Choosing Love Over Fear — A Peacemaker’s Leap Into Tattooing

Well, thank you so very much for taking time out of your day to drive south an hour or so and join me for some fun. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's my pleasure. Well I wanna start with kind of the basics. When you were tattooing me, we talked a little bit about your childhood. Can you just share, before we get into the meat of the discussion, just a little bit of your upbringing and experience as a child that you feel is sort of relevant and necessary context to set the stage for the rest about what we're gonna discuss.

Yeah, yeah. Sounds good. Let me think. Life story but brief. I grew up definitely with a lot of appreciation for art and then going to museums and stuff like that. And I always played instruments and was a musician when I was younger, but I didn't grow up with any intention of actually making art into a career or doing any kind of visual art. My dad was a business professor, so I was kinda just like, I'll do business, and went and studied that in my undergrad. Didn't really like the types of jobs that I was interviewing for after that, so I went into the Peace Corps, came back, studied conflict resolution at that point, 'cause I thought, okay, maybe I'll do some international work, and did that for a couple of years, but didn't feel quite as fulfilled doing that. So at that kind of point I was like, what else can I do? And I enjoyed getting tattooed at that point a lot, so I figured that might be the direction for me to go in, and took a good time to make that transition. And I think that that was a really interesting, unsure period of my life, which involved a lot of getting up early and kinda studying before I go into my regular job and getting back and studying more and practicing and working. And after about four years of doing that I found a way into the tattoo industry, and here I am.

Beautiful. You talked about starting over at twenty eight. And so at twenty eight, that's when you realized I do not want to continue on this current trajectory. Is that when you made the mental decision to shift to tattooing professionally?

Yeah, yeah. It was really a moment decision where it was like, I've now decided, and no, I will do this.

Beautiful. Yeah, you can ask my wife because I texted her a picture. I didn't even really draw at that point, and I texted her a picture of something I was sitting in a meeting drawing, and she's like, yeah, cool. And she always makes fun of me for it 'cause she's like, I had no—

Wait, wait, so so you decided to be a tattoo artist when you had very little experience drawing to begin with?

Yeah, yeah, no, I didn't have really any art experience. I liked art and I feel like I had an aesthetic, and I had studied art history, so I had an academic understanding of art and breaking it down, but I didn't draw or create visual art. At that point when I decided I wanted to do it, I got that knowledge. I didn't start tattooing people without being able to make art. I started taking coursework and drawing all the time and just put — I put the hours in. But it is like a little unnerving talking to every tattooer I know, 'cause they're all like, yeah, I've been drawing since I was two years old. And it's like I did not draw until I was twenty, and maybe like twenty six, twenty seven I started drawing.

Wow. Well that's really reassuring for me.

No, I meant like for me feeling like I'm so new.

So where I was gonna take this was you said being a beginner again in a stage in life where most of your friends are becoming experts. And that line hit really hard because I think that is where — we hear there's so much noise and you have to kind of sift through the noise. But I think the noise that gets to me is the noise of the people who I feel have identified a direction that they're ready to run with. And that's something that has taken me a long time to get to. In fact, there's a lot of change happening in my life, in my world. And one of the changes that will take place in some time in the future is I'm gonna shave my head. And the thing that sort of catalyzed the long hair was an analogy for where I was in my life, where I wanted to allow my life to sort of take shape without influencing it in any direction. So instead of me getting a haircut and forcing me to have a mullet or a bowl cut, which I would never — why would I get a bowl cut — but instead of forcing some sort of aesthetic direction, just letting it happen organically.

Yeah. I'm in a bit of a different place where I'm ready to dive headfirst and chase something. I don't know exactly what it is, but it's really jarring when it seems like everyone in the world around me who's 30-some years old is like, no, I've been kicking ass in this job for 10 years, I'm ready to do it. Meanwhile, I've been working just shy of 10 years out of college, and I just had the conversation with more or less my boss, one of my clients, today, and I said, I am no longer doing this.

Yeah. That is jarring. That's very, very difficult.

And you said that starting over period was characterized by a lot of insecurity, comparison, embarrassment, and feelings of inadequacy.

Yeah. I feel like those are the best ways to describe kind of this ongoing wrestle that I'm having.

Yeah. Yeah. What were some of the ways that you were able to combat that and move through that?

Yeah. I'm really tempted to pivot and start talking about hair.

Do you want to take a tangent?

Not yet. Maybe. I love tangents, so we'll find our way back on track. 'Cause I can see what you would look like with short hair because the headphones are pulling your hair back.

True. And I feel like — yeah, we're going on a tangent now, I know you don't want to, but it's okay, we'll get back on track. I mean, I feel like hair is something that you carry with you on your journey, right, as you're changing and growing and doing whatever, but then it's also one part of your body that you can completely remove and move forward without, and it's something that affects how people see you and judge you so much, you know? It's one of the few things we can dramatically change about our appearance aside from getting tattoos.

Sure. That really is like a fresh start, like new me kinda vibe. So I think that's cool. I used to have long hair as well and I shaved it bald maybe like a year and a half ago.

From the long hair? Yeah, from like shoulder length. It feels really good.

I bet. 'Cause I was debating, do I wanna get it trimmed to a style or do I wanna just shave it? And the reason why I've decided on shaving is 'cause I don't know if there'll ever be another time in my life where the contrast will be so stark. From shoulder length, it's curly, so when it's wet it feels like it's touching my ass. I was at a swimming pool a couple of weekends ago and I was like, this feels really fucking long.

Yeah. To nothing. Like a centimeter or whatever. It's so good.

Just go all the way bald. If you're that short, it just feels nice when it's bald.

Yeah. Well like bald bald?

Yeah, yeah. Get like a face razor and take it over your head. You're so close. You're never gonna experience that again. You might as well go for it.

Yeah, maybe. I'll think about it. I like the idea of a buzz.

Yeah. But anyway, I think one important thing for me was reframing this idea — we think that when we're adults we can no longer learn things, right? We're all like, yeah, kids are so good at absorbing knowledge, their brains are like little sponges. But I think, sure, that's probably true, but when you're an adult, you have a level of discipline and access to resources and all these other things that kids don't have. And I would give up all my little neuroplasticity as a child to have an ounce of that — I'm gonna sit down every day and do the same thing until I get good at it, you know? So I think it's good to focus on those advantages when you're trying to transition to something new as an adult, and not lean into the kind of learned helplessness of, I'm too new to learn this because everyone my age who's doing it is already really, really good. You think about those 18 year old saxophone players or violinists that are masters, and maybe this is because they're young, but they've only been studying like five or six years. You can become an expert at something if you are really dedicated to it, if you find the right resources, you create the right space for yourself. So we have lifetimes within our lifetime to become experts and then change fields and become experts again. We just gotta keep trying.

It's so true. And the whole concept of rebirth and starting over has come up a lot lately. And it's something where I feel grateful that I have a bit of a higher tolerance for rebirth than your average person, because there have been multiple times where I've taken a step away from basically everything in my life. Some of it maybe was my choice, some of it wasn't. But I feel grateful that I feel comfortable with that. And we live in a world where it seems highly discouraged to take a step away from work, to switch from a white collar to a blue collar career — which we can get into that framing, and have a probably lengthy conversation because I don't necessarily love that framing — but the point is there's a lot of discouragement of making a pivot in your career. I think there's a lot more encouragement of persevering and continuing on this path that is known. But it's so true, we do have so many lifetimes where we can really explore anything that we want. Why not go around and play and think, all right, for the next however long I'm gonna experiment with this.

