Experience Leader
Experience Leader
Design and AI with Won You
In this episode, Devin and Won You discuss the profound impact of AI on the design and technology sectors. They explore how AI tools have already enhanced productivity in their workflows, raising both opportunities and concerns for the future role of designers. Key topics include the commoditization of design, potential loss of craftsmanship, and broader economic consequences of AI replacing traditional jobs.
Ethical considerations around AI, such as copyright issues and ethical content production, are also examined. The episode highlights advancements in web and product design, speculates on the future work landscape, and emphasizes the value of AI in streamlining tasks, enabling more efficient business operations, and democratizing design capabilities for solopreneurs and creatives. Challenges faced by junior designers and the importance of responsible scaling and apprenticeship models are also discussed.
00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:19 The Impact of AI on Design and Society
00:46 Using AI in the Design Process
01:38 Challenges and Limitations of AI in Design
02:41 Experimenting with AI Art
03:44 AI's Role in Client Projects
05:48 The Future of Design Jobs with AI
06:13 Balancing Vision and AI Capabilities
07:21 AI as a Design Partner
08:03 The Evolution of Design and AI
10:21 The Commoditization of Design
11:58 The Role of Craft in a Post-AI World
21:13 The Future of Design Education
34:51 Ethical Considerations in AI Art
37:09 The Ethics and Future of AI
37:45 Job Displacement and AI
39:01 Creativity in the Age of AI
42:25 Capitalism and Value Creation
45:54 Technological Innovations and Their Impact
49:12 The Future of Work and AI
58:35 The Digital Universe and AI
01:06:36 Journey into Design
01:13:12 Evolution of Design Tools
01:13:24 AI and the Future of User Interfaces
01:14:59 AI's Impact on Customer Portals
01:16:55 AI-Generated Dashboards and Design Systems
01:22:27 No-Code Tools and AI-Assisted Development
01:23:35 AI's Role in Product Design Business
01:29:30 Challenges and Opportunities in Design Education
01:31:37 The Case for Apprenticeship Models
01:46:25 Final Thoughts and Contact Information
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I would argue, if there's an established design system and an established look and feel from a creative director, art director, designer, and you have that established design system and you train the model on that and you're like, hey, what I need is a feed and I need it to do X, y, z. It's going to look at the library of other apps and how they do feeds and it will generate a very high quality feed. That's where I see the product person no longer needing a design.
Speaker 1:See the product person no longer needing a design. Do you want to decommoditize your products and services? Do you want to become a destination brand, increase your revenue and have more control over your pricing? Well, you're in the right place. Each week, we'll talk about how to create great customer experiences and how to orient your company to enable them. I'm your host, Devin Smith, and this is the Experience Leader Podcast. All right, everybody, welcome back to the show. We are talking today about AI and everybody's talking about AI. I'm here with my friend, Juan Yu Juan, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's actually your idea to talk about this. I think it's a fantastic topic, man, Thanks for coming.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me, devin. Yeah, this is something that's been on my mind all of last year. I'm sure it's on everybody's mind right now, but I think it's particularly salient with all the tech layoffs that's been happening over the last couple of years and just trying to think ahead about where technology is going to go and how that's going to affect design but also society at large in terms of other occupations that might be well, maybe not threatened but at risk of having to evolve or change in some way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. I'm very interested as I watch the applications of AI. I'm already using AI in my design process. I don't use it necessarily to lay out interfaces yet, but I have used it. I'm also an artist, so I've used it to like get me started on illustrations, like the deadlines I'm able to hit for clients. You know, there's no way I could move as fast as I can now with AI and sometimes I don't actually use the output from the AI, it's just like a starting place to you know, get some ideas going.
