Die With the Most Likes: Art in the Digital Age

0:00Hey, everyone. As you know, on this podcast, I bring the best guests in the world at that nexus of understanding of macro crypto crypto and the exponential age of technology. If you're enjoying the show, a quick five-star rating goes a long way. It helps us grow and keep these conversations coming with the best guests in the world. Thanks a lot. Hi, I'm Raoul Pal, and welcome to my show, The Journeyman, where we travel together to that nexus of understanding of macro, crypto, and the exponential age of technology. One of the things I spend my time thinking about, what does the world look like after the economic singularity?

0:34What retains value in a world where anything can be made in abundance and intelligence is worth zero? And that's where blockchain comes in because blockchain creates scarcity in a digital world. It has a unique property that will create different forms of value over time. It's also spawned a cultural revolution that came from the Internet and into crypto. And that expressed itself via art. And I talk a lot about the digital art market because I think it's of primary importance. It's our culture. It's the culture of these times, these momentous times where we live all day on the Internet, trying to make that living, to unfuck our futures.

1:16And those stories are told about that culture and these times. And they end up being these memetic packages called digital art. And there's many great artists that are looking at the cultural side. We also have the technological side. Don't forget, AI is coming into all of this and into the creative industries. And we're seeing the digital art market absorb that too. So this is a historical marker point in the history of art. So there's a lot of excitement around art. There's a lot of confusion too, because the NFT market blew up spectacularly in 2022. And people confuse NFTs and PFPs with actual art.

1:56Art is upstream of all wealth. as people make money as this crypto industry goes from a three trillion dollar industry to a hundred trillion dollar industry there's a lot of wealth that's going to get generated and upstream of all wealth ends up being art so art tells the stories of our times it stores wealth because it stores these cultural mimetics of these times and it's always important to us as humans to record those. We've always done it, whether it's cave paintings, whether it's Warhol, whether it's Damien Hirst, whether it's Banksy, they're all cultural packages that last time and become valuable.

2:38So today I want to speak to who I think is a personal friend, but also one of the greatest living artists in the United States, not just in a digital format, but he tells his story across all formats, whether it's prose, whether it's books, whether it's performance art, whether it's digital art, whether it's physical art. He's ridiculously talented, extraordinarily funny, and his outlook on America and the cultural decay of America through fond eyes is, I think, one of the most profound statements that we see today. So anyway, let's chat to Mark Mark Wilson, also known as Die With The Most Likes.

3:17Join me, Raoul Pal, as I go on a journey of discovery through the macro, crypto, and exponential age landscapes. In The Journeyman, I talk to the smartest people in the world so we can all become smarter together.

3:36Mark, welcome to Real Vision. Cheers. I'm pumped to be here. Oh, shit, I got to get the label up. This classy, aged, to perfection. I'm drinking Bollinger and you're drinking Pab's. This is the basis of our friendship, right? It's a vintage Pab's, though. I think it's been in our fridge for a couple of years. So I will say it's drinking well today. It's almost the 12 on the front is like it's 12 years old and age vintage Pab's. Yeah, I think that's right, man. The thing is, is you can't really tell how old it is. It's always going to taste the same. It always tastes like piss. It goes in piss.

4:06It comes out piss. It's fine. There was some old, some guy here was a legend. He'd been on the island. He'd never worked a day in his life. his parents are kind of wealthy people from Kentucky or Indiana, that border. And he'd never worked. And he would take his own beer to every party into his late seventies. And I'm like, why are you doing this? He goes, I don't sell by dates. I will only drink fresh beer. I'm like, wow. Damn man. So was it good beer? Like, no, it was terrible beer. Okay. It was Budweiser. It was always Budweiser. And it had to be within its sell by date. because on this small island, a little came around now, almost everything's past its sell-by date.

4:47You get used to eating things that are two years past their sell-by date. Blondie's not very good at that, but I'm teaching her the ways of a small island. So she'll just be eating like two-year-old hot dogs and not really caring like they've gone completely pale. We haven't got her there yet. I'm there. You're there. That's my dichotomy. I'm drinking Bollinger eating two-year-old hot dogs with out-of-date mustard. so listen there's so much i want to talk to you about and you know it's weird because i don't get intimidated a lot and even though we're friends the weirdest thing is the body of your work is so fucking massive that you have everything from videos to performance art to physical art to digital art to books to prose to article writing and it all tells a story of the weird world of die with the most likes and it's actually pretty hard to get my head around and as you know i've been going down this rabbit hole for a while and it keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger but before we get into all of that shit and there's so much to talk about i just want to go to start to the beginning is who are you where did you grow up where did you start because i want to get to why you're doing what you're doing that's the kind of big thing so tell me about yourself let's get after it yeah i mean i'm so i'm from northern indiana many would refer to it as like the butthole of america but like proudly the butthole you know like i think we we love warm we love like kind of existing in like the warm shit and kind of just spewing all over the place man it's great and like i i hold a great reverence for the place that i'm from and like the ross spelled so um i'm i'm from there originally and uh it's inspired a ton of my art like in in really like that entire region strip uh strip mall culture fresh asphalt fast casual restaurants all that stuff kind of pours in but like really from way back from the start you know i think like for the longest time um you know i was i was making shit that that nobody wanted to look look at what were you doing as a career what happened let's start with when did you get into art let's do it.

