The Future of AI in the Creative Industry #podcast #creativepodcast

the people I know who are professionals who are creative who know how to to direct and Lead teams and put things together they're not as threatened by AI as the people who have yet to to kind of make their living doing it sort of the the lwh hanging fruit that AI is going to be really good at replacing is is kind of that stock photography level of things sitting through hours and hours and hours of footage that's not what we strive to do at the the higher level but we had to do that to get to the higher level if we start to remove that and it's just a push button my fear is that some of the the newer generation are not going to be trained on the same sort of fundamentals that we may have been trained on there's a very tricky line or tight rope to walk to to inject yourself where it's necessary to to care deeply about the work but yet not so much so that you lose yourself in the work and when when the idea is not approved or clients want to make changes you feel mortally wounded because they didn't love that thing that you were so passionate about it's a real hard thing to unplug at the end of the day and not take all those things personally but I think there's a huge talent in in sort of getting to that next level of being able to be more objective about the work my next guest I haven't spoken to in a number of years we kind of go way back to the old school and a lot of you who are longtime OG followers and fans of the show know that at one point in my life I used to make commercials and music videos for a living and I've left that world long behind so it's always nice to welcome a familiar face and a familiar voice back to the show so Kevin for people who don't know who you are can you introduce yourself tell us a little story about who you are and what you do yeah so uh it's good to see you Chris it's been many years uh I guess the broad category is I you know I'm in the motion graphic space uh work primarily in commercials music videos like you were saying way back in the day if you know you know got my start at a company called fuel long since gone on but you know kind of one of the early OG motion graphic shops and then you know just kind of work my way through the industry and uh we worked at a lot of different uh places know a lot of similar people and uh yeah so that's kind of my brief history and where are you at today so uh I'm currently at a place called motion which uh they've been around for about 35 years um and they are traditionally known for being a theatrical uh advertising agency or trailer house um one of the interesting things about them is that they sort of during the pandemic when the movie stuff shut down they kind of saw that they had all their eggs in one basket and so they really wanted to Pivot and they would always had a a foot in the Graphics and Design and branding space um and so they kind of hit me up and uh they want to kind of expand on that and kind of double down and get get uh a little bit more presence in the design and branding space so kind of over there bolstering some of the stuff uh it's kind of like a startup with inside of the company um and it's been a lot of fun they've been really supportive and it's very interesting because I'm sort of what drew me over to them was I started looking around the landscape and I started to see that I'm in commercial advertising but then some of the biggest Tech brands in the world are now content providers and so I was looking at this company going like I think there's a way into some new interesting stuff that they are actually trying to diversify out of but I'm kind of looking at them going like well content is now the product and it's kind of an interesting kind of thing where I think it's a really great space to be in and it's it's very it's cool to sort of get access to um a lot of the the big Tech through advertising and entertainment there's a lot for us to unpack and so before we go to the future or the present I want to revisit the past I didn't know this and I probably should have known this that you you're you're there kind of the very beginning and and fuel is a name that's going to kind of raise a lot of eyebrows and bring back an instant flashback of memories and Nostalgia for those of us who were kind of at the birthplace of motion design in Los Angeles uh so fuel was founded by uh Seth Epstein right and he was kind of a guy playing around with desktop tools and and Seth is somebody who started out as I guess a rival contemporary and then later on just appear but take us back to those early days what was it like to be at Fuel and what was your role and your capacity and and was the General Vibe back then well I got in right as sort of fuel had sort of disbanded so fuel got its start in sort of the.com boom right and so they were part of Razor fish they got acquired into this agency and they were right there and there was like a a couple different ones I think you got your start at if right is that kind of where you were early on in your career um I was freelancing a little bit yeah something like that it was RGA back yeah RGA yeah so you know but there were a couple of like uh Pinnacle places and fuel was one of them so early out of uh sort of design school I kind of got in as uh just designer ground level um and right then it was sort of splintering from Fuel and out of fuel had spun brand new school and so that was kind of the the start of kind of the the style shop and like just these like really really great places that were making desktop you know accessible groups of young people kind of just breaking the rules and it was kind of No Holds bar it was just like who can make the coolest thing who could outdo each other and it was just kind of taking the tools that were coming out with After Effects taking uh you know early 3D applications and just kind of twisting the knobs because we were kind of rejecting some of uh the stuff that was happening in visual effects and actually back at the time it was kind of the late '90s early 2000s and it was kind of like that era of postmodernism so it was like kind of during the era of like ray gun and it was like we're distressing fonts and we're we're shooting things practically and then running them through Xerox copers and like kind of just reimagining how um imagery was created and processed and I think that was a really exciting time because there were established rules but we were all kind of just breaking the rules and sort of experimenting with these new tools were coming out and I think that's pretty analogous to how things are happening today with uh the Advent of sort of AI and some of these new tools that are kind of being introduced to us and and just