Speaker 1:But I've used the output and just, you know, fix what it got wrong, right, like some funny stuff I've had happen where it's like do a project for a client, do a, you know, like a keystone illustration that's going to be used across a lot of things. And you know, for instance, like a semi-truck, ai knows generally what an a, what a semi-truck looks like, right, but it doesn't know where all the wheels are supposed to go. It doesn't know where all the wheels are supposed to go. It doesn't know actually, like how to get the number of wheels correct all the time. Yeah, and so you know, I still have to go in behind it and paint in the right stuff.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:But I still. I mean it did all the other heavy lifting, it got the aesthetic that I wanted and I'm just in there making tweaks and that's. I find that's not actually that different from how a lot of master painters worked. Eventually they had apprentices that were, you know, doing things and getting it to a certain point. That's why some people hate Thomas Kinkade, but it's not completely unheard of in human history and the creation of things to have that done.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and I'm right there with you. I've already incorporated AI into my process. I know a bunch of other designers have as well. Recently, I wanted to do a thought experiment that was inspired by something that I saw on TikTok, which is to see if I can actually sell AI art online, and so I went on Midjourney and had it export or create a variety of different images based on my prompt, and let me tell you some of those output.
Speaker 2:You would not be able to tell, at least you know, maybe two years ago, with I don't know, generation two of Midjourney, it wasn't that great. Stylistically. You can see it's trying to do something, but it wasn't believable. Now it is so good that the quality of the output is almost indistinguishable from that of a human. For example, one of the prompts was something around doing an Art Deco style illustration, like a portraiture, and what it created was really good, like something that I'm like yeah, I can see someone wanting this on their wall or as a phone case, see someone wanting this on their wall or as a you know, phone case.
Speaker 2:And more recently, I had a client project where I was trying to look up or I was starting to look for photography for like corporate headshots or office workers in a corporate environment and it, and I don't know why I thought of this, but I was like huh, I wonder if I can get MidJourney to create the shots that I want. Obviously, I wasn't using these photos in full bleed, but I was using them as, like thumbnails or things like that.
Speaker 2:You can't tell that that was AI generated, that it's not stock photography. In fact, if you go on Adobe stock photos, I think they sell photos now that are AI generated.
Speaker 1:They do.
Speaker 2:And they market are AI generated? They do, and they mark it as AI generated.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I appreciate that they do market, they mark those things as AI generated. But and I found cause, you know, and doing actual client work, I found that there are times when I'm trying to get a certain result from the AI, like Midjourney or Dolly. I'm trying to get a certain result from the AI, like mid journey or Dolly. I'm trying to get a certain result and it's not coming out quite as refined as I would like it. And I, you know I don't have the time to go and refine it myself because I've got, you know, a lot of other things that I've got to deliver. And so, you know, I there's a certain aesthetic that I'm looking for and sometimes I want to even know, like, can AI even get me what I want here? Like, is this a pipe dream?
Speaker 1:And I've gone on Adobe Stock and seen, like somebody produce a photo that's way better than mine, or like a painting that's way better than mine with AI, and I mean, like it was evident to me, it was like there's no way there, mine with AI. And I mean, like it was evident to me, it was like there's no way, there's no way that they were able, just given the state of AI image generation at the time. They were able to get to that without having to modify it themselves. But I mean, it was marked that and I was like, okay, like you know, and I was willing to buy the stuff, I actually sent it to the client. And I was willing to buy the stuff, I actually sent it to the client.
Speaker 2:I was like, hey, I think this is a great image, Like you know, we should just get this one. Yeah, I mean like if you think about it, you know, once the quality gets even better, which it will in future generations. Like you don't need to do photo shoots, you don't need to book like some sort of environment, hire actors or models, get the sign, the release, have the photographer, you know all of that is gone, it's gone. You can just do it through a prompt. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Which is crazy. I mean, one of the things that and I'm interested to get your take on this because, you know, just as a designer, as an artist, like you know, I a lot of times I have a vision for what I want and I'm trying to get AI to produce that vision faster than I could produce it myself. And in the past, what we would have to say is we just can't do that for this project. Like, I have this grandiose vision and it's just not possible for this project. We can't afford it, we don't have the timeline vision and it's just not possible for this project. We can't afford it. We don't have the timeline.