Yeah. And I think that mentality of I need to work my way up in one specific career is almost a remnant of the industrialization era, and it's not relevant to the modern era that we live in. And I think the people I see who are doing that, who aren't pivoting, are really suffering right now. And the people who are really thriving are people in tech who change their job every year and are just climbing up this pay scale — not that I think that has other problems and all of that, but —

Well I think too, the driving force behind us wanting to persevere is — who is creating the narrative that you should not pivot? It's the people who have incentives for you to continue to work at the job.

Yeah. It's expensive to manage employee turnover.

Exactly. It's a lot easier to say, no, you're only worth a hundred thousand dollars a year, you're not worth any more than that. That's a lot of money. That's a good, low amount of money. You're worth two hundred K, that's a lot of money, you're worth that much money, but no more, you should continue here, otherwise you're gonna lose everything.

Yeah. I don't meet many people who have pivoted and it's been worse.

Yeah. Yeah. It's also like the resume gap — what I would call the resume gap myth — I feel like growing up people always said, don't not have a job for like six months 'cause you're gonna have a gap, how you gonna explain that. And it's like every time I've taken a year off, six months off, and come back, I've come back to a better job, a higher pay, a better position. It's crazy.

You can explain to someone what you did for those six months, but don't just do nothing — or do nothing, who gives a fuck, it doesn't matter.

Yeah, yeah. Someone I interviewed — actually I think I interviewed him a while ago, but I've just been editing his podcast — he was talking about how he took a couple years off. Civil engineer, took some time off and did the three trails that are backpacking trails north to south through America. And he said when he went into his interviews and was back on the horse, if there's anyone who didn't resonate with his time off, it was an easy choice for him to say, you don't resonate with that, you're not the type of company I want to work for, you're not the boss I want to have.

Absolutely. Also works in that favor.

Yeah. Totally. I've been having that conversation with a friend a lot lately, of like, should I put this out into the internet, into the world? What if it affects future job prospects? And it's like that idea of self selection as well — you're interviewing the company as well, and you want someone who's gonna align with your values. And if you're afraid of authentically expressing yourself because they're gonna judge you negatively, then why would you want to work for someone who doesn't like your authentic self, right?

100%. Well I think — and this is a good transition to another point I wanted to talk to you about, which is this idea of authentic self — but to take it a little bit more practically, doing work but not being attached to the outcome of the work. You talked a little bit about your journey where we're obsessed with metrics — you said not requiring every action to produce a visible reward in order for it to be worthwhile. This concept of ROI — every single decision, because of the internet and computation, we're able to understand: if we put X dollars into this ad, we're going to see X revenue, this is what our funnel looks like. You have all these metrics and all this data, and so it's so easy for us to be blinded by that and think too much about what's the ROI behind this decision. But talk to me about how you frame things up, not based on ROI, but based on — I don't know — whatever it is that you care about.

Yeah, yeah, totally. It's such a trap, I think, in our world where I wear the biomonitor that gives me a score every time I wake up on how I slept. It makes our motivations so focused on achieving some goal, and then that makes us disappointed when we don't hit those goals. And that's fine if you're doing like a six month evaluation of did I do what I wanted to do. But when you're doing that like 10, 20 times a day of I failed, I succeeded, I failed, I succeeded, you're just emotionally going to be all over the place. And I think what's helped me, especially when you're restarting something — because when you're restarting a career or doing something new, then you're getting that feedback mechanism twenty times a day and you're failing twenty times a day — I think sort of like the Hindu concept of Dharma, I guess, is one way of putting it, where you just have a role in the world that you're supposed to be doing and you just do it because that's what you do. Or in Buddhism they talk about acting without seeking rewards for your actions. I think both those ideas are really helpful in the sense of you just decide that you want to be someone or do something, and then you just do that, and the doing itself is the reward. And it doesn't matter if you do it well, it doesn't matter if you do it poorly, 'cause you're just solid in that identity of, this is me. And I think getting to that point is really good just for your emotional health, and allows you to be sustainable over time.

Hundred percent. What were some practices that you employed while you were just initially starting your tattoo career to help encourage that behavior and mindset of, I'm doing it for the art, doing it for the work, not doing it for the result? And what might other people be able to practice on a small scale before they are able to fully adopt that mentality in everything they do?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think one thing — I don't know if this is a practice, but the philosophical underpinnings of that, which for me is like Thich Nhat Hanh and Eckhart Tolle. One of my favorite books is The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching that Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, and A New Earth or The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. Going back to those books honestly and just rereading that philosophy as I was going was really helpful. And those books could be anything for anyone else, whatever you're taking inspiration from and kinda philosophically —

I try and think of practices other than that, and I'm like, but these are actually all evaluative practices. I journal every day and write down what I did in that day and what effects it had, and I overanalyze every piece I did, but that's actually putting me in the opposite direction. And that's also helpful, but maybe the net of this is that there's a balance. It's like — 'cause I tend to be a pretty critical person of myself, mostly of myself but also of others, and it doesn't come from a place of judgment, it comes from a place of optimizing for becoming the best. But when I'm looking back at a reel I post, or looking at an episode that I'm watching, I'm looking at what was the camera angle like. I don't really listen back to any episode in the past. But what I do do is every time someone texts me and says, hey, I just listened to that episode, I give them a call and say, okay, give me all your feedback — the good, the bad, and the ugly, I want everything. Most people shy away from the ugly, unfortunately, but I love that feedback mechanism. I want to learn, because I feel like the most growth comes from the failures, from the missed opportunities that now you're able to see how to turn into something beautiful and positive. So I think there's opportunity to look at what you're doing, learn from it, grow from it. But the objective maybe shouldn't be just some arbitrary North Star metric or hitting numbers. We were talking beforehand about Instagram, and how there's this optimizing for the algorithm, which obviously serves Meta and Instagram — not necessarily, I mean it can serve creators, but ultimately what is it about — it's about engagement, eyeballs, reach, and growth. But as a tattoo artist, if there's twenty thousand new followers that you gain on social media who are living halfway across the world and have zero intention of ever getting tattooed by you, what value do those twenty thousand followers serve in your life aside from a glamour metric? Is there value in that? I don't know.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that talking about it within the context of balance is a really good way of framing it, because I think it is like our internal drives for success, along with all these tools we have, lean us — regardless of your philosophy and your beliefs — in that direction of analysis, performance. So how do you counterbalance it? As you're talking, I'm like, okay, there are things that come to mind. I think one thing is whatever allows you to turn that switch off at the end of the day. It's having a dedicated time for analysis and then having a time to let that analysis go. And I think journaling actually serves that purpose for me, where when I can have a dedicated analytical time — and this is actually from cognitive behavioral therapy, you have a scheduled panic time where you're like, alright, this is the half an hour where I'm just gonna sit down and write down all the shitty things I did in that tattoo today, or all the ways I failed that I need to fix next time — and because you have that record, you don't need to be ruminating on that when you're going to sleep, when you get home, when you're cooking dinner. So I think journaling is helpful in that sense. I think exercise and just physical movement is really helpful too, especially with tattooing — I think there's a nervous system buildup of stress and anxiety that happens when you're sitting with someone who's going through a difficult experience or a lot of pain, and I think that accumulates within you, and just having some physical release is really cathartic in that sense.

Absolutely. Yeah, a little bit of a tangent, but you mentioned Buddhism philosophy — can you just share a little bit of your background into your belief system, what your beliefs are, and how you came to the model in which you work today?

Yeah, yeah. Ooh, that's a little bit of a tricky one. I grew up going to Christian church, I guess, and when I was maybe ten or eleven, my parents were like, do you guys like this? And we were like, no, and they were like, we don't like it either, so let's stop. And then I was a pretty hardcore atheist, I think, from that period until probably my early twenties.

