Carlos Segura Asks Difficult Questions (90 mins)

ladies and gentlemen i'm talking to carlos segura he's prepared some questions to test my resolve to test my ability to think of my feet none of this has been prepared so i have no idea what to expect except for to expect the unexpected the legend himself is going to lead this conversation we'll go where we go that's it let's start with this who do you think you are and who do you think you're perceived as this is one about um self-awareness right it could well it's not just self-awareness it's partly that but also we often think of ourselves differently than how we are thought of oh it just happened to me two minutes before i called you by the way which i'm i'm a little like uh tense but as i protect our previous podcast by the way but let's get back to the question so okay who do you think you are and who do you think people think you are i i'm a little scared just because like i could feel my mom asking me that question like who do you think you are by the way that's not the tone that the question is intended to right [Laughter] it started as how are you now it's who do you think you are i think i'm um a design snob i think i'm very direct and sometimes can come across as being for some people cantankerous acerbic rude short but it really comes from a place of caring and not wanting to mince words i have a great appreciation for those that can speak their mind clearly with an economy of words and i aspire to do the same i made a decision to move away from being a very emotional person which is the first half of my life towards being a much more logical person maybe us like to practice stoicism and i am the byproduct of two very different types of people my dad and his entire family all my uncles and aunts on that side they're engineers they're practical they're pragmatic they're very logical and then my mom's side of the family with all my aunts and uncles on that side of the family they're artists poets musicians photographers their dreamers they seem to be more free-spirited and happy with their lives except for they don't have the material data that backs up their happiness and so i think i'm exactly in the middle of these two people where i'm a creative person but i'm also very analytical i can be very business-minded but also be creative and free-flowing i think that's who i am okay i'm surprised at some of the things that you described yourself some of the words i don't think that i would have i don't see you that way but now let's move on to the second part how do you think people perceive you or do you think people perceive you as you see yourself that that question is really complex to unpack i'll do my best people who catch one minute of me will have a very different reaction to people who spend i say a couple hours with me and and i have anecdotal stories to share with you where someone literally marched up to me uh when i was in a crowd of people and i knew that there was going to be trouble carlos you and i we've seen this look before like they're making a beeline towards you a man walking towards me i'm like i can see him i can see him even though i'm talking these people we're gonna have trouble and he goes chris i'm the person who tweeted this not so nice thing that you on twitter i'm like okay which one because there's so many of them all right let's figure out which one you are and then i quickly figure it out because he gives me enough context and he starts to ask me some questions and he said here's why i asked you this question how do you want to respond so he took a very accusational tone with me and it was not like let's have a polite discussion about this it's like i want to prove that i'm right and you're wrong and we talked we talked for five or ten minutes and his whole energy changed immediately because in his mind i was this person who was like going to fight him on everything and be unreasonable i'm not that person and he he did the most amazing thing which is very rare days after meeting he wrote a blog post and he says i thought chris was an a-hole turns out i'm the a-hole that's a good one right that is a really good one that is a really good one and you know frankly in some ways it's your discovery of me during our last podcast i think you thought i was going to be different i think we all tell ourselves stories about way too little information and we fill in the gaps we're always doing this and so if someone sees one interaction with me and talking to someone they're gonna have a completely different perception than someone who spends any amount of time with me and i'd like to think that i think i'm semi-charming i can win people over so when they come in with the aggression i can usually defuse and have a chat and then hopefully we're not going to be best friends later but at least there's more nuance to this so i i was that answer okay yeah no it was good do you think um that judgment often comes from the person seeing you as opposed to yourself because i mean i think maybe we bring a lot to the table with our own experiences and pre conditions or whatever i think so and then you're there to to cleanse it right yeah i think oftentimes when people um and it works on both ends of the spectrum the emotional spectrum like when people shower you with affection or want to throw a lot of hate at you it's really like a mirror it's a reflection on who they are and where they've been so if i say something i could not have said enough to to aggravate or insult you enough for you to respond this way i think what is happening is i'm opening up a wound that hasn't fully healed from your childhood unresolved trauma whatever and you couldn't respond and protect yourself in that time but now you're an adult and you will protect yourself so oftentimes people were responding not to what they saw or heard but more often as a way to kind of remedy an old problem and i i feel that a lot that is an absolutely perfect answer and i think just on point really really good thank you so we'll still keep it in helvetica then oh yeah definitely we're not going to a times roman anytime soon carlos i have a question for you you said the minutes before something kind of threw you off can you share with me i can um i have and this is exactly what you just outlined i have a friend who i described in our last podcast with the most loved possible and he just called me and was rather hurt and possibly even offended by it and it's it didn't come that way from my heart but uh because i do care for him a lot and i was really in shock when he called me a few minutes ago but how did it end well he had to go in a meeting so i don't know but he was uh he was vocal about it it made me feel very uh sad in fact i'm a little sad right now but you know i can't control i think it touches on the answer that you gave me a little while ago is that maybe he's maybe he's bringing something to the table that obviously it was not my intent but he's feeling something that who knows i don't know i really don't know yeah i i feel what you're saying because when our intention is other than what how it's perceived those those are the ones that hurt us the most absolutely yeah really true when i'm angry when i'm deliberately trying to dismiss someone or disrespect someone and they're angry i'm like yeah that was the intention when i'm coming from a positive place and it's received the opposite that really will mess me up it really messed me up yeah it really did i can see that yeah all right let me go to the next question this is a little bit fun but let's see is there something you would like to know that you are absolutely positive you will never know without question there's nothing in humanity that would fix this curiosity stream that you have oh that's a hard one carlos that was supposed to be the fun one i'm i'm nervous for the ones that are supposed to be hard what what what is there anything i want to know that there's no way i could possibly know you couldn't possibly know it it's literally impossible this is a question that i've never had to answer before so let's see how this goes we can come back to it if you want time to think about it no i think i have an answer and if it's not good we'll come back both my grandfathers passed away before i was aware on both sides my mom and my dad and so i've had two loving amazing grandmothers totally different energy but i would have liked to have known them because i think it's part of your story and your father's story your mom's story that i just have missed out on i'm grateful that both my grandmothers lived into a pretty old age they passed away like 10 years ago but they're in their 90s so i think that's a full life but both my grandfathers i i don't know i don't know them from anything except for a photograph yeah that's all i got so i would have really liked to just you know the things that grandparents do they take you for a walk they tell you about life and there's there's something in old people's wisdom that i think is lost yeah absolutely okay that's a good answer were you born in the us or did you come i i was born in saigon vietnam and i came to the us in 1975 after the fall of saigon okay so this question is is close to what happened to me too i guess so what are three influential or transformative things that happened to you when you first came to the us it does they don't they don't even have to be serious like i have an answer to this that i it's kind of funny but i i think uh because i was three years old when i came to united states i had no recollection of of my home country and what it was like and so here's the funny thing and this is not meaningful just it's just funny i remember watching tv and i was watching gilligan's island you know shipwrecked black and white tv show and they were able to make modern technology with bamboo and fulcrums and gears and things like that i remember watching that on tv and i said dad is that like how vietnam was and he just looked at me you stupid stupid boy because my perception was we lived in villages and huts with really primitive tools and technology he goes no we do we live in a city and i just remember like that's so weird this perception like i have no no memory and i've lost a part of my my history so you can obviously ask them that much after three yeah okay well in the in the spirit of your youthful observation i'm gonna answer this one too because if it's close to what you so when we first came from cuba we went to mexico first i'll make this very very short and then we came to united states and when we were there the