860. - Shepard Fairey

8:37Shepard Fairey:shit is like I get your Taylor Swift I get your aversion to it I totally do but I can't believe how good it is it's so much better than everything else that's meant to be like that and it's it's and it also fascinates me because she's the one who wrote the Gracie Abrams hits and Gracie

8:54Jason Stewart:abrams in my mind has no songs you know what i mean it's like confusing to me a little bit you are you are not making you're sort of making my point a little bit by doing that but you know it all goes back to what what is a hit you know no totally i mean but i think that i think that

9:09Shepard Fairey:there's a certain level of like thing that gets so big that people don't even know why they like it

9:17Chris Black:do you know what i'm saying like i think for sure like i think that some of these i think some of

9:21Shepard Fairey:this pop stuff gets to this point where it's like you could ask somebody about the music and they would like stumble over their words but they could talk about the outfits or the tweets or the instagram you know what i mean which and i think that's just part of our modern society many many

9:33Jason Stewart:of our listeners might feel the same way about the music of like black pink for example just like i'm going to the black pink show tonight what's your favorite song they make music yeah i don't know it's just i just like it they hand me a thing that lights up yeah but i think that's where we're

9:47Shepard Fairey:at i think i think it's this very strange time where that's like not you know the the idea when we were younger that if you wore a shirt of a band that you didn't actually know or like you would get clowned for that that's completely out the window like that kind of behavior is totally

10:03Jason Stewart:out the window not for me i'm still i see kylie jenner wearing a suffocation long sleeve boom

10:09Shepard Fairey:where it's on site fuck you bitch king kylie could get it anytime if she's wearing the wrong suffocation long sleep king kylie wearing the i hate god hat oh fuck no name five albums dude i saw there's a book coming out about like florida like basically like underground music and um the the addison who does despair books was like yeah i worked on this and posted like an assuck chapter and i was like man this is crazy shit this is crazy shit there's a book about florida coming out and there's multiple spreads about ass suck in this book you know i don't know if

10:44Jason Stewart:we're gonna make the mcnally jackson top 10 with this one a little more of a niche audience i

10:49Shepard Fairey:pre-ordered my copy of course but yes i i i know the scene it's on site for kylie it's on site for travis when he wears his avail shirt you already know what time it is we have a guest today uh our guests say um shepherd ferry uh you know his his art he's been beasting for i mean at this

11:06Jason Stewart:point 30 years known for the obey giant andre the giant got a posse he's tangled with uh the long

11:14Shepard Fairey:arm of the law over the obama poster that he made uh he still does these insane murals that take like days and several pieces of uh construction equipment to get up there and he just he just has

11:28Jason Stewart:a he's a he has a collab show in london right now with damien hurst and uh space invader which i

11:33Shepard Fairey:I was looking at that earlier, and I was like, oh, all three of these motherfuckers touched all this shit. It's not just the three. It's not a group show. It's like, no, we all did this together, which is kind of a crazy thing to do.

11:45Jason Stewart:It was a polycule art show. We'll get into it with Shepard. All right, let's give him a call.

11:51Shepard Fairey:This episode of How Long Gone is brought to you by our dear friends at BetterHelp. We are back with BetterHelp, Jason. Sometimes it can feel like everyone else has it all together in their love lives. You know what I'm talking about. Whether married, dating, or single, the truth is most of us are still figuring it out and finding our way. And no matter where you are in your romantic journey, therapy can help you find your way, help you determine what you want, what feels heavy, and how you can take some pressure off of yourself. February, I mean, we're in the heat of it, Jason. It's full of flowers, candy, stuffed animals, and of course, lots of talk about relationships and dating.

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13:16Shepard Fairey:All right. This episode of How Long Gone is brought to you by Cheers. We're up early. We got workouts. We're traveling. We're tracking our sleep score. but after the age of 30, which unfortunately we are, even responsibly drinking a little booze will make you feel less than 100 % the next day. And look, there are obviously more negative effects from alcohol than just dehydration. Otherwise, how could alcohol be hard on your brain and liver? It has a depressant effect on specific receptors in your brain and it's toxic to your liver. That's bad, Jason. What can we do? Is there a fix for this? Is there a way to sort of hack this?

13:51Jason Stewart:That is bad, Chris. There is a good one. I like to drink. I like to put them down a little bit. Certain alcohols give me certain feelings and headaches and bad feelings. When I drink wine, I won't be feeling so good the next day compared to something else. And that's where I like to grab a little Cheers. They appeared over on Shark Tank.

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17:27Jason Stewart:support the show you're sounding good you're sounding good how are you doing buddy uh you know

17:34Chris Black:uh busy you you um you were just talking about it i i got just got back from london and berlin and i have a lot of other projects moving along so never never a chance to catch my breath but hey in a world that's quite fickle to still have demand for my creativity this many years in.

17:53Shepard Fairey:Sure, you're like, I'll take that. Yeah, exactly.

17:57Jason Stewart:I'll sleep when I'm dead type B. I get it. Okay, so we're back in Echo Park at the studio?

18:05Chris Black:Yeah, I'm on Sunset by Dodger Stadium. You know the spot.

18:09Jason Stewart:Oh, I know the spot. Dodgers, going to the World Series. That's going to fuck your next two weeks up, isn't it? Just in terms of parking and getting in and out of your lot?

18:19Chris Black:Yeah, that might be true, but I will sustain the wrath of many Dodgers fans if I complain about it. I'm like, oh, I'll take one for the team. No problem. Literally, you can't say shit.

18:32Jason Stewart:You can't say shit. You can't say shit.

18:34Shepard Fairey:That really does cause problems over there, though. It's an interesting—but, I mean, how many—what? There's seven games in the World Series. They play half at home. We're looking at three to four if it goes all the way. It's not that bad. Yeah.

18:44Jason Stewart:Yeah, yeah. Well, I guess speaking of that and that neighborhood, you've been in that studio space for, what, 20 years?

18:52Chris Black:Since 2008, beginning in 2008.

18:55Jason Stewart:15, 20 years. How have you experienced the neighborhood changing from when you first got there to now, just in terms of your level of gentrification?

19:06Chris Black:Well, it is gentrifying, but I think COVID and the 2008 financial meltdown, it all sort of slowed that. And so the cost of living everywhere in LA has just gone crazy. So I feel I feel bad for everybody who doesn't have the ability to already be in the housing market and have, you know, have a mortgage to pay instead of rent. But but, you know, we own our building, so we're lucky that way. But, yeah, I mean, I still think there's a good mix of kinds of people in this neighborhood. But I think if you're if you're young and trying to get your start, it's harder than ever. I know a lot of people that they would have lived here 10 years ago, but now they're in Boyle Heights or even further out because rent's so expensive.