6:55Yep. So I've been making shit my whole life. But like many people, I think, and my parents included, assumed that I was just going to grow up and then die doing something I hate. So I was working in a digital, I graduated from college with degrees in German and political science, completely worthless. And then started just creating digital waste for a living. So I was at this company that essentially I was programming spam emails to B2B marketing people, like just a horrifically depleting job, soul crushing in many ways. Like really, you know, I looked at myself and, you know, it's funny, you gave me that really heartwarming introduction.

7:31And I think the introduction that they sent out was a low importance email that just said, this is just the next sorry fuck to do something he hates. He's going to be sending our spam emails for the next 13 years. So I spent 13 years of this company doing the exact same thing, completely stuck in a rut, zero progress, zero momentum, just creating and churning digital a waste for a living. But while I was there, it was it was so soul crushing and backbreaking and defeating in every way that I started to really get into my writing. And so the first couple books I wrote, I was writing them while I was at work because it was just like such a horrific thing that I needed to retreat into these different worlds.

8:09So books were first for you. Yep. Books were first. That's right. So really the writing, the writing kind of preceded all of the serious production of like paintings and digital art. And really because it was like the only thing that wasn't taking up room in our apartment in Chicago at the time where like, we'll get into this, I'm sure. But like my wife banned me from painting any more paintings because our entire house was filling with them and nobody wanted them. So it was just like this accumulation of like my creativity and my imagination that was ultimately like making it impossible to live inside of our house or our apartment in Chicago.

8:48So it was only writing at the time. That existence of doing a soulless job that's repetitive reminds me a lot of, I don't know if you ever saw the British version of The Office. It was soul-crushingly awful. And I grew up with that. That was suburbia. And in my summer jobs when I was at school or university, I was working in an insurance company. And you just can't imagine anything worse because you have no personality, no nothing. And you live in this awful world where you aspire to have a two bedroom house and a strip of lawn this big that you might or may not mow. And you're like, this is it.

9:28Yeah. And you'd see people at these jobs who were like, who had worked there for like 50 years and they'd just be sitting there microwaving clam chowder for lunch every day, just in the shared office microwave while all of us just died under like the suffocating pressure of white noise machines that were trying to like pacify us is we created this shit for people that no one wanted we were it was literally the production of shit that got immediately thrown away by whoever was meant it was meant to consume and then we would just keep churning and churning uh for no reason whatsoever so it was kind of this weird did that build a sort of rage within you because the books were i mean they're not an easy read they're bloody funny but they're there's like this whole disgust of what you see around you and you're distilling it and exaggerating it into make why why were you doing that what were you trying to say or was it the rebellion against the awfulness of suburban existence it it was absolutely written in varying states of disgust right like i think that i looked at my own i looked at my own life and my existence and the pointlessness of everything i was doing and i was becoming so incredibly frustrated and just absolutely disgusted by it um and so i did pour myself into that and it became ultimately like a vow for not completely succumbing to madness in those worlds you know because it's easy to do like you're you're in that job forever and you feel like why could you see it and others couldn't because other people that's their life but it is you for example it flicked the switch to say there's something different yeah i think growing up uh growing up you know i didn't i didn't have a lot of uh a lot of outlets for observing art or experiencing art outside the world.

11:09So I was an avid reader. So I think, you know, reading Hunter S. Thompson and George Bataille and Michelle Hula Beck and stuff, I would be reading them as I was at this job. And I was kind of like imagining the world that the worlds that they were creating. And I really longed to create something as special as they did in his backbreaking and soul crushing. So it was so. So when I saw these people who were just coming into the office and just experiencing this day-to-day kind of drudgery. I became obsessed with being a documentarian versus just a passive observer of what was happening. And so a lot of the things that I'm making now with my art and my writing, I'm really just a documentarian.