Which is the time to be an atheist.

Yeah, that was my exact journey too — you start with Christianity and then you go to atheism in your twenties.

And I think we go to atheism because we see the harms that institutionalized religion have done to the world, right — you can't deny that, they did some fucked up stuff and we don't want to do that anymore. There's a lot of patriarchy within it, a lot of colonialism within it. So I think at that point in my life — and in many people's lives — you kind of also realize we don't understand everything that's happening. The history of humanity has been a history of discovering what we didn't know in the past. So there's undoubtedly things about, whether it's energy or an afterlife or whatever it may be, we don't know it all. So you start asking, alright, what is that about? And I think at that point I started reading more about Buddhism. And one thing I learned is Buddhism has its own institutional history, and it's done its own fucked up things, and it has its own mechanisms of controlling people, and I think that kinda led me to adopt a more modern philosophy where I've pulled a lot of tenets from Buddhism into my personal life, my practice, my meditation practice, all that stuff, but I don't necessarily subscribe to any specific school or lineage.

Understood. I feel like there's a — yeah, the draw to atheism is not anything within atheism, it's the rejection of religion and institutions and organized religion. But I think once you get over the hump and you realize, okay, there's problems with atheism too — just because I would not consider myself an atheist, even though I don't tend to believe in the Judeo-Christian God, and certainly wouldn't consider myself a Christian — I think the natural trajectory is, okay, now let's figure out what I actually believe. And that's where I think the beauty lies, is where you've been able to shun the things and reject the things that didn't resonate with you, but now you're welcome and you open up to and accept things that do resonate with you.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's kinda like — I feel like there's a saying in Buddhism that's like, don't mistake the moon for the finger pointing at the moon, or don't mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon. And I feel like that's a really nice way of thinking about it, where you look at any teaching or something someone's telling you and try and see what it's indicating, and don't get too caught up on who the teacher is and what else they're telling you. Every idea is like a spark that can either catch some fire in you, or maybe it just dies out, or maybe it needs to be doused. Add your own level of analysis and your own understanding, and contextualize it within how you see the world and what your experiences have been, and hopefully you can pull some learning out of that, as opposed to just blindly, dogmatically accepting things.

Yeah. Yeah. I think curiosity plays a pretty big role in that too.

Yeah. Would you consider yourself a curious person?

Yeah, I would say I'm a curious person. Do you think you've always been that way?

I think so. I think I've always wanted to experience a lot of different things. Maybe less in the sense of an engineer's curiosity of wanting to pull everything apart and see how it works — I've always wanted to live an examined life and have interesting experiences and stuff like that. I know, I'm curious, I guess.

I would consider myself very curious, and the more that I meet people, those who are curious seem to be the ones that intrigue me the most.

Yeah. There's something to it.

I want to talk a little bit, shift gears back into this concept of finding purpose you shared a little bit about. You mentioned how you said, I found that having a stronger sense of purpose has led to a huge natural alignment in life. And I feel like that's something where I almost think of it the other way, or have thought of it the other way, where in order for me to find my purpose, I must understand alignment with self. And you kind of framed it the other way — that purpose is what drives alignment, if that's making sense.

Yeah, so are you saying you need to find alignment and then purpose comes, versus finding purpose and then alignment?

Exactly. And you touch on this a little bit too, down the line, around identity, and how you do not seek to find your identity — instead you just try to figure out a more truer version of yourself, and then that is what comes from that is your identity. And I think identity is kind of like a buzzword nowadays, and everything is about find your identity, and authentic is too, and everyone's like, live authentically.

It's like finding an identity has become an identity.

Yeah. Exactly. And I think that's something that I'm sort of intoxicated by the idea of, self discovery and fucking off to a foreign country and just exploring. But having done that a couple of times, I've found that that doesn't necessarily just open up a can of worms into who you are — like it may open a can of worms, but it raises a lot of questions, maybe more questions than it actually answers. So how do you think about your identity? How do you think about moving through the world authentically? And how does that tie into everything that you do?

Yeah. Yeah. Identity — I think my journey with identity has been almost like remedial, in the sense that I spent most of my young life really striving to build a resume and look really good on paper and be impressive to other people, and I didn't spend a lot of time reflecting on who I wanted to be and what would make me happy and what it meant for me to show up authentically in the world. And I think meeting my wife really changed that for me — she's a creative nonfiction writer, shares her personal story really beautifully and powerfully, and that connects with a lot of people. And it kind of made me realize how, no matter how intellectually engineered my personal story was for the purpose of impressing others, it never connected with people in the same way as just a raw telling of her life story to others. I just don't think people respond to that overtly intellectualized personal narrative, because it's trying to be impressive as opposed to trying to be human and real, and people resonate with things that are real, 'cause we're all living our own real lives, even if our internal lives are always real even if our external lives aren't, right?

What do you mean by that?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think we create these personas in the world, especially in a world that's so dominated by social media and having a personal brand and all this stuff, that aren't necessarily authentic to us because we want to achieve certain things or impress certain people. And I think when you really start achieving things and impressing people is when you stop trying to do that and you start being more authentically just who you are — which I think includes the shiny, cool, smart aspects of yourself, and also the more raw, anxiety-inducing, painful parts of yourself.

Which all ties back to doing things not for the result, but doing it for the work itself.

Exactly. And it's like — for me, not having a resume anymore has been a big thing for that, because with tattooing I don't need to convince someone what I can do by talking about it. You can just look at what I do, and that's just what I do, and you can like that or not like that. Because I feel like so much of my professional life was, I have all these experiences, I know how to do things, but I'm really — I go into an interview and I'm gonna try and explain to you what I can do, but I'm also trying to convince myself I can do it, and it's maybe stretching in certain ways.

Yeah, all of that, like they say show not tell, right, in any kind of application or whatever, and you gotta do that with yourself as well — show yourself who you are, as opposed to just telling yourself who you are and trying to convince yourself of something. When something is really true, you don't need to talk about it too much, it's just there.

I feel like this is a beautiful segue to the shift from Peace Corps and doing more structured work with the express and explicit intention of helping people, versus shifting to tattooing. And correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that big shift happened partly when you realized the people who have influenced you the most were not people who organized a massive nonprofit initiative with the express intention of helping a marginalized class or whatever — it was the people who moved through life in a way that encouraged you and showed you there's actually a completely different way of doing things.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think my motivation for getting into the Peace Corps and doing nonprofit work after — and I'll preface it by saying I think the Peace Corps is a great organization, I think nonprofit work is very well intended and effective a lot of the time — but my intention in it was always to have some effect on the world and on the people that we were working with. But what I found is the only real way you can affect people is by setting an example for them. We don't go to a training and then come back home and change who we are. We hang out with someone who is doing what we want to be doing, and we come home and we're like, how do I become more like that person? Or we have a really in-depth conversation with someone about our lives and their lives, and we kinda change that way. But you can't teach or orchestrate that kind of change, you need to inspire that kind of change. And I think a lot of social change programs that are more focused on helping people in that way fall short, because they don't have that degree of inspiration for people. And I feel like careers where you're able to have a lot of one-on-one interaction, sit with people, and then also help them realize a personal change — like a tattoo — give you that potential in a different way. And I've found that to be really impactful.