new abilities to create in ways that we hadn't seen before if our audience will indulge me for a little bit I just want to set the stage for like what it was like back then so I I might be I might be a couple years older than you Kevin because I was there in 1995 when Seth was just trying to figure out how to make a real this is pre uh razor fish interest and all that kind of stuff and I had friends that were freelancing there working with Seth and so it's like how do we how do we figure this stuff out and this is the wild wild west back in those days because I think we're still on After Effects version 1.0 or something like that where many of the things that the youngsters today take for for granted in terms of like what they can do with the tools and it was just a time for playing around and trying to figure things out and what was happening was there were a bunch of art school kids either in in image making or or design like traditional graphic design who got these tools and there were tremendous opportunities that ad agencies wanted to tap into these creative minds versus going with more traditional Henry or uh I forget what the other box was called uh operators who knew the tools but didn't bring that level of creativity and so it was a wonderful kind of Renaissance or or a period of great discovery the rules weren't even written so you can't even say breaking the rules we're just trying stuff and seeing what we can get away with it's it's like I look back very fondly during that time and then of course the market matures competition sets in Rules start uh formulating and then we're all just trying to figure it out now that's a long time ago if anybody's paying attention 1995 let's move forward you're a couple years you're you're a couple years ahead of me I think yeah just just a couple I mean not not many but yeah after effects used to be called kosa um and there were no degrees in design it was not a thing that you could go to school and have an instructor that had any sort of background in so it was actually an interesting thing to come up through design school and be doing stuff in motion design and then later in into like web design and stuff like that using uh future Splash which became flash um and those types of tools when your instructors didn't have it and I again I think that's kind of analogous to stuff that's probably happening now so it's kind of we're coming full circle to how things always reinvent themselves right so just for context what people may not understand is the term motion design was not even invented in the time in which we were doing it it became an industry accepted term and so we're all doing things that we were not trained to do because no instructor even knew what to do so a lot of it was just through Tri ER invention and and it kind of just bringing us to the moment in time in which we live in today which is generative images through Ai and what that's doing so we're all kind of in the wild wild west again in terms of having this um I guess existential threat to our own creativity about concept art and style frames and all these kinds of things that some young person can type in a few prompts can generate a pretty good-looking image and in many cases and I'd love to get your take on this probably would take days to do and not even as good from a professional seasoned artist because AI has already learned how to compose things how to like things and how to create at atmosphere you just have to be really good at prompting so I'm curious because you're still in the field what is the general feeling of generative images is it embrac or do we hate it what's going on uh it is bouts of Terror and then complete wonder and awe and then uh and then kind of realizing that it hasn't solved everything yet um so I mean there's a lot to unpack there right cuz kind of going back to that statement of like how desktop was the first Revolution you know we've been using tools that For Better or For Worse have been AI for a long time it just hasn't been called AI so like for a long time there's been content aware Phil and these other things in Photoshop where you can start to do predictive stuff you know but if we look even further back in history it's like when we got the camera it was saying that we could now recreate reality so painters before used to strive to be absolute realism so rembrand and other things like that so it wasn't until about the 1900s we started to get expressionism and you know all these other things that came out because we no longer had to do those tasks as sort of Artisans so we're kind of at that area now where we can sort of take Ai and use it as something as more of a accelerant to our daily frame making um we have seen with social media that the time frames have just gotten compressed so iterating um coming up with style frames selling ideas through before you get into production those things I think AI can really sort of help and benefit um we're using like in an editorial sense there's a a way to do analysis of sort of uh scene analysis right so you know how you can type in a prompt and you can say like these sort of things but not these sort of things well you can start to do that with movie clips so you can start to go through um bins of of clips and say hey give me all of the close-ups so now instead of what used to take hours and hours of just watching footage you can now say here's close-ups and now I can do match Cuts between these close-ups um it's just creating things that we can Now shortcut some of the grunt work and actually get into the creative work and really um hopefully enhance that I mean I think we are going to get to a point when we sort of reach that moment where the creative process can't keep up with the generative process but we're not quite there yet I think it's still trying to create those good ideas okay there's a lot a lot here a couple years ago during one of the many Adobe sneak sessions that's happens at Max they showed off Adobe Sensei with Photoshop and using their version of AI and machine learning and just to make it super simple for people understand if you go and take a bunch of pictures on your camera one of of the most difficult things to sort through the camera to find the right image and what what was interesting in that demo pre all this talk about AI was somebody typed in 34 profile female and it went through all the hundreds if not thousands of photos found the right angle found the right lighting and showed you options and it was just aiding you and and the audience naturally OED and odd over this and I'm thinking when is this going to happen because I need this tool yesterday and so now we fast forward to today you're saying within the editing space you could do this Beyond