20:01Chris Black:And that's a bummer. I worry about that for L.A. because one of the things I loved about L.A. when I moved here 25 years ago was that relative to a place like San Francisco or New York, it had the same kind of cultural opportunities, but the cost of living was a lot more affordable. I could never have had all the studio space for my art in those places, but I could in LA. Yeah, that is kind of crazy to think about because no one would say that today. Yeah, no, they wouldn't. And I don't really, I'm not an economist, so I don't really - Wait, hold on, hold on.

20:38Shepard Fairey:Who are we talking to?

20:40Chris Black:You're telling us you're not an economist. Got it, okay. Go ahead, go ahead. But I think that maybe the ice raids or something else will just have all those people thinking they're going to get on a soap opera or become an influencer, have them not show up because it's too expensive and things will mellow out.

21:00Shepard Fairey:I don't know. You're right. There's not a lot of content creators coming from Iowa to Boyle Heights to kick their career off. That's a good point. That's a good point. the mom bloggers aren't aren't relocating to to boil heights to get it to get it started yeah yeah

21:14Chris Black:and and you know with the popularity of yellowstone it's it's better for to be you know for your maga

21:19Jason Stewart:demographic to be in iowa anyway yeah yeah yeah take a second look at wyoming guys i mean those

21:26Shepard Fairey:places those places are because i i guess i re i pretty recently went to jackson hole for the first time and i was like oh this is i get what this is but i felt like places like that sort of feel and maybe this is because i've watched them on tv but they just feel like a sort of like a backlot they don't feel real and it feels like a disney world type situation and i just i didn't it didn't

21:51Chris Black:sit right with me the way i thought it would yeah they're like cowboy hats and cowboy boots as as kind of a costume of authenticity it's it's really depressing to me all right this is a good question

22:00Shepard Fairey:for you, Shepard. You've made some bread in your time. Why do rich guys become cowboys? Why do they want to become cowboys once they make money? What do you think the reason is?

22:09Chris Black:I know what the reason is. It's because they want to project this American fantasy of, I pulled myself up by my bootstraps. I don't need anyone. Me and my six gun laid claim to this land. It's not that you were born with a silver spoon and your hedge fund thing worked out. Um, and you, you know, it's not that it's that, um, you know, you, you broke, you broke them horses to your will and now you rule things.

22:38Shepard Fairey:You got, you got it out the JP Morgan mud, as they say.

22:43Chris Black:I I'm from, I'm from Charleston, South Carolina. That person's not just in Wyoming. Yeah. Down, down there, they're, uh, you know, the, the whole thing is yes, I'm a banker all week long, but on the weekend I, um, I drink some rock and rye and bring home the limit of green heads and uh yeah i could live off this land i i'm you know i'm tough i could live off this land

23:04Shepard Fairey:it's like bitch you have a g-wagon you could not live off the land yeah yeah i'm i mean i'm i'm so

23:10Chris Black:glad that i discovered skateboarding and punk rock i might have ended up one of those guys

23:14Shepard Fairey:i'm from it i'm from atlanta and i so i have a similar charleston's a little more um a little more that i think and always has been because it's just smaller yeah but i know i know what you mean a few wrong turns and that's you yeah yeah yeah you'd be you'd be wearing a vineyard

23:31Chris Black:vines shirt right now yeah the uh i we would call it the um the uh the the blue blazer and khakis

23:38Shepard Fairey:mafia yeah no that's that's real that's very yeah it is and uh my parents are still there when you

23:44Jason Stewart:when you go when you go back there to charleston are you a little bit of a local celeb or are you able to kind of go under the radar because you are not wearing vineyard vines and things like that

23:57Chris Black:to be fair to charleston it's not it's not one-dimensional it's not a monolith the uh i have a lot of friends i skateboarded with in high school that i still live there i'm still friends with the woman i used to cut school with a lot now runs two montessori schools i don't know

24:12Shepard Fairey:how good an idea that was no she's actually amazing um but sounds like a new hulu show

24:17Chris Black:Also, a lot of my parents' friends who are sort of more Charleston culture centric, they still like what I do as an artist. A lot of them have, they have a little bit of a, of a creative spirit in what they do. They, you know, there is a lot of creativity there. It's a very, whether it comes to antiques or architecture or landscaping, there's a, there's a lot of aesthetic appreciation there. And it's not all for what the kind of stuff I do, but they can kind of, they can kind of say, okay, you know, we would never live in LA where it's, you know, coke fueled orgies all day and and antifa and drive-by drive-by shootings but like but you know hey if you if if that floats your boat like we have we're happy for you we're happy they're saying i i personally

25:11Jason Stewart:didn't vote for obama but i did like your artwork shepherd yeah seriously seriously there is there's

25:17Shepard Fairey:plenty of that and um that's like but that's an archetype that's a southern archetype where it's like oh i mean you do whatever you want to do sweetheart but like that ain't that ain't my thing.

25:27Chris Black:And my, my parents have become more politically outspoken because of, because of Trump. I mean, they've always been Democrats, but I think that finally this whole idea of, uh, of, of sort of the, um, you know, the genteel assimilation to whatever, whichever way the wind is blowing in the South. Um, my parents have decided, okay, we, we can't do that anymore. and um you know there was a no kings march there my mom my mom was out there um it is definitely part of charleston culture to sort of just um politely disagree and do things that might

26:05Jason Stewart:oppress others um when you vote and and well put well put no no it's fine it's fine as long as the others live far away enough then it's not a problem yeah yeah it's all good just keep out of

26:19Shepard Fairey:my zip code and I'm happy.

26:21Jason Stewart:Well, I guess speaking of the Obama things, I was listening to you on Moby's podcast and you mentioned that your daughter was born the same year that you did that, which would make her, what, 18 now?

26:32Chris Black:17.

26:33Jason Stewart:Yeah, she'll be 18 in January. I cannot believe it's been that many years since we were trying to get Obama in office. I feel old. I can only imagine how old you must feel then.

26:45Chris Black:I think I am older than you, so I do feel older.

26:48Shepard Fairey:all right well let's not let's not get into facts here it's a feeling it's a feeling yeah

26:53Chris Black:we're talking about politics we shouldn't be dealing with facts yeah we don't deal with facts

26:56Jason Stewart:that's not the point no no we're just having fun here precisely precisely well since enough time has passed coming you know it'll be it'll be a 20-year anniversary in a couple years have you felt inspired to create your next version of that to do you know to to make a strong political message for good?

27:14Chris Black:I'm trying to do that all the time. Not necessarily in that way. I did make a poster for Kamala Harris, who I admire, but I don't think she has the same communication skills as Obama. And she also didn't have - No, she does not.

27:33Shepard Fairey:No, she does not.