11:48Like I look at stuff, I write it down and create these kind of depraved, depressing versions of those things that are already pretty bad. And so they're these kind of slightly exaggerated versions, but yeah but with them when you start writing these books what do your friends say because that's also their life too right and you're looking at it with a with a with a different lens you've got you know a lot of the time art is a mirror but in in your case it's actually a magnifying glass and you're finding the shittiest awfulest smelliest most revolting parts and holding up a magnifying glass and say look at this this is real finding insects to like light on fire with that magnifying glass that's right right like just torturing the shit out of people uh yeah so the funny part is they don't my friends don't really read any of my book like i don't think any of my friends writing in my books uh honestly and like many people who i know don't read my books i think the the most hilarious part about that is like you know the most special moment for me as an artist was when a 70 year old woman read one of my books and made, and said it made her physically ill to read.

12:58And I was like, I was just like, I've made it now. This is fucking great. So even though my friends won't read them, at least the 70 year old woman has read it and it has made her physically ill. Now I'm like, I'm an accomplished artist. So that part was like really special. And so it's little nooks and crannies that you find the tiny wins when like nothing is going your way. And at least, at least there's that, at least you can make people sick with your writing. So, but yeah, they didn't really experience my writing a lot, honestly. I mean, your books, there was the, I've read a few of them now and the collection of short stories, I loved.

13:31It's this warped world that I kind of really enjoy. The other one where you introduce a character, Alfonso Newtson, plus the, who's the hero, anti-hero? Duke Dasher. yeah duke dasher who is really quite something and that book gets almost impossible to read but in a brilliant way it's like you know you took that steven seagal character which i need to ask you about why the fuck steven seagal and what does he mean to you but that whole thing that characterization was epic yeah thank you and that one was like a true manifestation of it's so as you know I think both of us share an extreme love for 90s action films so that combined with like my dad was reading all sorts of like David Baldacci and Dan Brown those like god awful novels are sold at Hudson News Airport so what I wanted to do was take those the original marketing plan for that book was I was going to write it and then I was going to put them inside of Hudson News across the country because it was made to look like one of those books right and so I was hoping that somebody would get stuck on like a nine-hour Germany flight that they thought was like a Dan Brown novel and they find themselves getting baptized in a urinal full of shit at a tilted kilt in Ohio where like people are just dying and like the goriest shit is happening I'm like that would be my ideal scenario it was just ruining somebody's like super long flight with a fake book from Hudson News but that's taking the same idea of like this average commuter reading the the that Dan Brown book and doing their insurance job or their spam email job and you're just liked saying i'm going to entirely fuck with that idea yeah for sure and i think i think the funny part is that that now that that now that more and more people have kind of experienced my art and my writing i think there's there's ultimately little parts of us morsels of us that want to participate in the depravity that i'm creating in those books kind of like you said where it's like oh it's this completely fucked up world and it is putting a magnifying glass on the and carry on corpse of corporate America and like our lives in general but there's parts of us that are like fuck that is that's me and like I I experienced the same frustration and I experienced the same like um you know inability to potentially like spiral out of what I'm doing so I think that hopefully I give people a playground to get into like uh you know yeah so a quick break in your regular programming if you're serious about your future grab my free report called prepare for 2030 I think you've got five years to make as much money as possible.

16:02And this guide will help you navigate what's coming. The link is in the description. Download it now. Many people grew up with games where that was normality. You know, you're living, you know, like Grand Theft Auto. You're living in a totally fucked up, depraved world. And people spend enormous amounts of their time living in those worlds. So it's not that big because it's escapism. Yep, it is. format it is right it really is yeah and it's like you know who doesn't want to like have their head plunged into a like a bat a vat of you know rotted fortified wine and just drink up you know like that's the thing it's like we i think that that i'm obsessed with we'll talk about this i'm sure but i'm very obsessed with like county fair culture uh which is very big in america i think blondie took you to the texas state fair which is like a level up from county county is like it's going up overnight you're going on the rides your legs may get severed you know you're you're gonna watch a prize hog get slaughtered it's all sorts of like weird stuff um but but i've become obsessed with with creating that same playground for people to yeah like experience and into to get into so okay so you start writing books nobody cares nope your friends don't care your family don't care people who read them don't care how does that make you feel and how does that then branch out into other forms of art what gives you the courage to say i'm going to express this in a different way to be fair my dad did love it it was kind of written for him because he loves that that type of book and he was like oh this is just insane he's like this is disgusting but he was in so i will say he loved it which was a huge which was a huge honor for me but um yeah so once the writing, uh, had kind of stalled out much like everything else.

17:51Uh, I, I just continued to, to make things, you know, and I think that it just didn't, it never mattered who was looking at it in many ways, even though my friends weren't looking at it, even though there was, um, like a couple of porn spam bots on Instagram that were following me and they would give me some likes at times when they liked the content or maybe they did or didn't, but, um, it just, it never really mattered. And creating in that void and in that vacuum really helped me develop my own style, kind of absent of uh of influence in many ways because i was just like this is just what i'm making i guess i'm just gonna make this forever even if no one looks at it i think i had this fantasy were you painting but at that stage or did you just start and realize you could actually do it how did you do that so i was painting then but uh i was i was painting too much uh so i make shit a lot like way too much probably you're so prolific it's insane thanks dude yes so so like we talked about earlier, my wife had banned me from making any more paintings essentially, because she's like, dude, you're filling up our whole house.