Speaker 1:Now it's kind of possible and so that you know the the crazy artist in me, like I'm like, so you're saying there's a chance, like you know, like there's a possibility. So I'm, you know, I would sit in front of mid journey for for hours trying to get the prompt right. Yeah to to produce the vision. And one of the things that I've found is sometimes I struggle with the words to communicate what I see in my head. And even if I could, it's like I realize now what it's like to be on the other side where you're trying to get another artist to produce what you want and I've kind of landed in two modes here.
Speaker 1:There's a mode where I have a vision for what I want and I'm going to get AI to get me as close as possible and I'm going to take it the rest of the way if I can get AI to get in the ballpark right. And then I have another mode where it's like I have a vision it is not so tightly prescriptive and I'm going to see what it comes up with and I feel like that's actually more like working with a real artist. The way that I enjoy when people work with me is they have a general idea of what they're trying to express or accomplish and they let me, as the artist, use my creativity to express that. And I found that actually is when it works better. When I'm trying to get AI to produce a very specific result, it's hard.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, it's interesting. You said that because it reminds me of a, a friend on LinkedIn who posted an experiment maybe a couple of years back, and they do 3d images, and they showed one that he did which was like I think it was like his own custom Nike shoe or something, and then one that AI generated and and he and he was making the argument that AI isn't quite there yet. But when you think about what you need to do to get AI to get closer to what your vision is, it's very similar to all the things that you need from a client, right, you need a brief, you need them to explain what are the things that they like, what are things that they would like to emulate, what's the vibe? It's almost like creating a mood board, right, you also need to be very specific in terms of the ingredients, and so the more specificity you give, the more accurate the output.
Speaker 2:Right, and with AI, I think, for mid-journey at least, you can feed it reference images and say, like, for mid-journey at least, you can feed it reference images and say model it after these things. It will approximate it much closer, especially if it's like oh, I want this redhead. You're like okay, I'll make that red and providing that definition and constraint in a way that allows them to fill in those gaps without too much imagination, then you're going to get pretty good results, I think. But I like it also in the way that you're talking about it, which is surprise me, like generally surprise me, and I also love the results you get sometimes from that as well. You know, of course it's going to be more hit or miss, but that's part of, I think, what's good about the way Midjourney works is that they give you four options.
Speaker 2:So, they do the stable diffusion, to sort of come up with more than one variation and you can pick the one that you think is closest and then tell it to you know. Do other variations based off of that? So I agree with you. I think the way in which technology works is both as a partner but also as a delivery support person right.
Speaker 2:Like a production artist and I think that's the argument a lot of other people are making in the industry is that, oh, production design will disappear, Like the actual comping up of high fidelity mock-ups that will start to go away because you don't need a person to do that. But I would argue that that's one of the seminal artifacts and deliverables that we as designers create seminal artifacts and deliverables that we as designers create Right.
Speaker 2:And the place that I get a little worried is when so much of the work is going to be taken over by AI. Where does that responsibly lie in terms of the strategy, the thinking? Well, it could be the product person. If a product person can literally go to some sort of generative tool and say make me this design based off of these requirements, user stories, yada, yada, yada, and it's able to produce that, do they need the designer at that point?
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So I'm wondering where the industry will shift. Industry will shift. Will it be product people kind of taking on some of that work because AI helps them do it and they don't need like a team of designers, they just maybe need one, like you said, to refine it, to kind of dial it in. Or will it be the designer that starts to become more like a product person and it's helped creating the thinking, the strategy defining the product requirements? Who takes on that response? Because the job of the strategy defining the product requirements, who takes on that response? Because the job of the actual screens is going to go away.