27:34Chris Black:She did not have the same runway as Obama also. Obama is pretty special in terms of his oratory ability where he made yeah i listened to him on mark maron he shut his little ass down it's hard

27:46Shepard Fairey:to get maron to shut up that take that takes it obama level obama had more runway but he could

27:53Jason Stewart:have done it with kamala's runway he was that good he just came out of nowhere and we said who

27:57Chris Black:the fuck is this guy the real challenge i think is promote the kind of culture that means that people like Obama can rise to the top. But the whole cult of celebrity and personality is not necessarily something that I want to do moment to moment, because I think that that's that's not making the ground fertile for the right people. It's just sort of moving from person to person where you use all the tactics that are used against progressive people from the other side. I don't want to be fighting fire with fire in that way. I do enjoy that Gavin Newsom has used a lot of Trump's tactics in in combating Trump because all of a sudden when the tables are turned, you know, we'll see who the snowflakes are on this one.

28:50Chris Black:Sorry, you know, that MAGA is melting, melting under the heat of of of what Gavin Newsom's doing. But that's not what I want to do. Sometimes I look at what will be effective in grabbing attention and maybe going viral versus what creates the world I want to live in in a sustained way. They're different sometimes.

29:11Shepard Fairey:Not all the time, but sometimes. I think they're different most of the time probably just based on how the world moves.

29:17Jason Stewart:Well, unfortunately, I think a good example of that is you creating art to share this political message and spread the word for decades of your life. And then within the last year, you and everyone else has to record themselves talking into their phone for TikTok to get that message across. You know what I mean? Yeah.

29:37Chris Black:And I don't do TikTok, but I do all the other platforms for the most part. And yeah, there's a book I read recently. I know this is definitely not where you guys want to go with this podcast, but I'm going to do it anyway. Sorry. We don't know.

29:51Jason Stewart:We don't know. No wrong turns, brother.

29:53Chris Black:A book called Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari that's looking at how social media algorithms and AI are really leading us in these directions away from each other. Polarization, not unity, echo chambers, but also how AI can track your patterns to such a degree that you aren't even necessarily conscious of that its ability to manipulate you psychologically is going to become very dangerous for politics.

30:21Shepard Fairey:um hold on shepherd you're saying that that that screen i've been talking to is not a hot chick who wants to have sex with me you're telling me that that's a computer yeah god damn it allegedly yeah

30:33Chris Black:i think it's even deeper than that it's you know noticing that you um you respond to certain things and that you're you know that you're angry about certain things and then feeding you that in a way where you're only focusing on something much in the way that with Brexit, there was research done by Cambridge Analytica that people didn't like the idea of money going out of the country that could be spent in the UK. So they focused all on that without mentioning that the return on that investment was much greater than the expenditure. And so people were like, oh, yeah, forget that we're yo uk uh we we won't take that from the rest of europe all those horrible people

31:17Shepard Fairey:that we're so similar to well let's not we don't no one loves the parisians but go ahead go ahead

31:22Chris Black:yeah yeah i i do i will take issue with you on that here's what here's what you have to do you just have to you just have to meet some influencers like daft punk or whoever and get them to vouch for you and then everyone from paris likes you i've done it i know jason i know you

31:39Jason Stewart:know this too as a dj no no i got in early with the ed banger crew and yeah page pedro winter that's your boy i've seen you dj with him you can hang out with daft punk as well you know i'm not on that level just quite yet they don't love me as much as they might love you but but anyway my

31:56Chris Black:my point is that i you know i think that the way that i want to reach people is everywhere possible but I don't like the idea that the medium itself is compromising the nature of the communication. And I'm working against that and how I use Instagram, how I, you know, how I use any of it.

32:17Shepard Fairey:Does that make you, does that make it less successful? Like as far as like the, the, the reach goes, or do you think it's like, Oh yeah. Okay.

32:25Chris Black:I'm, I'm always trying to be reasonably reasonable and and like you know reasonable doesn't mean i don't say what i truly believe i don't share my convictions but i'm not just trying to stoke outrage and that

32:40Jason Stewart:that's terrible for engagement bro it's gonna be hard for me to hate watch your shit if you're just

32:45Chris Black:a regular reasonable guy exactly because i'm tired of seeing that and so when i do a post about something that I genuinely believe like human rights in Gaza matter, I will, you know, I'll get a lot of people that are like, yeah. And a lot of people that are like, you're an anti-Semite. And so that gets a lot of engagement, but I'm not going to court controversy on a regular basis just to try to get numbers on my social media. It's disgusting. People that do that disgust me.

33:19Shepard Fairey:You're better than me. All I do is stoke them on this podcast. That's all we can do. You don't even want to know the shit I say to get people to listen to this garbage. You have no idea.

33:28Jason Stewart:I feel the same way when we talk about it and you can see other podcasters or TV hosts or whatever over the evolution over the last few years and how you're able to find financial success, followership, and overall success in general if you pick one side. and uh and go full in one side jason you know if i went if you pick the right side but you know if

33:54Shepard Fairey:i if i became either a youth pastor or a fucking right-wing podcaster i'd have a lot more money and instead i'm slumming it with you fucking bozos you know going the wrong way i mean this is a good

34:06Chris Black:segue to to uh donald trump's strategy he was a democrat when it when it suited his interest to be a Democrat. He was pro-choice, gave money to Hillary Clinton's campaign because he was in New York. But then when he decided he's going to run because of his racism that he just couldn't shake, even though it wasn't classy in New York.

34:30Shepard Fairey:The stain will not come out of the shirt.

34:33Jason Stewart:As a racist Democrat, it's not an easy existence.

34:37Chris Black:It's tough. But when he, you know, his whole birther conspiracy about Obama, when he decides to run, he just goes, who are the people easiest to manipulate? How can I aggregate power most quickly and efficiently? And of course, it was scapegoating. It's the that loves scapegoating that feels like, you know, somebody is taking something from them. the American dream of being rich and having trophy wives and cheating with a porn star, all of which Donald Trump embodies. Hey, hey, hey. Where are they going to find that?

35:15Shepard Fairey:Yeah. I find that. I got people in my life. Here you go. Here you go. Yeah. No, but I mean, I think there's a pretty, you know, there's a history of a lot of people doing that over time. You know what I mean? Where it's like, you look at their, the records are public. You know what I mean? we can tell what you were doing whatever 10 years ago and if you decide to change that it's almost like if you go hard enough no one cares like no one even chooses to look at that or remember it if you go so far in the other direction well i think what it is is that there

35:45Chris Black:there's um there's always going to be an audience because we're a polarized nation and and some people think that the more extreme you go the more uh the more conviction you have if you're uncompromising than like you're principled no no it's just that's where the juice is because our our society and our culture hasn't created a lower ceiling for that bullshit

36:13Jason Stewart:yeah we're here to win we're not here to do actual good things yeah in the world and the um you know

36:19Chris Black:the the spewing um whatever you're spewing and uh it does not necessarily mean that you're going to be able to solve problems. And that's been, that's, you know, played out, uh, in real time for lots of people, but we're susceptible to the grift as a nation. Um, I don't know how to get past that really. Um, you guys are smart. You guys aren't susceptible to the grift.