Yeah, that reminds me of a quote I just read in that book that's sitting over there, which is — I'm paraphrasing — but something around, the effect you have in the world can be measured by the influence you create, or by the influence that you have, which is, if you want to impact people, you can't measure that, it's not exactly quantifiable. Even if you start a company and there's the value of the company itself — did it leave a lasting impact on people, how many people were actually affected and to what extent were they affected and impacted. And I think that is one of the benefits of the internet, that it allows for influence and positively affecting others. But I felt it, because if I didn't get a tattoo by you, we wouldn't be sitting here right now having — honestly, many of the conversations we had, we were together for quite a long time, so we had a lot of deep conversations. But I feel very much that the impact you had on me is far greater than many people who go out and seek helping people, if you will. So it's almost like, if you want to impact people, stop trying to impact people, because if you're sitting here trying to change someone else, it's almost like a manipulation in a way — I want you to be different in this way. You can't change anyone else, right? Anyone in a relationship knows that — you can only work on yourself such that people see a better way of being themselves.

Beautiful. Yeah, I like that articulation. And it's something I think this is a point I want to continue talking about, because it's something that has been a bit of a challenge for me with regard to my family and my job. My sister, my dad, my grandfather, they're all doctors, which is great, and they're all people who clearly chose that profession because they want to help people. They have very, very caring, kind hearts deep down — doesn't mean they always make the right choices, they don't always get it right, we're human beings — however, it all comes from a place of, I want to help people, and this is a very tangible way that you can help people. And I think something I've wrestled with in my career is, am I choosing the jobs that are actually helping people, or am I choosing it for the wrong reason? When I first started in the professional world, I was thinking about how can I impact people — well, maybe if I start a company and we have a hundred thousand users, that's gonna have impact on people. And then I was like, is that really the way I want to impact people, by encouraging them to use my fucking app? I don't know if that's really how I want to impact people. And I was like, well, I don't know if I really want to impact people the way that my family has gone about it, because they're doing a very tangible way of helping people, but there's so many ways that you can help people. And then I realized — I've started to realize that there have been a few people who've come up to me and said, hey, I've really enjoyed — we've only had three conversations at the gym or whatever, but you've inspired me to do X. It's like, what, we've had three conversations. And that's kind of slowly made me realize that you can have impact in everything you do. You don't have to be a doctor to have impact, you don't have to work at the Peace Corps to have impact, you can do literally anything, and if you do it with the desire of showing yourself and helping, offering a helping hand, whatever the work is, it will positively affect someone else in the world.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. If you're in the world, then you're affecting the world in some way. And it is an interesting question to think of not how do I have an impact, but what impact do I really want to have, what lever do I want to pull. And from there you can get to how do I want to do it, but that's often secondary. When I think about tattooing, the impact I wanna have on people is connecting them more with their bodies and connecting them more with something that is personal and primal to them, and pulls them out of the conventional ways of interacting in our society, which are so subject to manipulation by corporations and all this stuff we're calling civilization that's kind of making us mentally unwell and disconnected from ourselves. I think separating yourself through tattooing is one way of doing that, and then also sitting with pain is one way of connecting with your embodied self. And it's not something that's gonna get a foundation funding it, being like, yeah, you're making a great change in the world, but I think it's a meaningful change, and I feel like it affects people's lives more than any of the other work that I've done in my life.

Hundred percent. I love the two things — the ritualistic part that you touched on about tattoos, and the pain. Because I've mentioned this book quite a few times, it's on the bookshelf over there — The Comfort Crisis. And there's so much danger that comes from our overemphasis of comfort in the world. You can tap a button on your phone and get groceries delivered in minutes. There's so much ease in how you move through life, but the problem is that's not really serving you. And I think choosing to sit through pain for an extended period of time is a hell of a choice, and every single one of your clients is willing to sit down for three, ten, maybe more hours of that — I think it's a little bit extreme, but consistent pain for hours and hours, just to reap the reward. The two days after I got my tattoo by you, I was walking on the trail behind this place, and there was a spray someone had tagged under a bridge that said, pain is temporary, swag is forever. And I was like, that is so apropos right now. It's silly, but I think it's so true — the pain that you experience in a tattoo or in the world is going to bring so much more good into your life, and the joy that I have from just looking down at my knee, or even just looking at it in the mirror if I'm at the gym — it's fucking ten out of ten times I would have chosen this, I would have done the same thing, every time.

Talk to me a little about the ritual piece, 'cause I think you think a little bit more deeply than I do about how we as a society have completely shifted away from the ritualistic components of life. There's no becoming-of-men, coming-of-age type ceremonies. How do tattoos kind of fit that space and serve that role in society?

Yeah, yeah. I think, like you said, we don't have these markers of different monumental occasions in our life, or becoming different people, and when we do, they also don't require sacrifice or pain or challenge in the ways that they might have. And I think because of that we don't give ourselves the internal signals that allow us to make those changes really concrete for ourselves, and therefore we go through these different stages of being in different places and different mindsets, and none of them stick, and we kinda have this crisis of identity as we're growing up. I feel like when you meet people who are really emotionally grounded and have a really strong sense of self, they've often had different trials in their lives that have brought them to that place. And I'm not saying tattooing is just fabricating trials so that we can be someone we want to be — maybe it is — but I think there's power in making an intentional decision to make a concrete change in your life or your physical appearance and then seeing that through, and having a difficult journey of seeing that through and investing in it. And when you have embodied that change and gone through that experience, it doesn't feel like a light, quick, easy decision — it's like anything in life is as sacred and as important as we let it be, and carries the seriousness that we give it. So I think tattooing as a ritual practice is just one of potentially several powerful ways to embody a change and really feel a sense of certainty and gravitas within an identity or life that we've chosen.

Yeah. And I think even if it is fabricated, right, there's still value in that.

Right. I've asked a lot of people about, how do you listen to your intuition, how do you become more attuned to your gut. And time and time again, the answer is just through little choices — if you go to the park and, rather than logic-ing should I go left or go right, you just follow where do I feel drawn. I think it's the same thing — when you're faced with a choice where you can either take the easy route that's gonna lead to a harder long term decision, or the harder route that in the long run is gonna yield a more positive result, because you have endured the pain of a tattoo, or the fabrication of a ritualistic event, it enables and sets you up to appreciate and accept the slightly harder choice, because you've already done it, you've already done the hard thing, you have practice with that. So I think there's a lot of value in that, even if it is fabricated.

Right. Yeah, and going along that vein, it's also — I really like the sort of dichotomy of motivations of saying, you're in life, you're either motivated by fear or love, and every choice you make, you're making it based on one of those base emotions. And when you get in the practice of not making fear based decisions, I feel like a lot more comes into alignment. And I can definitely see that as I consult with people and talk to them about their motivations — you can get a sense of where people are coming from, and by far the people who have good experiences, who have the tattoo experiences that they want, are those that are really not feeling as strong a sense of fear and uncertainty as they go into that decision making process.

And you mentioned intuition earlier, which reminded me of something I heard the other day, talking about the meaning behind tattoos, and I thought it was a really cool way of phrasing it — that all tattoos have meaning, even if they don't have visual imagery that connects with you, because we have this intuitive aesthetic that we've developed since we were kids, and we look at something and we don't necessarily know why we think that looks cool, but there's something deeper in our lizard brain that's like, that abstract art is awesome, and in a way that sense of taste is more uniquely us than any cartoon or something else that has a really clear direct meaning. So even if something isn't an image that's meaningful, the fact that you intuitively respond to it is like an imprint of your personality and preference and taste and self, which I thought was a cool way of describing it.

Absolutely. I like that. It holds so true for me too, because there's a couple of tattoos that I have that, when I chose to get them, there was no meaning behind them other than, that looks cool. But there's been meaning that has come from those tattoos after having them, because I didn't unearth the meaning at the time of the decision point, I unearthed the meaning over time through the experience of moving through life with the tattoo.