first thing that someone gave me was coke and i spit it out because it had bubbles i never had coke before and then the next thing another family member gave me chiclets which were the gum at the time and i swallowed it because i never had gum before and then on the way home i saw this amazing sunoco oil station gas sign you know with a big red arrow going through and it was one of those revolving signs and i remember the feeling i had at the time of course i didn't make anything of it at the time because i was eight and a half years old but i remember it triggering something inside me and i tell you to this day that i feel like that was my awakening for the attachment of graphics so those are three things that i still remember today wow it's interesting when you come from a place from another place where the culture is different and everyone looks and sounds like you and there's a shared experience then you come to america how different it can be and that stories also depend on where you land in the united states right the different cultures and there and people don't understand this when we say culture shock it's a real thing oh no question man it's yeah and your your gum story reminded me of something when i was i think i was like five years old maybe six um i was always told up until this point never swallow gum me too never swallow gum because it tastes as a child like it's delicious it's so many flavors you want to swallow it and so i asked my uncle one day why can't we swallow it he says just don't swallow it but what will happen you will die i'm like okay do not swallow gum and so i'm i'm i'm living at my grandmother's house before my parents uh moved from kansas city missouri to san jose and i'm chewing this gum i'm laughing i'm talking and then i swallow the gum and i thought carlos i was gonna die it was it i didn't know what to do and it was kind of like a guilty shame like oh my god i'm gonna die because i'm an idiot and what are how am i going to handle this so my mom wasn't there yet so she had called and and my aunt's like hey your mom's on the phone i'm not great i'll run over and the whole time i'm like my eyes are like welling up with tears and i'm talking to my mom obviously it's like i'm thinking to myself this is the last time i'm gonna talk to my mom and i was telling her i love you but i didn't tell her i swallowed gum and just the whole time like as a five six year old you're thinking about um that you're passing and what are you gonna say what are your last words and so i went through this crazy thing and then i asked some other uh person adult in the house and like oh don't swallow gum honey it'll be okay but just don't do it and then i was just relieved and overjoyed that i get to see tomorrow were you trying to spare your mother with bad news or were you afraid to tell her that you had violated the rule i think both and i just like well if if your fate is inevitable why waste it on words like that i just just told her i love her and i asked her what she's doing and just but in my back of my mind i'm just thinking this is it this is the last conversation i'm gonna have with my mom okay let me ask you this what changes happen in your life that you wish hadn't so these are like potential things that are like regretful if any of these things are too personal we can move on no i mean i i like that you're asking these kind of questions you know because every human being on this planet goes through this yeah you know just to give me some time let me ask you that question back i wish i had spent more time with my mother i as you know my last discussion they sacrificed absolutely everything so i could have a better life and then i went off and had a better life and i forgot about them yeah and then uh 25 years went by i mean i would call them every once in a while and maybe come see them once every three five years i don't know not even that to be honest with you but i honestly if i'm being completely honest with myself i kind of just lived the life they wanted me to live and then by the time i got back my dad was dying and then my mom died later of uh pancreatic cancer and it was just god damn you know sometimes like i think about this as a parent i want my children to be happy and i think it's like um you know i read this great article um it's written by scott burns about how his dad who had been separated from his mom needed um is it a kidney can you give up a kidney or i think so yeah so he needed a kidney and they couldn't find him when he needed one to live and his dad in the hospital bed had said to him don't feel like you need to but if you want to i i i could use your support here and he thought about he walked outside and told his mom about it who because they were separated was like your dad should have never asked you that question and there's a line in this article that he wrote about that i just will never forget and and he said something like the genetic river flows one direction it doesn't go back there's two things that he was thinking about he was kind of guilted into this idea of giving his kidney and it might be rejected it might not make any difference and he'd be down one kidney and then he made the decision to go ahead and do it and so i think about that a lot the responsibility of parents and what they want for their children and i want my children to be happy they can be exactly who they are what they want to do and i don't expect anything back so when your parents sacrifice so much for you to have that dream and you live that dream could that just have been what they wanted i don't doubt for a second that it's what they wanted my real struggle is from me like why didn't i reach out i remember one day i was talking to my father and i felt the desperation in his voice when he simply said can you just call me once a week and that really hurt me what happened to what happened after that well as usual i did call him once a week for a couple of months and then it just went back to the normal you know and i hate to say this man but i found myself not having anything to talk about with him yeah it was really hard because i i would call and the reason i didn't continue calling every week is because there were just these awkward moments of silence that just we were just lived in completely different solar systems and trust me man he loved me and i loved him there was no you know but it was just a weird thing to have a conversation over the phone it's different when you're face to face and you know you have a beer blah blah blah and you see facial expressions and blah blah you know that kind of stuff but on the phone it's like awkward silences you know i wonder though if it's i think women tend to have the ability to talk about little things big things and it's very natural i don't know if it's cultural this way or just the way things are set up or not but i have the same problem my mom and i we can talk about lots of stuff because she'll ask me all kinds of questions big and small are you eating enough this and that what's going on with that she seems genuinely interested in the most mundane things whereas with my dad it's like we don't have those kind of conversations yeah and it would be weird if we did because it would be like this is not the relationship we've set up so when i'm talking it's very brief with my dad and we we he lives near me and we just wanted to see him yesterday both my parents and it's just maybe men need to learn something here about how to have those kinds of conversations well i think it's genetic i in fact i i don't know if you know of jordan peterson but he has a great quote of which i cannot remember right now but he talks about the things that women tend to be attracted to and men tend to be attracted to and one of the things that women like because they're more emotional as you just spoke of is you know being nurses and and stuff like that and moms and because they're just more you know expressive in the caring department than men i wonder if it's like we're socialized differently like if we go back to ancient times like when there's a small tribe of us like literally like 20 uh people or something the most physically capable had to go out and procure food and to defend against threats like a bear or a lion or an invading tribe and then everyone else who was not physically capable were going to build social skills uh to to be able to make sure that if something were to happen that the others felt enough of a bond and connection with them that they would protect them and provide for them i actually think that our behavior is deeper than activity based as you described i think it's uh cell-based i mean and the the best example i can give you is how birds behave when they're doing their mating dance there's nothing other than cellular [Music] you know originality there that makes them do what they do and and that's just the way it is so yeah so let me ask you this what influence or people can you point to in your life that made a difference oh okay and let me ask you and let me let me refine that by saying other than your parents because i suspect it might be your parents um i have a tremendous amount of appreciation for anyone who's ever done anything for me in my life those moments and those people are recorded very vividly in my mind so this one is pretty easy for me to answer so excluding my parents uh can i talk about my my family other than my parents okay um one of those people is my older brother he's four years older than me his name is arthur and we he's basically like a surrogate father to me because my dad is working my dad doesn't understand the culture of america so my older brother becomes this guy who's looking out for me and he he saw things in me that i didn't know of myself like when i was in high school i was in metal shop and he would see these uh sculptures i would make and he's like you know have you ever thought about doing something with that like this old chunk he goes yeah not a lot of people can do that he got me my first credit card he helped me to find my first freelance client and he flew me to an animation festival because he thought i might be interested and it was one of the first times i flew as an as as a teenager because we didn't go we didn't fly anywhere so he flew me down to san diego i was like this is an experience and this is my brother he's only four years older than me so he opened a lot of doors and still to this day we're pretty close because we can talk about pretty deep things and i had that connection there's a bunch of teachers in my life teachers from