36:46Shepard Fairey:Oh, I, I, I, Shepard, I think it's going to only get worse.

36:49Jason Stewart:I use, I use drugs to block it out, but the older you get the, you know, it's like, I remember being a kid and you would every, every four years it would be like the current president all he does is play golf all day not me i'm not going to do that when i'm in office they get voted in office they play golf all day every every four years a new president plays golf more than the last president and it's you know and nothing changes nothing gets done so it's easy to get kind of disaffected and just kind of just remove yourself from it completely i admire how how strong-willed you are and how political you still are i feel like you could be somebody running for office you could be here we go you know echo park school board right here you got to start somewhere well i was thinking you you brought up gavin newsom and like it takes a world so shitty for us to start being like damn gavin newsom's kind of tight you know i mean like that's how rough things have gone gavin newsom the one

37:43Chris Black:thing he has going for him is that he looks presidential he looks like he could have played

37:47Shepard Fairey:the president on tv and that's for half the people that's all they need

37:53Chris Black:yeah i think and you know that's been seen as um a liability because the right is like oh he's he's slick he's handsome he's not you know and um you know meanwhile they were when um sarah palin was vice president running for vice president they were like she'll do a great job because she's

38:12Shepard Fairey:kind of pretty yeah i i was i heard somebody talking today i don't know what i was listening to but they were talking about like the og sort of like ai porn stuff and it like the a lot of people remember it being sarah palin like they would put sarah palin's head on an on another body and that was like the original baddie the original baddie of all the women in the world who

38:35Jason Stewart:have ever been alive who could we put oh yeah we're gonna go with sarah palin i i totally

38:40Shepard Fairey:forgotten about sarah palin i feel like we forget about and how insane that was when she was on tv when SNL is making fun of her every week. That was a simpler time.

38:49Chris Black:Yeah, it was because she seems somewhat civilized compared to, say, Marjorie Taylor Greene or anything.

38:56Shepard Fairey:Very, very, are you kidding me? Very civilized.

38:59Chris Black:Yeah, I mean, she didn't. Let's go to dinner. She didn't say anything about Jewish space lasers. Like this Marjorie Taylor Greene has actually said that and then also joined the whole, well, you know, the Free Palestine movement is a problem on campus because these campuses are permitting antisemitism. I mean, you know, like the Orwellian double think, double speak is so pervasive now. And they're like, Orwellian, what's that? Marjorie Taylor Greene did a tweet or an ex post, whatever, that said, if you get Kamala Harris as president or Joe Biden right now, I don't remember which one it was, but it'll be Marshall Law, but she spelled it like Marshalls, the department store.

39:52Jason Stewart:I'm declaring a full Maxinista on this country.

39:56Shepard Fairey:Hey, look, man, spelling errors happened. You know, she was hurrying.

40:00Chris Black:It was on her phone. Do you remember that Dan Quayle misspelled potato and then it was like his political career is over.

40:08Shepard Fairey:We never heard from Quayle again. Quayle went quiet.

40:11Jason Stewart:We forget how spelling can be a real minefield sometimes for our uneducated.

40:19Shepard Fairey:That's actually really funny. Yeah, I forgot about quail. Thank you for reminding me.

40:22Chris Black:Yeah, there's a bunch of people out there that are D-U-M. Yeah, yeah.

40:26Shepard Fairey:No, there's a lot of D-U-M asses out there.

40:28Jason Stewart:No, that's true. So, yes, all that is to say you are running for office then?

40:32Chris Black:I don't have the constitution for that, and we aren't going to have a constitution at all. Okay, this guy.

40:39Jason Stewart:All right. What about, I mean, you are a pun king, so maybe a movement into the male podcaster political space. I feel like you're a great chitter chatter about all this stuff. Like you brought up Marjorie Taylor Greene. She's recently flip-flopping to be a little anti-MAGA lately. Do you believe she's doing this in earnest or do you think it's a little smoke and mirrors?

41:01Chris Black:I think that she's so ignorant that she didn't understand that attacking health care might affect her own family. And then when it did, the threat of that emerged, she went, oh, wait.

41:15Shepard Fairey:I think you could be on to something here. I think maybe her understanding of the outcome was, you know, maybe not.

41:23Jason Stewart:So that would mean that these people who we could consider to be, you know, monsters in so many ways might actually have a heart and a conscious deep down in there that could be turned?

41:34Chris Black:I here's here's my take on things which isn't particularly fun, but I think that what's going on with Trump right now and, you know, the sort of authoritarian manipulation, getting his getting his tentacles into every branch of government, putting loyalists in, you know, in positions of power, even in places that should be bipartisan or nonpartisan. I think that the consequences for the country are going to be so severe that people who are normally just assuming they will be safe and comfortable will be stung. And it's going to create more suffering for people who are already struggling or marginalized.

42:16Chris Black:But what is the thing that that people who are in power fear the most? It is a solidarity from people who normally they can pit against each other. So I think it will eventually backfire in that a lot of people who are suffering economically, even if they've been told like, oh, it's because of immigrants or it's because of non-white people or whatever, they might realize, oh, you know what? We're all dealing with the problems of Trump trying to create a Putin style fascist government that relies on his cronyism with oligarchs and everybody else is screwed. Look, I want to be clear.

42:59Shepard Fairey:All my problems are caused by white people. I want to be very clear and on the record. Any problem in my life is caused by white people.

43:06Jason Stewart:It seems like maybe those powers that be that you're speaking of are already aware of this as well. And do you think that when the time for this revolution comes, we're going to be too busy jacking off to our AI Sarah Palin links and having our food tubes delivered to us? And we're just going to be so, you know, just numbed out and apolitical and we're just going to roll over and take it? But what do you think is going to happen? What will need to happen to have a true revolution?

43:39Chris Black:I wish I knew. I really do.

43:41Jason Stewart:You're like, have you considered wheat pasting?

43:47Chris Black:I got a few ideas.

43:48Jason Stewart:Just stick with me.

