 Welcome to the Valley Advocate Podcast, featuring interviews that take us deeper into the people and happenings on the local scene. For more podcasts and a closer look at what's going on in the Valley, visit us at valleyadvocate.com. Hi, this is Dave Eisencett, or I am the editor of the Valley Advocate. This is the Valley Advocate Podcast, a collaboration with Amherst Media, and I'm here with Arts and Culture Editor Gina Beavers. Yes, and we are here with TX Watson, fourth year, well, last year's student at Hampshire College, and TX is selling their soul. A purveyor of your soul, anyway. Yeah, we should just ask you, like, how you came up with the idea of selling your soul. I understand that it was something you've had for a while, and you wanted to just do it this year. Yeah, I've had the idea for something relating to, you know, using souls as a currency or as, like, material basis for a currency for a long time. My original idea years ago was to try and write a short story about just, like, a little island nation that backs their currency with souls the way the U.S. government used to back our currency with gold. Soul standard. The soul standard. And I've actually always kind of thought that would be a pretty good idea because you could, you know, assign a certain amount of, like, raw number to each soul and then just, like, give a person's whole soul to them on, like, their 18th birthday or something. And it would be a really good way to, like, systematically incorporate people into the economy. It's not a foolproof plan, but... What is that? Clearly in the end. Yeah. It reminds me of, like, the Giver, the Lois Lowry book, where they all, like, they get their job assigned to them when they're 12 or 13 or something, and then they go off on their... Yeah. Right. Yeah. I read that in middle school, but... Whatever. But, yeah, so I don't know. I like that. And, you know, we should say that you're selling your soul for a very specific reason. I am selling 1,000 shares of ownership in my immortal soul. I love how corporate this is. It's the best. It's the best. The shares are $45 a piece, and if I sell all 1,000, it will completely wipe out my student debt, as well as some credit that I've accumulated, you know, surviving in college and the tax and production costs for the certificates themselves. Interesting. And go ahead. I was just wondering. So, I mean, the obvious, the benefit is obvious. You rid yourself of your debt. What's the upside for the purchaser? So it's, I mean, really, literally, it's an investment, you know, just like when you buy a stock, you're buying a share of ownership on the faith that it will eventually be more valuable than it is now. I'm, you know, an artist just starting out my career. Getting your hands on one of my early limited edition prints would be a potentially really valuable asset. So I expect shares in my soul to appreciate value over time. Yeah. I mean, that, okay. So that's the, like, physical object, the, you know, the print. But like, I mean, like, do you feel at all uneasy about giving your soul away? I mean, your immortal soul to 1,000 other people or however many people buy these things? Well, I'm personally not religious. So my concerns about this are sort of background. Maybe I'm wrong concerns, not like first order. This is a consequence I'm expecting. But I was fairly careful in the fine print. So purchasing a share in my soul does entitle you to ownership over that share. The fine print is very clear about the fact that anything that remotely resembles a soul existing constitutes the thing that is being sold. So I'm not wiggling out of it that way. But it does also say that destruction or radical transmutation of the certificate constitutes the remit of the soul to me. So you could get it back. So worst case scenario, I just have to wait till the sun explodes. Okay. Yes. So it's free to do whatever souls do. Right. Assuming that I need all thousand shares consolidated under a single owner in order for my soul to, you know, move beyond. Because I mean, as with corporations, it's perfectly easy to own a share in something and not actually possess that fraction of the thing. When you buy a share in a company, it's not like seven of the employees start showing up to your house and working from there. That would be nice. I would probably buy more stocks if I thought I would get more employees. Absolutely. Yeah. We talked about this actually before when we were talking for the article about this, kind of the idea of corporations as individuals, you know, that corporations are people too. And people too. And yeah. I just like you to talk about that a little bit and your thoughts behind that. Yeah. So the idea that corporations are people is embraced among certain subsets of the political right, mostly rejected on the left. And I think that that's a problem because I think that corporations meaningfully act as agents in the world in a way that can't be adequately reduced to the behavior of the behavior or the intentions of any individual or individual group within that corporation. You know, it's possible for, say, Amazon to do things as a company that Jeff Bezos would never decide to do because corporations have elaborate mechanics for decision making, most of which are out of the hands of anyone with any particular power, certainly all of which are distributed so that no one person has access to all of them. And but like, do you think that like the idea that corporations as people like is this like a problematic issue that we're facing now? Or is this something that is like more appropriate for, you know, just like this is the direction that we're living in a modern world? I think it's something the left should accept as true. I do think it is dangerous. But I think the fact that there are these weird alien things in control of our society being scary is not a good reason to dismiss it. So I have a question about your future. So let's say that I and a thousand people buy your soul and you get to become a successful artist, a debt free artist, important. You know, what are you going to be doing in ten years? Like, what's your, you know, what are your your artistic ambitions? Like, what are what are we going to see you doing? Do you think or do you hope? Well, it depends on a lot of unforeseeable variables. I think at this point in human history, it's kind of silly to think ten years in advance. Well, how about in your perfect world? In my perfect world, capitalism will have ended ten years from now and you'll be much better off than you hypothetically might have been for any benefit from buying my soul. Oh, yes. OK. So in this ten years from now, capitalism free world, like, how do we do what we do? Yeah. Well, there are lots of speculative models for what a post capitalist world would look like. Like I said, I don't like the idea of predicting the future. Personally, I think that what we really need to do is cultivate a lot of small efforts to experiment with different models for post capitalist civilization building. And I think we should stick with the ones that work. And I don't know which ones those will be. OK, unknown for now. How do we how do we buy your soul? Where do we get it? If you go to www.txwatson.com slash my soul, you can buy the soul there for forty five dollars plus shipping. Shipping is a little steep because it's art shipping. But there's also an option to pick it up in person, which if you live in the valley, I can arrange to, you know, meet you. And you've got your your your own show, right? In April. Is that right at Hampshire? Yes, April 8th through 11th. I have a gallery show in the Hampshire Gallery. All right, great. All right. Oh, go ahead. I just wanted to know I haven't fortunately seen your art. What kind of what what inspires you? Well, I'm a big believer in political art. I. There's this quote from George Orwell in his essay, Why I Write, where he wrote everything that he's written in the past 10 years or so. He has written for democratic socialism and against fascism as he understands it. And he goes on to talk about the idea that it's impossible not to write about politics. And I think it's impossible not to make art about politics. And so doing so intentionally and starting from that position puts you in the best possible position to then. Explore those ideas in a way that is not artistically bankrupt. I think the. Aesthetics, while they are important, while I really enjoy them, they can't come first. They have to be informed by what the intention of the project is. I'm definitely going to come to your show. I got to see this. Yeah, this is a must. Yeah, definitely. Well, thank you so much, TX. Yeah, so much. Thank you for having me. We wish you the best in selling your soul. Yeah, right. It's like, do we wish you the best? I don't know. What was your the best if it's your desire? We wish you the best to sell your soul. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks for listening. And don't forget to visit us at valleyadvocate.com.