junior high all the way through high school and college that showed me some some kindness and and they they bent the rules a little bit for me which to me at that age it was like everything just everything i'll give you two examples one was mr thompson mr ted thompson in social studies at john steinbeck middle school he had that uh that the haircut from like my father's nose best you know old school sweater vest very proper guy a kind of man out of time thing and i would doodle i would draw my notepad all the time and then i remember heather who sat to my right beautiful woman beautiful girl she's like how come he can draw and i can't in class and he stopped i'm like shoot why would you do that to me things were cool he goes here's the thing he can listen and draw and you cannot so i wasn't in trouble this was fantastic so just these little gestures i i will remember and and mrs karen new york from english class um english lit in in high school she would told everyone basically if you don't bring your your notebook your textbook um you're going to be docked points you cannot get an a in this class if you do not bring your textbook back then i was taking the bus i have a backpack full of books i don't want to bring this textbook with me every day and she always had one or two spare books that she would loan and she would always gently slide it over to me so i wouldn't get in trouble and everyone else got in trouble and so again i was just like that's amazing it's also amazing that you were able to recognize that gesture well as a as a kid you i mean anybody shows you any kindness i think especially in this really awkward place where we're trying to figure out who we are those things matter a lot especially because i felt like i didn't recognize it well no well you you're probably you know i don't know but i always felt like a stranger and an outcast in society and so anyone who showed me some kindness i remembered well yeah i guess i can connect with that too what is your measure of success freedom 100 freedom that's exactly my answer you know no no riches no nothing in the world will matter if you can't choose what you want to do with whom you want to do it do it with and for how long so i i work towards having freedom and luckily the reason why i'm most of the time is very happy and optimistic and filled with joy is because i have a lot of choices yes and i'll only add because my single word answer to that question was the same you also have to have the recognition as they say that freedom isn't free and you really do have to fight for that freedom or work for it i guess i should say so what what drove you to change your career path and why do you think it's important are we talking about from working with clients to being an educator so what i was going to ask you related to this is to for you to give me a better scope of of the business you had and why you left okay and from what i gather it you had a pretty good thing going so like what was the situation that made you change your career path i guess those two questions are connected so we made commercials and music videos and we were paid relatively speaking a lot of money to do those things and if and the longer you do something the better you're at it and the easier it is for you to procure clients and have them trust you much more difficult when you're young so why would we walk away a couple different things were happening and i like to think i can fly above what it is i'm doing kind of see what's happening on the larger cultural landscape and we see that people are no longer tied to cable and television people are streaming and the young people that work for me they they're all based on subscription services so they don't watch commercials at all and so i can see the tide shifting if our careers in building and making commercials as the demand for commercials is going down and other things are capturing the advertising dollars if you will we're probably not going to be able to continue to do this for at the at the level in which we want to do it for for that much longer i could see that in the the jobs that our reps would bring us they're less creative and they were more demanding and the budgets were lower and so i'm i'm like the canary in the coal mine where i can sense change happening much quicker than most people and i like to think it's because i'm less attached to what it is i'm doing and so i can feel that so i'm having conversations with our raps with my um executive producer and saying you know i think we need to build a new ship this the ship is not going to keep going this way and i think they thought it was alarmist like i don't think so guys the writing's on the wall you're just not willing to read it it's right there i can see it and so i started to to shift away from doing commercial advertising work to doing branding and brand design and and that was really cool because i was very rewarding i'm not concerned that that's going away because that's going to be around but then i just thought that i i think i exchanged one master for another master i'm still working for the master i i'm still you know just a slave to client work and it's in this moment when you can feel like your your needs are met financially and creatively that you can explore other things so that's when i started to explore the education side and it filled my heart my soul up so much that i was like this has got to be my calling in life i didn't have a business model yet but i was going to figure it out what was the trigger what made you i mean that's a pretty big change the trigger is i had been teaching for i think at that time uh almost 15 years at art center and at otis and i get so much fulfillment from doing this but we all know teachers don't get paid anything and so it was a labor of love and i i just really enjoyed teaching the handful of students that i had and it really just if you want something that's life affirming you just try and help people and teaching is one form of helping people and so when these young students from all over the world when we sat together and i could see that oh they're on the verge of having a breakthrough a creative breakthrough that lit me up like you can't believe i'll go home and i'll read three more books to come back to teach you more theories or looking at the problem from a different angle i'm really motivated but and then i look at how much am i being paid relative to the amount of time i'm putting into this this is upside down how can i teach get that fulfillment help other people have these transformative moments but do it in a way that i don't have to go and work another job which is servicing clients and so that was the beginning in just searching for a business model where i could do that and then ultimately that led us where where we are here today so how are you able to juggle all the things that i suspect you do in that transition or now now i have a wonderful team i delegate almost everything and so i get to do the things i love the most back to the freedom thing so i don't like dealing with contracts someone deals with the contracts i don't want to deal with the negotiations i have a different person doing that i don't even want to talk to the team necessarily i just want to talk to one person and for that person then to manage the team and so i put in place people to do every single thing that um that that doesn't have to be done by me so i get time to talk to people like you i get to read books from friends like ours like jason fried and that's what i get to do and and everything else somebody else takes care of can you say how big your team is yes we're 18 people right now wow that's that's pretty healthy number yeah and looking to hire probably four more people soon okay well then so i'm gonna jump to the conclusion that things are going well for you yes things are going really well and so this year or last year we did four and a half million dollars in revenue and it's very profitable business now now that we took care of a couple of problems and it will continue to grow and i'll tell you this carlos for the 20 plus years that i ran blind as a surface design company uh only one person ever talked to us about investing or buying us and running the future as an education company oddly i have venture capitalists reaching out to me do you need money do you need money it's like where were you when i was struggling this is kind of interesting so the market is telling you something that in in high growth markets or industries people are looking like quite literally right before our call got off the phone with a venture capital firm well that's uh definitely something to be proud of i mean it might must make you feel like you've made the right call and a variety of levels yeah yeah well the the level of fulfillment i have is if before on a scale of one to one hundred from a creative point of view it was very fulfilling to do but on a spiritual kind of like am i making a difference in the world is pretty low and even times on the creative level it's like okay so they want to make these changes all right let's just go make them right i'm tired of fighting them so we do it but now i'm so fulfilled and the funny thing is and i believe this very much if something gives you joy you're passionate about it and you put in the time to practice and hone your craft the kind of money that you can make it will eventually catch up to that passion you just got to stay in it to figure out the business model to position yourself in the proper way but eventually it will catch up and i think we're starting to catch that wave because it was a lot of paddling out to the wave and now we're riding that wave and it it feels great yeah what's the first and last thing you do every day and you know other than the obvious brush your teeth put on your pants kind of stuff i i read messages on social media first thing and last thing it's interesting yeah because you know people people are like oh my god okay what kind of society have we turned into but i just want to clarify one thing for anyone who might be watching or listening to this is that my business is understanding customer sentiment and i used to hear things about like mark cuban and other people who was like no i'm literally at up to three in the morning reading what it is because he is invested in his community his customers his audience as am i so when i read the comments that are coming in from whatever platforms and there are many for me to check i get a general feeling okay because i have to keep my finger on the pulse like this is where