just static frames you could do this with video you can ask it for certain things that I don't think it's the job anyone is trying to fight to keep and this is how it can accelerate your creativity so that the human is driving and not doing unnecessary production work but of course this is going to offset some labor somewhere because somebody's job at some point was to do that it could have been an intern assistant editor or somebody and and so we're trying away the benefits of AI versus the impact that it's going to have on jobs so it sounds to me like you're very Pro AI is that the case I'm cautiously optimistic um you know I think a lot of people and we've been sort of analyzing this and trying to say that there's something precious about The Human Experience and all these things like that but at a large point do we all just become an algorithm and like will it be able to connect the dots and we're not there yet but if you look at sort of how a toddler learns and when it first starts to speak words and then it really starts to accelerate and it's learning we're kind of at the curve of the hockey stick right now and so I think the future is not written with AI so I don't want to be a doomsdays but I also don't want to be so bullish on it that I don't look at how we can be ahead of that curve or Incorporated in ways that you know can be beneficial to us and and start to just I don't know I haven't fully I I think we'd be um a little hubris to say that we know the outcome of where this is but I think right now I'm excited by what it is offering and how we can start to incorporate that H and since I don't have many opportunities to talk to people from my former life I'm going to ask you to do something that may be impossible to do but I just love to get your feedback finger on the pulse if you will if you look at the larger industry of all the players that that still do we do or did what is the general sentiment if we were to take 100% of the motion design industry and to try to figure out a percentage of that pie how many people are bullish versus bearish uh can you give me a sense of like what the atmosphere is like out in the creative space I think that people by and large are excited by it and a lot of the people that I have had conversations with and again you know it's a small test case because you know your your sphere is as big as as right who you hang out with but when we had that discussion about like where the industry came from a lot of us were those tinkerers and a lot of us were those ones that kind of wanted to experiment and so once you start to understand how generative AI actually works and how it is kind of deconstructing an image to reconstruct an image and how it filters down and adds noise and then removes noise which is a longer discussion about that but like that's that's in essence it's creating something out of noise and it says hey does this look like what I knew something to be and it just runs Cycles over and over and over again so once you understand that that process that you demystify the magic of what it is you realize that it is actually just a a mathematical process that is an inference engine or really asking an if then statement a million or a billion times in a very short you know succession of of time so back to the original question I think right now we're all very curious and I think right now we're trying to sort of see how we can use it in a way that doesn't just feel um derivative because I think we're starting to see how AI art kind of has a certain gloss to it kind of has a certain composition to it kind of has a certain way that it's rendering and all that's going to change but it is it is a thing where we want to not be derivative and we strive as artists to kind of have originality to so it seems to me like you're saying that uh the majority is positive sentiment with some uh some caution and still trying to figure out how to do work that's new and different yeah is that about right yeah I think I think there's some cautious optimism yes okay so then here's my theory that I'm gonna put out there and I'd love to get your take on this okay so from the world in which we come from we've been able to earn a good living working at a very high level on super sexy fun projects making probably more money than we're supposed to make basically painting and drawing things right and so we've had a good life and I think the larger population of artists out there in the world that haven't had a taste of the good life working as a professional are way more threatened I think they have the exact opposite sentiment which is AI is pure evil it's stealing images what about the rights of the artists and probably because they don't fully understand how AI works but they they didn't have job opportunities they barely being or able to make ends meet and so I'd like to get your take on the theory because the people I know who are professionals who are creative who know how to to direct and Lead teams and put things together they're not as threatened by AI as the people who have yet to to kind of make their living doing it sort of the the lwh hanging fruit that AI is going to be really good at replacing is is kind of that stock photography level of things right like I have a local website and I just need to say that I'm a cafe and here's the menu and here's a cool signage or like a coffee cup with some coffee beans on it right and that's not what we strive to do at the the higher level but we had to do that to get to the higher level you know and and I think that um going back to that thing about hey was sitting through hours and hours and hours of footage getting rid of a job that somebody necessarily wanted probably not but is that job something that taught somebody what it means to have a good eye because they had to sit through hours and hours and hours of bad footage to know what the good footage was so much like you have to train an AI about input output of images we have to train humans about input output of images you need to have enough input in your brain to be able to have that decision-making process of taste or uh you know outcome and so if we start to remove that and it's just a push button my fear is that some of the the newer generation are not going to be trained on the same sort of fundamentals that we may have been trained on I'm glad you brought up the word taste because I I've I've commented before that I think given that if AI can make anything it could generate any kind of image it could actually produce videos from nothing now it can write poetry it could write books it could generate songs in the style of so many different people I think the biggest one of the biggest skills that you're going to need to have is a broad