Deke Weaver is an artist, writer, performer, and professor whose work sits somewhere between theater, storytelling, science, environmentalism, and performance art.
For years, Deke has been building The Unreliable Bestiary, an ambitious lifelong project: a performance for every letter of the alphabet, each centered on an endangered animal or threatened habitat. What begins with a whale, wolf, elephant, tiger, or monkey quickly becomes a way of talking about much bigger things—climate change, extinction, politics, culture, fear, and what it means to be human.
But this conversation became about much more than animals.
Deke talks about growing up without a clear career plan, moving through San Francisco and New York, treating cities almost like universities, and building an artistic life while keeping a day job.
We talk about why the best work tells the truth, why people can sense when something is authentic, and why fear and controversy are easy shortcuts while truth takes much more work.
And eventually, all of it comes back to the same question: what are you actually trying to make with your life?
College can make it easy to confuse a career with a life. Deke argues for something bigger: stay curious, go toward things you barely understand, find people worth keeping around, take the opportunities that may not come twice, and keep making things that feel true.
*EPISODE LINKS:*
- The Unreliable Bestiary: https://www.unreliablebestiary.org/
- Deke Weaver's Glorious Self-Promotion: https://www.dekeweaver.com/
- Deke Weaver's UIUC Website: https://art.illinois.edu/people/profiles/deke-weaver/
*OUTLINE:*
0:00 - Building a Whale—and Finding the Money to Do It
2:20 - Why College Prepares You for a Job, Not Your Own Projects
3:22 - Choosing Cities and People Over Careers
5:16 - Art as a Place to Tell the Truth
8:15 - Why Most Artists Need a Day Job
9:05 - Treating a City Like a University
11:32 - “The Best Work Tells the Truth”
12:35 - Can Art Actually Change the World?
16:25 - When Your Own Art Scares You
18:54 - Self-Censorship & the Fear of Getting Cancelled
21:02 - Marriage, Collaboration & a Tattooed Wedding Ring
23:26 - Why Spend a Lifetime Making Art About Endangered Animals?
26:09 - How Wolves Literally Changed Yellowstone
28:28 - The Stories We Believe Change the World We See
30:26 - Elephants, Tourism & What Happens When a Way of Life Disappears
36:55 - From Tiny New York Rooms to Making Art Across Illinois
39:15 - How to Tell a Story People Actually Remember
42:10 - Velocity, Momentum & Surprise
45:25 - How Do You Tell the Story of Climate Change Without Fear?
49:49 - Which Feedback Should You Actually Listen To?
53:05 - Finding the Right People to Make Something With
55:03 - Stop Waiting for Inspiration. Show Up and Make the Work.
57:32 - When a Project Starts to Feel Like Magic
59:10 - Where Good Ideas Actually Come From
1:00:03 - Why Creativity Needs Silence
1:03:30 - Trusting Yourself When You Don't Know What Comes Next
1:04:32 - Can Art Restore Trust?
1:10:20 - What Should Our Generation Believe In?
1:11:16 - Sending Signals Into the World
1:14:52 - Where Art and Science Meet
1:17:19 - Fear Gets Attention. Truth Takes More Work.
1:19:52 - Truth vs. Authenticity
1:22:04 - Why People Can Tell When You're Being Fake
1:24:09 - Art as a Way of Bringing Completely Different People Together
1:25:51 - If You Had All the Time in the World, What Would You Make?
1:30:10 - What Can a Professor Still Offer the Next Generation?
1:32:34 - The Pressure to Turn College Into a Job Machine
1:34:31 - Choosing Art When Everyone Tells You Not To
1:37:18 - Advice for Young People: Go to Things You're Barely Curious About
🚥 Overrated or Underrated 🚥
1:39:36 - 🐋 Free Willy
1:40:30 - 🌀 Cybernetics
1:44:11 - 🦇 Batman
1:47:55 - 🦁 Disney's Animal Kingdom
1:50:20 - 🦬 Is Yellowstone Basically a Giant Zoo?
1:52:43 - 🎭 Sleep No More
1:53:20 - 🧔 Growing a Beard for 365 Days
1:58:46 - Closing Words