they're shifting they're not happy about this there's questions about this and we have not adequately addressed that so this is what we're doing so i used to look at analytics before we had an audience and so i was studying the analytics as a tea leaves of what the customer consumer sentiment is but now i'm reading their comments and so these are from strangers from friends from people in my community outside and i build a composite of their sentiment and i try to steer the company so that we give and create more joy in the world and we try to diminish the other stuff that's not good i agree with that too uh i think there's a lot of learning sometimes the learning isn't what you well often it's actually not what you think it was going to be tell me a few things that you think our industry does wrong what i want to just define industry first which industry are you referring to well i'll shoot i'll give you a big umbrella by saying creative but more specifically you know ad agencies design firms uh yeah just communicators i think there's a lot of things so i'll hit high and low on this um i think creative people generally are are not very good at being self-directed they're other directed and so we look at ad agencies and i wonder this a lot like how come there's so few ad agencies who are are really good at branding at marketing messaging finding customer why don't they just create their own products why don't they become their own clients why doesn't wyden and kennedy have their own shoe line i don't understand that myself they've been really good at building a multi-billion dollar business for phil knight why didn't they do it for themselves and so these are kinds of things i think about and then unfortunately that ripples all the way down from the big agencies that doing you know the big global agencies all the way down to the solar practitioner in their studio they're waiting for someone to find a problem and give it to them for them to solve and brian collins talks about this like we we have to shift away from this mindset of being problem solvers to problem seekers like we have to go find a problem scratch our own itch and then when we find that problem why aren't we the ones who benefit from the recognition of a problem and the creation of the solution can i dive into that answer a little bit because that you're kind of triggering some questions that i hadn't written down one is is it possible that part of the answer is that and this touches another question that i was going to ask you is what do you think about award shows which we'll go into later which touches on my concern here which is i think that some of this stuff is or gels i.e works because of budget not because of creative and so i think that a lot of a lot of creative people just create we have no way of guaranteeing anything or sharing anybody the word is going to work or it's not going to work and of course the more money you throw at something sometimes it works because of the money and the support but i think that maybe that's why creators don't do their own thing because they know that you can't just have a good idea you have to have a good idea with a lot of backup right so and by backup i mean money and knowledge and experience and marketing know-how and business acumen but that's a really good question that i've never thought about is since we are so good at marketing why aren't we marketing ourselves and and the other thing too is i have found that where almost every magazine of course there are exceptions to every rule but almost every magazine in our sector is poorly designed well i recently uh resubscribed to wired magazine because i remember sharing concepts that are read and wired years ago and to this day so i'm like i'll support wired magazine so my first issue came back in the mail and i opened it up and it's as thin as i've ever seen a magazine almost all the advertising out from it so if you are in the space of creating periodical stories interests research whatever white paper it's a weird business to be in all the ad dollars are gone and i'm missing that to be honest because i like seeing ads that were targeted towards common interests i wanted to learn about those companies yeah there was a time when i used to buy magazines as my school books basically mostly fashion magazines but yeah have you ever abandoned a project or a client several yeah i think we call it uh the clinical term is we resigned a client mm-hmm can you tell me of a story of one that's gone horribly wrong i can i can tell you a couple but i'll focus you don't have to name a client but maybe just the general story yeah um there's a couple but i'll pick the one that comes to my mind first and we'll see where you want to go with this but um there was a a director producer um in in santa monica who were they were starting a new production company okay cool they had heard things about us great they needed an identity system designed for them okay we can do this no problem and so we meet with everyone we talk about what they want whatever so they go away and we we do a bunch of ideas this was back when like i made a lot of ideas because i just like making stuff and so we get together with a client we lay out all our our initial logo concepts for them and they're like wow this is a lot and they literally applauded which doesn't happen very often am i cool like you know you've given us a lot to think about we kind of pared it down to a couple that they might go with and then a couple days later one of the partners in this three-person operation said can we meet i'm like sure sure let's meet came in he's like you know so and carlos you're gonna know where the story goes so i showed my wife my daughter oh my god i have the same story keep going okay so i showed my wife and daughter i'm like okay and you know what i've been thinking about it um do you have other ideas i'm like uh other than the gazillion we showed you i mean i think we need to pair things down at this point he goes well you know just to be honest with you i'm kind of underwhelmed and i said to him i said to him how do we go from applause to underwhelmed he goes could you just humor me and like explore more ideas and i said you know what i got i got a different proposal for you why don't we just return your initial payment on this we part ways and you do whatever you think you need to do and oftentimes they're like thrown back they're like they're not used to people saying take your money back you know and luckily freedom you have enough money that you can just turn work away and i know by saying what what it is that i said that i'll never work with that person or anyone that's connected with them ever again because that's kind of a burn burn abridge moment i'm totally professional i just say to them i just don't think we're the right company for you i could understand if you were disappointed and then you're underwhelmed i totally get that but to go from one spectrum to the other um we're not the right company for you so yeah i've now learned in my life that if you make the uh poor decisions to take on a client that you then quickly realize this was the bad decision cut your losses get out don't know this was a bad claim from the beginning i did not because of the other partners were really cool people who knew of our work but this was the the suit if you will and the suit was making the decisions so i'm like all right can i share my version please i don't want to take away from from your spotlight but this is very similar with a different outcome however okay it was a branding project it was for a company in california i'm not even going to tell you what kind of company because that would reveal it was a pretty big company and we did this branding project it was fantastic we showed several ideas they were just so blown away i just couldn't even believe this was a friday i'm sorry thursday they were just blown away fantastic you guys walk on water blah blah blah friday they called and they completely shifted just like as you just outlined exactly the same thing it was uh we're not sure uh we think uh that we want to explore some other things here's a logo that our secretary did and he sends it to me by email and it had a big swoosh like that big circle like the whirlpool sort you know yeah and ironically at the mo at the time i had been working on a study of logos that had switches and i had literally almost 5 000 logos on a board that had a swash so i wrote them this very very respectful professional letter basically outlined exactly what you just said in a nutshell sometimes people are meant to be together you're an amazing person i'm an amazing person but sometimes we just don't click and maybe this is one of those times that said what i did is i put the logo that her secretary did on this 5000 logo chart and i emailed them back and i said i'll give you 500 if you can pick your logo out of this collection and they couldn't do it they couldn't find their own logo so i told him i respectfully request that you think about this again you're going to be throwing your money away if you go this way if you want to that's completely up to you it's your company and i respect it but i can't continue with you if you go this route the only difference between you and me though is that i didn't give our money back and here's the best part monday they thought about it over the weekend they called us back and they said you are absolutely right and thank you for forcing us to think this through and i've gotten four or five other projects from them and we've done amazing branding for them and i think for me the moral of the story here is as as you did is you have to stand up for what you believe in if not for your creative but more for your process you know because it's um there is always the reality that someone will simply not like what you do even if it's good i mean there's just human taste right right but as you point out to go from this is the most amazing thing i've ever seen to i want to see more that's that's a sign i like the way your story ended better than the way my story ended so all right well let's wait wait i i need i i don't want to let you off on just yet so you tell them i think sometimes things were not meant to be you show them this thing and i encourage you to think about it they thought about they came back said and did he say carlos please let's continue on with what you were doing yes we actually got to do this yeah everything was great it was it was one of the most uh you know it complicated and large branding projects we've done i mean