43:49Shepard Fairey:I've got a lot of stickers. Yeah. That's a big question. I think that we're too far gone. I think we've gotten to an every man for himself or their selves position. position and that's sort of it's only going to get more more extreme as we go on because it doesn't feel like anything is stable enough to believe in or like put put your weight behind or sort of align yourself with it's it's better to be like i care about me and the three people in this fucking house and that's all i can concern myself i have been pandering to the wealthy lately

44:21Jason Stewart:now that i think about it yeah i would never do that you know that yeah it's hard it's hard to

44:27Chris Black:say, I know that there are a lot of people who care about the principles I care about, but the way in which the mechanisms to achieve that in terms of governance and policy, those are all disintegrating. So how do we bounce back? And that's one of the things that I think dystopian novels like Fahrenheit 451 or 1984 um or Brave New World there were meant to caution people against letting things get to that yeah yeah yeah I was like oh shit this this this shit

45:09Shepard Fairey:came true that's crazy it's like no that's not the point okay so maybe you're saying what we

45:14Jason Stewart:need is somebody you know somebody really cool needs to take an Orwell novel and turn it into like a dope ass netflix documentary or like a really cool podcast and then we will be like oh

45:26Chris Black:shit you know what's funny i mean i i'm um i watch tv and movies pretty regularly um i was just on a long flight back from from berlin so i watched um i watched the most recent mission impossible not necessarily the sweet spot of my taste generally but i know it'd be like uh you know fun and

45:50Jason Stewart:totally ridiculous but a fine plane movie yeah except for the part where planes crash but yeah

45:55Chris Black:go ahead in in this new in this newest tom tom cruise mission impossible the the villain is a thing called the entity which is a weaponized ai and having read nexus by harari i was like wow whoever whoever wrote the script for this film is looking at the way things could get more extreme And in the film, the AI is stoking distrust from nation to nation, group to group, and showing how that makes us vulnerable to a potential nuclear war because we're in such fear of other people that we'd have to strike first. And I think it was a really good metaphor for what's happening. And then and then there's this whole Ving Rhames has a has a whole sort of CODA speech in the film about how how we need to see the that we have more in common and build the ability to collaborate, et cetera, et cetera.

46:58Chris Black:And I was like, damn, everything that I am worried about and believe politically just actually got done by this movie.

47:06Shepard Fairey:that is fucked up yeah i want to just be clear that's the first time ving rames has been mentioned on this podcast in our history i want to give you props for that so you're saying we need to basically um elect in some way tom cruise's character to sort of take over um definitely

47:23Jason Stewart:not but um okay well i think i think the on the dark sides of that i like films where we have like an enemy that could have a face or a country you know from our childhood into now it went you know the russians and the chinese and the middle easterns and then it's and then it gets starts getting a little bit more vague as political correct correctness grows and then it's just kind of like vague people that are bad whereas you know like where you watch back to the future and it's like the lebanon guys are coming on the volkswagen bus and those are our enemy the libyans

47:59Chris Black:Libyans. Close. The Libyans. The Libyans, yeah.

48:00Jason Stewart:The Libyans are coming. The Russians are coming, blah, blah, blah. And now it works perfectly with our political correctness of like, it's the entity. Yeah. It's just a blank enemy. We don't. And when you have that, you feel as if you'll never defeat it. You know what I mean? It doesn't feel like something that you can like, all right, movie's over. We killed the entity. Everything is going to be okay now. Like you finish the movie and you're still like, oh, we're.

48:27Chris Black:Yeah. The entity wants Trump to get elected. It has nothing to do with Russia, the entity, but it wants, we don't know where it's from. It could be a 300 pound guy in his basement bedroom. Remember, that's what Trump said about the Russia election.

48:45Shepard Fairey:Look, I still don't know. I don't want to be, you know, I don't want to. No, I think. I don't want to.

48:51Chris Black:Could just be a guy. I think that anything creative that gets people to consider that we're social creatures, we need to work together to maintain the things that we all benefit from. You know, libertarians have always been disgusted by libertarians because they're really selective libertarians. They don't build, pave their own roads. They don't take their own garbage to the dump. They don't remove their own sewage. most of them don't homeschool their kids, but they don't want to pay taxes. They take for granted everything that a functional society provides and the governance that goes on within a functional society.

49:34Chris Black:And they go, yeah, let me cherry pick the things that work best for me, not pay taxes when I want to, blah, blah, blah. And realizing that we all are benefiting from the distribution of responsibilities and labor within our society and how, uh, you know, we, we get to have our thing, we do well, and then we don't have to do all the other things well, because there's somebody else out there doing that, that provides a service for us. Like, just don't be a selfish dick. That's basically like, we need, we need creative things that tell those stories and, uh, you know, all the best music, all the best film, um, all the best art to me has some, uh, you know, idiosyncratic take that is unique to that, to that creator yet has a way to find an audience, um, that sees, uh, a connection to it.

50:30Chris Black:That's, uh, there's something universal and there's something, and there's also something unique to it. So I just, I want, I want people to experience more of that because I think the current way of relating to the world is making a lot of people very unhappy and hostile and no one benefits from that i'm miserable i'm miserable i totally yeah i agree with you i mean i agree yeah and when when your ratings slip from having me as a guest you'll be more miserable so oh it's okay we've done we've done way worse don't worry this this will be fine

51:02Jason Stewart:this will be fine no we're off we're off to a good start this is good no i think that you i think that

51:07Shepard Fairey:making something that is both sort of like appeals to i don't know what the right term is maybe underground or like a niche audience, but then finds that sort of universal appeal eventually is the hardest thing to possibly accomplish with whatever the art form is.

51:23Chris Black:I agree. So like when I say hopefully finding something universal, I don't mean pandering to the lowest common denominator, not at all. I think kind of asking the audience to lean in and then that can build a critical mass where something's talked about and then And it becomes like a reference pointer.

51:42Shepard Fairey:What is a good example of this musically for you? Like the clash or something? Like what is something that felt very, but then really had the universal appeal?

51:50Chris Black:Yeah, the clash, public enemy, Rage Against the Machine. You know, I mean, La Tigra.

51:58Shepard Fairey:Cool, cool, cool. Wow, okay. Damn, La Tigra is lucky to be thrown in with that mix.

52:03Chris Black:La Tigra is quite popular. And, you know, I love Bikini Kill, but La Tigra is far more infectious. It's sort of like the way that Devo saw for their challenging ideas that really catchy music would be a better delivery vehicle. It's like the Trojan horse. The Yay Ya's new album is talking about climate change in a couple of the songs and yet it's not done in a way that's going to divide people. It's sort of more poetic and symbolic but I appreciate when anybody is trying to find a way to nudge people in a direction that allows them to absorb it, process it, and then embrace it without feeling like they're just being scolded.

52:51Jason Stewart:I feel like Tool was always good at doing that as well. I know that, Chris, you're not a big fan of Tool, but I think exposing some of those messages and ideas to an OzFest crowd is a good demographic to focus on. The Ausfest crowd needs more help than most. I think that's the, you know, the late Tigras and the yeah, yeah, yeah, as it could be a little preaching to the choir, but you know what I mean?

53:16Chris Black:But come on, Black Sabbath. I mean, not that the people, or even Metallica, you've got a song like Disposable Heroes by Metallica or with Black Sabbath, War Pigs or Children of the Grave. You know, there's so many songs in Black Sabbath that are not just about how Satan is scary. There's a lot of stuff that's about, in War Pigs, it's talking about sending off the poor to do the fighting. They're being treated like pawns. Yeah, it's actually pretty smart stuff, but it doesn't mean everybody absorbs it. In fact, maybe with that crowd, a small percentage absorb it, but at least an effort's being made.

54:03Chris Black:Yeah, yeah, I respect that.