Speaker 2:I think everyone's agreed upon that. When that happens, that person still needs to be fully employed, so they got to do other things. So either that designers, you know, I think in the industry we have the typical design organization where you have designers and pods right Part of different feature sets or different parts of the customer journey. I don't know that you need so many designers dedicated to each part of the product. You might have one designer overseeing multiple features at that point right.
Speaker 1:Right. I mean that is interesting because I'm a designer who became a product person. I've done design, I've done front-end development, I've done product management and product strategy and it's easy for me to see the shift from designer to product person, designer like designer to product person, because I know that I could go if ai generated ui got good enough right.
Speaker 1:I know that I have the mental model to be able to create an experience, to think about how something works, to know what it what good looks like. Because I think the struggle for the product person, who has no design background using AI, is that the product person doesn't necessarily know what good looks like. They can know from it at a surface level, but the experienced designer can look at something and say that's unrefined or that this is a bad interaction. There's an element of skill and experience there that makes that person fast at being able to determine what's a good experience or not, or what is good visual design or not, and doesn't give you that there's a lot of stuff that ai can generate that that, as a designer, I can look at it and say, okay, that's close, that's not it, but that's close and that's helpful.
Speaker 1:Right, but this hasn't replaced me yet yet right, right, and I think that, like I am not arrogant enough at this point to say now that it won't replace me doing some of those things, but it's easy for me to say, okay, so like I can do this with a smaller staff. Yes, this with less people. Like you know, the people that I know who are doing just like killing the game in AI everybody that I know, everybody who I know that's doing that well, they're using AI to do something they're already highly skilled at and they're producing high quality results because they know what good looks like, right Right, developers, designers, artists they already know what good looks like. The folks who I see who are using AI, who they don't have experience in that field they're getting good results, but they're not getting great results. Like you know somebody who's experienced. I'm looking at that and I'm like, oh yeah, that's definitely AI generated.
Speaker 1:I can tell, like you know, and so I think there is a. I do think we'll cross a threshold and I do think it's going to remap things. I think for tech, it's definitely going to remap things the product person producing UI without a designer. It's harder for me without knowing that people are out there working on design tools that are being trained by designers to create good UI Without seeing that. It's harder for me to see a product person not needing somebody who knows what good design looks like to be the one at the steering wheel with the AI.
Speaker 2:You know what I'm saying. I agree with you. With the AI, you know what I'm saying. I agree with you. However, I feel like so I don't. I agree with you in the sense that, yes, great design is probably not going to be produced by AI right For the foreseeable future. In fact, especially innovative design, it's not capable of original thought Right. A lot of the AI generated, whatever are almost always derivative.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:But I would also argue that a lot of design over the last five to 10 years has become so homogenous yes, it's no true and everything looks the same. We're like logo on the upper left corner, hamburger menu on the upper right. Maybe they swap positions, maybe the logo is in the middle of the header, but it's always the same structure. You've got a hero, there's an image, there's a headline, there's a CTA. This is a formula.
Speaker 2:I think it's good because, as juxtaposed to the very early days of the web, where it was like the wild west and you had some really bad design and every website was like I don't know what I'm going to get, I don't know how I'm going to use this website, how to check out. Maybe it's going to be functional, maybe it won't. But there was also some real novel ideas that have carried through. But we've come to the opposite of that now, where it's so formulaic and also with the rise of design systems, it's so formulaic and also with the rise of design systems, everything's become very componentized. And so I would argue, if there's an established design system and an established look and feel from a creative director, art director, designer, and you have that established design system and you train the model on that and you're like, hey, what I need is a feed and I need it to do X, y, z. It's going to look at the library of other apps and how they do feeds and it will generate a very high quality feed.
Speaker 2:That's where I see the product person no longer needing a design Agreed. When that foundation is laid, what do you need the designer for? Like, the designer at that point might be a design director coming in to do a pass through and make sure everything's good, but you're not going to need a designer actually doing the implementation Right. And there's tools now that and I don't think we're far away from it that can take a design and even generate the front-end code. That's right, oh, that's right.