18:51Like we can't move around in here. It was a really depressing, uh, state of, of things because you didn't want to throw them away. Like I spent all this time on them, but nobody also wanted them. So I was just kind of stuck with these burdens that were like these like manifestations of things that I really, really cared about. But it was really sad that, um, that it only seemed like it was me who cared about them. Um, and then, so she got me an iPad like 12 years ago, just saying, you have to start using this to get, to get your creativity out. They can all be stored on the cloud or wherever the fuck it is.

19:20And the painting goes away for a while until like something, something happens. So once I got the iPad, it became really easy for me to just participate in, um, to participate in things way more quickly. So like when I was creating memes and when I was creating these like different like expressions of myself i just became like you know thousands and thousands and thousands of hours on that thing just allowed me to be able to create very very quick which are you publishing them were you like tumblr like x copy or what were you where where was this going this outlet i had an instagram account with an art instagram specific account with 29 followers on it so those 29 uh courageous followers were would would dole out like two or three likes per post and I would take those as I could, you know, the, the small wins.

20:06Um, and that was it. There was nothing else. Like, and, and so I had a Twitter at the time too, uh, with like, I think 200 followers or something like most of them were bots. Most of them were bots. And then also I did have a moment where I was like, I was trying to get people from the show, the Hills to follow me for some reason. So like I went on this quest and Spencer Pratt finally followed me, which was like this huge win at the time. It was absolutely insane. And that's the kind of performance art shit that i was already doing when no one was even looking at anything it was these like random things where i would just you were kind of thinking of it as performance art at the time i was yeah i was just like what i was like what are these people what's going through their head when they're reading these like depraved prose or looking at these like fucked up drawings i'm making so i was just kind of like putting stuff out there and it was very performative um but but um then like i had a tweet go semi-viral because the comedian eric andre who i love he's like this if you know eric andre at all no he's this hilarious just completely mad he's got this like fake talk show that he does and he's super sweaty all the time he's like he's this very violent human where he's like throwing himself into shit but i just made a piece and i tweeted at him and he retweeted it and then it picked up all this steam and i started to get some followers and somebody then we'll get into this but somebody um just dm me was like hey have you ever considered minting anything i'm like i don't know what the fuck that is like i have no clue what minting is um and so he kind of explained it so it's just this complete stranger who had like suggested that i sell digital art and i'm like i've never sold physical art so why would i you know like i'm not sure why i would be able to sell digital art if nobody already wants my physical but i went in anyways and what people don't realize about you is you're not stopping any of these other art forms so now you're you've already started writing and you continue to write then you start painting pissing off your wife then you start doing digital art then you're doing performance art these are all cumulative that nothing is stopping it's just it's like you doing more of that so when does die with the most likes emerge so i created this piece well so um i i created this piece of these all i've always been very obsessed with uh with with consumption like kind of my my phrase is create nothing consume everything the the hungry for content caterpillar you know just people just being passive sponges and and absolutely devouring anything that's put in front of them barely digesting it and shitting it back out into a neglected toilet is like my obsession with with human beings and like us too like i feel like i'm a part of that you know i barely like we all are yeah realistic mirror to ourselves yeah we're all on x all day scrolling through shit just with our little yeah just our little hands just rubbing poop together like flies and just like um so i i've been obsessed with that and i thought like man you know what would be a really fucked up scenario would be like a bunch of elderly people um in a nursing home and they're being kept alive by like the adoration the empty adoration bits they're getting from strangers online and so i created this piece where it was like this guy in like a breathing tube and there was a bunch of people behind him like pressing the button and as soon as they stopped pressing the button it would kind of like stop the breathing tube and i just became obsessed with it and i said you know what that's as good of a name as anything is die with the most likes and hopefully i'll get there at some point it's like ironic because ultimately ultimately i didn't have any likes at the time and i didn't really give a shit either so like yeah yeah but in in the end truthfully attention is the currency of humanity right Right.

23:38Upstream of all of that is love. That's the top of the attention bracket. But almost adjacent to it is hate. As long as you're getting attention and the Internet opened up attention in ways that we didn't imagine. It's now you're not trying to get attention in the playground at school or at work. You've now got this whole playing field of attention and it's scored. And humans love a bit of gamification. And before you know it, we're all rabid dogs for attention. It's, it's insane, but it's kind of a human trait. That's always been there. Yeah, for sure. It's funny as much as people don't want to say it, like we, and, and like before, like, you know, we will sit there and you'll have people complaining about the algorithm all day, every day.