54:05Jason Stewart:I think I see it with country music nowadays a little bit. Because, I mean, like War Pigs and a lot of those songs, Vietnam War, 60s, 70s, there was a lot of great music that was a reaction to that, and we don't really have a ton of that today in the mainstream. We obviously have a lot of politically charged music nowadays.

54:26Shepard Fairey:Well, I can tell that you've never read the Jelly Roll lyrics, Jason.

54:31Jason Stewart:And that's something we're going to fix if I have anything to say about it.

54:35Shepard Fairey:You know, we need to get you in there.

54:36Jason Stewart:If Jelly Roll wrote a song about how it sucks that we're sending all of our young men to war to die for these corporations, that would enact some true change versus kneecap saying free Palestine. No offense. Yeah, no, I agree.

54:52Shepard Fairey:I mean, that's Zach Bryan shit that happened a couple weeks ago is crazy. Like, the room, you know, he wrote this song. He basically says, I sucks. everybody that I heard talk about it for the first couple days just assumed it was him supporting Ice

55:07Jason Stewart:because of who he is saying Ice is going to come and get you and they were like hell yeah and then they read the rest of the lyrics and they're like oh

55:17Shepard Fairey:but a guy like that is in a very interesting position where he's successfully become arguably the biggest artist in the world walking this line of being sort of like a veteran and like a good old boy but never crossing the line either way like i think the reason this the ice thing got so much attention is because he'd never really made a statement either way for whatever four or five years since he became so popular um but i i just i found that to be i love people jump into inclusions and then being like oh oh shit well uh all right never mind yeah i

55:52Chris Black:the number of comments um about i've done some things with uh tom morello and rage against the machine over the years yeah and the number of comments about them raging quote-unquote with the machine because they said you know get out and vote um you're like all right look you might

56:14Shepard Fairey:have got me on technicality but let's talk this through let's talk through but i was i thought i

56:19Jason Stewart:was supposed to throw a molotov cocktail at the voting booth but you want me to go in there and

56:23Chris Black:wait in line oh hell no that's really funny that's really really funny but you know i i there's always going to be that issue. And there's plenty of art and music that isn't political that I, that I like, I, you know, there's a lot of fun stuff. I think that, um, you know, one of the things that I've found in the people that endure as activists, because it can be, feel like such a daunting thing to contend with the world world's problems day in and day out is maintaining joy in your life. And Nadia from Pussy Riot is a friend and she's somebody that definitely, you know, sort of toggles between having a good time.

57:04Chris Black:And you can see that in the music and the videos that she does, but she like, you know, she likes to, she likes to have fun. And, and, and also she thinks that getting under the skin of people with too much power is fun. The mischief is fun. I find that fun too. A lot of people have been saying to me like, oh, are you going to tone down what you say because look what happened to jimmy kimmel look what happened to stephen colbert i'm like well i don't have a show where i work for a network so like i can't fire myself so i think

57:32Shepard Fairey:we're good i think we're good not gonna happen to me i could but i choose not to but you know i the

57:36Jason Stewart:the um so you're saying greta thernberg could have a little more joy in her life

57:42Chris Black:definitely yeah yeah greta could no i see what you're saying it's like it doesn't have to be

57:47Shepard Fairey:it doesn't being engaged and that being your cause doesn't mean you have to have like a miserable

57:53Chris Black:joyless life like you can do both exactly and um in fact it's like the it's probably the only way to find the the correct rhythm and balance to to maintain that kind of uh effort because other otherwise it it's a really heavy depressing thing yeah i mean like i feel like if if aoc was a little

58:18Jason Stewart:more... She could be a president if she was a little more fun and joyous and didn't have a narky energy to it. Easier said than done, of course. Obviously, you have to consciously make an effort to, I'm having fun now. It's something that should come natural.

58:33Shepard Fairey:Jason, you know as well as I do that shaking a narky personality, that's almost impossible. That's something that is almost impossible to shake if you're born that way. I'm the man for the job.

58:43Jason Stewart:Well, speaking of cutting loose, having fun a little bit, you just DJed your photo show, Arch Retrospective in Berlin. Were you playing anything new? Any new music?

58:58Chris Black:Probably the only new thing, Wet Leg and Yard Act. But I like those two bands a lot. I, yeah, on the hip hop side, I like Joey Valance and Bray, but they, do you know them? They, you know, they're kind of Beastie Boys-esque, but they're, you know, they're new. And I think they're, they actually rhyme. They don't just come up with sort of a chant and then have some like lazy beats under it. They actually rhyme.

59:28Jason Stewart:They're saying words? Yeah.

59:30Chris Black:You know me, Jason, we've DJed together a lot. you know that I love the artistry of classic hip-hop from, you know, Public Enemy, Eric B and Rakim, Boogie Down Productions, Run DMC, Public Enemy, Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, you know, even NWA, they seem like Rhodes Scholars now compared to some of this stuff. I mean, look,

59:54Shepard Fairey:to be fair, NWA is a Rhodes Scholar compared to Playboy Cardi. I agree with you. I agree. yeah yeah yeah because i i don't listen to that music at all it was never my thing i respect it of course because it's like foundational but i i guess did you grow did you get into that through

1:00:11Chris Black:punk and skateboarding or was that first punk and skateboarding were first for me i mean 40 years ago plus um but i got into the beastie boys because i it was quite infectious and then i I had already liked Run DMC when I was 14, but thought if I got into punk that like I had to abandon anything other than punk. And so I went back to Run DMC. Back then you kind of did.

1:00:38Jason Stewart:Yeah.

1:00:39Chris Black:And then when Thrasher had a review of the first Public Enemy record, Yo Bom Rush The Show, they described it as this is the new punk, which for me was like, OK, now it now it's safe to embrace hip hop because it's been. it's been you know ordained as the new punk by by thrasher and so speaking of road scholars the

1:01:04Jason Stewart:good people at thrasher yeah exactly like moses from on high yeah it's so well that was that was

1:01:10Chris Black:my bible at the time um of course and so uh for me all that hip-hop was it had a lot of the same spirit as punk it was very underdog diy punk was about not having to be a virtuoso musician a lot of hip hop people didn't have any formal musical training, but they had a good ear. And so the way that there's with this remix culture in the late eighties and the, and the nineties that was emerging the way it sat perfectly in there sampling really creatively building a collage and then wrapping over it. It, it suited my sensibility 100%. And a lot of it was also social and political commentary um especially public enemy but um a lot of the other groups too and then when it got to be more successful and this whole like oh i deserve to be making a lot of money became i am making a lot of money um it got less interesting to me i mean that

1:02:09Shepard Fairey:happens to a lot of people in a lot of industries you know what i mean that that that is a common

1:02:13Jason Stewart:i've never heard it put so well though i like that going from i should be making a lot of money to i am making a lot of money really you really i don't want to listen to that song anymore did bands play

1:02:24Shepard Fairey:in like in charleston in your like in high school and stuff or were you having to drive to to other

1:02:29Chris Black:cities in the south um i saw the circle jerks at a high school gymnasium in 86 in charleston shit and uh that was great but otherwise like i went to go i went from charleston to new york to stay with my friend and his aunt um in in the summer of 86 to see the smiths on the queen is dead tour and then gbh the crow mags and seven seconds um at the ritz which is now webster hall bro hold on hold on bro we're not gonna just breeze over the queen is dead tour i just got i mean that's when morrissey had abs for christ's sake that's that long yeah yeah yeah um that was pretty that was pretty amazing i i was a smith's fan but i'm probably more of a smith's fan now than i was back then even though i find morrissey really tedious in a lot of ways i had a feeling you wouldn't be sort of with him i think i think finding him tedious is a beautiful way to put it but um but yeah i i mean i was really really hungry for seeing music and then when i went to the Rhode Island School of Design in 88.

