The one true God is chaos. That is the one altar I will bend the knee at.

An interview with multi-hyphenate artist Diogo Hausen

Hello dear readers,

Case Two of Vibes, Detectives Agency has just wrapped up (check it out here) and instead of moving right on to Case Three, today, I’m bringing you an interview with Diogo Hausen, my long-time creative collaborator, co-creator on all the various iterations of Vibes¹, the illustrator for all my covers, and the muse for Santi Abreau, the mystical Brazilian actor/acupuncturist/shaman half of the Vibes’ ghost hunting duo.

We talk creativity, Burning Man, and the primacy of friendship over conflict. I hope you enjoy.

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Alex and Diogo. Burning Man, 2018

[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]

A: Diogo, I want to do this a little bit as a retrospective of how Vibes, this thing we keep doing in so many different iterations and we can't escape from, came to be. I think since it's so integral to you and me as friends, do you remember the first time we met?

D: Uh. Vaguely, I think from what I remember—I’m not sure if it's me actually remembering it or if it's you telling me this is how we met— I was getting full body painted standing naked in the middle of the desert [At Burning Man, 2014].

A: Was that it? Did I just make that how Iz meets Santi and then we've reverse engineered that into how we met? All I remember is our camps were vaguely connected and I walked by, and you were like hot and naked. Maybe you were getting painted. Maybe you weren't. And I’m like, “who the fuck is this guy? Fuck this handsome asshole. I don't like him.”

D: I get that a lot.

A: Then we camped together next year. I remember I didn't know you all that well but you seemed to really get the whole Burning Man thing. You invited me to an Ecstatic Dance thing and I thought, well, I ought to give this a shot. We went together and we ate mushrooms and it was…baaad. Like, embarrassingly dumb and I was really worried that you were going to like this thing and we’d be stuck there. Like, they started by playing the Lion King song while everyone got naked, which I did make into night one of how Santi meets Iz.

D: Oh yeah, that was so stupid!

A: I remember you looked at me like, “let’s get the fuck out of here!” And we ran to our bikes and sped away right as our mushrooms hit.

D: Wow, it's so funny how this all seemed so clear, all these formative life experiences. I felt like, “Of course! we'll never forget any of this.” And now I'm like, “Who are you again? How did you get in here?”

A: I think somebody reading this will think, “Well, of course they don’t remember, they were on drugs,” but these are such formative memories that I think I could have painted the picture word by word for at least two years after what happened.

D: It’s like thinking about your cat and being like, “The cat was always here, I’ve always had this cat”. Now I just remember us riding bikes and talking about stuff, like, ‘hey, so you live in LA? That's cool. I would like to live in LA.”

A: I don't remember anything other than you writing on a wall that you want to be a superhero.

D: That’s very funny because I don't remember that and I'm wearing a Green Lantern shirt.

A: Yeah, that's true. It's very indicative of you, right? Because I didn't know who you were, but I did the thing that everybody does when they meet you because you're tall and tan and have a strong jaw, making the assumption that you are an asshole.

D: A lot of my best friendships begin that way.

A: All of my best friendships begin with me assuming someone's an asshole. So… simpatico. We were getting to know each other and I was starting to realize in the same way that Iz realizes that Santi is a goofy weirdo, that you were a goofy weirdo. And then around midnight we go to this wall in the middle of the playa where people are writing what they want for their lives. It was a very …weak, uninspired Burning Man art installation; write what you want on this wall and manifest and shit. Zero thought went into it. I was in a really bad relationship then, trying to convince myself that I loved her, so I wrote, ‘I want to feel love’ or you know, ‘what love feels like’. But you wrote ‘I want to be a superhero.’ And I was like, “The fuck? Who is this guy?”

D: That’s awesome. Young me was great. Yeah. He had his priorities in order, damn it.

A: It’s funny how Burning Man leads to its own mythology in our lives.

D: Yeah. I think about this a lot. I think about how world-consumingly important it was. Anyone who wasn't going with us I had to be like, “You don't get it, man. You don't get it.” And now in retrospect, did I even get it? I'm embarrassed a little bit.

A: Me too, but it was so formative in who I am. I think even as an artist, it's so formative to what my idea of transpersonal presence is, and what I want to accomplish with art. That feeling of, “Oh, I'm really fucking right here and everything feels weird”, you know?

D:No, it a thousand percent changed my life. That first year, I was like, “Anything’s possible. I can do anything.” The day after I came back, someone asked me to be in a music video. I was actually getting acting work, like out of nowhere. I felt like, “This is a sign. I'm going to pursue this forever.” Then all the sequels to that were me just trying to get year one magic again.

