeah. So I didn't actually move up till 2011. Mm. Because I graduated in oh nine. Yeah. And then 11 is when I moved up. So, but yeah, but you know, he's in Los Angeles. Yeah. And so he come, you know, he came up here and did some wheat paste and stuff. A coup. I mean, he was just up here like a month ago. Yeah. But maybe four years before that, but certainly not in the era. He sent people stickers pop up from time to time. Yeah. But yeah, it was sort of like, yeah. Also when I moved here, there was, there were like three or four galleries maybe who were dedicated to what you would call urban art. Yeah. White walls and shooting gallery, first Amendment upper playground had an art gallery at that time. And then you were seeing stuff from, like, spoke Art Hashimoto. They, they were, you know, they still are actually on and off, but First Amendment isn't really doing shows anymore. Upper playground shut down their gallery and white walls stole everybody's money and fled town. Oof, whatever. And so, you know, there were really cool shows. I got a chance to experience all of those. But at some point those have all closed. Is that a known metaphor? The idea of the Statue of Liberty in the sand?'cause that's awesome. Yeah. This is from the end of Planet of the Apes. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's why it was so familiar. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I'm referring to, where it's like, oh, like there was a civilization here. But it's gone and, you know. Yeah. And oh my God, there's statue like, ugh, beautiful metaphor for Yeah. It's, we can't build it anymore. But it, it seems like you catch San Francisco and you catch the art scene at this moment where Yeah. I, I'm gonna end up just repeating you, but there are obvious signs of there having been life here. Mm-hmm. But there isn't really a vibrant active scene. And it, who were, or it's working its way down, right? Yeah. Yeah. The shows I saw at some of those galleries were awesome. Yeah. Like, it was really sad when the Ian Ross Gallery closed it, changed his name to Rosha Art. And then the last show they did, he painted, Ian painted the entire inside of the building. And his style was kinda like floral flowy and it was like a cathedral and walking in there, it's like a religious experience, but it was kinda like, Hey, running this thing is not economically viable anymore. Maybe because rent prices have gone up so much. Maybe'cause the buyers have, have. Faded for whatever reason or culture has shifted, or, you know, I think there's a whole series of reasons. Probably mostly around the cost of living in San Francisco, if I can just propose that as a modest suggestion. You know, but, but yeah, I wouldn't say it, it was kind of, maybe it was in transition and I got to see some part of something. The, the other thing I got to see a lot of, which I didn't think was gonna go away'cause it felt like it was at a peak, was I lived in the mission for a bit. Right as I was getting after I'd already started doing street art before I kind of, when the period, I got really, really into it, and there was a sticker scene in the mission of these hand hand-drawn stickers that was like insane. And it was like my roommate and I would just, we became obsessed, right? So we would check when you open a mailbox, stickers would be on the inside, and we'd check all those and every post. And there was different artists that we would and we'd follow. We basically would get these stickers and they then they would hand draw on them. You know, and they put them around. You get to know, oh, there's another, you know, cry tough or sad cloud or and again, I think a lot of those it was mostly young people. I think a lot of'em was moved to Oakland at the end of the day is, is my suspicion. Mm-hmm. Cause of living reasons. Again, I think maybe they were in high school and then they graduated from high school and then they, you know, either have to get jobs or go to college or, you know. What, whatever it is, they're not sitting around and hand drawing with a Sharpie a hundred stickers back to back, to back, to back to go out. And then paying Somar rent after that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it's a, it's a tough, it's a tough thing, but that was like a really sick thing and to see, and I'm, I'm sort of sad that it, it also, which was awesome. I mean, to me, even your life story, what I know of it I, I,'cause I, I showed up in San Francisco 2012. Mm-hmm. That's when I yeah, same time. And I, or less, I, I remember having a lot of conversations with people at Berkeley around just San Francisco was, it was the, the temperature was too high for microbial life, for art, microbial life to survive here. It just was, you need to have certain pockets where you could have, have an artist colony and you could, you could have seven people living in a loft and paying a thousand dollars a month total. And it just wasn't hospitable to that. And I mean, and I know that with your life that, you know, you kind of embark on this whole career at this point, and you have to, you know, properly, you work in tech and you have to start companies For you to be able to live and do your work In San Francisco, you had to go out and actually to, to put it plainly, you had to go out and actually make money. You had to actually make this work. And we probably don't wanna get too far into the details of the companies you started, but, I think one thing that I've always been amazed by with you, and I think it shows up in your art in, in every way is you've always had this incredible sense for economics. And just how hype works and how how things get shared. And I just, I, I wonder how much of that came from when you studied economics and then you go on this sort of 10 year, was it ten-ish years of like working in tech and eight, I think is Yeah. Accurate. And I just, I, I think it actually like, in the best possible way, it like kind of marbled the product that I think what we all got to experience and what, what you did for the city. I don't think it would've been possible at some level if you hadn't spent that time in the business world and learned these sort of,'cause again, what you were trying to do, I just don't think is quite as simple as like, oh, you make a great piece of art and you just put it out there. I don't mean to talk on your behalf, but I, I feel like it was the scale that you were looking to operate at mm-hmm. Just would not have been possible if you didn't have some understanding of the core mechanics of how, you know, distribution works. Yeah. So, this sparked a lot of thoughts. Which is that I feel like there's a little bit of revisionist history happening here where it was absolutely not my intention to be an artist when I got into this. I was in a work situation where I felt stuck. I didn't feel like I could quit and I didn't feel like I could do something creative there. I wanted to be creative. I didn't wanna moonlight on my partners by doing software on the side. And so I just started going out and doing street art and I thought it was gonna be like, oh, I was your friend who worked in tech with this cool side hobby where mm-hmm. Oh yeah. He goes out, you know, he's Finch at night and, and he does some stuff. Yeah. Right. So I spent about two years doing it strictly as a hobby with really, honestly no ambition of having it be a thing. And then I was able to work my way outta that company in good terms. I kept doing the street art more seriously and I kind of flipped into being like, okay, I'm just gonna do consulting work just to pay the bills. Like I'm, I'm basically gonna be a mercenary and the software work I'm doing is gonna be just for money and I'm just gonna get as much as I can in a small amount of time as I can. So basically worked the first week of every month is what I eventually worked it into, would be software consulting, and the next three would be art. My last consulting client, I knew that they were going to go bankrupt when I got there because I'd seen enough startups to know that this is just not gonna work. A feeling. Yeah. The math that too many people, not enough money. But they paid me in cash and on time. And so I was like, cool, I'm happy to do this. But as predicted, they went outta business and I thought I'd get another client and I actually interviewed with one person. But at that point I was like, I was like, look, I just wanna kinda take a break anyway'cause this is a little bit stressful.'cause even though I wasn't, you know, financially invested in it, it's, it's always sad to see when these things go down. And and yeah. And so, you know, he didn't hire me and I didn't bother to go ask anybody else or look around anymore. And even then it wasn't like, oh, I'm trying to make it as an artist. It's just what I told people at the time was two things. One, it felt like I had a string and I didn't know where it went, but I was enjoying pulling on it. And so I was like, and the other thought was that. It would, would me at 60 look back and be, and be like, I really regret the two years I spent as a street artist. Hmm. And I thought, as long as I could say that, that like future me won't regret actually doing this, then it didn't really matter if there was a, a global sense to it. Yeah. Right. And then when I actually went full time and I didn't know, by the way, there was a strange, there was about a six month period where I was full-time, but I didn't know it. And then about six months later I was like, okay. What I had seen was, you know, the sales were basically doubling every year. And I was like, what's gonna happen is I'm gonna have a dip in the beginning of this year where I'm gonna be burning money from my savings. But if it doubles again. You know, about three quarters of the way through the year I'm gonna net out back ahead and I'll be okay on the year to pay all my expenses. Yeah. And that's exactly what happened. And I was like, okay, I guess this is what I do. And then dot, dot do. So. But yeah, but that, that experience, I'm finding from doing this, it's surprisingly common with people who've built incredible things is you're doing this one thing and that's your, for all intents and purposes, that's your just kind of your day job. And then you're doing this thing on the side and at some point, and it's, it's like every good story, every good like campfire story, right? Where at the end the guy telling the story goes, but this fucking thing I told you about at the beginning, then it comes rest sort. And it's, yeah. I just, I love the idea for you that you've got, you know, you grew up in this house with a bunch of art and it's sort of always bubbling and you have this incredible experience at the St. Louis Art Museum, but it's, you know, it's never a thing that you've really maybe considered being your full-time thing, but you kind of, you never really, you always have one hand on it, right? Yeah. And then I just Yeah, that's fair. I just, I like that it, it got to a place where you were like, oh no, but what about this? And you just, you know, and everything else. Sighting is the main thing. Exactly. Oh, shit. You know, I'm trying to something over here. Yeah. The thing, by the way, advice I give to a lot of artists Yeah. Is as I was getting going there's another artist who was kind of doing street art around the same time, and she basically quit her job and just dumped two feet into art and. I don't know, maybe she made it a year or something. And it's really hard to build a career as an artist. Yes, because of just the market size, which I can touch on in a second. But you've heard that it's hard and when all of a sudden you're burning through your savings, you got a pretty good clip, then it really either limits the projects that you can do as an artist or just limits your timeline. Right. And I was able to take it from basically working on my current body of work or whatever you wanna say to full time was about four years. And that's considered to be actually quite fast. Yeah. And so that's quite a long time, even the fast version. Yeah. Right. And so she's couldn't cross the gap and I don't know if she would have or she wouldn't have if time had gone on, but you basically ended up kind of stopping making art in any kind of a serious way. And so the fact that I kept, and for, and this is also the, the same by the way for startups, right? Like Yep. Sometimes better try to build it as a side project while you keep your job at your big co. Right. And you know, especially when you're young and you can, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of hours that you can fit in outside of a regular eight hour day or whatever. And just try to get the sidetrack to a point where it's looking pretty stable, right. Like, again, I didn't, I was still looking for clients when I was already full-time. I didn't know I was full-time, but I was still like, yeah, okay, you know, I'm gonna do a lot better. And a parallel to this, something I heard, I think while I was doing this was that Tim Ferriss interviewed Arnold Schwartzenegger and Schwartzenegger revealed that he was already a millionaire from commercial real estate. Before his acting career began. And so he said, I never took any projects just for the money. I never had to I only did things I thought were gonna advance my career. And I've always felt the same way. Like a lot of artists end up, so there's a whole industry of commercial art, right. Where, you know, your company wants a mural and your design firm designs it, and then you hire a technician mm-hmm. To actually go and produce the mural. Right. I have the technical skills to produce a mural like that that you give me. I mean, within some boundaries right there, there are some set of murals that designers might design mm-hmm. That I could perfectly reproduce on a wall or I could paint a logo or something on side of the building. I'm just like, that doesn't really help my art career. So yeah. I don't need the money. Especially in the beginning, people were like, okay, will you do this thing for me, this commercial mural for like X dollars? I'm like, well, I charged 10 times that a week to do this consulting work over here. So it's like a joke, right? It's like, you know, the, the entire Yeah. I made more basically in two weeks as a consultant that I made selling art my entire first year that actually made money doing it. Which is 2015. Right. I'm like, all the art stuff was like, this is sort of a joke compared to the thing