Yeah. I think there's a lot of power in that. And there's also, on the note of our lizard brain seeing something and not knowing why we like it, there's a RuPaul quote where they say, when you see something that you like in someone else, that's already part of you, that's already part of your identity and you appreciate it, you just may not have decided to adopt it yet.

Yeah. Totally. Tattoos and nose piercings were the first things that come to mind when I heard that. I always saw Jack Dorsey, and — shame on me, blanking on his name — Odell Beckham Jr., those two, they stood out, and I was like, they have cool ass nose rings. I love their nose rings. They're doing very different things in their careers, very starkly different individuals, but I saw it in them and I was like, that's badass. And then I reflected on that quote I heard years and years ago, and I was like, fuck, that means I want it, I should go and get it. And tattoos are the same thing — I always thought I love them on other people, I don't know if I want them on me. And then eventually I was dating someone, and she's like, I think you should get a tattoo, we'll do it on your birthday, I'll help you, I'll hold your hand through it, and I'm like, alright, let's do it. And then from that point I'm like, what the fuck was I thinking — they're good on someone else, but not me. If I like it on someone else, I probably like it on me. There you go. It's just like the little fear still on your back of your mind, will people judge me, is it gonna be okay for my work and all that stuff, and none of that's ever true. And it's the self selecting thing we talked about earlier — if it is true, then maybe you just don't want to be around those people.

Very true. Talk to me a little bit about fear — this dichotomy between fear and love — have you always moved through life orienting yourself towards love, or did it take some work to get to that point?

Yeah, I think that is so powerful to me, 'cause for most of my young life I was very fear motivated, I had a lot of anxiety, a lot of social anxiety, and I think everything I was doing was out of some fear or another. And I read that quote — I think it's been said many times by many different people — but I think it was on an Eric Clapton poster or something in my wife's friend's basement before we got married, and I was like, whoa, that is exactly — and I could very clearly go through all the different things I was doing in my life and be like, that's fear, that's love, that's fear, that's love. And from that moment, I wrote that quote into our wedding vows. It's been a really guiding principle for me, and it clarifies so many things for me. I have "fear is the mind killer" tattooed on my leg — I also like Dune and sci-fi and all that stuff. But it's always led me in the right direction of, am I just not doing this 'cause I'm afraid, and if so, you just gotta do it.

Yeah. And I think just that framing is really helpful. Even though I don't like to think of myself as a very fear driven person, there are definitely a lot of things that I'm afraid of. Like I used to have a roller coaster fear, and then I basically got bullied out of that — my friend Brett was just talking shit to me, and I was like, you know what, fuck it, I'm gonna do it. And frankly, time has proven, time and time again, bullying me does help.

Yeah, yeah, it's a normal part of the human experience. And I think there's like physical fear and then there's deeper emotional fears. I'm afraid of heights, I'm probably not gonna go skydiving. I've made peace with that, and I don't think that's really gonna affect my life. But if I stopped going out in public because I'm afraid of judgment, I think that's a different kind of fear that I need to get over.

That's not necessarily the case with me, just to give you an example. Bert Kreischer was interviewed on Oprah, and Oprah asked him what he was most terrified of before the show, and he's like, skydiving, easily. She's like, okay, thank you for sharing. The next day, picks him up in a limo — hey, we're going somewhere — and he goes, where are we going, and Oprah goes, we're going skydiving. And for that, I think the people who need to skydive the most are the people who are most afraid of it.

Yeah, so maybe just planting a seed — I love skydiving.

It's funny you mention that too, because that's actually where my head went — that was not something that really ever scared me, frankly, skydiving. And I think that's where the logical part of my brain comes in — my barber, love her, haven't seen her in ages, but I used to go to her quite often when I had shorter hair, and she found out I was going to Vegas, and she went to Vegas recently, and she's like, would highly recommend you skydive, there's great Groupons, just do your research and make sure you go to a place that has a low fatality rate, whatever the metric is for a slightly less severe consequence.

Yeah. Do your due diligence.

So I did my due diligence, and I found a place that was very reputable, a good deal, and I shot it out to my friends I was going to Vegas with, and they were like, fuck yeah, I'm down. And for some reason it didn't really scare me — even when we got to the point of jumping, I was just so excited for it. But that isn't to say I'm not afraid of anything — there's a lot of shit that the layperson would think is much less terrifying that I'm afraid of. Like I'm afraid of selling my car.

Right. That's a silly thing to be afraid of.

Yeah, no, it's a good point. And maybe my separating it into physical and emotional isn't the right way of thinking about it — maybe it's just that we all have different fears that are more serious to us for different reasons.

Yeah, we need to — maybe skydiving is the more important fear to get over for some people. For me, I don't think it is. But if it's affecting your life negatively —

Right. If we lived in the sky and needed to go grocery shopping on the earth, and I was afraid of skydiving, then I'd be like, I gotta get over this.

That's a good way of putting it too, 'cause there's so many ways you can improve your life, so many opportunities for growth and bettering yourself, and you do have to be a little decisive about which areas am I gonna actually try and which areas am I not. And to your point, how often are you faced with the fear of heights, probably not that often, in the grand scheme of things, as opposed to if you truly have a deep seated fear of going out in public — that's every day, that's hard to avoid.

Yeah. Heard. Glad I'm glad you contextualized that a little more. I'm getting off on a tangent here.

I love it, I live for the tangents, though I think it's my responsibility to get back onto the railroad tracks. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, cool. Okay, speaking of railroad tracks, there's one thing I wanted to touch on that's a little more pragmatic — the notion of money. You have a lot of notes that I highlighted a bunch, about just the concept of moving away from trading time for money. And I feel like money has come up so much recently, and it's been something where I sort of initially peeled back the onion to recognize, alright, I have these money wounds, what's driving that. And now with the podcast and shifting away from software development, I'm like, what the fuck am I doing here. So can you just talk a little bit about what is your relationship with money, how do you view it in the work that you do?

Yeah. Yeah, it's like, I feel like in tattooing I've tried to separate the work from the money, and I think that's enabled me to move a lot quicker in the earlier stages of my career, because I was not trying to equate every single action to getting a certain amount of money. I was more thinking of it as, here's the work, I do the work — it's almost like I treated it more like a salary job, even though there was no salary, and I just go to work and I do the work. I intentionally set my rates and my policies and all that stuff, but I let the income come separately from, I worked five and a half hours, I need to have this exact amount of money. And that allowed me to pursue opportunities that I wouldn't have been able to pursue if I had been worried about whether I would be getting paid for those opportunities, or if I was spending this amount of time, am I being compensated for that amount of time. And because of that, I was able to more quickly align my general trajectory and career towards what I wanted to be doing, because I was just doing what I wanted to be doing, and then maybe I wasn't making as much money doing that at first, but I was getting the experience and building my portfolio in that direction. So I didn't spend three years doing tattoos that I didn't want to be doing because I knew I could sell them — and there were definitely tattoos like that. I could have made a lot more money earlier on doing what certain people wanted me to do — not to speak ill of anyone who wanted that — but especially fine lines, script, all that stuff, there's big demand for it. As an early tattoo artist, if you want a lot of experience, you can definitely find those clients. But I tried to focus my work more in geometric stuff and larger scale stuff, and made less money doing that initially, but now I'm pretty much exclusively doing stuff that I'm really excited about and that I love.

So is it fair to say you treat money more as an energetic exchange, as opposed to something that must be quantifiable, like perfectly tied one to one to value that I'm bringing to the world, monetary value I'm capturing? Am I understanding that correctly?