A: That does feel like the truest thing about Burning Man, always trying to recapture that year one magic. Do you think that if you could go back in time, you would tell your younger self after year one, “Kid, you got it. Don't go hunting?”

D: No. No, the process, the whole evolution of everything I went through, I needed all of that. I needed the buildup and the break and the looking and the not getting, the repeated disappointment. I learned a lot from that.

A: And you think that's helped you land where you are now?

D: I feel like the first year built up delusions in me of, you know, the universe has got my back and everything's going to be great. There are no problems. I'll just follow the flow. I got the vibes. And my main mode of operation was to hit the spiritual bypass button and let that rocket ship take me.

A: Could you define the spiritual bypass button?

D: One of my roommates used to be a canvasser for Greenpeace, and he went up to someone one day. He’s said, “Oh, do you have a second for the environment?” but she's like, “no, I believe that God is going to end the universe one day very soon”, and she very happily walked away. That was like the best example I ever saw of someone just being like, happy as a clam going through life with all the faith in the world that it will sort itself out. That’s how I was. For me, it was very much “My spirituality will take care of it,” right? “Well, how do you know that?” “Because I have spirituality.”

A: Do you miss it, the spiritual bypass button?

D: Every day. Yeah. Every waking moment, especially when I see the more religious members of my family. Last year was probably the hardest year on record for me for so many reasons. Or at least I went through the hardest thing I had to go through. Talking to my family about it, it drove me nuts to see how fast some of them were able to be like, “Oh, no, everything will be okay. You just have to have faith.” And I'm like, “That's what got me into this mess. That is the exact thought process that got me here.” So, I think that going back to the well so many times, expecting a desert rave to fix all of the issues inside and outside of me was perhaps… unrealistic. So… That was my first primer for like, “Hey, you know how doing mushrooms and running around naked didn't help you financially? Maybe… Maybe it's not going to work out later. Yeah. Maybe actually make a decision.”

A: Watching that process has been wild, as your friend, especially as I’ve been on my own equal but opposite anti-spirituality journey. It used to consume me but now… I don't give a single fuck about it anymore. I’m still an atheist. I still don't believe that spiritual or supernatural or magical stuff has or will happen, but if it happened, I’d just shrug. If it's like, okay, no, aliens did build the pyramids and Bigfoot is a planeswalker and you can talk to your dead grandpa whenever you want, then… okay, that's sick. Doesn't change my life one bit.

D: Yes! The one thing that changed for me is I just don't believe that there's anyone out there who gives a fuck about my wants or needs. I think whoever's running the simulation set it to irony and is kicking back with some kettle corn right now. Like everything else is still on the table. Ancient alien theory, Bigfoots, that’s probably out there. But it doesn't matter. It's just characters that were thrown in there specifically to mess with me.

A: That’s the thing that made us fall in love with Vibes enough to want to make it something. The idea that the universe is just the universe. You know, you can have crazy like spiritual magic, but well then that’s just a mundane thing in the world. The more things you add, the more things are just there in the world, and it doesn't mean that you're not in the world anymore.

D: Right. I can have premonition dreams from like today until the end of time. But there's nothing I can do with it.

A: My favorite piece of this is when you were starting to lose your belief in the spiritual bypass button and you were having a session over Zoom with your hypnotherapist and you were like, “I just keep thinking about polar bears,” and they're like, “Wow! There's polar bear pictures on my wall that you can't see!” And you were like, “cool… and?”

D: No, of course I psychically picked up that they were somehow polar bear obsessed. Of course I would pick up on that. Will it make me money? Will it put food on the table? Will it make me happy? No. I just have this fun party story to tell.

A: It's like the same thing as doing a backflip. Fun trick.

D: And ironically, I can no longer do a backflip.

A: So there's the idea with a lot of, I don't know… ideas? That there's the thesis, the antithesis, the synthesis, right? And we're dealing with that in the stories we're writing right now and in our own lives. Like here your thesis was, spirituality will do the magic, but you went hard into the antithesis last year. Now, I am willing to posit that art is the synthesis.

D: Ooh.

A: Does that feel true for you? The less spiritual you've become… or the less that you've cared about spirituality, the more you’ve… I don't know… You've always been a weird artist, but it feels like you're taking the bull by the horns right now in more of a way than you ever have.