understanding of Art music literature history with a heavy dose of do you understand what good music sounds like do you know what a good poem sounds like because if it can make anything then it's discernment between those things I just happened to be watching a clip yesterday where it showed Fel Williams working with Justin Timberlake Post in sync when he was working on his first solo album called Justified and farel turns to the camera and says this is going to be hot this guy's got really good taste he's willing to push and try different genres and he's so open it's kind of interesting because that's a super old video but it kind of brings these themes together what do you think to prepare for the future of the design and creative business that schools need to do in terms of preparing them for an for a an industry that's going to be aided by AI how do we best prepare our new young fresh Minds to be viable in the marketplace that's a that's a tall that's a heavy question I mean it is it is something that I have been trying to unpack for a long time because I think that in order to have taste it's kind of one of those things where it's an intangible thing right some people are born with it some people intuitively do it some people grind and they just look at more things um it AI is real good at synthesizing and creating something that's come before I think the interesting thing about that that term of taste is pivoting when everybody body has been going down this path and then it's saying here's something that you haven't seen right and so we're get we get those trends when we go from modernism to postmodernism which where everything was super clean and then it's like pendulum swing we go super crusty and then the web comes out and then we have to make fonts and everything readable on a screen but then we get better screens so like actually now we're starting to see a return back to more Heritage logo design because our resolutions got better and our phone screens are easier to see but it's being able to see and predict those things that I think is where human right now still has the edge right because it's it's being able to say that we're numb right and and getting that overload and saying like Okay even though we've seen that and everybody's doing this trend let's try and buck that Trend or let's go against the graen to a large part artists are contrarians and we do stuff just because somebody else did the opposite so I'm going to do the opposite just to kind of prove that I'm different and I think a lot of times those things help take off there are people that do have a a higher intuition and I think like back to that Fel statement it's like you look at people like farel or Justin Timberlake or Rick ruin and and they definitely are people that synthesize stuff larger than just a narrow segment and they're able to take stuff that is influenced by a number of different things and see how they connect and sort of um create something that is new or Innovative or better than the some other parts um I think it was in his book Alan Trot writes about uh 1+ 1 equals 3 he said the the problem with creative people isn't that they don't know enough they just know too much about one thing that they need to be able to pull from more desperate sources so getting back to my original question to see if you have Insight on this if I'm a professor if I'm the department chair of a program of design in one of these prominent schools what is it that I have to introduce into the curriculum that gives a person a fighting chance if we take away the variable of of saying that um taste is innate because if it's innate then there's nothing we can do but if taste is something that we can be taught how do we have to change the the program or adjusta that we're we're going to be okay for the next 10 20 30 years well I mean I think that's one thing too about starting to become more of a manager and art director and creative director too is like trying to figure out how to Foster that out of other people right so whether you're an educator or higher up it's it's I I'm I'm mean I'm trying to decode that as a curriculum assignment right because the the thing is you really want to create an environment where people can sort of experiment and sort of you know synthesize and and play with things in order to come up with something new I don't know I don't know it's it's that thing it's like if we could say how do you teach taste I think a lot more people would would innately have that I think it is it is it is doing the work and failing and then knowing intuitively it's like you touch the stove it's hot then I don't touch it again so I did that thing it was bad or ill-received I'm not going to do it again so I I think the system is is set up already for that in the the idea of doing the work doing the crits getting the cons the consensus um I think there are ways Now with an expanded audience and with the Internet is to see if there's like a wider net that we could throw these projects to if there's ways that we can get more of not necessarily designed by committee but like the idea of a broader swash in our feedback loops um that might be something that's interesting to think about like creating a curriculum that gets a wider swash in the CR the the critique phase um but yeah I mean if there was a if there was a silver bullet for taste I think uh I think I would have tried to do that a long time ago myself well maybe this is not good for me to admit but I'm goingon to say it I think for a period of time I did not have good taste at all in many different things and as an educ is a person who's removed from the surfice space I have to believe that this stuff can be taught like everything it's just that we don't understand things well enough and I'll give you an example and and people are going to probably shriek at this two of my favorite colors used to be purple and teal let's not even go into I'm just going to put that out there and I had pretty poor taste and and I'll tell you why I grew up in the valley and Silicon Valley as a first generation immigrant I wasn't exposed to Art architecture photography Fine Art none of that stuff and so I'm just kind of like a kid with Valley taste right and then I go to Art Center and I start to get exposed to the the Legends the the the people who are written in the history books and I start to understand things from a different perspective and with increased exposure I start to learn things I take a a nature materials class and they teach you how to fabricate a desk unit so now you have an appreciation for craftsmanship because it's so hard to get a perfect Edge and then what I try to do with my own children is when we go out into the world I expose them things