we printed so much stuff it was unbelievable this was back in the day when print was you know the thing but i have several stories and case histories like that that i've actually been considering putting in a book without naming names because they're very very very important teaching moments i still have the letters from everyone do you um are you a fan of fargo absolutely the film and the tv series amazing right so they have this thing at the beginning and i think you'll like this they said uh the following are true stories and then they they erase the word true very deliberately and they're just following our stories and you know it's a cadence and that's perfect and it says um the the names have been changed but everything else is exactly the way it was as we recall to protect the innocent the not so innocent or whatever okay i think you need to release a book under the kind of same thematic vibes i have a story that i'll tell you some other time about this teaching experience that i had a few months ago it will blow your mind it blew mine wow it will blow your mind okay we'll have to go offline and do that teaching experience i think the difference between where you are in that story and where i was was this is a small time production company it really was you're talking about a much bigger company i think and a relationship worth working through and i think them saying um somebody in our you know our team has an idea carlos would you consider it it's a little different than us maybe not that much man we're just really just not wanting to hear lip from anybody it's like don't go from this to this that's just too much of a spectrum it seems like i don't want to use this word but like manic or bipolar it's like how do you go from like applause to like this is not good well the other important key point here too though chris is that how do you go from hiring a design firm of our level and then tell and then sending me something that your secretary did i mean what and you're a pr you're a company that is in the creative field you should know better you just simply put yeah so anyway so we're both close to walking and then yours said no no come back to the table well you know to your point earlier about every wanting to treat clients with respect i actually want to do that to every client but i also expect the same in return which is the line of my contract i'll try not to be an ass you should do the same right that's what that speaks to in fact that line came from that experience you went back to the table like i need to update our business card and our letters yes i love that so how do you deal with third with disappointing third-party vendors or did back then because you don't do that anymore i suspect in your industry what is a third-party vendor well a printer or a um manufacturer of some packaging or you know right someone that works for you you're the client now yeah what mood are we in today like how do i you know give me some parameters like we're generous we're we're upset right now no we're upset we're upset this is a lot of money a lot of money and they've dropped the ball they've dropped the ball you depended on these guys and they've dropped the ball okay so i i like to try to deliver um hard information through steely cold unemotional uh voice right my delivery should just be even killed in temper uh even though the messages can be cutting because i think when you start to yell uh people just shut down they'll tell you anything that you need to hear but you won't work towards a solution okay so sometimes you can you can ask a question it is a very directed question it's something like when we met we talked about it was going to do x y and z help me understand how what you came up with what you're doing honors what we agreed and then you just let them do what they do and then they usually make a bunch of excuses and you're like so i'm hearing a lot of reasons but none of this is getting us closer to the solution here so i'm in a difficult position i got to make a choice the choice right now is cut our losses with you and move to a different party which i don't want to do but i'm not exactly confident that if i stay with you that this can be resolved so right now i'm looking for assurances from you and your team with the detailed plan is how we're going to right this ship otherwise i'm going to have to make a different decision and then let them talk you know my situation or not my situation i think that a lot of the situations for you and me and these in these in dealing with these problems isn't so much that they've disappointed you it's that they've usually painted you into a corner at least for me and that is that every single time i've been disappointed to that degree that we're talking about now it's been difficult because i don't have plan b or the option for a plan b because the deadline is is you know coming up or the disaster is so costly that i mean it's just so difficult and i've always wondered how people deal with stuff like that so okay that's that's part of the parameters then that you can't you can't find another option right you can't fire them and you're hitting this thing okay so new tactic then yeah and i've had some things like these hap this happened we basically have each other over a barrel like i i'm your client but you've also screwed me over and i can't find another person so what we do next is going to determine the kind of relationship we'll have in the future maybe you just don't care so now i get into solutions mode like we're beyond the point of pointing fingers and trying to understand how we got here given what we need to get done in the next x days i need to strategize with you on how to get this back on track as much as possible and i i need some concessions from you and your team to make this work otherwise we've screwed this up in ways that i would not be able to prepare so i try to come with that like i don't really care if i said this you said this if your team missed you know there's a car or accident i don't that won't help us we have to get into what can we both do right now to try to pull this from the jaws of fear and then i probably would never work with them again but you know at least right now that's what we got to do well i can tell you that the the the source for the question for at least from me came from 100 of the time not having an option and it was just so utterly frustrating that i just didn't even know what to do were you able to fix it in some cases no yeah in one case it it became a legal problem if you weren't doing what you're doing today what are the career do you think would be of interest to you probably architecture oh that's good i love architecture so much i like designing dimensional space and i think i i remember working with the architect i think he was saying just insult me but i i took it like oh when we were designing our first office and my architects looked at me because i came in with like books tear sheets materials i was ready to go and he said chris are you a frustrated architect you know i think that's a dig but i'm like yeah i think i am maybe and i remember in in design class i always was thinking like okay this is what it looks like in the 2d space but what if it did this for the cover and it wrapped around trying to think it on a multi-dimensional level and looking at it in physical space and i think the if you are a good designer as massimo vagnelli had said if you can design one thing you design everything i don't believe that by the way you don't i do no i do not okay because i think there's relationships that you understand about form and function and how things work that you can apply it to other things i'd love to hear your point but there's no way that's in my opinion that uh someone who designs a logo can design a building i'll go with you on that one i don't think yeah you know i've often been asked why don't because i'm a car guy which was going to be one of my next questions are you a car guy but people are saying you should design your own car and go never it's impossible are you a car guy yeah but i want to circle back so i think the person who designs a logo is a form maker and a very specific type of form it's a hyper specialized skill whether it's calligraphy hand hand drawn or built up lettering but the kind of design i guess it's autobiographical and that i i understand layout and typography so now we're not just looking at the micro we're looking at the macro like how things fit together in a in a system and oddly enough i have designed buildings before and interior spaces and furniture so like the same relationship i understand between a block of copy a headline and the negative space around it i can apply those if i'm a diligent student of architecture i'm not saying i don't know anything about it and then also i'm going to try and design a building it's probably disaster i'm not saying i can design it better than architect but i can design something so well i'll give you that as i mentioned earlier there are exceptions to the rule but i think in general uh it for example the analogy of typography in a building you know typography is more of a sensory visual experience a building is a whole other thing it's not just making a little pretty drawing of a building so i don't think that it's a doable thing but but even deeper since you brought up the typography example i think that closer to home i don't know that anyone that designs a logo can go off and do beautiful ancient calligraphy for example you know and it's a form of typography it's just a different talent uh pool for for me but i i could be wrong who knows okay yeah so where do you think your wisdom comes from because you do have really unique answers to common questions well first of all thank you i don't know who said this but i believe this wisdom is experience plus reflection it's probably one of the great to like philosophers right so if you want to be wise you must experience things very few people can be wise and have experienced nothing so therefore there's a correlation it's not causal between age and life experience and that's a necessary ingredient plus reflection that's the part where you kind of look back and like what is the meaning of this what did i get from it and so i think being such an awkward introverted um like first generation immigrant i've had a lot of time to reflect because i wasn't talking to anybody i was just thinking about what i was thinking about and i've described certain experiences to other people and like whoa that's pretty trippy i'm like i just thought