D: The quote of my life was, ‘everything will randomly work out’. It was a very half-baked Taoist approach with a quote from The Ladies' Man. And I believed that until my world came crashing down last year and it now has become, “Oh, no, I only have the decisions I make. So I'm going to decide to make a shit ton of art.”

A: Why art over, like, I don't know, business?

D: I’ve tried business before, but I've always tried business because I was afraid of doing art. So now I'm trying realigning myself to my values rather than someone else's let’s… you know, let’s call this someone a completely spontaneous name… let’s call him ‘my dad’, for instance. So... I've always been guided by following my passions and my intuitions and my love. And that's always made me make better work because I gave a shit. I spent so much time making big decisions, like where to go to grad school, what to study in undergrad, and like all of this was based on what would be ‘better for my future’. I'm going to do this so that I can make money, so later I can be happy. And any time that's happened, it has blown up in my face spectacularly.

I feel so much more fulfilled now. Spending my time working on something that is actually what I want to do. I know that working in film and arts and all this creative stuff, I know logically it's not like the safe business bet to bring money, but it brings so much more hope to me, and the hope takes me further than anything.

A: It's been good to see, because that last year was… I mean, last year was hard for all of our friends, but you definitely got hit by it the hardest. It's been cool to watch you trudge back towards what matters.

D: Thank you. It's cool to hear. And I agree with it because it's felt good to feel that way after my beliefs had to change. I went from ‘everything is meaning and everything is symbols’, right? Like, “That squirrel is teaching me about abundance.” And then, “oh, no, there's nothing. Nothing matters. What am I even doing here? The one true God is chaos. That is the one altar I will bend the knee at.” And then I swing to like, “Okay, maybe chaos is the one true God, but there is meaning where we put it, and I'm going to be more intentional on where I put my meaning and my focus.” I'm going to know when a squirrel is just a squirrel.

A: Famously, as Freud said. So you’re saying you've got to decide for yourself what has meaning because ultimately you're the only lens you can have on the universe? If you're just so open, then being completely open is almost the same thing as being completely closed… Oh, fuck. Is that the point of Vibes?

D: Oh, my God.

A: Completely closed and completely open, and they’ve got to find somewhere in the middle.

D: Exactly.

[We hi five through the screen]

Yeah. Okay, let's sort of spiral out a little bit. You’re a multi-hyphenate artist pretty severely. When people ask, ‘what do you do?’ how do you respond?

D: Cry.

A: You say you cry or you break down in tears?

D: I say, “I'm going to cry now”, and then I go into the fetal position. You know, strangely enough though, when people ask me what I do, I answer proudly with my day job. I don't really worry about it too much because it then becomes a fun game of people discovering things I do along the way if they end up mattering. For a long time here in LA, I had to answer, like, “No, I am an actor,” or whatever I wanted to promote myself as. I end up having more honest, real conversations when I say I'm middle management at a company, and then later I'm like, “Oh, yeah, I'm making a movie about a woman who gives birth to a live dog.” Then we go from there.

A: Before I get towards the bottom half of the interview I need to tell the audience about New Brothers.

D: Go for it.

What follows is a massive digression, feel free to skip. TLDR: Diogo turned a messy but spirited project from 2014 into animated and hilarious insanity all while teaching himself animation.

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Picture this:

The year is 2014, people still think Mumford and Sons is anything but farmcore elevator music, Obama is president and so nothing will every be bad ever agin, all the while, everyone in the New York comedy scene is dead sure that the only thing keeping them from SNL is that they’ve yet to make their webseries. Broad City was making waves, High Maintenance was the coolest thing there’d ever been, NYU kids were landing in TV writers rooms because of online sketch comedy.

In this milieu of hope and cluelessness exists two early twenties boy-men, Alex Shifman (that’s me) and Nathaniel Moore (my long time comedy partner). After meeting in a study abroad program² we began writing and performing as a sketch comedy duo, A+N³.

A+N in 2014.

Two years later, in 2014, before I moved to LA, we decided to make our mark on the world with New Brothers.

Pitch: After the death of a father they never knew, two painfully ordinary young men learn that not only are they brothers, but their absent father was the most interesting man that ever lived. Now, to earn the massive inheritance he’s left them, they must relive all of his greatest feats, together as brothers⁴…NEW BROTHERS.