and I say look how this is constructed this is quality this is not quality and we keep going through that that's good design that's bad design and so they start to train themselves so I think in order for us to survive in this space into the future we have to have really great history teachers who make this stuff come alive because we need to know where things come from so that we can be precise in our prompt engineering or saying I think it's a little bit of a mati but in the early work works with a little bit of like a datais kind of approach put those two together and do it this way so that we have those reference points otherwise the machine is leading artist I think we need to to be heavy into rhetoric so we know how to speak we know how to think critically we know how to make an argument for things and we need to I think enroll in critical dialogue and Analysis so that when we look at a painting or we listen to a piece of music we can break down the layers to understand the subcomponents so we know how they're arrange and why they work together so that we can do similar things or at least direct a machine to do that at least that was what I would throw out there yeah I think I think knowing what came before is a huge part of that so like that that sort of breadcrumb of saying like do you understand the history or atmology of like where these words or where these phrases or Styles came from I think is a huge thing but like to your own point though it's like if you're saying purple and teal I mean we just went through a vapor wave kind of like whole athe where purple and teal and fuchsia are like the ways that you construct it so maybe it's more back to the the construction right the the quality and the craftsmanship as opposed to you know things come and go and taste and and um Trends kind of like EB and flow but I think it's still being identify the craftsmanship the quality and like when those things are appropriate or what they're hearkening back to or why does this feel fun does this feel like a sports graphic and why does this feel like what are the tropes and what is kind of the the genre that you're playing in and then once you understand that that's when you become a visual Communicator because you're able to take those things and amplify those signals well let's stay on this for half a beat longer I'm trying to say this objectively like even looking at my own taste level back then I'm saying I'm not trying to like to beat myself up here but it was pretty bad Kevin there's no saving any of that taste right and we both know that in the hands of someone who understands design and materials and composition that there's no such thing as bad colors or bad color combinations even bad tias it's really about how to use them but here's the thing like I remember like there's 80s design and it's just really bad but then there was this period in the 2000s when when brand new school or superfat or whoever else was out there were were able to take those retro references make them contemporary make them good again so it wasn't just like mimicking the past but applying modern Design Concepts to to make it like viable and to kind of fix some of the things that made it like cheesy and bad and and and that's I think part of the creative process at least how I feel about it what what do you think yeah I know I can definitely agree with that because there there's it's we see these trends that kind of happen and and you know that kind of the 20-year hypothesis of like hey that's what I grew up with and I sort of remember it as a kid but then now I become a taste maker and I sort of reinter that back into the world so it's like that's how we get an 80s Revival followed by a '90s Revival and when I was in you know High School it was like a 70s Revival um but you take that and you sort of synthesize and you sort of like again it's like what are the modern tools how do we composite now we can do these things better we can do them cleaner um so yeah I think it is it is you know every every generation is a remix and kind of we we're always building and adding on what came before us so I I do think a good history lesson is is important I think having humility and also um understanding what those Trends even meant uh you know so it's like what if you use constructionist kind of looks or brutalists or you know things that were coming out of a certain era or War torn like you understand what those Communications are and that's how you get like a Barbara Krueger you know like you start to see how those things sort of enforce and reinforce the message you know Milton Glazer those kinds of people kind of Drew from those Aesthetics to kind of get their message across um so if you're working with a brand you can sort of say like well is this trendy or is this poignant or is this on brand um and sort of take something from the past and sort of reappropriate it for for something new and that that's kind of the fun part of it before we move on to the next thing I want to talk to you about maybe we this is the final AI question here which is I'd love for you to look into your crystal ball and say okay where are we as the design industry in the motion space in the uh theatrical branding or trailer space and and where we use these AI tools mid Journey's been amazing I've been on it I think since V1 and now we're seeing it V5 and just the amount of of quality and in in a very short amount of time it's able to improve been fascinating now this Runway where we can take prompts and turn them into video clips some of it's horrible but it is getting better by the minute which is pretty incredible and so where are you going to be in 10 years with AI tools and and what is the industry going to look like I think like we were kind of talking about earlier I mean I think it's it's something that allows us to try and look at the history so this kind of like leads into that that conversation that we're just having is like understanding the history of where things came from and understanding that we're just on a time continuum of progression so you know if you understand the terms of physical production it's like letting and kerning so like letting literally used to be physical pieces of lead they put in between Type blocks to make the spaces bigger a lot of people don't know that but that was when we went to regular type setting on the computer we didn't have to have letting but that's a carryover from that terminology you know I think think we've seen things where we get into non- litar video editing and we started to see you know flash frames you wouldn't used to be able to make flash frames if you were single splicing uh film together but when that became something that you could do with this new tool we