I actually do for money. And that freed up the art stuff to do. Like, I didn't need to make any sale, I didn't need to take any project. I was like, I'm just gonna do the coolest things I can do. And that ended up being extremely freeing and I'm thankful that I just kind of kept, kept one foot on both sides. If people take one piece of advice away from, from this episode, this is a critical concept. Do not quit your day job yet. Yeah, yeah. Don't quit your day job and not, because unless you have a trust fund, in which case Oh, exactly. Then do whatever. But I think that in our culture Yeah. There's this, we fetishize the moment that somebody quits their job and commits commits to, to, to whatever craft they've chosen. Right? Yeah. But it is that to me is an emotional moment that you can create for yourself in a lot of,'cause what you're trying to create is a feeling of committing to something. Mm-hmm. You can create that in a lot of different ways. If you're focused exclusively on what is best for the craft, it really helps to not have to immediately apply commercial motive to it. Yeah. To not have to figure out how it can pay your bills. And most importantly, this is what I tell founders all the time, is dude, optimize for being able to do this for a long time. Pick something that you don't think you'll get bored of in 10 years because it's gonna take 10 years. Build it in a way where the financial model doesn't come into play until much later. Mm-hmm. So you can kind of just mess around for a little bit. And I think people are so focused on creating this emotional moment of themselves being like, no, I care about my, my passion and I, I need to back that up by quitting my day job. And I just go find another way to give yourself that hit, man.'cause you gotta, like, you need to optimize for longevity. Not that like one moment of, you know, exploding onto the art scene. Yeah. It's, people have this illusion that they're gonna get discovered. Yeah. Right. In arts, like, oh, some. Mr. Art will call you one day. Yeah. He's gonna walk through and I'm gonna get the phone call the next day and I'm like, oh, I got a spot for you in my gallery in New York. I don't, I mean, like, does it happen? Yes, it happens. Is it once a generation? Yeah. I mean, you know, it's, it's I think it happens just enough to where that kind of idea floats around. Yeah. Like we're getting I'm, this will probably get taken out in post, but somebody's revving their motorcycle in the loudest possible way. Yeah. Six inches from Finch's head right now. Yeah. It's all good. It's the mission baby. Yeah. Anyway, yeah. But at what point did the did the poodles, or does the poodle come onto your radar? What was, how much were you thinking about it? Because that, I, I find that that's, it's a seminal point in your story, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. So, to give some context, so this would've been, yeah. So actually there's, there's some funny bits here. So the first bit that's funny is I move into a place in San Francisco in 2011, and I move there with my then girlfriend and the walls are all white. I get to have all my own art, and I buy a really amazing piece from a gallery called Spoke Art. And it was a thousand bucks, and I put it on the wall. I'm like, cool. That's about my whole art budget. There's a lot of wall. Yeah. Left here. How big was the piece? Maybe 24 by 12. That's not very big. Not very big. Yeah. And I was like, okay, cool. So then I thought, okay, maybe I'll make some art. And my college roommate and then business partner in my first company had worked at a project design firm in high school and had basically introduced me to the laser cutter as a concept. So laser cutter is a machine where the computer just tells it to cut a material with a laser beam. And I'd been doing stuff and it'll be illustrator since high school. And I was like, it turns out that Illustrator is the exact tool, or or one of the exact tools that is basically designed to use something like a laser cutter. Yeah. I was like, holy crap. That's a really interesting thing. And so the very first art piece I made for the house was, there's a website called The Noun Project and they have icons of like every noun and whatever. Right. And so I got like a kiwi bird, a crow, and I forgot the third one. And I had them cut from a company called Pocco, and I got back these three cutouts, this black acrylic that I mounted to the wall. And I was like, that's my first, that's, that's an art piece. Yeah. But when they send it to you, what you're actually buying is a piece of acrylic lick that's like 12 by 12. And they send you the excess as well. They give you the whole square. They just take the whole thing together and send you the whole thing.'cause probably they don't know a stencil basically. Exactly. Yeah. I pushed through the art piece and I'm holding up the empty bit and I'm like, holy crap, this is a stencil. And then that, that was the aha moment. And I was like, crap, all these things I've been doing in the illustrator are now, and like, and I love Banksy already. And I'm like, okay, this is gonna be good. Yeah. And so the, I actually did a swan painting on canvas. At home first, and I think I might have done the penguin, maybe the one was like a, I love the penguin three or a four layer stencil thing that I did onto a canvas that I hung in the wall as well. And, and then, but I already, I was like, I gotta do something outdoors. And I lived near Debo Park, which is a great dog park, and they had these dog leash stencils that the city had painted. Lumpy German Shepherd being walked by bathroom sign. Dude, I actually make one stencil to paint out the German Shepherd, so just to cover him up and paint him out in gray. And I'm trying to color match the several colors of spray paint I have. And then I basically put in, you know, a well-groomed poodle in its place. Yeah. And that was the street art. And, you know, I thought it was whimsical or joyful as the word you mentioned Yeah. Earlier. It doesn't diminish the meaning of the signage, so it just, I thought it was just like, this is clearly just better than what was there before. Like it does the exact same functional purpose, but it's got some whimsy and joy to it that that will make people happier if they see it. And so that was the beginning of the street art. Your relationship with this city, down to looking at signage that says to lease your dog and to think, to make art out of it is, I, I personally love that. At what point did, did the LaCroix cans appear? Yeah. So that is a while later. So this would've been 2013 that I did the. Poodles, I think Phil La Croix can, were 2017, like 2017. And this is based on an inside joke is what I've read. So, can you tell us a joke? Yeah. Well, I'll tell, I'll tell you the real story. Okay. Which is truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. Yeah. So there was an individual who's reached out and asked to commission a painting of a candle, LA Croix, for his house. Right. So this is a part of my PR practice then and now, not a big part, but people reach out and like, cool, I'll paint. Mm-hmm. I tell people I would, I will paint anything. I would paint. So there's a set of things that I would paint everyday objects, animals, birds, bugs, sea creatures, flowers, et cetera. And there's a set of things that meet your goals. And we're trying to find something in the intersection, which usually we can do, but not always. And I think he might have had the joke with his friends, so I actually don't know what the joke was. Yeah. But, but he thought it was gonna be funny. And so at the time there were nine flavors. There are now more. And he wanted, you know, nine cans. And what was great about the LaCroix stencils is that earlier on, I had earlier projects, so the lips were the second thing I did after the dog walkers and I already had the insight that changed the colors. Same stencils. Yeah. Get a different image. Right. So the text on the candle LaCroix changes and then the colors change, but nothing else changes. Yeah. And so I can get I basically can amortize the, the high cost of that. Design work across all of the pieces. I think you were the very first artist in the world to know and use the word amortize. Okay. Yeah. But you can amortize the cost. Yes. I think, I think that's the correct usage. If I'm, if I'm wrong, you can correct me. Yeah. So I, I did these paintings for him. He had them framed he put them in his house. And then I got there was this art space, sadly no more, called the Sub in the Mission. And it was kind of a co-living artsy space. I don't quite describe it. That is speakeasy downstairs. That was totally illegal. And somewhat dangerous. It was the proper speakeasy. Yeah, proper speakeasy. And then the upstairs that like used to be an autobody shop, people lived in all the little nooks and crannies and they had a big shared kitchen. And they had art shows and the guy Johnny Wynn that ran it invited me to do an art show. And actually a couple of artists, so there's artists called Heather Day, who's become actually quite successful, an art show after me. There's one called the Most Famous Artist or Mad Moe, who had won maybe right before me. So they, you know, were looking for stuff that was interesting and I thought, Hey, I really like these LaCroix paintings. I wanna show them. And so I go turn to the guy who bought them. I was like, Hey, can I come into your house and remove these paintings from your house and put them in an art show and then sell like other versions of them that aren't quite the same but are pretty close, which is a pretty outrageous proposition. And how did he react to it? Yeah, yeah, sure. Oh, what a great guy. Yeah. And so I took them out of his house. He already had them framed, so like great. And I called them, I called it Nine Cancel LaCroix, and I called them soup cans for millennials. Yeah. And that basically through a series of luck. So somebody who lived in the space worked for, I feel like it was a music blog. And then he posted it to his Facebook and then someone from Eater read his Facebook and posted about it. And then somebody from the Chronicle read Eater and posted about it. And then someone from the Washington Post read the Chronicle and posted about it. And they called you Warhol it was Warhol soup cans for millennials. Right? For millennials. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I had the soup cans for millennials, like tagline. Yeah. That just kind of like, and this was the moment to meet you back in time when LaCroix was like, people were calling it startup water. Yes. There was like shortages. Yeah. Right. Like it was like touching on the cultural zeitgeist at that moment. And obviously that's why, you know, the original buyer thought it was interesting and so you might think this is something I reflect on some and share that you might think that making more Cancel LaCroix would diminish the value of the original set of nine. But actually they became sort of famous, right? So before I'd put them in the show, they're just a painting I did in someone's house that no one would've heard about. But after I put them in the show, he has the original set that sparked the whole thing that ended up in the Washington Post and in Vice and in Food Network magazine and, and all this stuff. Right. So by any measure, it should actually make his paintings a lot more valuable. And this is one of those things where like repetition, people are like, oh, well, repetition, you know, obviously I painted a lot of honey bears. If I painted just one honey bear, then that wouldn't be such a thing. But having painted thousands and thousands of honey bears, right? Yeah. It, it, it becomes a thing much greater than, than just the one through the repetition of it. And so, I think he was happy with the outcome at the end. And it brought the paintings right back to his house where they still hang Yeah. To this day. Well, this is, it goes back to, to something that we were saying a second a little bit earlier in the conversation, but again, you have this economist understanding, and I don't mean commercial, I'm not saying businessy understanding. And I I have a whole section about Warhol here. Okay. Yeah. That I will get to, but that's the only artist that I have seen that had that. And I think for him it was maybe like characterological as just kind of like, you know, knee jerky understanding of it. But I really think that you cannot do the art. You can't do it at the scale that you've done it at if you don't understand at some level, like how this stuff works. Yeah. Because yours is, you know, and they're like Geffen goods and Wein goods and, you know, this is, I'm not smart enough to explain it. People should Google it in economics. We think that everything is a certain type of good, that the more supply there is, the less valuable it is. But, you know, they find economists start to study that their goods that actually increase in value as there's more supply. Also goods where demand increases as price goes up. That too. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And so, and I think that there's something very, very interesting where you just have this like, again, like really incredible understanding of the mechanics of art and how it sort of scales. But tell me, tell me this, at what point did the honey bearers come into the picture? Yeah. So before I get there, actually, yeah. There's two things I wanna circle back on that touch on this again. Yeah. So I wanna just comment on how doing startupy things relates to doing Yes. Art things. So the first thing is, one of the things I say a lot is that I'm not too proud to dig in the dirt. And I feel like if I have a, maybe a strength that is more uncommon, it, it is that, it's not that I don't have a small ego. I kinda feel like ego and pride are maybe two separate things, but I'm willing to do things that don't work and I'm willing to try things with a high probability of failure. And when I was working on software in the beginning, right, it, you know, we didn't. We just started doing things in our dorm room, and just trying stuff out. And we tried a lot of things and, you know, of the probably 30 apps I built with my roommate, maybe three or four of them were hits. You don't, you only need one or two. Some of the ones that failed were spectacular failures, where a lot of efforts going into them, and I've had art projects that I've put a lot of time into that have been unbelievable disasters in some cases. Mm-hmm. People just really don't like them, or, you know, there's a really negative response or whatever the thing is. And, and so yeah, I feel like that's, you know, if you get too precious about what you're doing and you think that everything you're doing, you really tie your ego up and what you're doing. Then that's a recipe for disaster because you can't see, you know, what's working or not working or is good or is or is not good. So that, that's that, that's one thought. The other thought, and this took me a while to come around to, is that business I think of as a lens. So you can look at an art practice through an aesthetic lens and you can say, oh, what I'm doing is pop art, or it's urban art, or it's stencil art, or whatever. Or it's colorful. You can look at, you know, it through a political lens, oh, it's being done illegally in public space. Or he is trying to promote, you know, art for the masses or whatever. You know, some artists have more of political bent than others. Right. And, you know, you can look at through, through a social lens, you can look at it through in many lenses, but the business lens is one lens that you can put onto it. Right. And as a, as you look at it through that, you can say, oh. Okay. You know, doing multiples means, you know, he's got a high fixed cost of designing a stencil and a lower marginal cost of making each of the paintings so he can sell them at a lower price point. The lower price point allows me to sell it on the internet, which means you don't have to see it in person necessarily. You're more willing to take a risk to do it. Right. Or it's gonna hit an audience that's a more broad audience than if you're making things in really small numbers at a higher price. Right. So there's, you know, all these things kinda fit together, right? It's like, oh, an art gallery is, you know, kind of like a sales channel, right? And maybe they're a branding partner. Um mm-hmm. And so these concepts of like unit economics or again, sales channels or whatever I guess you'd call'em economic concepts or business. Yeah. And the, the way I think about it's that all of the knobs of business are the same. Yeah. That is configured in a different way. Yep. So in software, your labor costs might be really, really high, but your materials costs basically zero. Right. Whereas in art, my materials costs are like pretty reasonable. Mm-hmm. Like double digit percentage of, you know, all expenditures might be on wood and cardboard, right. Like yeah. Paint. Right. But the labor cost, you know, hiring an AI engineer versus hiring an art assistant is like orders of magnitude difference in price. Mm-hmm. Right. So it's like, okay, when I need more labor to help me, I'm actually more able to get somebody to help me out in the studio with things because it's something that actually can fit in the economics of my art practice. And so I think artists think that, oh, business is something that somebody else does. And not being like, whether you admit it, accept it or not. What you are a solopreneur in the beginning and you are running a business. It's really hard to start a business. It's doubly hard when you're doing it by accident. Yeah. Right. You're just like stumbling around, hoping that it's gonna work out. Whereas if you just were to look at some basic economic principles, like, hey, if it takes you a month to make a painting and need to earn X number of dollars a year, then you need to be able to sell it for, you know mm-hmm. X over 12 or your math is not gonna work. Right. You need to figure out something else. Right. Like something pretty basic like that are things where if you don't look at it that way, you might find yourself doing things that you think are, are gonna work or you, or currently are working. Right. And then all of a sudden you look around one day and you're like, oh crap. Like I gotta go get a different job or something. Right? Yeah. You know, and so, yeah, I would encourage people like whatever they're doing, just to not, not find like tissue rejection to it. Yeah. And I don't try to center, I, I guess there's part of my art practice that are more commercial in nature and parts that are less commercial in nature. And as I mentioned earlier, I view them as supporting each other, but I don't, if I wanted to maximize my lifetime income, I would've stayed in software. Yeah. Like it's a much, much, much better financial proposition. Mm-hmm. Right. But it doesn't mean that I don't wanna think about finances at all. Like, you know, I have payroll, like I have a studio that there's a loan that I have on the studio that I need to pay off every month. Right. And like I draw a salary I, I have expenses, you know, like Yeah. At some point there's, like, you need to be an adult about it and, and manage it in an adult fashion. And so I think having the startup experience, you know, those were businesses. This is a business. You know, those weren't just businesses. We were doing things. We just wanted to muck around in college and make stuff we thought was funny. Right. Yeah. And at some point we're like, oh crap. We owe taxes. Yeah. I think let's, let's, I'm, I'm glad you Yeah. I'm glad you kind of, pulled me back to this. I, I want to hear a little bit more about emotionally how that time felt in your life where you've now, you can't even pretend like you're in tech anymore at this point. Yeah, yeah. I burned the bridges or the boats. Yeah, exactly. The boats. I burned the boats a long time ago. The boats are fully burnt. Yeah. And now you're, you're making poodles and penguins. Yeah. How did that feel? Just how, what did, what did your days look like? So what's nice about art is that it's very project based. So in software you end up in a thing where like you have a monolith and you keep building Airbnb, you know, every, you know, we're gonna do a version every year. We're gonna keep reiterating the iPhone, whatever. And art, there's actually projects that I've done that I've forgotten about. Like, someone shows me a painting that I made and I'm like, yeah, oh yeah, I did make that. Wow. And so I view the wheel as projects come on the wheel and then you do them and they come off the wheel. Usually I have multiple projects going on at once. Right. And kind of run'em in parallel. And there's, you know, how fast you can spin the wheel is important. And then obviously way more important than that is what projects do you put on the wheel. Mm-hmm. And try to pick the best project you can. Right. And so that's kind of how I thought about it for a long time, when I'm doing the penguins and the birds and, and the other things and the lips in the early days and the first honey bears, there's no conception that this is gonna be a professional art practice. There's no conception that if there is a monolith that I have now, it's like a career. There's now a career that I'm like stewarding in some way. And maybe that's the monolith that that exists and the projects, you know, spin and contribute to that. But, but then I'm just like, what is a cool thing I can do that I think will surprise and delight? You know, if some people are gonna find interesting and appealing or more that I find interesting and appealing, and I'm gonna find that other people also find interesting and appealing. Right. It is kind of my general approach. It, it's a more like, plan my life two weeks in advance and hope that it goes somewhere good. Were you, were you scared this time? No. No. I, I guess there, well early on, I mean, the boats didn't get burned, as I said, for two years. Right. Two years from when I started taking the art more seriously and doing it with most of my time, there was still a two year period where I was still, you know, keeping up my skills and Yeah. And so when you're a year out of that you know, you're not that far out of the game. Right. And you feel like you could come back even now, like when I was an undergraduate. So how I got doing software at all, like obviously I have a background in math and economics. I learned a program as a kid. I did the CS Corps at Stanford. So it wasn't like I didn't have programming experience, but, you know, I didn't think this was gonna be a part of my life. And what happened is that the the very first iPhone programming class was offered at Stanford, which was interesting'cause it was illegal to do. So the NDA hadn't been dropped yet. Wow. From, from, and so two members of the original iPhone team came to Stanford. They formed this university program, which made us a team so we can actually share information. And then they taught the class and the NDA was dropped at some point. And I told'em, I talked to my roommate, I was like, look, these skills are gonna become commoditized like pretty quickly. Like, you know, people in India are gonna learn them and they're gonna be able to, you know, to charge less for, for what we do. Yeah. And then, you know, five years later, hold on. Sorry. We're gonna wait for the party to go outside. This is the mission baby. We've done, we've done a half a dozen at this point. We have never had as much activity outside as we have today. Well, it's Friday. It's Friday, I think. I think San Francisco's in a Friday mood. Yeah. It's be funny if that it's parked right outside the door. I know, and, and I think we might actually have to, is it Parked? Warm Intro is brought to you by Wefunder. A Wefunder created this thing called the Community Round that lets you raise money directly from your community. So instead of going to VCs and rich people, angel investors, you can go straight to your friends and your family and your customers. And you know, this is not a traditional ad read. I used Wefunder for my company three times. We ran three rounds in Wefunder. We raised over a million dollars, and I found that it completely changed how everybody felt about our business. Our customers all of a sudden didn't feel like they were just customers. They felt like they were owners in the business. They shopped with us more. They told their friends about us. My team felt like what we were doing was important because our community had shown up to invest in us. I tell every founder I can find to go raise a Wefunder round, especially for companies that care about community. There is nothing greater you can do than letting that community invest. Go to wefunder.com/join to check it out. So the music break is over. We're we're back to you skills. You were talking about the boat. The boats weren't fully burnt. Oh yeah. And you still felt like, sorry. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. At this point, which is that. So, yeah. So we thought that our skills on the iPhone were gonna become a commodity. Yeah. And I started programming with iOS 2 and then, you know, iOS three came out and then four, and then five, and then six. And what we realized is our rates weren't going down. And the reason they say the same is because being on the cutting edge was not about having skills, it was about learning whatever is coming next. Right? Yeah. And so if you're good at doing that, like even now, if I was like, oh my gosh, this is all gonna hell and I need to go back to this old trade skill that I had. Mm-hmm. You know, as long as I can learn that thing or whatever the new thing is, right. You can, you can kind of come back to it. So each year that goes by, obviously it becomes harder to do that, and I want to do it even less and less. Yeah. But but yeah, like one year into being an artist, I was always like, oh yeah, I bet I could, you know, could come back to this. The other thing was I viewed it in part as, you know, this is just another thing I'm doing. Right. Like, it's just another, like, it's another business in some way, right. That you know, if this. Like, I couldn't go do something else, and that something else could be kinda anything. Right. And the way that your skills fit together, like did I think that these digital illustration skills from middle school were gonna somehow end up being like effectively essential to how I made my living, you know, however, like 10 years later mm-hmm. This is like the Steve Jobs. You can only connect the dots looking back back, looking back. Yeah. Right. You know, there may be something else where dots make sense that I don't even know about. Yeah. Right. That could come together. And so, yeah. I guess I wasn't scared and I, you know, I had some again, I didn't make the transition in until sales were enough to support, you know, again, I didn't travel. I didn't eat out. Like, it wasn't like I was living super high on the hog. Right. I, I basically was like, look, I wanna work the least amount possible, so I'm gonna, you know, I'm just gonna cut back you know, on all the discretionary Oh, LaCroix. Yeah. Went back to regular water. I actually had a soda stream. Like actually I never really drunk LaCroix. I always had a soda stream. Yeah. And now I have a sparkling water tap at my house. Shout out, zip tap. So yeah, I don't the can is well it's more expensive, but that's not the only reason. It's, I like, I do like the idea it's waste idea. The study of your career through sparkling water. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know, he's successful when, well, you had to sparkling water's on tap. You had to paint sparkling water while drinking regular water. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Until you could get to a point where yeah. SodaStream is a very cost effective way to get sparkling water. And I bought the last version that you still carbonated in glass. I think you can do it again. Yeah. For a long time they only let you carbonate in the plastic. And so I, I locked in that soda stream and I Yeah. I wrote that thing for a long time. Is it, it's a great product. Is it funny to you not sponsored? No. We're we're gonna reach out to them after this. We're gonna try to make bank off this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But is it, is it funny to you that you've become related to these products? Like, and I want to like the LaCroix can, or actually at what point do the Honey bears kind of come into your consciousness, into your art? Yeah. So the First Honey Bear would've been in I think it was in 2013. I think it was like the fourth thing I did was the Honey Bear. And I painted it on a park wall in Noe Valley. Hmm. And people definitely had a really positive response to it. Yeah. Kids would scream at it. I, like, I would go back to take photos and stuff and just kinda like linger near my pieces to see how people would respond. And you know, I watched a girl demand that her mom snap a photo of her with it. Yeah. And then some Instagram influencer posted it. That photo actually ended up in a book at Urban Outfitters without my permission, which is hilarious. And classic Urban Outfitters. So it was clear that something was different. Yeah. But what is, what I just realized recently is I didn't do another Honey Bear in Public Space for 11 months. Wow. So it wasn't like, bam, this is what I do. Right. I did a bunch of other projects that year. I did the butterflies and I did beetles on the ground, and I did the ladybugs and I did the fried eggs, and I did, you know, like there's many things that I was doing but. But somehow I came back to it again in 2015 and and yeah, and then, and that was one where it started to take on a life of its own and become a more central part of my practice. I don't know why I waited 11 months and why I came back to it at all after 11 months. Mm-hmm. That I don't know. You, you can't connect. You can only connect the dots looking back. Again, I'm, I'm very struck by your willingness to just try shit. Yeah. And just throw stuff at the wall and let the patterns emerge Yeah. Themselves. Right. And let the, let the calling, let the craft become undeniable and let it become, like, I think your willingness to just try stuff, I think is, is very inspirational. And you know, I think part of the flaw of the model of what I'm doing here. And I think like any kind of interview does is try to go back and act like you could see the dots. Yeah, exactly. That you, the dots are pretty clear now. Like, world domination through honey. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yes, genius. I wanna actually, let's, let's talk about the honey bears for a second. So to people that are listening to this outside of San Francisco. I, I don't think they can fully appreciate the degree to which the honey bears were were deeply sewn into the fabric of San Francisco. There was a period I lived in San Francisco all through, you know, this entire period that we're talking about, and you could not go anywhere in San Francisco and not see a honey bear. And we all collectively fucking loved them. Yeah. Like, it just was, I don't care. People can now act like they were too cool for school or whatever, but it was genuinely a beautiful and joyous thing. And they were everywhere in San Francisco and I'm so happy to have lived through that. Why do you think they caught on so much? Why do you think that little girl wanted to hug the honey bear? Yeah. Why do you think people resonated with it so much? Yeah. So I think of this now as positive, nostalgic, and inclusive. Mm. The three words I like here. So basically, you know, as a kid, what do you want? You want sugar. Yeah. Right? And you see that, that that bear, the bear is cute. It's got sugar in it, right? Like Yeah. Pretty straightforward. We want that thing. We get older, what do we want? We don't have it as much because we now have, you know, whatever executive function. Mm-hmm. And a sense of our own mortality and diabetes. Yeah. So we don't just, you know, squeeze all the honey into our mouth. Yeah. I like wanted to as a kid. But we still have a lot of affinity for it. It still is quite delicious. But also there's something that Jeff Koons said, and I'm gonna paraphrase here'cause I won't get the wording exact, but he is like, when you go see a balloon dog like whatever cultural background you have is enough. So I'm very often, I, I view my art in opposition to stuff that you'll see in some stuff that you'll see, say in the MoMA, where I go in the MoMA and I see a mirror on the ground with a pile of dirt on the mirror, and this thing, this thing may be worth a million dollars, but it makes me feel stupid. Yeah. Because I don't have the cultural background to appreciate that I, I don't know all of Chaucer, I haven't seen all the work of Duchamp. I, I don't don't even know what it is to appreciate there's some arc of art history that I'm ignorant of. Yeah. That, that is required to make that piece appealing to me and therefore it makes me feel lesser than, or maybe this is a place where I shouldn't be. And a lot of the art world, I think cultivates this almost on purpose, right? Where it's like, oh no, this is exclusive, this is for us, this is for some set of rich people and or cultural elites. And I have the sense that art is for everybody. You don't need to be a cultural elite to appreciate art. Right. And so therefore the honey bear is kinda like this, where it's like, look, anybody can appreciate it. It doesn't have to be again, you don't need really any cultural background. And so it has a really broad appeal. Obviously it appeals to children who have no cultural background at all for the most part. Right. And it appeals to people, who well being raised in America definitely helps because honey bears aren't in every country. Yeah. Which is the thing I only discovered when I started bringing my work international. Like I go to Hong Kong and they're like, what is this thing? Yeah. Now I'm like, okay, it is just a bear. Sure. I mean, we like bears in other countries but I don't get the honey. Which make makes it a bit of a bigger lift. But but yeah. So, but you know, it doesn't, matter what your race is or your background is, like you probably had a honey bear around if you grew up in America somewhere. Can I tell you my experience? Yes. With the, so I I grew up in India and I moved here when I was 17 years old. And it wasn't just the American honey bears, but the honey bears were definitely part of it. I remember the first time I bought honey at a, an American grocery store, and I remember thinking oh, they, they made it cute. Yeah. They made it, they made it fun. And that little, it's, at some level it's an incredible luxury'cause in India I'm sure it's different now, but like, the honey came in, like, it was like everything. It came in like the most functional piece of packaging ever, right? Mm-hmm. And I liked that in America we took the time and spent a little bit of money to make, to add a little bit of joy to something that could be plain. Yeah. It could all be San Francisco could be plain and honey bear less. Yes, yes, yes. But. Life's a little better, isn't it? A little bit better with honey. Yeah. And isn't it a little bit better when your honey container looks like a bear? And I just, and I remember that to me is still so core to my understanding of this country. Yeah. Is that here? Hmm. There's a great book about this that they teach everybody in architecture school. And how you read that book actually tells me a lot about you. It's a, it's a book called Learning from Las Vegas. Mm-hmm. It's in every architecture school in America. It's a critique of American architecture, I think in the, in the sixties when the Las Vegas strip strip is just kind of starting to appear fifties, sixties. And it says, you know, as architects, we shouldn't just be making architecture for ourselves mm-hmm. To look at and be amused by. There's, there's nothing bad about making something that entertains Yeah. And adds a little bit of joy. Adds just a little bit. It's a little bit of pep to your life. And I think that that's what, to me, that's what the honey bear original, the honey bear packaging four factor is. That's what I think your, your art has done so well. And I think this becomes especially true during COVID. I mean, we, gwan and I were talking about this when we were preparing for this. And I, again, I think people, speaking of revisionist history, I think people forget how it felt Yeah. To live through those years. Especially San Francisco is the first American city of lockdown. You walk through the city and it just was. I mean, it felt so dystopian, right? Yeah. It just felt like everything that makes life joyous had now been sort of removed. And it was just, it felt like living in like a massive hospital ward. And at that moment you start to see these little bits of sweet joy all over the city. And you did this really, I think again goes back to your economic brain, but also like, I think your, honestly, I think your philanthropic side of, of like, you started giving out these honey bears at cost. Mm-hmm. And I just, I loved in those moments,'cause the only other thing that people had in their windows was we support essential workers Yeah. And all this stuff. And we're in this together, which again, I support those messages. Yeah. But man, could we just fucking take a break from it? Like I Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can I support essential workers on my own time? Like it just, yeah. It felt like it was, you could not escape the DRE of San Francisco and of COVID in that time. And I think that's where, to me, the honey bears just take off, especially the ones with the mass on. Yeah. Was that your experience that you felt like there was a bit of like a hockey stick, like an inflection point? Yeah. So, yeah, certainly that was the year where I went from being, so people are are like, oh yeah, you started painting these in 2020, right? I was likeactually started painting'em in 2013. Yeah. And you know, sales roughly doubled every year, you know, through those years. And so the last double is a much bigger double and one that you actually notice. And certainly transitioned from being someone that, that you knew of if you were really into the art world or into street art, but you didn't know about otherwise, as someone that was kind of, you know, you couldn't escape it. So for context at peak there was a bear in 10,000 unique households in San Francisco Wow. Itself, which is basically one per block on average. Oh my god. Or one, one per block for every block of the entire city. So you, you can't get away from it. That's amazing. Like, I would walk my dog around a block in the morning and I would pass like four or five, and they don't know that I live in the neighborhood. This is just randomly who, who had them in their windows. So that was crazy. But what, what happened? A couple things happened. So I was in a very good position because I was, again, before that happened, I was already a full-time artist. I already had my studio in the mission. I already had art assistance. Right. You know, I was already shipping paintings to many countries and many states I was operating at a reasonable level. But what I had was a commercial grade printer. And so the print shops shut down, but there's an art form called Wheat Paste, where you print your artwork out on a paper and use a wallpaper paste to adhere it to the wall. So other artists couldn't make wheat paste because if they used a print shop, but I could, because I had my own printer and I had an art assistant to go and print and actually cut mine out on the laser cutter again, so they actually could print it and cut it for me. And so my, my wife would go out for runs early on. I was like, Hey, there's all these boarded up storefronts. Mm-hmm. And they're totally. You know, at least north of Market Street. Right. They're totally empty. Right. And so twice a week we'd go load up with 20 bears, you know, and we'd go hit every storefront, right? Yeah. We'd just go down Fillmore Street and be like, you know, or maybe whatever, three or four a block and every bear would be different. And if it was an ice cream shop that's broughted up. We had the ice cream bear. But today, sorry, step one, step back. The idea of doing wheat paste came up. I was walking around near my studio in the mission and I'd done a couple of things. And in the Soap Bear, the Mask Bear, I'd just done some masks alone thinking I would find like advertisements with people and just put masks on them. Yeah. And for context, if we can rewind back at this point, masks were not a political thing. It wasn't a tread on me, it was you just like, Hey, we have to flatten the curve. Yeah. And mass, you know what I thought they were really interesting is my understanding at the time, which I think actually is my understanding now, is that they do more to protect other people if you're sick Yes. Than to protect you if other people are sick. Mm-hmm. And like that idea of like, Hey, I might be sick and therefore we're gonna support each other in this. And it's a communal effort. That I thought was a really beautiful idea. And so to me at the time, masks was sort of this like, we can get through this together if we work together sort of a thing. Again, history has this whole thing out the far side and whatever it is, it is what it is. But as we're going around pasting up these bears, I found that the only ones I wanted to paint were the ones in the mask. And then the idea came of, Hey, what if I do all my bears? In mask. So it's a David Bowie bear in a mask, avocado, bear in a mask, chef bear in a mask. Powered bear in a mask. I do all these bears in all these outfits. I've been doing this for however many years at that point, seven years. And so I accumulated some number of them and that was the idea where it was like, okay, cool. This is cool. And then so that's what the project became. Bears all bears in masks, and it was all the board ups. And so, and then that I guess I'll just tell the story of how that turned into the whole thing. The next step was there's only so many downtown corridors with boarded up storefronts. Right? Yeah. I did like Chestnut Street and the Marina and you know, I went down Castro and The Castro. But a lot of San Francisco isn't those places. Like Clement you know, in the Richmond. And so I was like, okay, well I'm gonna, because I don't wanna do this onto like your house or something, right? Yeah. I'm gonna put out a call with a Google form like, Hey, if you want me to do one of these on your home, just fill out the form with your address. And like 500 people filled it out. And I was like, whoa. So I drove around with my wife and, you know, driving around house to house the night. And how much time was it taking you to do one at this time? Well, so when, when we're doing a corridor, that can be pretty fast, right? Everyone's taking about 60 seconds just to pace them up on the wall. Yeah. And from my time I was having'em all made by an art assistant, so I would just grab 20 of'em and it would take us an hour or two to go, I mean, an hour say to go and do them driving around is a way worse proposition, right? Because it's now like 10 minutes to get to the house to go spend 60 seconds to put the