24:23And it's like, what changed about the algorithm? I'm getting no views. What's happening. And at a certain point, you just have to say, fuck it. Like, I don't care, you know, but like, um, I think that it's programmed into us to care and we feel like failures if people aren't looking at our shit um i don't know yeah what do you think i mean i interestingly enough i i feel like being in the void for so long where it was like a a pretty much a full decade of having no one ever look at my art i i kind of almost became numb to the sensation of wanting and i think that's the that's the right answer if you you if you do it for other people then it kind of falls apart the genuineness and the authenticity of it falls yeah so you've got to do just push out what you think people like and and over time some people like it maybe they don't maybe it never works for you but maybe it does and then that becomes interesting agreed and which is the funny part is like my poetry posts fail all the time on x and i'm still just like i'm posting my poetry like you guys are just gonna get it but they but it gets like you know 20 likes instead of a couple hundred to something to be honest i mean i love the prose it's like i don't think your art exists without the prose they're like thank you they're through a different lens the saying the same thing but what you write is so uncomfortable most people don't they'd want to live in an instagram world of fluffy things and you ask them to think about the things that are not so easy which is the banality of life.

25:57We talk about this consumerism, this aging population, the holing out. People don't want to see that, but they also do. It's like looking at a car crash. And I think the prose, A, you need to be a reader and to understand, but the prose is hard when you read. I mean, your prose is genius. I mean, the description of any piece of art that you do is exemplary there's there's two ends of that there's you who writes this long prose and there's x copy who does like what my favorite is well in fact you made a uh ponderosa meat manager out of it is the fuck you looking at and the description is twat it's like it's great genius and you do the opposite side of that which is you give a contextualized beautiful prose about the awfulness of it which comes from what you were sort of doing in the book and what becomes interesting is it's it's and we'll talk more of this later because i want to get through the chronology a bit but it's this whole thing story you're trying to tell from every angle that is amazing so you're putting art out there somebody goes into your dms and says why don't you mint something what year was this that was uh that was 2022 i think yep or 2021 maybe yeah maybe 21 yeah i think it's 21 and uh i just said well like i guess i don't know what the i because because really he just said hey people are selling he essentially said people are selling idiotic shit and i think your stuff is better than some of the stuff and i was like that's the first compliment i've ever had so like I guess I will, I'll follow that in.

27:40So he sent me at the time, it was a foundation, like everyone was minting on this platform called Foundation. So he sent me an invite, which was very hard to get at the time, I guess. And I minted my first piece and it was like$300 for gas or whatever. I didn't understand what was happening. I just noticed that I had lost$300. Was this on ETH or on Tezos? That was on ETH. Yep. So I was like, all right, well, I guess that's$300, but I'm going to make it back. this is going to sell so fast and like everyone's going to love it. And the piece was a, the piece was an illustration of a Microsoft office inbox where everybody's in varying states of decay.

28:15There's like Xanax bars flying into people's mouths. And it's just the type of thing that I'm very obsessed with, like the office banality, like we had said. So I thought it was going to crush. It did not at all. Nobody looked at it. No one obviously bought it. I didn't understand how Twitter worked like with, with like, you know, building a community and just like, in being around and in like, you know, caring about shit. So, um, so that didn't work. And then later he DM me again and said, Hey, have you heard about this platform platform? Hick at nuke? I said, no, but he's like, well, it's a lot cheaper.

28:46And I'm like, all right, cool. I'll start putting stuff up on this thing. Like, I don't know what the hell. And so I didn't even know if stuff was selling on there. It was so, it was awesome though, because it was like a, it was just a feed. And so there was no curation. There was nobody deciding what gets put up front. there was nothing out there. It was just, you get blasted with, you get blasted in the face with art and you have no idea where it's coming from. You have no idea what order it's in. It's just there. So it was a really formative time in my life because, um, in many ways it fostered the weirdo bizarro art that I fucking love.