Yeah, yeah, I would say so. I mean — I don't even know if it's an energetic exchange in that sense. I think there's an energetic exchange in the sense of, when I work with someone, I would rather work with someone where there is a good energetic exchange and a tattoo and there's no money involved, than someone where there is not a good vibe between us but I'm getting paid a lot. My priority in working with someone is that they have a good experience, that they are positively changed in whatever way they want to be changed, and that they're happy with their tattoo — that's all that's going in my head when I'm working with someone. I set my prices and my policies, I go in a room, I set that, I make that what it is, and I do that so I don't have to think about it later on. And as long as I'm physically sustained and have food and shelter, then that part of the business is working just fine, and I'm over here doing the energetic exchange for the artwork side of things.

I see. It's something where, you know, maybe you wouldn't frame it as a necessary evil, but to a certain extent it's like a necessary evil — we obviously need it to be functioning members of operational reality of life. It's like, if you compare it to a Renaissance painter having a patron that pays your bills and feeds you so you paint, I think the clientele is the patron, and that's feeding me and nourishing me, and then I'm over here not thinking about that and trying to create artwork and allow people to get tattoos that they're psyched about.

That makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, you said money sustains the work but it's not the reason for the work.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I like that, 'cause I'm in a place now where I'm trying to figure out what are the monetization opportunities for this, if any, at least if any at my scale. Obviously there's monetization opportunities — even Spotify, if you get a certain number of downloads, they'll just feed you money. I'm not there yet. And so I'm in a weird place where I recognize that I need money in order to survive, but at the same time, this for me feels a lot more like art. It's much more about the intention behind the practice, and how can I deliver a product or an outcome that I am happy with, not an outcome that looks good on paper. And that in of itself, that concept of looking good on paper versus being what I want in practice — that's another big one that comes up a lot. You mentioned how, when you were starting your career, you were optimizing for the resume, the paper, everything must look good. But then when you get older, you realize, okay, there's people who want to see paper, obviously that matters if you're chasing that kind of route. But in the industries we're in, no one's looking at a fucking resume — now they might be looking at a portfolio, could be on Spotify, YouTube, Instagram, or a website, they wanna see the work. But yeah, how did you eventually evolve into what feels like a much more mature mindset around money that's not just maximization — because we live in a world of maximization, the reason why billionaires exist is because they're trying to capture as much value out of the world as possible. How did you evolve from a more corporate, traditional mindset to the mindset of, okay, money obviously serves a place in this world, but I'm gonna put it in a cubby where I feel like I can safely allocate my mental energy into that — I've set my prices, wipe my hands clean, I forget about it. How did you get there?

Yeah, it's a good question. I think sometimes I take my business background and degree for granted when I say that, 'cause as I say that I'm also like, I don't want to necessarily encourage artists to do that, because I know so many artists that just don't charge enough for their work, and they're starving, and they don't have that engine going, and therefore they don't have the energy to create more artwork. I don't mean to downplay the importance of supporting yourself. And I think if you want to grow as an artist, you need to set those policies and those rates such that you can pursue educational opportunities, you can take a week off and go into the woods and draw. If you're just working every day just to survive because you're like, it's about the art, it's not about the money, then you're not serving the art either — you're not investing enough in yourself to grow, and you're not giving yourself enough space to be creative, because you're up until three in the morning drawing every night, you get up at seven AM, you're working all day, you're just working yourself down and you're not gonna do anything new. You're just gonna be doing exactly what you know how to do, drilling it down until you burn out and stop.

Do you think the trope of a starving artist is a self-inflicted thing, where you have the choice as an artist to make it work, but you have to make the hard decisions and understand that setting a price you may feel uncomfortable with, that's higher than what other people are doing, is part of the process? Or do you think there's some people who —

I think it doesn't even necessarily need to be higher than what other people are doing. I think you need to have a business mindset about understanding what your expenses are, what time you have to work, and what your output is, and set your prices accordingly. I think it's like a logistical thing. At least in tattooing, market rates — my rates are probably below what other people doing similar work are in this market, but it's enough to sustain what I'm doing, and it's not like I'm trying to compete on that bargain level, but it's very much within that realm.

But I think you're saying you're comfortable with the prices you're charging, and that's what matters most. But part of that comfort is recognizing you're making enough to continue to sustain it, and part of the comfort is you're not just trying to maximize — you're not trying to optimize for as much revenue as possible. There's a bit of that balance there.

Yeah. Exactly. You find something that you find to be fair, and then you look at what you want to do in your life, and make sure that the amount you're working relative to the amount you're charging is enabling the way you want to live. So anyway, all that is just to say — have that business infrastructure set up, make it concrete, make it clear, and let that machine run, and then you can focus on the art. If you just focus on the art without any of that, then you are gonna burn out and the art's not gonna be served.

That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think that too — having a business background is something I take for granted in this endeavor too, because I love thinking about the business side of things, frankly, I love it, it's fun. But there's that level of pragmatism that is necessary in order for any endeavor to be worth your time and effort. But there's also that balance of, am I becoming too focused on the vanity metrics, too focused on the maximization of value capture and not focusing enough on the purpose.

Yeah. And it's also, you think about what you need to think about. I feel like I know a lot of artists who don't wanna make it about the business, they kinda think of business as a dirty word, and they don't set their prices well — but they think about money way more, they're always thinking about money 'cause they don't have enough money to support what they're doing. So it's like, if you really wanna be able to put something on the back burner and just let it run, set it up nicely, be fair but be realistic and pragmatic, and build a machine that runs on its own so that you can go and actually focus on the things you want to focus on. It's like if you think about the spectrum of never thinking about money and only thinking about money, at a certain point when you air too far towards never thinking about money, you just circle right back around to now all you're thinking about is money because you can't support your life.

Yeah, that's — when we were working in Liberia they used to say, money's not everything unless you don't have it. So that being said, you don't wanna have too much money and only be thinking about that either, but there's a healthy midpoint there, where you have enough, and you recognize that you have enough, and then your life's not about that anymore, and you can just go and focus on the things you want to do.

Yeah. And that's something we have to discover for ourselves, because there's a lot of noise in the world about earning more money, increasing your salary, climbing the corporate ladder, making sure you're fighting for the money that's yours, and all this stuff. And that isn't to take away from the importance of money and the role that it plays in being an actively contributing member of society, but it can become too much of the focus.

Yeah. I like this framing of not confusing the objective with the point. I get that earning an income can be an objective, right, but what's the point — is that the point of what we're doing here?

Exactly. What's it enabling? I feel like when I was a kid I used to play — like Age of Mythology or Age of Empires, did you ever play those games?

I did not.

I feel like it taught me a really good fundamental lesson about money, which is, if you accumulate resources but you don't use them to invest in infrastructure and buy things and have a purpose for it, then you get overrun by the other civilizations really quickly. So you always want to have a purpose in what you're earning, and then you wanna have it doing something that serves the actual goal you have, beyond just sitting in the bank and hoarding it.

I wish I played that game as a kid, it's really fun, I wish I could get it on my computer but I can't, because I have a Mac and Macs just don't play these.

Not even on Steam? If you sat down, I feel like you could figure it out.

I feel like that game would have served such an amazing role in my journey with money, because when I was a kid — I'll never forget this, and at the time I didn't realize what I was doing — I got a little jewelry box that was about six inches tall, four by four wide and deep, and it had three drawers: save, spend, and give. And a hundred percent of my money went in that save drawer. I would put a little bit into the give and throw it in church as a kid, but I never spent, I never gave, all I did was hoard. And that's a behavior that I'm really trying to practice differently now — in fact, I think this is a massive example of me trying to step away from that save, even taking this job, or leaving this job rather, it's a practice and exercise in me taking a step away from this hoarding mentality, because just like the game taught you, if you're not allocating your resources towards something good, you're doing harm, even if there aren't other civilizations attacking you.