started to do it and we started to see steady cam like the one the Wier we could do a one shot we could follow through you know it's following the character all the way through the environment so we just have to look at it as a building block and now now we're starting to see like Runway where it's like I don't need to have a Production Studio I just need to have the good idea I can I can act it out I can say we're in space I can remove the background so again it really does come back to content it really does come back to the idea and it puts the onus really on you know you you still have to have the Genesis of why or what you know that's the how the how is like you put a prompt in there but it's like why why did you put the prompt in there and what was the reason and what did you want to communicate so visual communication is still at the end of the day about saying here's something that has a point of view and here is a reason for somebody to sit through it and watch it the tool is just how it's done and I think design is more fundamental it's more about solving the problem of why why are we doing these things so kind of to close the loop on that I think you know in 5 years time we'll kind of look back at this you know and it is a faster aggression cuz we're at the elbow of the hockey stick but I do think that it will become part of the tool set and it will just be like hey we still have to brainstorm we still have to get in a room we still have to like bounce ideas off each other um we still have to synthesize a brief we still have to know what the market is and then we go back and we start to execute and the unfortunate thing is we're just in a world that wants these things faster and this is just enabling us to do things faster so it's gonna it's GNA butt up real hard against just our cognitive ability to iterate and and sort of you know um hypothesize and sort of create that first question um but I think it will help us execute a lot faster maybe I'm just a a futurist or a fan of Science Fiction because I think in five years I I I may have a slightly different take on this where you'll just talk to it to the machine you'll say uh read the brief that the client sent over and is done and so what what are the potential two target markets that would benefit to achieve this goal based on this what is the through line that has to be communicated what art styles make the most sense if I wanted to take a contrarian approach to this what is something that's radical that still makes sense contextually relevant to this generate 35 ideas write 14 scripts and then analyze those scripts and those ideas based on these goals and metrics and you're just doing this by yourself you might be lying in bed you might be hooked up to neuralink and you don't even have to use your mouth to say these things Kevin am I do you think I'm I'm far off there because I want to put this out there in case in five years we're like oh my God that is exactly what has happened I I don't think you're far off I think maybe the timeline might be a little expanded but yeah definitely that is the path that we're going down right cuz a lot of those things are just analytics right so it's it's saying if there's a large enough data set what what do we do to be um liquid death to Evon right so it's like what's the what's the what's the Bob to the weave and so hey the space is crowded here but the product is the same thing we just need to brand the product in a different category and here's a category that is underserved so let's go to here we know that they've got X number of dollars and we know so I think to a large extent some of that uh is very true what you just said and so here's the irony because I was reading about the the I think this is in Marty num's book one of the many branding books that it used to be the people who controlled factories that was the barrier to entry so if you didn't have access to money to resources uh to be able to build stuff then you would lose and then eventually became about intellectual property like if if you have the brand and now just not even about that anymore so as we kind of Advance where anybody can make anything in the in the uh in the world of imagination it might come back to well can you manufacture it can you produce it can you sell that idea through the client because anybody can make anything it's now a question of who can make it tangible and get it to Market like liquid death maybe there's a thousand kids sitting out there like I had that idea well you didn't make it so there there's a person who put a lot of treasure at risk and and and relationships to be able to bring that to Market and made the correct decisions and and partnered up with the right humans to be able to get this to the point in which it's worth I think $700 million or something like that which is kind of like where I think we might be going back because as far as I know right now ai still is not making it it's still not spending its own money because it has no money yeah does not have capital and so I mean that that is a large part of what I've been thinking about too is is sort of like how how people are kind of going to return back to experiences when you dematerialize everything to the point where it can be infinitely repeated or reproduced um we're starting to see a lot of you know gen Alpha Gen X or or uh you know Millennials um gen zers that you know they they they hold ations and experiences over um like these digital things it's like they they they want to go experience they want to be out they want to have these uh luxury goods are doing a lot better now because you can have these like very tangible um things that you can enjoy so I do think there's going to be a return back to sort of the physical aspects and properties of consumerism to to a certain extent and like what what what experiences can you create or um sort of curate too that's one thing that I've been sort of thinking about and we've been seeing a lot more sort of advertising dollars go to experiential you know less um stuff going into TVC and a lot more going into what's playing on the monitors at Coachella or what is going on at Sofi stadium before the the you know the concert or the concert itself you know look at Taylor Swift she's creating an experience and that I think the estimates I saw were like6 to7 billion for that tour and it's it's Unstoppable you know and that that's something that you know you can't recreate that's something that you physically tangibly have to be at yeah very good okay you've been in the industry and unlike me I've I've kind of left and done other things you've been in industry for close to three decades now I'd love for you to kind of just look back on where you started the the the