29:18And there was a place for it finally. So I started making these little sales of like four and$5 a pop. Like I would like mint an addition of three things. And it would be like, I made$15. I'm like, this is nuts. Like I can order a fucking pizza with this. I can like, I was, I was like, you know, going crazy. I'm like, this is crazy. People are actually buying my stuff. This is awesome. And, um, so I felt like I'd finally found a home there and then it just kind of like grew and grew and grew and spiraled. Um, and, and, and from there, it just kind of, uh, yeah, got to where it is now, um, through an insanely diligent and obsessive need to suffocate people in this world that I was like relentlessly building and it's like you've picked at a scab endlessly from every direction and I was listening through some of some of the series that you've done from dying is not enough which I I love because it's like the final end of that story that you're telling and even to say that death is not enough is like that's a big statement you know but then also the rise and the fall legalized grand beef consumer adoration exists to submit strip mall salvation the unbearable stench of eternal decay you're basically taking every angle of that scab and picking at it what why just taking a cheese grater to it and just ripping hoping that that blood just won't won't stop flowing yeah what are you trying to say to people because i mean you're doing it in every manifestation i mean every art form you've even sung because there was a video channel of you singing i feel the soundcloud rap yeah that's right so there's so there's so there's you in every form of art almost possible yeah i've not seen any sculpture work from you yet but but but all of these art forms and you're all telling this it's a big story it's why are you telling it at first i understand you write the books to rebel against your own life and you observe how ridiculous it is and you exaggerate it and turn it into this world but why do you feel that you have to tell this story because i i think it's one of the most important stories and i think you're cataloging something that's incredibly important that will disappear not only of americana culture in the middle of america but this moment in time with the baby boom generation dies out and everything changes and i think it's only going to be more relevant as ai comes and the robots come and we're going to feel less purposeful but what what's driving you to tell this yeah i think i think that i saw that nobody else wanted to tell it potentially like in some ways you know like i agree yeah like i'm from you know like northern indiana like i said considered by many the butthole of america which i proudly call it that But we're all from kind of piece of shit hometowns in some way.

32:16And like we all kind of love I think that I love the place I was from. And I think that many of us do. But it never gets the story that it needs to be told, like the kind of small town, middle American story. And also the and then also the story of our existence as like digital entities and like weird, you know, crypto people. I just I found I found myself just ruminating over and over. And I felt like that nobody else was telling it. And if somebody didn't tell it, like you said, it would be forgotten forever. And so I tell it. I tried to try to tell it as accurately as possible. And I'll sprinkle in some some extra madness and depravity at points.

32:58But like, I just I find it fascinating. Yeah. What's so authentic about what you do? And you and I've talked about this in the past is you see it for what it is, but you still have fondness for it. So at no point are you judging people for it. It's like it is what it is. And you kind of enjoy that, the awfulness of it all. And what it's come down to. It's come down to a bunch of brands and a bunch of people taking pharmaceuticals. And, you know, and how even the county fair doesn't exist anymore really as a magnet for culture. It's just all so shit. But with a fondness to it, it's passed. what it is now.

33:41Yeah. There's a comedy to our demise too. Like I think that we, we've talked about humor and comedy before and to not laugh at it is depriving yourself of one of the great joys in life. It's like, why wouldn't I laugh at going to Applebee's and having sex with a dollar margarita, you know, like a fuckable margarita or like a Dave and Buster's game. That's glory holes or something. It's like, this is where we're heading. And like, I'm totally on board with it and let's just let's just go down with it and like just crank up the depravity and the sickness to a thousand and just submit to this shit because it's just too funny not to it's like you're sitting there and like you know you're getting hammered by fan duel ads you've got a thousand browsers tabs open you're just gooning your ass off and that's just like you're that's life that's your existence and i find there to be a very very hilarious part to that you know so i'm on board let's go it's like but also again what makes it so important is you live there it's you're not like on the coasts judging middle america it's the opposite you're like you know what there's some magic here as well the magic there is dare i say it the olive garden or you know any of this stuff you know that that that you prolifically bring out which is the the bland consumerism becomes an identity that you end up with fondness over however awful it is absolutely and like i i've said i think one of my favorite stories of all time is i was at the county fair and this was like a pivotal creative moment for me where um there was a amusement fair ride operator who had a personal dvd player that had he was streaming hardcore pornography while working the tilt-a-whirl ride.