I would argue, any day, that the premise is still strong, even ten years later, and would have made a great series if Nathaniel and I had either more money, or more sense as to how to actually make anything. As it was, we were babes in the woods. With $6,000 dollars given to us by our parents we shot the second episode⁵. Again, despite all our floundering, there was some really cool shit in there: fight sequences, blood, one of the best just-below-camera barf jokes I’ve seen. We were plucky and determined, but we were also clueless. We’d written a helicopter scene that our director told us he’d be able to finish in post, a lot of green screen work on a rooftop with no plan as to how to light it consistently, and neither of us was tough enough to fire one of the actors when she told us she’d only be able to show up one of her two shoot days.

Despite all our hard work, the edit never got finished. I’m an expert in burying shit in the past and moving on, but it always rankled Nathaniel as something big he never put to bed. In 2015 I moved to LA. In 2020 Nathaniel followed. Neither of us put much work into New Brothers again until my 34th birthday. A friend who’d attempted to finish the edit for us in 2018 and failed because of the reasons mentioned above gave us back the hard drive and Nathaniel took a swing. He asked if Diogo, who’d taught himself to edit and was starting to take out some editing work, would finish it for Nathaniel’s 35 birthday six months later. Diogo, being the friend he is, gladly agreed.

So, six months goes by and in that time, Nathaniel books a small theater and we invite all our friends. Diogo works steadily on the edit, but we make him promise he tells us nothing. We wanted to go into it ignorant. The day arrives with much fanfare. We lay out the red carpet—a black carpet Nathaniel had spray panted with the word red— we give our guest drinks and cookies, we warm up the crowd with some of our old sketches we hadn’t touched in ten years, and then sit down and wait for the magic.

The projector whirrs to life and Nathaniel and I see the run time. The episode we shot was eleven minutes, but what we’re about to watch is pushing twenty. Before we can ask why, the screen blossoms to life with a granny montage of camcorder footage from the early 90’s, then a scene of a Brazilian actor portraying our father, and then 20 solid minutes of insanity. People like to throw around that word often—insanity— when what they really mean is, ‘slightly manic goofiness with a bit of oddball humor’. This was not that. Diogo animated sequences, wrote music, and finally gave us the helicopter scene we needed—though not the one we wanted— by inserting a giant, horned monster that’s then eaten by an opossum.

The above skills it took to create this were skills he did not have, or at least had not mastered, before he took on the project.

Stills from New Brothers

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The interview picks back up here.

A: Why the fuck did you put so much into that? It was amazing. It's the greatest thing that's happened to me artistically. Why did you do that?

D: That’s funny. I think this is the first time you're asking me this. And I think this is the first time anyone's asking me this. I... I have trouble stopping once I start a thing. Maybe let's call it ADHD. When I have a vision of something, I will— as long as I'm still learning and growing through it— I will go to the very ends to bring that to life. At no point in New Brothers did I ever come across a point where it wasn't fun and where it was like, “Oh, I'm stuck here”. Every time it was, “Oh, no, I know what I got to do”. So I just like kept going and weaving and moving.

A: So it kept presenting to you moves in the grand game?

D: Yeah.

A: Do you have a sense for where to keep looking to find things that move you on the game? How can you go about as an artist finding those places where every move will origami the art open into new moves to make?

D: I find the fun. This is a thing that I'm actively trying to be more conscious of, whether it's an audition or you know, something I'm drawing or something I'm editing, something I'm writing. I will hop from one thing to another, the second that I kind of get burnt out. Let something else inspire me.

A: That’s interesting you say that because when we first started hanging out again⁶, we all went to the spa together⁷ and I was thinking about how there's certain language that I like of artists like Jonathan Ames, who I reference all the time, and even Wes Anderson and the TV show The Great. I wanted to write something that would have some element of that elevated voice, and I was thinking, ‘what relationships do I have in my life are unique? Hey, Diogo and I have an interesting relationship’. And so I wrote the prologue basically sitting in the hot tub, like start to finish. I was doing that a lot back then just getting high and writing chunks in my head and it would be not perfect, but like close to perfect. I wrote all that down and thought, 'hey, this is fucking great. I love this. Okay, well… that's it. Do I want to keep writing a Litfic thing about these two guys?’ Like, at that moment in my life, I didn't really want to write literary fiction. I do now, but then I really only thought of myself as a genera writer.

D: You weren’t into autoerotic friend fic?

A: No. Not at that moment in my life, though, who knows what the back half of 2025 will look like. So after the prologue, when I didn’t know where to go, I thought, ‘why don't I make it fun. What if it was a ghost adventure?’ And I came up with that, ‘the haunted house changed all that’. That added the fun back in. And then from there, every time a thing stopped being fun, every time it felt they're fighting too much or Iz was being a dick, it didn’t feel fun. Even though I thought initially you needed that sort of conflict, because characters fight with their friends all the time in these sorts of two-handers, when they have different perspectives on life. That was even true of us. We had stopped hanging out because we had such different perspectives on life and I wasn't good with dealing with that.