highs and the lows in between and where you're at and highlight maybe a couple like key life lessons or for for creatives or someone who wants to have a longterm sustainable career what are some of the highlights or things that you can share with us yeah I mean it's been a long career and like one of the one of the things is like you kind of just wake up and you realize that you've been doing this for a long time right and I think that's something that as you kind of get older you we all kind of relate to I think one like right now one of the things that I'm sort of coming to loggerheads with and just sort of recognizing is just like not forgetting who I am or like what I stand for or like what Journeys I've been on so that's a very vague answer but in the sense of like you get into this and you start doing the work and you just kind of go through the motions at a certain point and then you feel like there's not a routine to it but like you know certain certain shortcuts that you start to take and you start to put things in buckets and that does a disservice to some of the things of like why you got in here again like the conversation that we had about like the experimentation and like wanting to dive into mid Journey wanting to dive into these things and not looking them as um sort of uh threats but almost more as opportunities and I think that's one thing is to just keep that Curiosity and it's hard to do because when you when this does become a job and like most of us we are very passionate about this and we get into it because like it was a hobby and we were doing this in school and we were doodling and and then it becomes a job and then 20 years later you're kind of like you've just been doing that and you kind of lose yourself in the identity of what the work is so that's kind of one thing that I think is really to just kind of really stay curious and and don't lose sight of yourself and like why you started to do this in the first place well you've been around long enough and seen enough of the inner workings of multiple companies uh I I even long before I left the industry I saw people burn out and I'm sure you've seen your share of people burning out for a number of different reasons what did they do wrong or what could they have done differently to prevent that state of like they're no longer interested in doing this thing anymore that gave them so much joy at the beginning one of the things that's hard not to do is take this thing personally you know I think when we're creating stuff you I I have always tried to separate the idea of being an artist for higher versus being an artist so I chose the path of designer and that's work for hire I'm not a fine artist you know I do stuff on the side I'll do these other things that's for me but when I go to work I do have to solve a problem for a client and that's the hard part to Bridge and I think when you the good ones take treat it like it is a personal project and that they're great because they do that but I think they leave a little bit too much of the Flesh on the table every time and so I think it's really trying to not disassociate from it but at least being objective on the wins and like letting yourself enjoy the wins and letting yourself enjoy those things and like shed some of the losses you know and and shed some of the the negative feedback or the things that weren't necessarily right from a creative standpoint but if you take a step back and you realize that it's a you know A6 billion doll brand and they can't be as daring because if they have one bad quarter that could be you know 25,000 people's jobs and like all these things you just have to kind of take a bigger step and a bigger perspective of it and just treat it a little less personal um but that's not to say don't try but I think it's like to try and figure out the level of of um when you can leave it at work yeah that's a very tricky line or tight rope to walk to to inject yourself where it's necessary to to care deeply about the work but yet not so much so that you lose yourself in the work and when when the idea is not approved or clients want to make changes you feel mortally wounded because they didn't love that thing that you were so passionate about it's it's really tricky because I've seen both ends of that Spectrum where people literally show up it's a job this is the time in which I need to leave and it doesn't matter what you say I'm I'm out so they're they're never emotionally involved and then we've also seen people who take the work home work on until 2:00 in the morning because their identity is tied to this work and they can't separate themselves one person will never reach the Pinnacle one person will probably burn out way too quickly it it reminds me of that line from like Blade Runner that the candle that burns twice as bright Burns twice as fast and you have to kind of be able to modulate that and to have periods in which you can create passionately but then detach and not very many people can do that no and and it it is it is a tight RPP and I think there's something for the Aging creative as well too where um you know I I remember being young in this industry and I I look very fondly at it and I look very fondly to the next generation of people that are coming up because they haven't kind of gone through it and they are challenging me and pushing me to do things or look at things in a new way and I think in a lot of ways you know we've had that kind of discussion about taste and I think part of my job now is much less about beating the pavement and like physically making stuff but kind of guiding that taste level and being able to not be young and in the club and seeing what's happening at the 22y old level but when they bring that to me I can go like okay how's that work in a different component or this is what's happening in a cultural movement or oh I didn't realize that this piece of tech plugs into that sort of component of like Society um and and sort of not feeling like you're aging out but feeling like you're able to use your superpowers of like experience and taste to sort of synthesize and process and and take some of that stuff that the newer generation is because you you honestly don't see a lot of people in this industry that are like you know post 50s kind of still batting around because it is it's a real hard thing to unplug at the end of the day and not take all those things personally but I think there's a huge talent in in sort of getting to that next level being able to be more objective about the work we have about 10 minutes left I'd love to get your your quick take on a bunch of questions like kind of Rapid firestyle is that okay with you we do this yeah okay motion design industry if I'm a new graduate