35:21And I was like, like, I became obsessed with that guy. And I was like, what is, this is the craziest thing I've ever seen. He's running this ride, screaming hardcore porn, people in line. And I'm like, this is what I want to document. Like, this is it right here. This is like the entire dream right here in front of my eyes. And like, I really never looked back. It's like my favorite fucking thing ever. But also culture is a weird thing because people assume that other people have culture. and like middle america has no culture that's the it has a culture it does it's very defining when you go to the texas state fair it is the definition of that now you might go to a spanish village and see bullfighting and some peeps person getting gored in the town if that was in america people would go well this is terrible but because they're dressed in fancy suits getting gored and people are watching right you go oh that's amazing culture it's like the weird world of cultural lens right what's deemed to be you we go to india to watch culture of you know people throwing paint at each other or whatever it is when it happens in the united states like it's just now society falling apart right right like can you imagine somebody like in a flame decal dragon shirt and a pair of jinkos doing a bullfighting competition people would be like this sucks but yeah the fancy clothing like great good wine and stuff it's what does it you know so shit yeah it's it's the weirdest thing it is but do you think and you and i've had this conversation before do you think people understand what you're trying to say because when i look at you know i i love culture i absorb culture and i look for culture and cultural moments and we're clearly having one digital art in crypto which is a culture on top of the internet which is a culture it's super interesting to see but i don't see your story being told in music the medium of books is declining in this kind of way so it's not really being told in digital art i see you doing it in art itself i don't see many people doing i'm sure there is some there's a direct line from what Warhol saw coming with soup cans to what you see to this day but I don't see people doing it I don't see writing about this I just it's like we can't even talk about it you wonder if people have gotten fed up with the process of creating things so because it is tiring relentless creation and documentation is tiring as fuck like when you're waking up and doing it every single day i write every day i draw every day i paint every day i'm just wondering if there's something about like the attrition of of like how much it takes and just people not really wanting to continue to to do that over and over i don't know i see the opposite i just see the trend towards pop culture which is like yeah let's brush this over yeah because we're going through such massive societal change let's just brush it over and pretend it's not there yeah which in itself is a culture yeah it is but yeah just just pave it over with asphalt erase any type of wart or scar or blemish and it's just smoothed over yeah it's like everything's gone through an instagram filter yeah yeah yeah yeah you're not wrong there i i didn't i didn't really think about it like that but i think there is a carelessness in consumption too like you were saying where where you can spend all day writing these books writing prose painting or whatever and like people on tick like logan paul on tiktok has a pokemon card and he's getting 10 billion views or something it's just like why make it becomes a point where it's like why make anything at all unless there is that drive where you just have to make it and you really want to fucking make it you know because otherwise it's just otherwise what's the point i guess for me great art is generally rebellion yeah right you have to be rejecting the system to say something worthwhile um there's very few artists that that play into the beauty of life at this time um can't remember the british artist who was painting in la stuff like that that's very different but but that kind of punk attitude is important because if not we don't look at ourselves yeah yeah you need you need somebody who is going to get into the bowels of things and just get and just put dip their hands into the the uh the sordid intestines of the the things pouring out of us and not be afraid to find you know the the little like the little things that are special that are still in there you know like i think that's the thing that that's the other part is like in a world where content has become where content flows just so seamlessly like if we don't take our time and like pick those little fucking things out those little morsels of corn in the shit then it's all just going to be shit all the time that's what it is and there's you know there's there's some people making commentary that really makes it stand out banks he's still brilliant at this you know he doesn't need to do that anymore but he's still really good at taking the zeitgeist yeah putting up a mirror and saying this is what you guys are fucking doing do you not see that and everyone's But yeah, that's embarrassing.

40:48Yeah, for sure. The reflection, the reflection part is huge. And I think that like when people look at that and it goes back to the point about there being this kind of deep desire to to experience and to have have a place in a mad world that you can't necessarily indulge in on a day to day basis where you're looking at art, you're looking at writing and you say, like, damn, like I just go to this horrific job. I need like you were saying is an escape mechanism. And hopefully like the things that I'm writing and the, and the pieces that I make give people an invitation to also indulge in their mad side and be like a little peculiar and uncanny and like do this, do the shit that still matters in this world, which is just being weird in general.

41:29Like it just, I think that that part is being completely erased and like, and it needs to be celebrated and cherished really. And I love the fact that around you, people use your language back at you, yeah which shows that you're kind of really getting into people's heads and they use they reflect some parts back at you not other parts yet um but you know the whole meat thing is like it's hilarious you've made meat your own which is the funniest thing yeah i was losing it because i think you had bought your first piece and you use the term fully fuckable which i use quite a bit, uh, because, because that's one of my obsessions.