D: Me neither.

A: That's not the fun. That isn't where the fun is, friends not hanging out because they believe in different things. I want to find what would feel good and move things along instead of what blocks.

D: I feel like there are more stories coming out like that now, where you would expect, ‘oh here comes the big friend fight’, but no, they actually communicated well. The problem is outside of them.

A: Psychological conflict is useful for a story, but I think over-focusing on it can both be unrealistic and a huge bummer.

D: Yeah.

A: Looking forward, what are the lessons you've learned in the past year that you can't wait to bring into other projects in your life?

D: The big thing that I've really been working on is not being afraid to ask my friends for help. I've worked on projects with so many different people that I have such good relationships with, and I'm like, “Oh, but certainly they would never want to work on my project”, and I'm realizing it's not true. People who I like to work with tend to like to work with me. So I’ve started showing more scripts, more pitch decks, etc. And people are like, “This is cool!”. It’s inspired me to actually push myself and do more things, maybe step up life in general and make decisions that will push me forward rather than trying to hide and not put my art out there.

A: I feel that from you, and it's something that I try to take into my own work nowadays too.

D: We’ve made stuff that's good enough for people to see. We have seen things that people are putting out there and we know we can make better stuff.

A: Yes. And that's such a hard thing to acknowledge because it’s not nice, but like, come on! Most shit that people get paid money for is trash. It's trash. It's bad. And my stuff is better than their trash. Is everything I make incredible? No. Some things that I make are great. Some things that you make are insane and better than great. They're like Everything Everywhere All At Once level. But even the bad ones, they’re still a lot better than the shit that is getting eyeballs, you know? So why not put out my own stuff? Even if it doesn't get eyeballs, it still exists.

D: Yeah, I'm not saying I'm making the best stuff. This isn't a brag. I just know that my stuff can be one level above a thing that I've seen and that's enough for me to believe in myself.

A: Yeah. It's not about how great I am. It's about how bad they are.

D: But that's exactly how Sam Raimi made Evil Dead, and that's one of my big inspirations. They were looking to make a horror movie, and it was right when Halloween came out. So they went to see Halloween in movie theaters, and he was like, “Oh my God, I can never make anything this good. I should quit and never make movies ever again.” But then, the next night they went to a grindhouse double feature, and he saw one of those B movies, and he's like, “I can beat that. If they could do that, I can do one better, and if I can do one better than that, we're golden.” That's the philosophy. Just do one better.

A: Yeah, I love that. Wrapping up, do you have a final thought to go at the bottom of this interview?

D: Not now that I have to. I feel like I said good things before. Just remember the thing that I said before that was good.

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Find more of Diogo’s work check here.

And, just for you, dear reader, the unlisted link to New Brothers.

1. It began as the shorts I’m publishing here, but since then we’ve tried to sell it as a comic, an animated series, and now we’re working on making it as a (low, low, low budget) feature.

2. I also thought he was an asshole when we first met, true to form.

3. We have three videos up from nine years ago. Are they good? Is my skin and hair and general ‘isness’ awful? Does Nathaniel look so thin you could blow him away with a straw?

4. Some of my favorite episode log lines; Blood is Thicker Than Blood: On the day they first meet, the new brothers have to perform open heart surgery on the executor of their father’s will. Soul Death And Taxes: Due to a scheduling error, the boys must file their estate taxes on the same day they need to relive their father’s shamanic journey with ayahuasca.

5. Why the second? Because an older, cooler, more successful guy we knew— he was at most 26, he was cool because he owned a cool jacket, and successful because he worked in the marketing department for College Humor— told us to ‘sell the steak, not the sizzle’.

6. As we’ve alluded to, in 2018 Diogo and I stoped hanging out completely. I’d avoid him at the Comedy Theater we both performed at, we’d ask our mutual friends not to invite us to the same things. All of this unnecessary agita came from us both placing beliefs over friendship.

7. LA is a cultural melting pot of the highest order and has as many Korean day spas as Taco trucks. At Wi Spa, my personal go to (because cursing is rare. I’m very glad for LA’s thriving Gay culture, but that makes it essential to know which spas are for relaxing and which are for hooking up), you can steam, schvitz, and soak for as long as you want— well, so long as it’s for twelve hours or less— and you also have access to one of my favorite rooftops in LA, all for $30.