should I get into it uh I I think so I think the motion design industry is super fun and I think there's a lot of opportunities and things move and everything needs motion okay motion design industry the the good old days were better or the the new days are going to be better H that's a hard one everyone always says ever since I've got into this business oh you should have gotten in this when I got into it so I think there's a lot of things that are changing with adte and the downward pressure um I look fondly at those old days but that's when I was young so maybe it's just that I was young and I look back on when I made all those friendships and early days putting in the time do you see yourself doing this until you retire can one because you want to and because the the market will support it or this is a Young Person's game and I'm I'm an anomaly in this space um like I said I think I've sort of graduated my career I've started to try and bounce into that that level of where I'm you know like you you you were an educator you started the future the future's awesome you're spreading your message to more and more people being able to kind of get a a broader reach I think on a smaller level that's kind of where I position myself within companies where I can come in I can help put together teams I can help guide teams so I think the longevity for me is um a still you know being on the box and doing things and making designs but also you know wanting that longevity and being able to stay relevant through a bigger establishments and a larger force of people kind of working with me and together this you can only answer this one if you've seen it so if you haven't we'll skip this question secret Invasion use AI generated mid-journey looking art did you like it did you hate it what are your thoughts I don't think I've seen that okay we can we can skip that the artists we very upset at it I'm like wow this is a very interesting aesthetic because you can see the strange brush marks it's kind of like mid-journey V2 and I think it has its own aesthetic as you say like sometimes the tools shape the way things look and there's an aesthetic that I'm going to this is shocking to say look back with nostalgic eyes I'm like that was pretty cool now they're on V5 it looks very different I mean not to go off on a tangent but that's an interesting thing because it's like you know we look at these things when we're talking about things becoming tools like early drum kits and samples came out and they were garbage but now people call out an 808 as like a specific period in time an 808 drum hit is an 808 which is a synthesized version of a drum hit but it was for the 80s and now you have all these new things that want to make an 808 sound so that's going to be you know AI mid Journey version one that's going to be version two and that's going to be version three it's going to have its own aesthetic and flavor right okay I saved the hardest rapid fire question for last I'm a new graduate what are three things I can do to get my career on track if I want to be in the motion design space can you can you rattle them off what are the three things I need to do to be able to get my career on track in the motion design space uh I mean first just put in the work you got to do the work uh be uh be easy to work with uh I think the people that are the most collaborative are the ones that stick around uh you can be a hot shot but if you don't work well in a team I think you're you're not going to get the call backs I mean it's it's one of those things where I choose the the people that work collaboratively um and then I think I don't know I think just again just build your network meet more people work with friends I think this is all stuff that's been said before but I think um you know Rising Tides rise all people it's like you look around and you see oh stevenh Spielberg Copa and Lucas it's like why do those oh wait they went to school together oh wait this is a Lucas directed Spielberg production this is so you know just keep good company and if you're a good person when somebody gets into a studio they'll recommend you and you'll get in and then if you're if you're doing the work you'll just keep getting called it's simple as that you make a compelling argument for why schools still matter because despite whether or not you can afford it whether you're getting the value of uh what you pay there's something to be said about the network of the people the friends your classmates we shouldn't even call it Network the the the friends the relationships that you build the classmates because I know for a fact I would not be here today because I can pinpoint key relationships that I built that open doors for me that I even know because I it was it would be impossible to predict back then but I'm grateful for it so as much as we may hem and haul at the rising cost of private art school education and how it's like totally out of control there will be those relationships that you make that will be something that you'll hold on for the rest of your life I think it was is your experience any different I think I mean it was interesting I kind of was a little bit after you and I was in the sort of.com bubble so things were just exploding and work was everywhere but I do think that schools are a good Proving Ground in the sense that you are surrounded by people that want to be there and so they're there for the right reasons and those are the people that you want to surround yourself with um can you find that externally without school maybe but you know that if you're in that school you're getting the inputs and you're getting the community and you're getting sort of the um atmosphere and relationship that will Bridge way past when you graduate it'll it'll you know there'll be somebody that 5 years after you graduate you'll reconnect with and they're they're now doing this thing in a different industry and it's going to be like oh hey you were always a great designer do you want to do something for me and that's how your network just kind of grows yeah so whether in in Life or in work if I can may may sum up one thing that if you get nothing else from our conversation today be a good person don't be a jerk cuz as my former business coach would say you're not good enough to have an attitude so let's just put it there Kevin was fun catching up with you I think the last time we ran into each other was at a bar or something like that it's been too long I hope to bump into you again somewhere in the meain streets of Santa Monica on the West Side sometime in the near future thanks for being our guest today absolutely thanks for having me and it was a great catching up and uh continued success my friend thank you so much