Right, right. It's not quite as clear cut and objective as that, but there are, for all intents and purposes, other things that are kind of coming at you. And it comes back to the fear-love dichotomy as well — saving is obviously good and you need to do it, but are you saving because you're afraid you're gonna run out of money, or are you saving because you're building towards something that you really want? And I feel like with a lot of people it's just, hoard the resources because what if I lose my job or what if this or that happens — and you wanna have some money put away for that, of course, but it's not building towards what you love. So I think you wanna have money in all those drawers.

I love the drawer approach, but I wish I had that when I was a kid.

Well, it's so funny too, because I reflect on my financial upbringing, and very, very grateful that my dad provided me with a lot of information and education around investing. I opened up my first Vanguard account when I was like a child.

That's fucking awesome.

There's no denying that I am so grateful that I had a checkbook when I was a kid, I had a bank account, I started cutting lawns when I was really young, I tutored in college, I had a lot of jobs as a kid — waiting tables, stuff like that — and because of that, I was able to put money into Vanguard, put money in my bank account, and some of that money is serving me to this day, enabling what I'm doing as a thirty year old, from shit I made when I was a tot. It's amazing. At the same time, my relationship and understanding with money — a little bit of context is my dad grew up dirt poor, had nothing, so he wanted to instill financial security in his kids so that they would never have to endure that. Now the flip side of that is the hoarding mentality — there's a lot of fear that I think he embedded into my financial understanding that was from his childhood, that he did not ever want me, my sister, or my family to experience again. And so, while I'm grateful for the financial literacy I have, there's also a bit of a disservice there, where on a macro scale, it didn't provide me with an understanding of what is my relationship with money, what's the value in donating and giving. It was just, okay, I'm gonna save a shit ton of money.

Yeah. It's interesting what we adopt from our parents, and I think about this a lot. I was talking to my mom about it the other day, where sometimes I want to be like, yeah, you didn't teach me this, you didn't teach me this — but I think they taught me so much also, and the obstacles that they were overcoming when they were growing up were huge, insurmountable obstacles, and because of that, I started at the end of that journey, and while I had these other things I needed to learn and teach myself, that's all just built up on this basis of what they did teach me. So I was thinking about it the other day, like, yeah, they taught me more than I've learned on my own, and maybe I learned other things, and now I'm trying to go back and also help them learn those things that I was able to build on.

Which is such a difficult task to undertake, because I love my parents, very grateful for them, they still see me as a kid, they still see me as their child, which I get, of course. But there's also things where I feel like I'm ahead of them in certain parts of life, and it's really hard to step from that role of child into somewhat of a teaching role — not that I think there's a lot I can teach my parents, but there are things that I've endured that they haven't, and vice versa.

Yeah, of course. When you were tattooing me, you mentioned something that stuck with me about how it really stemmed from grace, I think, towards the older generations — you were saying how we have so much more exposure to all the opportunities that the world can have, and they just didn't. So it's not surprising that we, as twenty-some year olds, even younger, want the world, because we see that we can have the world, whereas for them, they didn't have that, quite as broad of a vision, they didn't see that they could really reach for the moon. And that in of itself is a double-edged sword — there's so much opportunity for us to go and attack whatever it is that we want, but there's something beautiful about knowing that what you can have is right in front of you.

Yeah. I don't think there wasn't really much of a point there, I just think there's something that stuck out to me that I really like — it's just stuck with me since we were — was that a month or two ago?

Yeah. No, it's the context of the world and life and what you can achieve and what's possible has just changed so much.

Yeah. Hundred percent of that. I wanna talk to you about work, because you said that work does not have to be separate from life — you work pretty constantly, but you do not experience that as sacrificing life for work. So what is your relationship with work, and how did you get to that point where you see it that way?

Yeah, I mean, I think the only reason I see it that way is because my work is something I'm passionate about, and it's what I would be doing if I weren't working — I just have to get paid for my hobby. So I don't wanna sound like, everyone make your work your life. But I think once you kind of align with something that feels purposeful for you, then you can get rid of that separation of work and life and just kinda make it all one. I think with art as well, we take inspiration from the things we're doing and the places we're going and the people we're with and how we connect with people and conversations we have. So I feel like it all kind of feeds into itself.

Do you think that perhaps the reason why we feel like we should separate work and play is because so much work fucking sucks?

Yeah, exactly.

So it's like, if you can choose and create your own life, there should be an integration of work and play. But if you're working a miserable career at a desk where you want to bang your head against a sharp object or a corner — because that's what my problem is, when that corner over there is very tempting when I hop in a call with some engineers, I'm like, fuck, what am I doing here. But with this, it's like, yeah, I'd love to, this is not hard.

Exactly. I'm not — and I think that's the clarification of, I'm not saying make your work your life, I'm saying make your life your work — like, make what you want to be doing in your life, find a way to get paid doing it, which is harder to do than it is to say, I know that, but it feels good when you do it. But that should be the goal of everyone, and that's fundamentally the goal of the podcast here, right — if I love talking to people, I'm gonna quit my software job, which I fucking did today, and I'm gonna figure out how to make this work. Who knows what that's gonna look like, but I would love for that.

Say that again — don't make your work your life, make your life your work.

Yeah, exactly. And I think it's more possible right now than it has ever been in history — all these middlemen that were owning properties, so you had to go through them for your studio or your massage studio or whatever you want to do, all these disseminators, like publishing houses and producers, all these jobs have been democratized with the internet and are continuing to be made so as all the new stuff is coming out. So you have a unique opportunity to be a one person publishing house, one person record producer — I mean we're sitting here in your home studio. And maybe that opportunity doesn't last forever, maybe AI comes and bulldozes all the small creators, but hey, enjoy this little slice of history while we're in it and go do what you do.

Yeah, that is — I'm fired up right now, 'cause that is exactly my thesis right now, that is fundamentally my mindset and what made me want to shift away from a, for all intents and purposes, antiquated career. Especially — I also am a bit grateful that AI has fundamentally disrupted software engineering more than almost any other career at this point in time. Now, that's gonna change, I'm sure it's gonna fundamentally disrupt a lot of careers out there, but I am to a certain extent grateful that it did affect my career, because if it didn't, I'd probably still be sitting down unhappy. But I do think there's this golden ticket opportunity that we have, where the democratization of any opportunity — everything is crazy, the startup cost — like someone was sitting right there who started his own business, I think he spent four hundred dollars total out of pocket.

No, that's nothing, I spent less than that on this.

Probably to this day I've spent a total of four hundred dollars, and this is brand new — maybe a four hundred dollar microphone in of itself.

I think I got it for one fifty on Facebook.

So there's all these golden opportunities to save and not spend a whole lot of money, and go chase it. But that is fundamentally the goal here — how can we encourage more people and help more people find a way to make their life their work, and enjoy it and appreciate it, and know you gotta make money from it, but not feel like it's the bane of your existence.

Yeah. And going back to the saving, though — invest in your business. I feel like what moves a lot of people from a hobby to a business is the fact that you do put like an extra four hundred dollars into it, as opposed to keeping it as a super bare bones operation. It's not always necessary, but with a lot of things that's gonna move you a lot faster. And you obviously don't want to spend money you don't have or can't afford, but as soon as I started seeing tattooing income coming in, that went into buying better equipment, better machines, better photography equipment, and investing in marketing. A lot of people, especially artists, don't pay for marketing — there's no business that is out there functioning not paying for marketing. Just find effective ways to spend that money, but it's also good, if you want to move into a career, to not shy away — because I'm not doing this with the support of an organization, I shouldn't invest anything in it — it's like, invest everything you can if you want it to take off.