that's what everybody does i often was so self-conscious that i started to envision myself from a third third party point of view and float above myself and i i have described a couple times in my life where i was having an outer body experience and i'm i'm like totally drug free alcohol free so i just want to put that out there yeah me too and i'm just observing right so i'm just looking at things and now i don't have any experience but i do have an innate skill to to reflect and think and i'm really turned on by philosophy and so i i think it's just that really and i've had some a very good fortune in my life where i was thrown in a place where living in los angeles at the time in which i was living in it and motion design becoming a thing where i could catch that early first wave of motion designers allowed me to experience a lot of things and i i just think it's a combination of those things i also want to point out one thing which is uh growing up much like with you uh your your experience didn't have a lot of guidance from my parents because they're both working and so i was free to be whoever i wanted to be without a lot of voices in my head and oftentimes when i talk to people they're always battling some inner demons they're they're living their life because their their mom or their dad told them this is the way it's supposed to be and so they've written up all kinds of rules about how they're supposed to be in life and so they they can't seem to shake those voices whereas i just tell people and not in a weird way but like it's usually just one voice in my head i don't hear my dad's voice i don't hear my mom's voice it's just mostly me and so i'll have that kind of clarity you know i obviously know that the question i asked you is difficult to answer because sometimes there is no answer right but much like a unique singer or magical musician or incredible artist i think you fall into that space where you have the capability of delivering guidance to normal questions that and i don't who knows where that comes from and you know i know you say that you don't uh hear your mom or your dad's in your head but it's got to be in there i'm sure it's in there i would imagine yeah i learned a lot of things from both of them and i love them both dearly but it's like um you know how when you ask somebody like why why do you not ask the client for more money or why or they'll tell you like 55 reasons and i'm like whose voice is that it's not your voice like i don't know i never thought about like that he said try to trace back like who and then sure enough they were reveal like this happened to me when i was six years old this happened to me when i was 12. and so they're carrying that that baggage with them and it's hard for them to see and that's why it's so hard for them to make decisions see you just did it again you just did what i described of having an answer to you to a normal question i don't know your questions about realize that you do it huh your questions are not normal at all this is the most i've squirmed in my seat you've lived up to the billing all right well let me ask you another one and this is the one that i was i would told you i gave you the option to do some reasons this is kind of a fun one so every brand has a tagline right yeah so which tag line that you can recall and i'll give you the answers to mine because this is tricky which tagline resonates with you and which one is the complete opposite of you of a brand that's out there right now yeah this one okay you have to go first on this one carlos this is just fun i love i love the reese's peanut butter cup their tagline is not sorry the way they say it i love the uh duluth underwear get a pair i see a theme i see a theme so now i have plenty more i only outline two and the one i don't relate with at all even though i think it's hilarious and genius is the turbo tax tagline which is free free free free you know what you can't top that so you're going to take the fifth i can't top this you give all the ubc thought about this uh it's probably a quiet obsession hobby of yours well this is part of my uh branding study with that swish logo thing that i was doing so it's a bit unfair to throw this at you yeah but i'll ask you this with regard to a brand with so if you were a car brand which one do you think you are and which one do you think you'd like to be you you asked me briefly if i'm a car guy yes or no i appreciate beautiful sculptures but when people are like uh how many cylinders in that and how many horsepower and zero to sixty i'm like two i don't know to me this is a piece of moving art and i i have great admiration for the men and women who on every little thing the vents to the to the lights and the turn signal and the way it sounds right those are all things that i love um but i don't sit there and obsess over cars but i will say i'm gonna throw this answer out the first time i'm saying this and it could be something like come on chris so if i was a car brand i would probably be porsche and i'll tell you why um there is a timelessness to something in the shape from model to model from year to year that remains mostly unchanged by my eye minor changes here and there and i think it's something about the quiet confidence that a company can have they say we did it right we don't need to do it to be in fashion to change it we can work on everything else efficiency handling all the other kinds of stuff longevity materials all those kind of but you know what we did it right and it's so iconic and it's held its value and of all the car brands i think it's consistently ranked as one of the best drivers cars despite cars costing 2 3 10 x it's still right up there always in the top 10. and the porsches have held their value over the years because of this timeless quality and so if i could be like a car brand i would be like porsche how'd i do you did great it's actually the same answer that i had uh and i struggled for several reasons because it's so of course you want to be porsche but that's not the reason i selected it but i don't want to get into why i selected it but unless you want me to but um i wanted to know why in addition to the answer that you just gave me why you think that connects with the presence of christo why does what porsche does represent what chris does just a couple days ago a friend of mine was reading to me my my horoscope which i don't really put a lot of stock into so she's like when were you born what day what time all that kind of stuff and she was telling me according to your moon you're sending an ascendant sign i don't know any of that stuff she's reading something back to me which i guess this is pretty accurate if the suit fits crawl into it one of the things is i have now come to a place in my life i'm i'm i'm pretty comfortable with who i think i am and i'm not really willing to apologize for that anymore did you ever apologize yeah i did a lot really really yeah i think when i found design i started to find myself and each time i i got deeper into it i found another piece piece of the puzzle of myself and i was like i can build my identity here finally because i wasn't athletic i didn't play music i didn't have any kind of special skills uh wasn't tall wasn't short wasn't anything and so it was just kind of like disappearing and what i found is i'm like yeah i think i'm pretty good at this now i get to explore who i am and in the in the process of creating videos on youtube i'm 42 at that point right so i think i know who i am now and i've spent 20 years making commercials for other people i don't really not worry too much about money and so i get to just express who i am and for a lot of people they don't like it at all totally okay with that and i remember one time it's getting a little testy and during a live stream when somebody had suggested i think in in a non um offensive way like chris why don't you try this with the logo that you're designing and i paused you know this is a live stream and i said well that's a good idea when you host a channel you could do that idea but this is what i'm doing you know what i mean great idea so good it's so good you do it it's so good you should do it i'm just gonna do it this way and one one last little story here is i'm on clubhouse doing a call with my friend petrula franticas and after the call she texts me and she goes chris there's some strong reactions to you from this room today i know what that means because patrol is very polite it means people are throwing shade on me and they're dm'ing her right and i'm like okay she goes do you want to talk about it i'm like yeah okay so she tells me some of the things and she's very careful about how to phrase these things i said i appreciate that petrula i'm not going to change she goes do do chris people misunderstand you i like no they understand me perfectly they get to react however they want to react and i just it's just you know what people call me a charming razor blade i'm good with that label that fits really well half people really called you that chris yeah people give me all kind of loving uh just funny nicknames and i love it all i really do they like nicknames too and i told my wife because it was on twitter like chris you're the charming razorblade i told my wife she goes the internet knows you don't they there's an edge to you you can get cut but there's some charms so you're kind of there's some attraction there we don't know what it is and i said to her to petrula petrula that's my brand and she laughed she goes okay i'm just have to accept that yes that's absolutely right i found my voice i found i found who i am and i'm not really willing to apologize for that now if i misspeak if i offend you i will apologize but i'm not going to apologize for being me i'm not even sure that you should apologize if you offend someone well like you're you know how when you said your thing that your intention was from a good place and then somebody called you and said they're really hurt by this and they took it in a totally different way so for me i'm like i'm sorry that you interpret this allow me to explain but if you want to be mad at me so i can't do anything about that well that's that's exactly my point is that yeah i know where it came from yeah i can't help what he brings to that yeah although of course i will have a longer conversation and try and smooth it out what what's something that you like to do alone these days it seems like everything we're doing is alone isn't it no i mean for chris though i mean for yourself like just for myself just for yourself