thing up to go spend 10 minutes to go to the next one. Yeah. So like, this is not gonna work. And that was the idea of putting them into the windows where I was like, okay. I think actually what happened was a nonprofit I'd done some fundraising for called SF New Deal which was basically paying restaurants to make food to give to those in need. So supported both the restaurant and those in need. They're like, Hey, what if we did one in the window of an SF New Deal Bear? So it was holding a frying pan that said SF New Deal on it, and we put'em in the windows of, of restaurants that are participating and, and somewhere was like the, ah, the window is a pretty good place. Yeah. It, it's, it's inside, you know, you can't tag it, you can't rip it down. And ITP being inside did something to Yeah. To it because it felt like a, no, not to derail you, but it felt like a play of the Honey Bird was also Sheltering place. Sheltering place, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That, that's interesting. I, I put that together, but that, that definitely makes sense. Yeah. So I offered the kits at cost. Again, I thought I'd sell like 500 of them on Make A Map. You'd walk around, the art galleries were closed, the art museums were closed. It'd be a fun activity. It's a, it's a socially distanced activity. You can do it with your pod or your family or whatever, and you can spot them. And then it just went viral from there. And of course it's inherently viral because you're seeing them in Windows. And so we could only make about 700 a week or something. I shipped in the end of it, end of the day, 20,000, 10,000 to San Francisco, the city, and then 10,000 outside. And I got all 50 states by twisting the arm of Wyoming. I had like put out a post. I've got 49 states, anyone in Wyoming. There's a free bear on the way to you. This is an anti Wyoming shoutout real quick, which is uhoh. We, for my company. Yeah. We were always trying to get to a place where we'd shipped orders to all 50 states. Yes, yes, yes. And fucking Wyoming, man, I think it's less than one person per square mile for the state. Isn't it the same population in San Francisco? Even less. I think it's like 600 G, but it was possible. Yeah. I had to go out and Yellowstone yeah. And ask for Wyoming. But but yeah, so, you know, we only make so many, I was, I was hiring people. Yeah. You know, just get art assistants in to, just to, you know, just tubing, everyone like rolling into a tube and putting their shipping label being the whole thing. And so, basically as people were starting to lay off, I was like, look, I'm gonna find out work artists and, and employ them on this project. And so it turned into a thing that was the way I think about it was like, it was like a pretty good idea in a really bad time. And then this like, happiness is reality minus expectations. Expectations were really low. Yeah. So reality, you know, this project didn't have to be like the best thing you ever saw. I'd say it was like a pretty good idea. But the delta was so big and people were just really looking for anything that was positive and what was just a very bleak and depressing time. And so I happened to be there and be able to pull it off basically. And so managed to navigate into something that was you know, I'm really proud of. And I think, you know, I still get a lot of comments from people feeling telling me that it made a difference. Yeah. You people being like, my kids were too scared to leave the house, but I go tell them, we go on the honey bear hunt and, and then they leave. Or you know, just them taking walks and you know, just being engaged with the exterior of the city and. Yeah. Well, I wanna double click. I could talk about the honey bears for hours. Truly. Me too. Probably, I think a handful of things that this, like connects for me connects of course this idea of joy and how much joy is needed when things get hard, right? Mm-hmm. We can, it's very easy to thumb your nose at joyous art. Mm-hmm. Yeah. When when it's good times. Mm-hmm. And then all of a sudden it's a global pandemic and everybody feels that. Everybody gets why you need honey bears, right? That's one. But then the other thing is I think your your relationship with the city has always been very I think inspirational to me, which is, you see this, and this is, you know, in like urban planning, this is a big idea, but like, you've always seen the city as your canvas. And, tell me if I'm overstating this point, but like, I feel like you feel a responsibility as a citizen of San Francisco to beautify it and to make it a more joyous place. And to take that even to take that liberty mm-hmm. To be like, no, I'm gonna, nobody else is doing it. I'm gonna go out and make this more joyous and, and pretty and beautiful and more fun to be, especially when it's really sad to be, and I think that was a really, thank you for doing that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I truly mean that. You're very welcome. And, and yeah. I think, you know, I sometimes, I think of myself in a parallel to Batman, which is like, I'm not maybe the artist that San Francisco wants. I'm just the artist that it gets. But some in San Francisco want you. Yeah. Yeah. But it's kinda like I am a, you know, I'm here and I was here and I'm sort of, I'm a product of, of what we're going through as a, as a city and, you know, as a cultural moment or whatever. And I saw that I had the ability and opportunity to do something that, you know, I thought would be cool at least for me. Right. And I guess it just so happened other people agreed with me, like enough of them agreed that the whole thing works. Right. But it's yeah, maybe not everybody has the has the ability, like obviously I had some technical skills that I were latent, you know, from, from prior experience that I was like, okay, I can go make stencils and mm-hmm. Try to figure this out. And then, you know, just felt, yeah. Like it was something, you know, I wanted to live in a city with street art. I'm like, well, I could complain about it. Or sorry, with more street art, say that. I could complain about it. Or I could go make some fucking street art. Make some fucking street art. Yeah. Yeah. So that's what I did to, to turn this to the next topic with another Batman reference. Okay. Ooh. Is deep cuts. This idea of you either die a hero or you Oh yeah. Live long enough to see yourself become a villain. I'm gonna try, I think I've made my feelings about you. I thought you was quite clear on this. I'm gonna try to hold back on my part of this until you're done talking, but when are the. What's the earliest memory you have of starting to see pushback against the the Bears? Again, starting to see criticism of your work. Yeah. What's the first memory? So, the very first memory, not of the Bears, but what's interesting is I got a mural. I, you know, I was I live for a little bit in the mission and there was a pg e substation at the end of my block that was always getting, you know, a couple little scrawny tags in it, and they buffet and it, you know, this is this whole thing. I'm like, this is a pretty nice wall. And so I was like, maybe I can get permission to paint this thing. I spent 400 days trying to find my way in this whole story I wanna tell here. But eventually get to, yes, on the mural I paint a mural of sea turtles and somebody goes and tags them and writes Latino art only on it. And that was the first time I'd ever had a thing really noticeably being like, huh? It was the first time you got tagged? Well, I mean, that, that was my first ever legal mural and so, so yeah, I think I'd had maybe some of the street art tagged, but it was, sorry. Yeah, I can rewind to that.'cause this was more of a small misstep that got corrected and it was fine. I didn't understand when I was start starting I was in the parlance of graffiti a toy and I thought that if I painted something kind of complicated over a tag, that there's like a hierarchy in graffiti where you can paint something more complicated over something else. But I didn't realize only if you completely cover it. And so if you could peek the tag behind it. Then that's considered a diss and you're like insulting them. And so I did that with a couple of bears on mailboxes, and then the bears just got destroyed. And then I got the message and I never did it again. And then never tagged one again. Right. Sorry. Can you, can you explain this concept to somebody who's very not savvy with this? So the idea is a street artist has tagged something. You as another street artist, are allowed to go in and, and go over it as long as you fully cover it. If you only partially cover it, then it's an, it's a dis So yes, except replace the word street artists with graffiti writer. Ah, okay. Yeah. So street art and graffiti are two pretty separate cultures. Mm-hmm. But we're coexisting in the same space. Yeah. And so I was, you know, watching documentaries and stuff on graffiti and talking to people. And I thought in the beginning that like, I was gonna be respected by graffiti people and maybe even like, brought into a crew. And there were crews I was seeing that I liked, I discovered later that they were, they did not think I was cool and they're not like what I was doing and they never were going to because using stencils in graffiti is really, really, really low. That's like, you're like bottom of the barrel in street art. It doesn't really matter. You make the art. The art is what the art is. And so in their ethos, but, you know, you've seen like a basic tag. Someone kind of like scribbles their name, not scribbles, sorry. They, they use a hand style to pick their name. You can then do something more like some bubble letters, right? So there's a thing called the throw up where you're gonna maybe be doing two colors, like a fill and an outline you can cover. My understanding is that you can cover a tag with a throw up as long as it's completely covered. And then there's like a piece or a burner, which is gonna be a more complicated multicolored thing. You can cover a throw up with one of those. You know,'cause you've done something, if, if you put a tag over a throw up, that's not gonna be seen in a positive light. Right? Hmm. And so I thought, Hey, I'm doing a four color stencil here. It's taken me a long time. Like they tag for like 20 seconds. I'm putting like a lot of exposure and risk here. I can do this over a tag thinking I'm somehow operating in their, in their system, which I was not. And I just learned that lesson very easily. I mean, I learned it the way anybody learns it, which is they come over and they just like scribble over the bear. And then I'm like, oh, okay. I got that message and then I never did it again. And now I don't, I I don't even wanna clip a tag. Like if there's some big tag and it fs out at the end and there's a nice little spot ne next to it. Mm-hmm. But there, there's like some fuzz from the spray paint. You won't touch it. I don't wanna cover that. I just, I just like, you're doing your thing. I'm just not gonna touch it. But there wasn't like a graffiti against Finch thing from that early experience. This was kind of an isolated set of like, one day I went out and one day that they got tagged back in 2015. That didn't repeat for a long time. Right. And so this was more of the streets figuring themselves out. Yeah. The first mural that got tagged was this thing of the, of the of the turtles. And I, I ended up having this early experience actually in 2017 of sort of this you know, anti-gentrification. You know, there's a, a sentiment including, you know, what the FBI would call a gang. A group of people who are, you know, using graffiti and, and property damaged and, and other things to try to, you know, keep the mission the way that they wanna keep it. Right? Yeah. And so that was the whole experience I went through. You know, that people generally don't know about'cause it was just kind of happening in the mission. And, and what, what did it look like for you? Just people tagging your Yeah. People tagging my stuff. Yeah. And all writing things. Like, we kill yuppies, we kill techies, die yuppies, scum, whatever the thing is, right? Like this kind of happened. Yeah. 2017 is when this was really going down. And there was a group called Keep Hoods Yours or Kill Hippies and yuppies. That was hippies too. Hippies too. Yeah. Oh man. I thought hippies would, would be allowed to live not in the mission. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, so, you know, they identified me as being someone that they didn't like for whatever reason. I think probably for obvious reasons, you should look at me. Pretty obvious. And, you know, like, you know, and then, so this went on for a while. Actually. My understanding of this, I didn't follow this that carefully, is that the members of that group were like, there was like a midnight arrest of like 20 members where they were Wow. Charged with all these felony counts because they were like throwing rocks through windows and doing all this stuff. Like, it wasn't just like graffiti or whatever, but and yeah, I don't know what happened with, with the case, you know, I think people might have gone to jail or whatever, but you know, there's some amount of property damage being done on, on a systematic enough level that eventually the government stepped in and was like, okay. And I was just one, you know, like, like I, I wasn't actually part of this court case. I was just, you know, part of the damage that these people were doing that was just, you know, this was a thing that was part of my life. And so the kind of like the public space, you know, being a thing that has some contest to it is, is a theme of street art in general. And there's a quote from Shepherd Ferry. He is like, I've survived generations of haters. And certainly like if you know about banks, he's work, you know, he basically can't keep a piece up. You know, there's he, he does it, he gives this photo of it, and then it's pretty much instantly destroyed unless you put plexiglass over it. And so, I thankfully don't have that status where now things are pretty calm, but but yeah, I've gone through like, what you're probably thinking of in your head wasn't probably what I told you because I've gone through like waves of this over time, where, where you're getting, you know, I'm getting wrapped up in, in larger societal forces. Right. I could probably tell you about what you. What I'm guessing you were thinking of but maybe you, you weren't. So I just did a timeline again of, of all of my artwork, and I had sort of a narrative violation where I thought, where I thought the first really bare pushback was like, when that happened. It was actually much earlier than I expected. So I did all this stuff in COVID, right? And then I did, I sold the Mask Bear on as a painting from an edition, a bunch of them I actually did as a timed edition. Anyone who wanted to order the Mask Bear or the soap Bear within a day or seven days, whatever I'd paint them and donate half of that to charity. And then I then sold all the artist proofs, which were the extras and gave all that money to charity. And this ended up being a fair amount. I don't wanna get the number wrong, but$160,000 or something. Wow. I think a hundred of it went to basically direct cash transfers to artists. So if you're out of work there was a nonprofit called the Safety Net Fund that just kind of no questions asked, almost was like you say you're an artist who's out of work, performing artist, et cetera. We'll send you a direct cash transfer. And then the other one I mentioned already, which is called SF New Deal, which was paying the restaurants to make food. So I, I had the mass and the bears and the windows. Everything's going great. Yeah. And then George Floyd gets killed and I'm like, okay, I've had so much success fundraising over here. I'm gonna go do something for Black Lives Matter. And I launch what I called the Zero Bear, which was a bear that was all five layers of spray paint or the regular bear. But all those layers are black. Yeah. Sort of inspired by blackout Tuesday. And make this clear, this is a bear that is entirely black. Okay. It is a honey bear. It's a honey bear in shape. But, but, and if you look at it at an angle, you can see the bear in it because spray paint has a depth to it. Yes. But each of those layers, instead of being yellow and then brown and then more brown and then light yellow, whatever, as to make a classic honey bear appear. This was black on black on black on black. And actually there was a piece from Ashia Murakami around the same time he did the exact same thing. A flower all black. We were all doing it on our Instagram. Yeah. Yeah. So I thought this was cool. This be a chance to fundraise. The piece was actually pretty cool looking. But another artist who also does bears and also does some street art stuff, said that this was a bear in blackface. And as soon as he said that, like I made the mis, I made a couple of mistakes, but one of them was just responding at all. So as soon as I respond to a comment on Instagram, Instagram, the algorithm that takes that is to proponent it to the top. Yeah. And we said, this goes viral. And again, I'm getting death threats and I'm getting, so I, I had to re, I'd already had sold a hundred thousand dollars of these things and I had to refund them all. I had to hire a crisis PR firm.'cause this is starting to become like a pretty serious amount of. Of negative attention and you know, this one artist got to have his day in the sun and feel like, you know, he was doing a good job, whatever, stopping racists or something. But but yeah, so I actually put this piece in the latest sort of respective of my work because I wanted it to be like, look, at some point I, in the beginning you're like, well, maybe I am bad or something, right? Like I am, you know, I have sinned in some way. You know, and then at some point I'm, I'm coming around and being like, I actually just think objectively this is not in blackface. And a lot of my friends who are black are like, yeah, this is like total bullshit. Like whatever. But it's one of these times where everyone's really sensitive and, you know, I just had to basically take the L and just be like, okay, well maybe fundraising in Finch land is better when it's a natural disaster than when it's a social issue. Because when it's a social issue, now I'm inserting myself who is, is not black right? Into an issue of which, you know, I'm trying to help in my own way, but maybe not the way that they wanna be helped or, you know, or whatever, or it's a complicated scenario. Anyway, so that ended up being the first time that like shit really hit the fan in a way that seemed frankly existential to my career and ended up being fine. And, you know, my bestselling painting ever was like the year after that. So it wasn't like it had some big negative career impact, but that was the first time that it was like, okay, the, the kind of like to, to make it more, to the best of my understanding that the more progressive left. Of San Francisco, the people who would protest against AI and the Google buses and, and put the cones in the way modes waymo's and stuff, right? Like there's a set of people in the city the KHY guys, identification, et cetera. There's a group of people in the city who don't want, who want it to be a certain way, and I am either correctly or incorrectly as being viewed, as being on the other side of that. And they're gonna be upset with me in the same way they're upset at Google. At the same way they're upset with Waymo the same way they're upset with every startup that's in the city, except I'm just more public because my work's actually on the street, right? Like, you can go get angry as angry, you can shake your fist, you know, at open ai, whatever. Right? But you can't really take down chat GPT, right? Yeah. You know, but you can shake your fist at the honey bear and you can take a spray can and you can go destroy every honey bear in the city, right? And so I think was sort of a more public face of this, you know, societal issue that San Francisco is going through. Yeah. Which way, if I can take one more aside please. Here. I think the actual problem, oh, sorry. There's many actual problems, but poor housing policy is where I wanna put my money. Right? If we you know, let me describe to you two streets. I'm gonna call them nice street and mean Street, yeah. And there's two universes where, and one of them, and they're exactly the same. Every Adam is the same but in one. Everyone on the street is nice to each other. And then the other, everyone on the street is mean to each other. Which one has higher rent? Nice. Street. Street, I would guess. Yes. Right? Yeah. So when you make something nicer, when you add a cool restaurant or a bar or something, right? When you have artists doing cool artwork, like demand is gonna go up. And if all the atoms supply stays the same, then price is gonna go up. And when price goes up, certain people that we think have an outsized cultural or societal impact our teachers, even as people who grew up in the neighborhood, right? Who may be coming from a, from a broader, just even from a randomly distributed in economic background. But people wanna start coffee shops or play music or be artists, or be teachers or be firefighters or even work for the city. Like most people who work for San Francisco don't actually live in San Francisco, which blows my mind, right? So if you don't change the atoms, right, and increase the supply of housing which the city has made it legendarily tough to do, obviously very famously tough to do, then at some point rents are gonna go up and you can blame the people who are making it better you know, or, or nicer or more desirable to live in. But that feels to me to be kind of the wrong place to, to put your blame. Yeah. Like I don't feel like the honey bearers are what's ruining San Francisco, right? If it's truly actually being ruined. I think San Francisco is pretty awesome, but, understanding that like, look. When, when all your neighbors, like, you know, you don't want your neighborhood to change. And so when there, there's a giant apartment building that proposes to go up, you know, on the corner and you block that, like realizing that you actually are doing the damage to yourself because you know, like you living in the neighborhood are also doing cool stuff that's making it more desirable to live there. Yeah. Right. And so, you know, I feel like I'm being blamed on one side, but I feel like, you know, I'd like to put my blame on the other side as being like, look, if we just built a lot more housing, the price would've stayed the same and all the culture producers could still live here. And so I feel like they got the wrong guy, but but for better or for worse, this is a part of my story. And, I have been intertwined with this in San Francisco, by the way, in Chicago. They like I was in Chicago and this is all coming down and they're like, people in your city have lost their fucking minds. Yeah. Like people that, like San Francisco has a reputation on the national stage of being just totally insane. Right. Like, and, and so that actually works in my favor in some way. It's like, okay, actually you must be good. If, the crazy left is, you know is upset with you because that must mean you must be at least a, you know, like slightly left. You know, it's not even like I'm on the right or something. Right. It's always a near enemy, right? Yeah. Exactly. So that's maybe too long of a description of this, but, but that's at least, you know, how I view what situation is. And again, I've had waves of this come in, of this go. Actually I'll say a couple more things about this, please, as long as I can. So there's there's two the thought I've really come around to that helps me contextualize this. Is that there's a quote from Ali Vielle. He said, the opposite of love isn't hate. It's indifference. Yeah. So the worst thing as an artist that could happen is someone sees your work and they don't even really see it at all. They just, you paint a mural, a street art piece, and, and they just walk right by. They air piece of music and doesn't even grab them at all. And what I've discovered, even in the software that I was doing, is the stuff that we did that worked well also by people that absolutely hated it. And so there's indifference on one side and there's love and hate on the other. And so I had a sculpture that I built for Burning Man, called Nothing For Sale. And it was a giant Tube man, like you'd see at a gas station. And, and the text down the front said nothing for sale. And it was, I think the world's largest single tube man. And the, and Burning Man put it in Keyhole which is like the most prominent art. It's like right in front of center camp, the most prominent art location on the Playa except for the man in the temple or whatever. Which is like this honor. And people, some people were just like, even before I got out there, people were pissed, right? They're like, oh, it's like, you know, the death of Bri, whatever. And I was like, this is gonna be one of my greatest projects ever. I, I was like, now I've learned to interpret, you know, if somebody I really respect, by the way, is upset with something, you know, and, and I'm happy to sit down, frankly, with anybody, but it's come to a point where I now actually use that as signal. There's another quote I like from Rick Rubin. He's a legendary music producer. Mm-hmm. He said, great art divides the audience. Yeah. So I'm not claiming that my art is great art, but art that is great. We'll have people who are like, basically it's either gonna have nobody be happy with it or upset with it, or have people who are both happy with it and upset with it. And so in the beginning, I'm trying to make art that's happy, right? It's like honey bears, like, you know, I'm trying to broaden, you know, reach the masses with art and really do something that, that brings art to everybody that is, you know, low cultural background required, very inclusive for a broad community. Yeah. If someone is upset about it, that, that, that hurt a lot. And now the way I think about it's kinda like, well this is just it's just part of the game, right? And people think that Andy Warhol was, was the death of art and Picasso was the death of art. And they think Banksy is the death of art, right? And everyone's the death of art, right? And so anyone had any actual impact and so, and so at the time I was upset about it after some therapy, you know, I'm now more likely to be like, okay, I understand that it doesn't mean that I'm bad or even that the art's bad and it might just be like 1% of people that are just super noisy. And so I've come to kind of come to peace with it and even use it as a positive signal that if someone is upset about it, then maybe, you know, this could mean that I'm on the right track. Because if no one's upset, it means that I'm not on the right track. Yeah, man, I have a lot of thoughts and a lot of questions about that. I, there's a couple, I'll do a quick assortment, but there's a place I really wanna focus with this one that I think point you made that I think people forget very easily. The word gentrification on its own is not a negative word. Gentrification is a good thing. It's when it's paired with the lack of affordability. I mean, I'm saying in a technical dictionary sense, it is, it's a neighborhood becoming better. It's, it's a place becoming better. And it's really, when it's paired with bad housing policy and people getting price out, that's when it starts to become a problem. Right. But gentrification on its own, it's about beautifying a neighborhood and making it better to live in. That's one thought. And I think, you know, again, going back to the idea of joy and going back to the idea of beauty, like you've always made such a real attempt to make this place more beautiful and more joyous. So that's one thought. The, the other thought that comes to mind for me through all of this is, yeah, I mean, at, at some very basic level most people, most artists included, could only ever hope to be so big to get canceled. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. To to be so relevant. Yeah. To, for, to, for it to be worth anyone's time to cancel you is, and I don't know if you like to use that word with what, what was happening to you? Yeah. I say attempted to cancel. Yeah. Because I now think you only could cancel it yourself. At some level that's a beau that's a big idea. But there have been maybe seven attempts or something I you wanna say, but I just keep doing stuff. Like, I think if I'd worked for Google at that time in the cultural climate of, of the, you know, 2020s, I would've gotten fired and a lot of people Yeah. Did a thing at random it insert big co here and got fired for it. But no one can fire me'cause I just work for myself. Right. Yeah. And as long as my collectors and I kept going to like, events and being like, is somebody here gonna come and yell at me? And then realizing that all the people that I really like, my audience, the people that I hang out with, all my friends, all the people I see on a regular basis, they all think it's crazy. Right. And then being like, oh, interesting. And that, that was like, oh, it's not, it feels like every, the internet can make it feel like it's everybody. Right? Yeah. And it's just, you know, it's a band of people that work together to make a lot of comments on one Instagram post and they go from from pack to pack to pack and they do it. It's a whole weird Yeah. Social media. Thumb, slightly down. Well, you've, you've had this experience with social media that I think a lot of people hear about. I'm, I'm always fascinated by how much we talk about cancellation as a society because of how few people actually go through it. Right? Like, again, there are not that many people in America or in the world relevant enough, big enough to actually get canceled. But I wanna actually, I wanna focus on a very human part of all of this, which is, I, I suspect we will agree on almost everything about like, the criticism where I think it falls short, where I think it's misguided. But I wanna hear very specifically about what it feels like to get a death threat. Maybe we can do these as bullet pointed things. Mm-hmm. What does it feel like to get a death threat? What does it feel like to work on a piece of art for hours and then walk back out and see it tagged? The third one that I I would love to also hear about is what does it feel like to, to think that you've been building something for, for a long time and it's starting to, in front of your eyes, starting to disintegrate and fall apart. And especially when it feels like it's happening for malicious reasons, but let's, maybe we Yeah. Break those three out. So I don't think I got this idea for myself. I think I read this somewhere where, you know, we evolved, let's say in tribes, and if somebody in your tribe is really upset with you, then that's a signal that you need to take pretty seriously. But now that we have this, like someone's upset with me who really doesn't know me at all, it still feels like they're, you know, in my neighborhood or in my village or whatever but they're not, like, maybe they're not even in San Francisco or maybe whatever, like social media has, has allowed it to, we still are monkeys doing monkey things. Yeah. And we have our monkey responses, but the inputs coming in are like totally disjoint from our monkey upbringings. Mm-hmm. Right? And so it feels really bad. Right. I remember when the, when the blackout bear thing happened you know, I, I was on well, I cried. Somebody called me up to give me advice and I just wept on the phone with him. And then I thankfully was going to a friend's house that was staying at a winery over COVID. So I'm like, the only good option here is just to drink myself into total stupor. I was like, I'll deal with the rest of this. At this point. I can't anymore shadow and alcohol today. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not saying this is the best way to handle it, but that night I'm like, really The only plan I have for tonight is just, thankfully we have a co amount of wine here. So yeah. I'd say very much not good. And over time you basically learn a heart in your heart and to deal with it. Right. And I have it way lighter than a lot of people. Like, like Mark Zuckerberg has been through just ridiculous. Again, you can like, you can like him or not like him, but you, the amount of hate that guy gets. Yeah. And he's being, I'm only being accused of ruining San Francisco. He's being accused of ruining the world. Yeah, right. It's like existential to society what people think, you know? And, and at some point, you know, you just learn like everybody who who happens at some point is, you know, the, the mental challenge and you're like, Hey, I have this idea for a good project. Right. And if it works, then it's gonna draw people's attention, and that attention is gonna draw people having a negative reaction. It's then gonna come and hurt me. So it's like, if I wanna go reach something that's gonna be good, I'm actually gonna hurt myself. And then you see yourself be like, maybe I don't wanna reach for something good at all, because then I definitely won't hurt myself, but, and then insert expensive therapy here. Right? And you're like, no, no. Okay. You know, you start to work on reframing it where if you can basically, again, can try to understand the broader context of what's happening and be like, look, these aren't, you know, not everybody needs to like my art. Right? Other people have other agendas, you know, like if it's that they can use my art to like a great example is all these people throwing paint and soup onto famous paintings like the Van Gogh, whatever. For climate change, I dunno if you've seen this, this is like a, a meme in the world. I have this idea I haven't done yet, or I don't know how to do it, but imagine a giant balloon of carbon that if you destroy a painting in art museum, I'm just gonna release a gigaton of carbon in the atmosphere. Yeah. Whatever. And be like, look, you gotta stop this, right? Yeah. Like, that has nothing to do with the art. Right. But they're basically using that to further they think they can get, and they have been successful in using that to platform their own message. And it's really nothing to do with the art at all. Right. Yeah. And so there's a whole bunch of reasons for the stuff. Sorry, that was your first question. Your second question was, oh yeah. So, there's a song from Jane's Addiction called Mountain Song coming down the Mountain. Yeah. Every time I go to fix a mural. So what. At the end of the day, like street art, it's well if it's a mural, it's private property and you should respect private property. If it's street art, it's in public space and what goes, goes. But the ethos of it is just get up. Stay up. Right? And so at some level, someone tags the thing. I'm gonna go fix the thing. They tag the thing, I'm gonna go fix the thing, right? And I just played Mountain Song on the way to every, every time I have to go fix a thing, you're just like, crank up some loud punk rock music and you're like, fuck you. Yeah. Right? Like, you're not gonna stop me from doing my thing. Like, you don't speak for the city, you don't speak for, you know, the larger community abroad, you might be, you know, a lot of graffiti is 12-year-old boys with a bad home life just trying to get out and do stuff, right? Yeah. It's not all social justice, you know, warrior whatever, trying to save San Francisco. A lot of it's people who are pissed off, right? And maybe they have a bad situation and maybe their bad situation is caused by the fact the city has made some bad decisions in its policies, right? And they just wanna do something'cause they feel powerless and fucking up a bear is the best thing that they got. Right? But fuck you, right? Like, yeah, you know, this is not the most productive thing you could do with your time. You know, and so, so yeah. So that was the way I dealt with that. Again, thankfully things have been pretty calm. Again, it goes through waves. And then you had a third question, which I've already come, which is the feeling when it feels like the, oh yeah. The thing you've been building for decades at this point is starting to come apart. Yeah. So the there's times when it's felt like it's been, you know, one of the times I went through one of these cycles, only once have I actually lost projects. Most of the time. I remember I was about to launch a thing with William Sonoma where we, they did, worked in a whole collection Yeah. Of, you know, spatulas and mugs and plates, and they were gonna put it, and they did put it by the way spoiler alert in every store in the entire world, including Dubai and Kuwait and all the places they have stores. And, and then something happens that's in the news, right. And it's like, you know, whatever, fin socks, whatever. Right? And they call me up and they're like, every year someone makes the hater's guide to William Sonoma, and they just make fun of all of our stuff, and they call us bougie or whatever. They're like, we get it. Yeah. We think this is stupid. We're behind you. Full steam ahead. Yeah. But I had a tech company that I was about to go do a big project for that was like, like, you know, I already worked on design. I didn't charge a design fee because, you know, sometimes I do. But I was like this, you know, usually oftentimes these projects are not interviewing multiple people. They're just like, you're being hired to do this project. And Yeah. You know, it's a big enough project that I'm willing to do some proposals. So I already had a design ready to go. I won't name the company. But, but they were like, okay, well, you know, we don't think that this sends the right message to our employees or whatever. Right? And that's only really happened once. Of course, I don't know, projects that I didn't get because I've never asked to do them. But that was the only time when, when it was like, you know, kind of disappointing. And I was like, okay, well, but, but, but whatever. Even if you put the project part of it aside, right? Like, did it feel like your message was getting ripped apart? The thing, and I, I know you don't. Yeah, yeah. I know. I don't think you love that word message, but what you were trying to do in the world, did it feel like that was getting horribly misconstrued? Yeah. If they can basically pervert the symbol where it was a thing that was sort of like 99.9% of people thought was a joyous object. Yeah. And 0.01% of people are 0.1. Sorry to get that math right. Thought was not good. They can taint it for some percentage of the rest of the people then. Yeah. That's definitely disappointing. I think that's probably what they were trying to do. Yeah. But you know, this, the reality is that tainting is only happening within their sphere of influence. Yeah. Right. Which is maybe San Francisco. Right. I remember I had a really big project happening in Palo Alto and, you know, and I was like, am I gonna lose this project? Right. And I realized that like, who reads the fucking chronicle, right? Yeah. Like, nobody reads this anymore. Like I was on, at one point, I was on the front page of the Chronicle. It was San Francisco bitterly divided Over Honey Bear Art. Yeah. Which is like an onion article. I was like an onion article. Honestly, it's like we don't have bigger, even when I bought the paper in the corner store, the guy was like, can you believe Yeah. What the Chronicle is writing about? I was like, I know I can, it's me. Yeah. And he's like, oh, it's you. Oh, good job. Whatever. Wow. Right. And I'm in Palo Alto and like no one there has any idea what people are talking about. Yeah. Nor do they really care. Right. So like we have, again, when, when it's and I, I have other friends who've gone through some stuff. Right. Yeah. I feel like there's kind of like a support group of people who've been, you know, yeah. Been canceled on the internet or whatever, or had cancellation attempts on them. And when, when you're in the middle of it. It feels like the world's coming to an end. Yeah. But when I see other people go through it, like, I remember the sfm OA had something happened during COVID where they were being racist or not. Ra I don't, I don't even know, like Yeah. It, I cared so little to actually read these articles that I was, I was just like, look, they're doing something over there. You know? I just it doesn't, it didn't seem like this. This isn't like Bill Cosby Yeah. Like tier Yeah. Bad stuff. Right. This is not Harvey Weinstein, whatever. Right? Yeah. Like, that stuff becomes clear to you. You find out about it and you're like, okay, you know, I don't wanna support this institution or that institution. Right. But a lot of this stuff is like, they feel horrible. They're in the center of the males strumm. And so now if I advise someone who's going through this and was like, look, you know, it feels like everyone is talking about you, but most people just don't care. Yeah. Right. And if they are looking at this, like, I got a really big project this year where the person was like, oh, I found you when all those people were angry at you being successful. Mm-hmm. And, and that's how we actually found me. Wow. And I was like, okay, cool. Like you read the same article I read and your interpretation was, oh yeah, I get what this is. And so, you know, would I rather the whole thing not happen? Sure. And I think at the end of the day, people try to assassinate Dolly Parton and they try to assassinate Taylor Swift, like she drives around in a bulletproof vehicle. Right. Yeah. It's just kind of, like haters mean you're famous. Yeah. Right. Like you said, like, you know, I got to a certain tier of popularity and I got what comes with that tier of popularity. And some people decide that they don't want to go. And again, not that I'm, I'm gonna say this very clearly, not that I'm totally blameless, that I handled every situation the best of my abilities. It would've been nice to have a big enough institution to have a crisis PR team and get crisis coaching and get, you know, get all the things that, that people get so that they can respond better in, in certain moments. And, you know, try to have the most decorum and poise that they can. Right. But you know, being me and doing the best that I can, whatever, right. Like, I, I, I did the best I could. I'm still here. I, and my career is going well and you know, like, it's just, you know, you go through the thing and I think now I have a perspective on it that feels healthy. At the time it felt like the world was over, right? And that, and then this whole thing, like, I felt like it was existential to the art practice that I was gonna have to, to end the whole thing. And yeah. But, you know, here we are. Oh man. I'm gonna, I wanna do something. I wanna read out a few quotes that are written about you, and I want to, we've never done a rapid fire. Okay. But if you could just give me your quick, Ooh, okay. Couple word. It's good. Or even one sentence to feeling about this. The first one's actually a very easy one and we already talked about it. People are referring to you as Warhol's soup cans for millennials. Yeah. Love it. I love Warhol. I like soup cans and I like millennials. Beautiful. Number two, San Francisco has become so oversaturated with finches honey bears that what was once an occasional sugar rush now feels like a nausea inducing force feeding. Yeah. So, I, having a bear on every block was a lot of bears. Right. You know, what's too many, you know, I didn't put the bear on every block. I made them available and the citizens of San Francisco chose sorry, enough people, again, more than one per block. Every block. The city decided that they thought that was a thing that they wanted to have in their window to be part of this project. Again, it wasn't like I force fed this to anybody, right. I just enabled this to happen. I wasn't, again, it wasn't me going to every block and putting something up. Right. I just merely enabled it. So again, I have sympathy with that feeling where if you don't like them now, you can't escape them. Yeah. But, you know, I don't like advertisements. Yeah. And I see a lot of them. Well, it, it's a little like, like watching a lot walking to people's homes and seeing that they, they're using honey and being like, you know what, this is getting to be a bit much. Yeah. And like, well, nobody told you to fucking eat. Or, I mean, to make maybe a more charitable interpretation, it's like a person being vegan and thinking that, you know, like every time they see a person eating meat. They're like, I feel sick. I'm upset. Right. Yeah. Obviously painting honey bears and killing animals aren't, you know, kinda in the same universe here, but I'm trying to be sympathetic to the, to do the idea. There were a lot of bears, right? I mean, it was, it was, it was, it was a lot of bears. And they came down in the course of time as they faded in windows and the, and, and stuff with COVID started to fade out, et cetera, et cetera. And so, yeah. So anyway I'm sympathetic to the, to the claim, but I don't feel like I'm to blame for that. You know, people wanted bears. I gave people what they wanted. Speaking enough. Let me give you number three. Okay. His public peace has made the city a more cheerful place to be success. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Again, that's what I'm going for. Number four. No, it's just H bears people. Yeah. Like, come on, like we did, like the whole thing looks ridiculous. Again, it's like, it reads like an onion article. That's what it's, right, yeah. That's what it reads. Like an onion article. Right. At the time, I understand it was a weird time. We were on a witch hunt trying to find people who were, you know, tearing apart the world. And there were, there were people doing very bad things, whatever, right? Yeah. But there's a lot of collateral damage and, and I'm not sure, again, I think they kinda got the wrong guy on a lot of these things. Yeah. And like, I'm not really sure I'm, I'm always who they're looking for, but again, I think people, I, you know, enough people understand that, that, that it doesn't matter at the end of the day. Yeah. Right. Like people hate Taylor Swift too, you know, and they think her music is terrible and it's ruining country, or it's ruining pop or whatever. Right. And Taylor Swift just keeps Taylor Swift. Well, you're, you, you've set up number four, perfectly. Number four. And the very last one I have is his art reeks of commercialism, dot.dot. Their contribution to art is nil. Yeah. So, what is that? Art is a topic I actually really like, because Duchamp, more or less so Duchamp is his artist, if's not familiar. His most famous piece is the urinal he hung in the gallery. Mm-hmm. Called Fountain. But before that he had shovel where he just bought a shovel from a hardware store and he hung it up. You know, so ready, mades, whatever. And Duchamp is a very, well, I mean, a version of shovel just sold recently. I forgot what it's sold for, but it was millions. I actually saw a version of shovel at the moment in New York, and frankly I thought it was amazing. It was like hanging in middle of a room and it's just a shovel bought at a hardware store. But this whole, like what is art or what is not art, who's contributing or not contributing, like everybody of impact is called not art as it's happening. Like everybody, right? Like, again, they thought that Warhol was a death of art. He's contributing nothing to art. He's, you know, absolutely. Like what? It's just ti it's tiresome because if you're at all a student of history, you realize that again, saying this doesn't mean that it's good. In the same way that saying great art divides the audience doesn't mean that if something divides the audience, it is great art. Yeah. But but it's, but these comments are going to be levied against everything. Sorry, have been levied against everything that has driven art forward over as long as we have art history. Right. And so I found the whole thing just to be like, you can say I don't like it. Right. Let's have a debate about what you think is good or not good. And even you come up with a framework for what you think is good or not good, and you can have a discussion with people on reasonable terms about the kind of art that, that again, like is if there's even a like objective, good or bad, right? Whatever. That's a very reasonable thing to do, but saying like, no contribution or what, whatever, like, who cares, right? It's just like, yeah. Well, let me pull up my only surprise for the, oh, for the day. Okay. That last quote was actually the New York Times about Andy Warhol. Oh, hey, here we go. Okay. I feel justified. Yeah, I did say that about Warhol. Oh, I love Warhol as a model for you. I've been thinking about this this entire time that I've been preparing for this episode. And I'm not trying to gas you up. I'm not trying to sort of be too, you know, like overly complimentary. But I think that there's a, there's an analogy there, or not an analogy. There's, there's a, there's a parallel there. And I think people misunderstand this. They misunderstood it about him, and I think they misunderstand it about you. And we, but we can kind of break this out in a lot of different ways. One is the, the fact of repetition, right? Mm-hmm. What is the art trying to do? I think that is, you cannot, I, I genuinely believe you cannot criticize any art without first asking the question of what is the artist trying to do? What is the art trying to do? And what Warhol was trying to do, as I understand it, obviously didn't know the guy, but what, what Warhol was trying to do. And what I understand, and you've described today, you, you were trying to do is to create little bits of joy that almost anyone can relate to and to make them ubiquitous or near ubiquitous. Right. And to beautify the world that you live in, right? You cannot do that without repetition. You cannot, it is a very different thing. And I do think that there's this bias that people had in the sixties, and I think our generation has this bias towards, I think we almost, we don't even consider something art. And I, I think this was happening in the sixties too. We don't consider something art unless it has some sort of deeper subversive political meaning, either that mm-hmm. Or it's like this is a piece about my father's depression, like, and I look. I would love to see a piece of my father's depression. And a, I would love to see subversive art. I'm a big fan of both of those things, but it is just a fact of it that people unfairly attacked the, the one folk musician in Greenwich Village that was making happy tunes in the sixties. Mm-hmm. And people unfairly attack a honey bear that's just trying to make the city Yeah. More joyous place to be. And I think people, again, I think people misunderstand it. I think people misunderstand the idea of blending in the way that Warhol did with the Campbell soup cans, and you did with the LaCroix. A blending an object. A motif that is in everyone's life with art. Right. So you can relate to it and then putting it everywhere. I just and I think I, the more I read about your story, the more I think I, I think Andy would be proud. Oh, thank you. I wanna ask you one final question to, to end this whole thing. Where is, what is the future for Finch? Do you see yourself 10 years from now? Are you still making honey bears? Is that fully phased out? How, what do you, you know, and you can be as abstract with this as you want. Yeah. How, how, what do you see your life 10 years from now? So I'm gonna give two answers. I'm gonna give the narrow answer about bears, and then I'm gonna give a broader answer about the Finch career or something. So people sometimes ask me, like, do you get tired of painting fairs? Right. And when I tell them that the way my art practice actually works is that the art. Is in designing the stencils, which happens on a tablet. It's all, it's all called a Wacom cente. It's says, cream with a pen, right? So I have a bear, and then if I'm making a bear with a coffee cup, I'm not redrawing the bear. I've already drawn the bear. I'm drawing a coffee cup and then I'm putting the cup in the bear's hand. The actual production of the painting is merely a technical process where a la many layers between, you know, for a bear between five and 18 are being filled with spray paint. It's allowed to dry, and then that's repeated, you know, until the image appears from that, right? What you're feel, what's actually being filled with paint, doesn't matter. You're just filling it with paint, right? So that's purely technical. The creative art aspect is in designing the stencils themselves. So I don't, when I'm making all these honey bears, I'm not actually drawing bears. Yeah. I'm drawing coffee cups and I'm drawing, you know, pirate hats and baker's hats and, you know, whatever the thing is that I'm drawing, it's never the bear. The bear's already been draw. So I can make that an image of a coffee cup blown up big, or I can shrink it down and put it in a bear's. On that point. I, I just, I do want to linger on this. This is another Warhol parallel that I really think is very salient. People forget how novel it was to, like, he saw what silk printing could do. Yeah. And how mass production became core to his. So that's why when I see somebody call you a copy paste artist, I go, oh, you completely missed the fucking point, didn't you? Yeah. Right. Copy paste is the point. Yeah. Oh, no, no. Maybe not copy paste, but like mass production is the point. Yeah. But, but, but sorry, I I, I derail you even more than Warhol. I'm actually literally copying and pasting a bear between two files to make it the template for the next bear. Yeah. Like there's copy and paste as part of my art practice. Yes. Right. I'm like, cool. This bear looks good. I mean, I've updated the bears six times now and it's gotten better over the, over the years. But you know, it's whatever, 10 years and six updates. Yeah. So from a purely logistical standpoint, there's a misconception of art that many artists are doing the creative act and the production at the same time. Yeah. They have their canvas and their brush, and they're doing them. They're creating, they're making the art and they're producing it. And in my practice, and in many practices, they're actually completely separate where the creative practice is happening in one place. And then the actual production of the painting is just technical. Right? Yeah. It's not that it's easy, right. Spray paint comes out really fast and there's ways to use a can, et cetera, et cetera. But it's purely a technical production thing. So will I be making honey bears in 10 years? I don't know. The answer is probably because I'm not getting bored of making them, because I'm not making bears. I'm making coffee cups. Yeah. Right. And, and things like that. In terms of the broader vision of like Finch as a career. You know, it's I feel now like I'm in sort of a mid-career period where I was like new and hot at one point. Yeah. You know, I was sort of underground. I had a show in 2018 that was like lined down the block. I mean, like, you know, stampede of people trying to get in. And I've had shows later where I've, you know, had much more commercial success in them. I sold more stuff but not had kind of the, like, I'm not, hi, I'm not like new and hip, like I'm a millennial. Like we're having kids, like we're, yeah. We're not trying to find the coolest place to go on a Saturday night anymore. Yeah. So, but I'm also not yet like a blue chip artist in any way where I'm doing, you know, shows in art museums and I'm just here to stay over some longer time period that might exceed my death ever. Right. I'm somewhere in the middle, and this happens to every artist sorry, I, every artist, sorry. Artists who have the privilege get to this stage where it's just sort of like a weird middle stage where, you know, I have a career, it's probably not going anywhere. I'm probably gonna keep doing this for a long time. Because people seem to be liking what I'm doing on some level. And there's whatever network effects and things that help out. But you know, I don't know if I'll make that last transition. I don't know what of that is actually a thing worth striving for. Like, immortality is an illusion because in the arc of time. Like it, it all gets compressed out. Yeah. And then like who, who cares? I'll be dead anyway. We'll all just be a amount of dirt at the moment. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Or all the pile of dirt on the mirror. So there's something, so some of that that's like illusory and is going to drive unhappiness. And some amount, as mentioned before we started recording that reaching for brass rings, like having a solo show in the MoMA is also a thing that if you reach for that and you don't get it, it's also gonna lead to unhappiness. Yeah. So I have the wheel, I put projects on the wheel, I spin the wheel. Right. That's what I've been doing. So I'm continue to do, is try to pick projects that I think are interesting. I hope other people find interesting and keep doing them. And if people keep finding'em interesting, then I'll have the privilege of continuing to do this stuff. And if they don't, then someday I won't. And that's kind of the, that's the arc of time. Well, Finch, as a San Franciscan, I, I hope you keep doing it. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for being on the podcast, man. Yeah. Oh my God. Best one yet. Oh, thank you. That was I unfortunately am about to miss a flight. Okay. Warm Intro is produced by G one Moore audio and video by Gin Han Production help by Danielle Ibarra, hosted by me ish. Cool.