42:09I think that eventually every single product you'll just be able to have sex with here because like P cause people are going to be at the grocery store and just like, uh, I would buy that, but I don't think I can bang it. So like, I don't, you know, I don't, I don't want that. So I think everything will have like a flashlight attached to it or a dildo or something. And people will just be like, Oh, now I can have sex with that. So I'll pay the extra amount and I can go back and like goon with it or whatever. Um, but I think you would use that term and somebody was like what he's fully fuckable on this thing like what is that and i'm like yeah that's just what i it's what i use quite a bit so i was proud that you that you would use that term because i'm obsessed with it because you know people have really followed your language and and that perspective but that whole idea that everything becomes shaggable in english terminology kind of makes sense is because if you think about where the world is going i mean you're talking about the holing out of middle america because the manufacturing jobs disappeared and all of that we're going to do that to fucking knowledge workers we're going to do it to every all manual labor and in the end all we've got left is humanity because only humans can be humans ai can't be humans and we have these world weird things that we do that we stimulate ourselves via dopamine or sexual stuff and it and so die with the most likes plus fully fuckable is kind of all of humanity it is yeah i guess you're right it doesn't body everything that we'll need it's like our two basic needs in like 10 years probably that's it maybe you'll do a series on love at some point as opposed to yeah but but that's it that's it yeah maybe i'll rebrand maybe i'll do a corporate rebrand at some point and be uh live with the most likes and be like a guru you know be one of the people that holds their hands like this and be like i'm gonna start living with the most likes and like kind of just do the whole like you could be the brian johnson of attention it's like become zen with your attention and this is the way to manage your there's a big career in that there you go i'm i'm changing i'm changing the twitter name and the whole brand right after this let's go but i do think there's a characterization that could be done from that i think so too like yeah get the um get like a a lengthy white gown that i wear and roll up to things like as a guru and just kind of tell people i think honestly this is my next performance listen to you that's what i'm thinking i'm thinking i sell this to like corporate america and i go around as this goo this like supposed guru and then record the whole thing and that's my next like performance you know there's something in the ali g approach that you could definitely do for sure because people just don't quite know whether you're real or not and i think there's an leg approach to this as part of your performance art because that talk me through the alfonso newtson and the whole idea of so you've got mark wilson who's the the genesis he's creating ridiculous you need to express yourself through every format you possibly can and it keeps compounding so you're creating this vast body of work that's telling this weird world of die with the most likes or even mark wilson and then you start introducing your own characters in and what blew me away was i was you know i was introduced to alfonso via the gristle buddies um launch but then reading the book i'm like oh he was the president of the united states before you know this is mark is telling this story from every angle using the characterizations and then i realized okay this is i think i wrote to the time i'm like this is way bigger than i ever imagined and nobody's understanding how big this whole thing is yeah well because yeah the the two books are the i have five books now i'm working on another poetry collection but the two were like 120 ,000 word books that were written with zero with like zero care that everyone would ever read them which is just like such a pain you didn't even reread one of them did you i couldn't reread sparsely attended funerals because it was written kind of at the height of the pandemic and it was a really kind of paranoid and painful time for me in many ways so i wrote that over the course of like a month and it's like a 90 ,000 word book submitted to this indie publisher i love that book because i love the short stories and how it works yeah yeah it was like it was so it's just it's just a lot it's a very heavy use you know it's not a beach read like if you're reading that on a beach i don't know you're probably like fucked or something you're probably gonna get arrested you're probably gonna get arrested right um but yeah so so the world the world just kept expanding and expanding and really it did become this effort to try to drag people in.

46:55And it was funny, the digital art almost functioned as an appetizer to get people to read my books. You know, like when I was putting those on Instagram and stuff. Really? Yeah, it was almost like casting out a fishing line with rotten meat on it and saying, hey, come take a snack. And then maybe like you'll buy the book and maybe you'll figure out like this whole different, deeper world. And I still tend to want that for people. Like the happiest I'm ever at is when people reach out and say they've read one of those humongous books because like a novel is just different you know as you know it's a way different undertaking it's a different world that you have to create and stuff but um with those things with the novels with the soundcloud rap with the pieces of art and the painting like i want to be everywhere all the time i want to be a parasite in the mind of america okay i keep asking the question why why are you doing this look i think it's really important but i want to know your motivation why do you think the story's still not understood still not told and needs to be told from every angle yeah i think i i think that that part of it is just um i'm trying to think about the best way to express it really i think that part of it is is is making people feel the way that i feel inside a lot of times and seeking other people who are looking to to feel that way in many ways Like, I think that that part is drawn from, you know, 10 to 20 years of complete and utter irrelevance.

48:26And so, like, there's part of me that wants to find people and wants those people to experience the world through my eyes in the way that I look at stuff, not in a narcissistic way, but just in a sense that, like, I just think that it's important. I can't quite articulate it, I guess. Yeah, you don't articulate it. and I keep going back to you've got you're trying to get something across and it's incredibly important to you and I don't know why that is what is that emotion that's driving it and that you still think that people don't get it and I don't think they do because I don't think they see the corpus of your work but yeah and you know what now that I'm thinking about it I'm glad we're having this conversation because now I'm kind of coming back around to it and I think like all of the art that I create, it's created in a reaction to what I see going on in the world.

49:15And with that homogenization and that smoothing over of everything, there's this insane frustration on my end and like the AI stuff, the AI writing stuff, like really actually drives me kind of insane. Um, because as a writer, like you spend your entire life perfecting prose and like creating this great puzzle and things. So there's part of me that is just obsessed with, um, with almost like archive of creating like an, an archival, like an archival quasi fully fuckable museum of, of things that just may not ever be made again in some ways, you know, like, it's just like, these are things that I am so passionate about that I'm obsessed with that I, that I have poured like thousands and thousands of hours of into.