Dustin Yellin on Making Art, Weaving Madness, and Forging Your Own Path | The Tim Ferriss Show

Dustin Yellin tells Tim Ferriss the story of an unconventional life: dropping out of high school, hitchhiking through New Zealand, Australia, and Thailand on hallucinogens, and apprenticing with an out-there physicist who injected him with ketamine for consciousness experiments. He describes moving to New York in 1994, hustling and giving away art to survive, and a documented psychotic break ('The Crack-Up') that ended in arrest. Yellin explains his signature 'psychogeography' glass sculptures, made by layering collaged images and drawings between sheets of glass, and how Pioneer Works grew from a derelict ironworks building into a thriving cultural institution. Throughout, he reflects on widening one's perceptual 'aperture,' anti-competitiveness, system overload, death, and his ambitious project to stand a supertanker on its nose as a monument to the end of fossil fuels.

• After winning an 18th-birthday bet with his mother and getting cash instead of a car, Yellin spent it on 'drugs sex and rock and roll' and began heavy hallucinogen use while hitchhiking through New Zealand, Australia, and Thailand.
  00:09:28
• He apprenticed with a brilliant fringe physicist who claimed the government watched him for trying to make Tesla-style free energy, and who put Yellin in a closet on a saline-solution bed and injected him with ketamine for out-of-body experiences.
  00:14:35
• Yellin recounts a full psychotic break in New York, boarding the Forbes boat claiming it was his, kicking golf balls, scaling Belvedere Castle, getting arrested and committed, which he accidentally filmed and which became the video 'The Crack-Up.'
  00:25:23
• His 'psychogeographies' are an installation of roughly 120 human figures, each up to ~3,000 pounds, built from tens of thousands of images sourced from a century of books and magazines layered between sheets of glass.
  01:10:09
• The glass technique emerged by accident: pouring resin on a dictionary collage, then making resin boxes and drawings, until toxic resin fumes forced him to switch to laminated glass.
  01:15:47
• Yellin is developing 'The Bridge,' a project to stand a roughly 1,200-foot supertanker on its nose, billed as possibly the largest lift in history, as a walkable monument to the end of fossil fuels.
  01:30:52
• He frames Pioneer Works as a 'social sculpture' and measures his success by his own obsolescence, saying that as of about 36 months ago the institution can now thrive without him.
  01:01:52

• As a teenager Yellin hustled Swatch watches to buy his own car by age 16, and as a kid he busked as a breakdancer on cardboard for tips.
  00:08:57
• He learned about Nikola Tesla, Buckminster Fuller, Pablo Neruda, and Dostoyevsky for the first time through the physicist mentor he met after returning from Thailand.
  00:13:34
• During his break he tried to commandeer a golf-ball-collecting vehicle, telling the driver he needed to 'reprimand' it when he meant requisition it.
  00:27:27
• Yellin arrived in New York around 1994 and rented a closet-sized room in SoHo found through the Village Voice or Craigslist while making abstract expressionist paintings.
  00:21:45
• A friend describes Yellin as anti-competitive, arguing that competing with other creative people just depletes your energy and destroys you.
  00:42:33
• Pioneer Works occupies a building originally constructed as an ironworks at the end of the Civil War, about 27,000 square feet inside and 20,000 square feet outside.
  00:55:38
• Pioneer Works runs about 75 residencies a year, giving free space to scientists, artists, and writers.
  00:57:10
• Yellin says he genuinely used to breakdance on the Venice boardwalk and ended up dancing in Jay-Z's 2013 'Picasso Baby' video, but has no recollection of how he was recruited.
  01:27:44
• His film recommendations include Werner Herzog's 'Fitzcarraldo' and the documentary 'Burden of Dreams,' plus 'Bad Boy Bubby,' 'The Color of Pomegranates,' Hal Ashby's 'Being There' and 'Harold and Maude,' Kubrick, and Tarkovsky.
  00:50:58
• At age 25 Yellin lost his best friend, who was also his mentor and teacher, an event he says changed how he sees the world for the rest of his life.
  01:23:35