like a guilty indulgence or something yeah i love reading comic books i have a emotional sentimental connection to comic books that most people will not understand what age do you feel someone has to have their in the pile there's no age whenever it makes sense we all run a different timeline is there a place you'd like to live other than where you are i ask myself that question a lot and my wife and i we explore all kinds of options and the answer always comes back to nope exactly where we are because we can live anywhere and do what we do and the options are there so until that changes and i love the weather i love the people i love the freedom i love the energy of uh the the city that we live in and there it's hard to beat it's not perfect for sure what about you carlos uh i i am very very fond of barcelona i've been to barcelona it's very nice i think it's in my blood my dna blood not just blood i would like to go there or live there what's holding you back my roots i have what i call fortunate problems you know what though of all the cities that i've traveled to barcelona has a pretty good combination of things that i like oh it's fantastic most because my best friend lives there and it's fantastic yeah so what do you want can you add some context to that big picture what does crystal want i want to change formal education especially in undergrad space that's a big one right yeah are you confident you can make it happen no but i like the pursuit that's awesome great answer so carlos between you and me and my you know my mouth to odd god's ear it's it'll be the thing i do to tell them i can't do it anymore have you struggled finding team members that share your vision in the beginning yes uh not so much now and i have to remind myself from time to time that um i think people like us we we see things and we move differently and we have a different appetite for risk uh things that scare people don't scare us and so people are like you're very courageous for doing this it would only require courage if i thought i was going to fail but here's how my delusional mind works i don't think i can fail my past seems to indicate that if i set my sight on something it can happen and so i'll give you a perfect example here i'll try to abstract some of the details because i don't want to embarrass anybody but one of my team members said chris this is really how we need to build this program this community and he's like the data let me just read you all the data and he said i really respect you that you would do all this work and to tell me the data but the data doesn't tell the story this is not what we're going to do we're going to do it like this and i could be wrong and we might not have the kind of success that you're thinking about just wait it'll happen but to both of our surprise what i was telling him worked and he called me up the next day he said chris i was wrong you were right i it's not that i didn't believe but i was just like the data so you know i think this is um an analog to many different things that data is just one piece of information and depending on what it is that we're looking for it will tell a very specific story this is why statisticians lie all the time maybe not even on purpose we all have forms of bias and we'll read it the way we want to see it and it's kind of incredible like you see here's the here's a perfect example cryptocurrency is taking a dump right yeah like bitcoin all those things are like 50 from its peak so one person says reading that exact same data i knew it this is all hot air this is all speculation and it's all hype and the other person said this is wonderful this is a good opportunity to buy because i missed the first wave and i'm not going to sleep on this there's scared money that's running out the smart money goes in now same piece of data different stories and there's probably countless ways to read that you had mentioned earlier that you embarked on this because you knew or you felt that you couldn't fail but do you think and i suspect that maybe you would have done it anyway if you thought it would because i think part of what people like you and i do is that we're not hampered by the fear of failing i have different definitions of failure so if i decide and and people will say no chris you fail all the time like well it's because you're looking at it from from moment to moment in the short term i'm just looking from the long term like i didn't you didn't ask me how long i have to to be successful at this and so yes there's things that we do that don't work i try another thing that's not a failure that that was just information on what might not work and what could work potentially so but if i had said at the onset i don't see myself in this place in the future then i'm not going to do that i know i don't see it it being something that compels me to get out of bed every single day to think about this to obsess over it then to me i'm not going to start that but once i say yep i see that this is what i want and we had many hard years those are not failure there was just the beginning of building up what we needed to to do well the part is recognizing that you know as uh thomas edison said i forgot the exact quote but something like uh you know he failed a hundred times before he succeeded or something like that i don't know i know exactly what you're talking about though the quote yeah it's like somebody asked him uh like because it took him ten thousand different tries to find the thing to make the light bulb work right it turned out to be carbonized paper that worked the best and he goes i didn't fail 10 000 times i just found like 10 000 ways that it didn't work so he reframed it really fast so it's so amazing that's just so amazing i had mentioned earlier that i was going to ask you your thoughts on award shows and competitions and stuff like that and no no for no no reason other than just have a discussion i don't have one way or the other but just wondering what you thought was i think award shows are primarily uh we need to see them for what they are their businesses and i think somebody along the way said you know wouldn't it be great if we got fees for entries and then fees for collecting their prize and then we could sell tickets to this thing and then we could publish a book and sell that as well and so it's become its own business and i'm not not good or bad because businesses aren't good at just perfectly fine right where it gets bad is uh where the criteria for which you win an award is motivated by some other thing like nepotism cronyism those kinds of things and that's not good it is also a good for for building one's own credibility with an external benchmark and i think a lot of people do use it for that the smarter play is to use the words to thank your clients and so i learned this in a uh in a workshop is awards awards are useless except when you buy the award to send to your client to thank them for entrusting you with the creative reigns if you will and he said if you think about it when the client receives that award because the word's not for you it's for them they feel proud it reinforces the positive feelings of what has happened it encourages them to continue to allow you to do your best work more importantly when someone walks into the office and sees that the story begins again they get to relive the moment again but then that person leaves the office and says why aren't i working with a team that can get me this thing so before i looked at awards it's a purely selfish and and kind of like a like a vanity metric like i got these awards now i look at it like if i'm going to win an award it's not for me it could be for the team to thank them for their work but also more importantly it's for the client for trusting us to do this work what are your thoughts i i agree with you i the the one thing that i've always wondered about awards is the you know often in in focus groups uh advertising people are as close as you can be to a used car salesman because basically their view of us is that we're just professional liars yeah to put it lightly right and uh the only uh wonderment not concern that i've had about award shows is that there's no uh there's no um proof of of of effectiveness it's just cool it would be great if we had an award show that proved hey business was here when this was done and now it's up here you might like the effie awards yeah no i i know i know but i i um i like you don't also want to uh diminish it because i i do think that it plays a good part in a lot of things as you pointed out and also um it's nice to be uh get a pat on the back and it's okay to be a business like that but yeah so look i know that we're we've reached our hour and a half probably way over time so i'm going to shoot you some really short ones okay this is like lightning round lightning round okay all right i'm limber i got i survived the hard questions i think it wasn't that i'm not i'm not emotionally traumatized i think we're good yeah well there's two more that i was going to ask you one of them is kind of a dominant one the night's young chris i could still yeah don't don't celebrate too early right right okay so let's just go on the quick rounds okay why bald ready why what bald why bald hair is thinning it's a cleaner look okay i know but you can pull it off all right good i tried it didn't work you know i need to so you don't oh i need to trust me there's a reason i'm wearing a hat [Laughter] are you religious i was raised i'm not yeah neither one okay what type of music do you enjoy or default to um i like when i need to work and think i need that low fidelity stuff or classical music without lyrics that i can enter into the what do they call the alpha beta waves or whatever but when when i'm just in a in a mood i like fun music so i i'll listen to pop i'll listen to rap hip-hop i mean something that stirs my body like you can't help but dance anything that does that i'm good okay is there a movie that moved you that you really connected with that you saw it doesn't even have to be recently yeah there are plenty of movies um one of my favorite films that if you saw me in the theater you're like chris pull yourself together you idiot is um is a spider-man into the spider-verse it's a cartoon i know see i know i know carlos i'm gonna just bear my soul here and just now here's the thing there's a moment when when miles morales is trying to connect with his father in those parental relationships pre me having a family didn't hit me at all and once you have children because you can be the child in