1:03:40Chris Black:Providence is right between New York and Boston, so I could see tons of great stuff. You know, I saw Boogie Down Productions and Brand Nubian, like on the Browns campus and the RISD campus. I saw Firehose and Fugazi in the RISD dining hall. You know, I saw the Ramones with Jane's Addiction opening. I saw Primus. I saw so much good stuff. because I was right there. But yeah, I saw Ice-T. Public Enemy canceled because Flavor Flav went on a bender and couldn't be found. But I've seen Public Enemy a lot since then. It's really cool when I remember that Flavor Flav

1:04:21Shepard Fairey:was in Public Enemy. I totally detached him from that completely. And then when you say that, I'm like, oh yeah, he was the other guy. I mean, he was a major part of Public Enemy. He wasn't just the hype man.

1:04:35Jason Stewart:he was the star yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean for for me the um he's the morrissey of public enemy i should say sorry yeah yeah yeah chuck d's the johnny mar and he is the mar yeah that's that's

1:04:48Chris Black:true that's that's funny um yeah i mean chuck d worked on the production with the bomb squad and he wrote the lyrics i mean it's really like chuck d's entire project his his conception for everything but you guys are are you guys buddies are you guys buddies now you've done some stuff with them i'm sure yeah yeah i uh i actually just talked to him yesterday oh that's funny

1:05:09Jason Stewart:that's really funny um i wanted to to talk about the um the art show in london that you just had we were talking about in the intro with uh with damien hurst and space invader and you earlier in the pod you mentioned orwellian what's that as uh like not really knowing what the references are and what you know the original things are and now i'm it had me thinking of like space invader and now i'll go on on my phone and i'll see people just basically doing that themselves just because it looks fun to make a little tile of a creature and throw it against a building until it sticks or whatever and i feel like we're on the verge of i mean there's millions of people who don't even know that he's stealing that from somebody who stole it from somebody what do you think about all the, you know, the, the lost scrolls of information as, as the art world continues on.

1:06:02Chris Black:I think it's okay for things to just have an influence that it takes on its own life. It's great if somebody takes the time to understand the history, where things, where things came from. I have a, I have a natural, just inquisitive nature to look at like, oh, you know, I like that sound in that song. That's a hip hop song. Let me research the sample or of the sex missiles talk about how they listened to the stooges. Then I'm going to go back and listen to the stooges and see what that's about. But for other people who maybe they just don't have that mindset, I'm OK with that. But Space Invader should get a lot of credit for developing a an approach to street art that is really visually effective and usually doesn't get cleaned because a mosaic looks ornamental decorative and too cute to buff yeah it's it's you know it's smart and it's subversive in the way it works and he's also a maniac he's such a hard or he's got thousands of those things across the globe and something like 1 ,800 of them in Paris alone.

1:07:19Chris Black:Jesus. So, you know, I guess when I look at the power of art, thinking that something is inspiring enough to move beyond the crowd that wants a little bit of credit for knowing everything about it, that, you know, that's the side of the art world that I really don't like. this insular elitist side of the art world. There are people that have referenced either the graphic approach to the Obama or the obey with the red bar underneath, which I actually stole from Barbara Kruger, her red bar with white type and Supreme stole it from Barbara Kruger also. But I see those things out there and I say to myself, even if that person has no idea who I am, the fact that this graphic approach to communication has impacted them to do their mutation of it, it shows that it worked, that, that, that it worked, that something I'm doing is, is effective.

1:08:23Chris Black:And it also makes me think, okay, well, for the next thing to be meaningful, maybe it can't look the same because somebody might just assume that I'm one of the millions of people who uh you know have have like looked at that and are riffing off of that without without knowing it's become wallpaper to a degree so maybe i have to do my next evolution that has some connection to that but feels like it's taking it to a fresh place so i i enjoy all of that it's it's like a you know constant dialogue with the with the public that keeps me keeps me energized

1:09:00Shepard Fairey:I think that's a good attitude to have about it. I think that is like that, that I, I sort of agree. I think that's when something has worked, when it's crossed over to the point where people have no idea where it came from. They just like it because they like it. Yeah.

1:09:12Chris Black:I mean, all this stuff, it sort of gets down to, are you delusional about, um, about your contribution and about how creativity works or are you honest? Because people keep saying to me like, AI is taking things that other people made and it's remixing it. I'm like, yeah, that sounds like the entire premise of classic hip hop right there. Right. Um, that's also what humans do in general. we are we are receptors of information that then we process that information and spit something out based on all those experiences based on the things we've been inspired by that's what ai does too don't get mad at the ai because you're just the human version of the same thing yeah sure we did

1:09:54Shepard Fairey:it first i also i wanted to ask you about your art collection what do you gravitate towards over the years is there something that you've really gotten a lot of that you're happy with yeah i

1:10:04Chris Black:I mean, there's tons of people who I admire. A lot of them come from the street art zone, but definitely not all of them. I have a few pieces by Jamie Reid, who did all the art for the Sex Pistols. I have a few pieces by Winston Smith, who did all the art for the Dead Kennedys. Stuff from punk culture that really helped shape me. I've tried to collect. I have the two original drawings for Suicidal Tendencies by Lance Mountain, the skateboarder from the Bones Brigade. Yeah, of course. But then I've collected some Banksy stuff, a lot of Twist, Barry McGee, Thomas Campbell, Phil Frost, Swoon. She's a she's a good friend.

1:10:45Shepard Fairey:Yeah, I think I think a lot of these people is sort of your generation in some ways, which is cool. Yeah. Yeah.

1:10:50Chris Black:There's a guy from Portugal named Vills, whose work I really like a lot. There's stuff that I respond to purely aesthetically. Oh, I have some Raymond Pettibone stuff. He did all the art for Black Flag. But then a lot of times it's almost impossible to divorce how I feel about the aesthetics from how I feel about how I first engaged with those aesthetics. Like what was the cultural path to it? So I don't try to untangle that. If it makes me feel a certain way and it was important to who I am, then cool. You want it. Yeah, yeah, sure.