That's what I needed to hear. I appreciate you saying that. I'm sure others, but I know I needed to hear that a lot — which ties back to that same save, spend, give mentality of hoarding, hoarding, hoarding. Now, obviously, be intentional with where you're allocating those dollars, but there's opportunity there.

You said marketing — what sort of marketing? I just assumed that you post on Instagram and people just flock. What does the marketing look like?

Yeah, I mean, right now I do Instagram ads and Google ads.

You do? Okay.

It works. And honestly, I do Instagram ads — like, I don't feel great about giving money to Meta, but I don't wanna make reels, I don't wanna spend my life making reels, I don't make reels at all. And maybe at some point when this comes out I'll be making reels, who knows, it always changes. But when you do that, it takes four or five hours to make a really nice reel that's gonna hit, and then you have to do that consistently a couple times a week, and maybe one in every ten or twenty is actually gonna hit the right algorithm and go far. And you can get that same reach by just giving a couple hundred bucks to Instagram. It sucks, but I pay for Instagram ads for that reason, so I can focus on only making the content I want to make, which is pretty much just carousel photos. I love that, it's worth it to me. And at this point I can also equate any ad spend to revenue, so it financially makes sense — I could just be posting photos and have X fewer bookings, or I could do a couple hundred dollars in advertising and get a couple day bookings.

Which comes back to, there is value in being able to measure the ROI.

Right, exactly, it isn't to say that's a bad thing, but maintain focus on the objective before you go and aim for maximizing your ROI of some investment.

Exactly. And it's like the ROI stuff comes in more when you're talking about a direct marketing spend versus putting in your own labor, which you can essentially devalue infinitely — if I buy a hundred dollar ad, that's gonna be a hundred dollars no matter what. If I put an extra hour into doing something, even though I don't think it's gonna necessarily pay off, I haven't spent a hundred dollars, or I've wasted an hour, which is more acceptable to me.

Now we're just getting into the weeds. But I find myself thinking that way too, where I like to think of myself as a DIYer, and I think sometimes that becomes more of a crutch than it is a —

Yeah, for sure. It's like I still edit every single podcast myself, and I think that's really good for me right now, but I think there'll be a time where I have to bite the bullet and want someone else to take this on. I know what I'm looking for, I know what good editing is, it's hard to find good editors though, in my experience — I've tried so many times to outsource marketing stuff or social media stuff, and I've never found anyone who can approximate my voice in a way that I am willing to say, okay, go out and represent me publicly.

Heard. Just happened. Maybe if I hire a really expensive marketing firm — I haven't gone that route, but it's like, I think we often underestimate what we're actually good at, and I don't wanna get the freelance marketing world mad at me, but it's hard to find people that are gonna do that, especially when you get to a point of building an account to a couple thousand followers or something like that. Most freelance marketers haven't had that experience, so they don't necessarily know all the nuances, and they don't care about it as much as you care about it, because it's not their thing.

So anyway, I hope you find someone to edit your video someday.

Someday. We'll plant that seed. I don't think I need that right now.

Yeah. The thing I wanna kinda end on, which we've already touched on around identity and relationships — but since we're kinda talking about your voice and brand, talk to me a little bit about — you said you try not to focus too much on constructing an identity, a reputation, or personal brand, but you kind of feel that identity is something that is more of a byproduct. So I guess my question is, for those who recognize the value of a personal brand, or who want to move through the world authentically, what sort of advice or practices might you have for people like myself who are just getting started in our creative outlets, to continue to refine focus on self and identity and expression, without losing sight of the point and purpose behind our work?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I would kind of separate the idea of personal brand from personal values, because when we think about what is my brand, it's often how are people externally seeing me, whereas if you think about what are my values, it's what do I actually believe. And you wanna be on message with your values — if you really know what you believe, then everything you say is gonna revolve around those beliefs, and everything you do is gonna be in line with those beliefs, all your actions are aligned with how you want to show up in the world. And that can exist totally separate from a marketing strategy. So I think it's less — but if you're too focused on how are people seeing me, then it almost gets into that manipulative space of, how can I act differently so that people perceive me differently, and you're just doing some weird calculus there that comes off as inauthentic and doesn't necessarily get you where you want to go. But if you think about it as, who do I want to be, and then you just really unashamedly be that person, then you've created your personal brand — that's your brand, and it makes it a lot easier in that sense, and I think more effective and authentic.

Yeah. That checked out. Does that answer your question?

It does. I appreciate it. And the last thing I'm gonna ask you is, is there anything — it could be completely unrelated to anything we've talked about today or anything you've shared previously with me — is there anything that has been on your mind that you just want to share or get out, or have a conversation about?

Yeah. No, I think we hit on a lot of things that are personal to me. What's on my mind right now is just that we're renovating a new studio space, and there's two things for me that have taken up my entire mental energy. One is I've been learning to paint for the last year — and congratulations on the festival you're gonna be painting at, by the way.

Fuck yeah, yeah, in September, which I'm super excited about. And in the vein of being a beginner at something again — I posted my first painting, I've done a lot of paintings in the last year, but the first one I've shown anyone I posted today, and it's nerve-wracking, 'cause especially in the painting world, there's such good, amazing painters out there, and I'm like, is it okay to share.

But that was good stuff to share.

Yeah. And then we're renovating a new studio, which isn't even fun to discuss, it's just a million logistical things that are coming up. So that's what's been on my mind — it's kinda like logistics survival mode.

So where's the new studio, how can people find you, what's — share a little bit just about the more practical business stuff, where people can find out about you?

Totally, totally. So we're — I mean, we're called Found Tattoo Studio, @foundtattoostudio on Instagram, we'll have a website, I took it down a while ago, but I'm gonna bring it back up. My website's kyleshritattoo, my Instagram's @kyleshritattoo. We're in Fort Collins, Colorado. Hiring some new artists, check us out — if anyone's listening who is a tattoo artist local nearby, or if you want to come guest with us, or if you want to — we're gonna start doing art workshops, more community events, community drawing nights, lots of good community stuff. So I think part of the expansion is that we wanna be a broader art community than just a tattoo studio. So yeah, once we get through the renovation.

Will you be posting those events on your social media? Will I be able to find out about those?

Yeah, yeah, for sure, I'll put them on my social media. Once I have the website up, we'll have an event calendar.

I would love to go to some of those.

Yeah, I would love to have you. That'll be sweet.

Hell yeah. Thank you so much, I really appreciate the time. Just sitting down for quite a few hours in your tattoo studio was such an amazing experience — obviously very grateful for the art, but I think more so grateful for the conversations that we had. You're an inspiration for myself as I'm trying to get into a more creative space and figure out how can I do something that feels a lot more like art, but make it a job. I think we talked a lot about that today. But you clearly move through the world very authentically, it shines through in your work and just in your conversation and demeanor, and I'm truly grateful — I'm so happy that a friend of mine introduced me to you and pointed me in your direction, 'cause you mentioned something here where you said, you never really know which drawing, tattoo relationship, event, or opportunity will make the difference in the end. And I feel that way about it — it's cool that a tattoo can lead to a podcast, can lead to some art events, and who knows what else is on the horizon. But even if this is all that comes of it, what a fucking awesome opportunity.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me, it's been such a great experience to participate in this part of your life, and I'm excited to see what you do with your newfound freedom and all your travel and everything. So thank you.

Thank you. I'm stoked.