that story and you can also be the father like how am i what's my relationship with my own children and there's something there and i have a like i said i have a strange connection to comic books i read the comic book version it's not the same story but i balled as an adult like just tears not the whole thing when i read the death of spider-man it was so moving to me this young black man who's miles morales and it was just him understanding the impact that peter parker's life had and just looking it from that it's just some of the most brilliant writing sarah pacelli drew the comic book and it was just it was so perfect so yeah okay i wasn't expecting that yeah well i've got several but i i only want to mention one because i'd like for you to consider watching it if you hadn't and also your audience i think they'll connect with it it's called fountainhead okay i'm not saying it's the unofficial story of frank lloyd wright he's never mentioned by name and it doesn't isn't promoted as that it's really more about fighting for what you believe in it's outstanding it's in black and white okay and then we're going to end with your typical three truths and one lie [Laughter] that's not a lightning round question you're gonna have to make it quick okay carlos challenge accepted story number one uh when i was growing up we lived next to a a creek called coyote creek and both my brother my younger brother and i who's a year younger he did not know how to swim neither did i was a period in time in which after the rainfall the the water level would rise but we still go to the creek because we love being at the creek and he and i were messing around something happened i wasn't paying attention and he fell into the water and the current is stronger and higher and he barely makes it out of the water and he slips and falls back in now i'm there with my childhood friends and i don't know what to do i'm just panic stricken and i tell my friend who knows how to swim and it's in the boy scouts you gotta jump in you gotta get my brother and he was scared he's like i'm not going in there and he tries to take our fishing pole and cast a line around my brother's foot to pull him in but you know that's bad idea so eventually my brother's body drifts into a pool where it's still and it's really deep and i'm thinking to myself i cannot come home without my brother alive and this may be the last of me too so i go into the water i start bouncing up and down you know as the water is getting higher and higher and it's right by my ear and i could see his foot in this very murky pool and i just take a breath i go under i grab his foot and i'm thinking like i have to build enough momentum going back towards shore otherwise we're both done for so i'm hopping still underwater hopping hopping and eventually i get enough above i pull my brother's body out he is white as a ghost his lips are purple and i tend to turn to my friend again like dude do cpr you know this stuff you're in the cub scouts he's like i'm not doing that my brother looked dead wow and so i'm like you know what what do they remember what do you remember in school what do you remember in school so i first clear the air airway like i look in his mouth there's nothing in there you pump the stomach and then i start doing cpr on him push on the stomach and he's he's stiff he's just there and i'm doing i'm doing it and like i can feel the tears but i'm like you know what don't don't give up keep doing this and then all of a sudden he turns aside and he coughs one big cough and everything that he drank came out things that were in the water all kinds of horrific things he just vomited all out and he's like all bleary-eyed just blinking like what is going on oh my god we have to get you home that's story number one how old were you i was not yet in junior high so i don't know um i'm gonna guess 12 but i don't know okay yeah we got to do a lot of silly things as kids story number two my first uh girlfriend uh had a stranglehold on me emotionally and i'm 16 years old i love her to death i think i'm gonna marry her and she was very particular about valentine's day all our anniversaries and all that kind of stuff and you know me being a teenage boy i'm like oh i don't really remember this and she cited that as one of the reasons why we broke up she's like these little things matter to me so later on in life i meet my wife who is my girlfriend my best friend from school and i ask her like what what is important to you what are the dates and i write these things down and we've been married for 24 years i've never missed a single anniversary because i think that pain of losing my first love that this was gonna come back and haunt me so to this day i've never missed an important anniversary with my wife story number three i applied to go to arts center and i had asked for a scholarship consideration and they had sent me the portfolio back and then they called me and said you know what congratulations you got in school but we we realized we sent your portfolio back before reviewing it and the period in which to review it it's tomorrow i need you to go and fedex your portfolio now to be considered for a scholarship and so i go to my mom i need to send this via fedex can you take care of this and she goes no problem here's the address you got to do it now it's got to be tomorrow she goes okay no problem my mom comes back everything's cool they call me the next day like we did not get your portfolio i'm like what do you mean can you check and she goes you know what if he doesn't get here the next day this is done i go over to my mom like mom did you send this through fedex she goes no i sent it to ups it was just today what's the difference i'm like oh i just can't believe it i did get accepted i did get a scholarship but not because i didn't try all right story number four what's that you're making it hard on me i believe well you still have one story allowed yes so maybe you'll reconsider how many things i tell true and how much of a liar i am last one i'm traveling with my girlfriend later on to be my wife i'm visiting her family in taiwan we're not married yet but um i was given a script to read as a last minute project before i got on the plane and i'm reading through the script on the plane i'm like oh this is so hard to follow what's going on we land him jet lagged whatever and then i read it and i get a call from the producer who sent me the script he says we need you to work on this project can you come back i'm like cool i i think i can do this so i tell my girlfriend soon to be my wife i get all back it's a film title it looks really intriguing and she goes okay let's figure it out we can just go back i said no no you stay i'll i'll go back i'll do the work and luckily the producer called me and says you know chris it's not a go and you won't believe it but the script was for the matrix part one what i wouldn't have done to have gotten an opportunity not even to get it but to work on that because it's one of my favorite films of all time you've now been presented three truths and one lie carlos story number one was about my younger brother who drowned and was resurrected from the creek story number two was my first love uh having cited the reason why she broke up with me is because i missed an anniversary and didn't pay enough attention to the details so to this day to protect myself i don't miss any important dates with my wife number three is art center accepting me but saying the portfolio's late and my mom sending it like ups second day the last one was me being in taiwan getting a script before i left and then later on discovering that it was for the matrix because i couldn't understand the film uh but i never got a chance to work on it because it got killed before i i flew back which one is the lie all stories are true except for one i'm unfortunately talking to a guy who has a way with words and uh they're all quite believable but i'm gonna say that number four is a lie what makes you think that's a lie i think it's a lie because if your mother agreed to do it i don't know that she would have not asked when is it supposed to be there it's that said though hold on i totally understand why she wouldn't do it because i suspect my wife would have done the same thing across our relationships what's that i'm still going to call it a lie still going to call a lie even though it's very believable that someone is closing all your stories are believable [Laughter] now i will say this that's a very good guess my mom is notorious and so is my wife for not listening to the details of what is necessary and just thinking you want star wars star trek will just do just fine exactly you don't understand no it's very specific i fedex my i i messaged my wife i need you to do this and she comes home with some other i'm like literally like it says this how could you whatever that is a true story though i almost lost out on scholarship because my mom wasn't paying attention and thought you know second day is just good as first and it's half the cost what's the difference that's the reason why my wife would have sent that second day 100 it's just the the frugal uh asian immigrant who's like no this is not necessary there you go yeah i made the wrong call as i was saying it i see that you should have read my reaction and change your answer i saw that now when it's at a good gas but you're an honorable man you stayed with your initial that's right i will fight till the end even if i'm wrong because you know why because you got to get a pair exactly exactly okay not sorry exactly here we go not sorry the story that is not true is story number two um i did not screw up on any anniversaries with my first girlfriend we broke up for other reasons and to this day i miss all of our anniversaries because my wife doesn't care about them at all but that was my first choice really i don't believe it carlos you're right yes you're right when you said i'm not going to believe it well as i said you should have said i'm between these two and and you should have read my reaction as a poker player might i mean if i was playing poker i would have lost my ass today i guess you you're like i go all in it's a bluff i'm like four yeah chris thank you so much it was very enlightening and um i hope we do this again i i want to thank you for having this conversation with me and for being so generous with your questions and your time and it's just even though i did most of the talking i get a glimpse into how your brain works and to me yeah absolutely it was a pleasure it really was you