1:11:25Jason Stewart:You mentioned Banksy. the uh the recent heist over at the Louvre with the the jewelry that reeks of Banksy wouldn't you

1:11:33Chris Black:agree yeah only if he you know put like a poop emoji back in their place there's a free idea Banksy um yeah that's awesome when when's the last time when's the last time you got arrested are you clean yeah I'm clean for now um the last time I got arrested was a while ago now I think

1:11:54Shepard Fairey:it was i think it was 2015 oh yeah okay that's that's longer than 10 years honestly yeah i mean

1:12:00Chris Black:i have i i have 18 arrests under under my belt but um but that's enough i mean i don't um

1:12:08Jason Stewart:18 is good for you yeah we can stop right here out of those 18 arrests i'm sure they've happened various cities all over the world what is the uh number one jail you've been in treated you the best, nicest accommodations, et cetera.

1:12:23Chris Black:They were surprisingly nice in Chicago. Okay. Midwest, classic Midwestern charm. Yeah.

1:12:30Jason Stewart:They, they, um, can I get you something to eat? I gave you a pillow and shit. It was all good.

1:12:34Chris Black:They let me come out. They were watching TV and they saw me sort of leaning against the bars. They were watching the movie Shaft. And, um, and, and so, uh, you know, I liked that movie. So I was leaning out and they, they were like, Oh, you want to come out here and watch it? Like they just opened up the holding cell and let me go out

1:12:51Jason Stewart:and like hang out and watch the movie you don't you don't appear to be a physical danger to us at all would you like to come and watch the rest of shaft with us you're not going to stab me in

1:12:59Shepard Fairey:the neck with a pen hey yeah yeah you artist you artist pussy get in here and watch the movie with this yeah yeah i know right um poor guy he's he's in his early 30s still doing this what's wrong

1:13:12Chris Black:with you get a job this the slim-bristed stuff um yeah um yeah how many yeah once you once you're

1:13:19Jason Stewart:getting or like let's say you got arrested 10 years ago 2015 you were a full-grown adult man at a certain point you're you're older than the police that are arresting you for graffiti yeah yeah that has happened and then and then instead of that the cop saying hey what are you doing with your life you're asking you're telling them what are you doing with your life kid come on you know what i mean yeah you pull up the checkbook how much is it going to cost for this to go away chief What's going on?

1:13:44Chris Black:It's I mean, the way it's gone down in different places. When I got arrested in Boston in 2009, I had literally been doing a photo op with the mayor that two days before or something because they installed a giant banner of my art on the side of City Hall. it's a brutalist building which that that's an actual architectural term it's just plain concrete so they're all very embarrassed that brutalism was the trend when they made that so they always want to put something that that like you know lightens the place up a little bit so um i did the bostonian brutalist movement they're not proud of it yeah and so um so then you know a couple days later i get arrested by the by undercovers from the from the vandal squad and And, you know, a lot of times different branches of government aren't talking to each other.

1:14:36Chris Black:And this created a whole a whole thing of like conspiracy theories where, oh, are the cops trying to embarrass the mayor because he didn't give them a big enough raise when they were lobbying for it? And, you know, I sometimes am amused by how this stuff plays out in terms of the theories from the from the public.

1:14:55Jason Stewart:So you were a pawn in their dark political game is what it sounds like. Not to quote Black Sabbath and Metallica. Potentially. Yeah. I don't I don't I don't know.

1:15:07Chris Black:I don't know.

1:15:08Shepard Fairey:I did. I did my eight hours. I was kind of out of there. But you guys get this out. I hope you guys can work it out anyway.

1:15:14Chris Black:And another thing is the guy who was prosecuting me, the prosecutor from the government side. he he didn't make enough money as um as a prosecutor to do that only as his job and there was a bar where the owner had installed a bunch of my art and i went there for lunch with the curator for my museum show and adam the prosecutor was working the bar there and came up and had a chat with me um really really nice guy um seriously seriously but um but you know it was it was his job, but you could see how kind of half-hearted his approach to, yeah, I eventually was able to, you know, get out of a situation in Boston where they were charging me with 32 felonies, which could have been a cumulative 82 years in jail for, for allegedly putting posters and stickers up.

1:16:07Shepard Fairey:Shepard, Shepard said, I'm exonerated on all charges. All right. So what do we think? We're going to, we're going to have to go, but give us an estimation on legal fees throughout the years. What do you think? What do you think the tickets hit?

1:16:18Jason Stewart:Oh, man. And if Amanda's listening, turn the podcast off now.

1:16:22Chris Black:Unfortunately, we're talking about well over a million dollars. That's what I was assuming.

1:16:27Shepard Fairey:I mean, and look, we're happy you're free, bro. It's look, if you got it and that's you got to spend it. That's that's what some of that money should be used for. It goes back into the business.

1:16:35Chris Black:But of course, going through all these situations always made me think about the people that don't have the kind of resources that I can now throw at a situation like that and how it's going to screw them that they can't defend themselves properly. And, um, you know, I, I've done a lot of criminal justice reform stuff because I understand that it's not crazy. Yeah. It's, it's not, it's not fair for everybody. We got to get these graffiti artists to stop selling heroin and like really get on the straight and narrow.

1:17:05Shepard Fairey:I couldn't agree more. That's what we got to fight for.

1:17:08Chris Black:Well, you know, a lot of, a lot of people from graffiti had a code of you never pay for anything or else you're not keeping it real. Like you shop everything.

1:17:18Jason Stewart:You got to rack everything.

1:17:19Chris Black:Yeah. I, you know, I always paid for almost everything. I figured out a few scams with Kinko's to get free copies with a paper clip by rigging the machine and stuff like that. But it is minor. But I did not want if I was caught for something for it also to appear on my record that I did things like like shoplifting because because I wanted to be able to stand 100 % behind my crimes and say like, hey, I'm a taxpayer. I think there should be room for expression. This shouldn't just be purely top down. If you're a big corporation, you can pay for a billboard and subject everybody to that. But if you're just a citizen that has a cute, fun idea that you want to put on a poster on a corner, then you're going to go to jail.

1:18:00Chris Black:So yeah, that's been my approach. All right, Shepard. Yeah, yeah.

1:18:03Jason Stewart:Tougher to pull that off if you've got caught stealing catalytic converters for a couple years. You know what I mean? Look, officer, I have the receipt for all of my Rust-Oleum right here, actually, if you want to see it.

1:18:14Shepard Fairey:No, thank you for joining us, Shepard.

1:18:15Chris Black:It was a pleasure. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me, Chris. Thanks, Jay. Congrats on all the new shows, and we'll see you soon.

1:18:21Shepard Fairey:All right. Take care. All right, bro. Have a good one. All right. Later. Thanks, Shep. Good seeing you, buddy. Yeah, good to see you, too. Peace. Oh baby when you cry Your face is momentary You hide your look behind this girl Behind the moment Give me a moment