Speaker 1:I mean Webflow already takes. I mean yeah, I mean it's already doing that well. I mean, you know, used to be a front-end developer. There was a time where I thought, like man, I don't know if any you know no-code tool is going to be able to generate clean front-end code.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and they did it Well back in the day. Remember Dreamweaver? Oh yeah, it would slice things. And then you'd look at the markup and you're like what is this garbage? It's so bloated it's doing all these divs unnecessarily. Now I don't think that problem exists.
Speaker 1:Webflow was the first one to to pull it off. I mean, I remember I think macaw was the first engine I saw try to pull it off and they got close. I, I, I was working with that early on, I was an early adopter and it was getting close. Webflow solved the problem, in my opinion. They, at least they solved it good enough to where. You know, old school front end developer like me is like good enough, good enough for me to not get in there and write it from scratch Sorry, like you know, like I'd rather focus on the design, like and I was a hardcore, like there was a period where all I did was front end, like I took like three years of my career and just did front end, you know, for my day job, and so like I got really deep in it and was really hardcore and was very proud of you know clean standards, compliant yep.
Speaker 1:You know markup and css and using as little javascript as possible and and all that stuff. But when I saw the output from webflow, I was like, no, this is, this is good. I mean, I'm not so. I am not so proud that I like refuse to. You know, let this machine handle this thing Like. I want to be able to make websites and I. The goal here isn't for me to be able to write code. The goal is for me able to build websites to make things that are useful for people.
Speaker 2:Right, that's the goal. Yeah, have you used this tool called ReLume?
Speaker 1:I haven't used it yet. I've heard about it.
Speaker 2:So one of their tools is it'll create a wireframe for you and if you give it a prompt, it will generate, for example, a landing page. You tell it what kind of product it is prompt it will generate, for example, a landing page.
Speaker 2:You tell it what kind of product it is, if it's a SaaS product, if it's a retail for selling I don't know shoes or anything else. Right, it will create. It will. Basically, they have their own Figma component library that they created and it will pull in blocks and do the UX copy and lay it out. Obviously it's pretty derivative, it's very blocky, it's kind of like the three column layouts, you know, like a bootstrap type of website layout, but it's so fast and good. It is better than a lot of entry level designers work. When I look at this, I'm like I got this result in one minute and if I assigned it to a junior entry level designer, I promise you it wouldn't look that good and polished Alignment and things like that would be off and it would have taken them days to get it to me. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I worry about the future of design for these younger designers coming into the field, because I wonder if they're going to be reliant on the tools and they won't even know how to think for themselves right and how to actually do the craft with their own hands are you listening?
Speaker 1:design teachers are you listening? This is the problem of the future yeah, I mean like even coding.
Speaker 2:I remember. So I have a degree in computer science and back then you couldn't cheat I. You can cheat by maybe copying friends' work, but there was no way for you to easily find sample code to solve some homework assignment. Now all of that is online and now with like GitHub, copilot, it will write the code for you. I don't even know how, with this new generation of students with that tool available to them, if they're actually going to do the hard work of figuring it out, or they're just gonna be like, why do I need to figure it out? I can just have ai do the work for me. Isn't this the future?
Speaker 1:that it's kind of. It's kind of like back in school when the teacher told you like hey, you're not always going to have a calculator with you, and it's like now you know, you see all the memes. It's like you know, like you know, like I always do, but there's still value. There's still value in knowing how to do it. I think the it is dependent on what you want in the, and I think a lot of times it is going to take a design professor telling the students if you want to be able to produce the same thing as AI, then fine, go, let the AI do it for you. If you want AI models to be trained on what you're able to do, then do it the way I'm teaching you to do it. Right.
Speaker 1:You know, if you want to be a designer, like the great designers of history and the designers who are the ones that the AI models feed off of, then this is the path that you have to be able to generate original thought that works on the basis of good design. I think that's what the professor is going to have to do, at least right now.
Speaker 2:Right. Well, here's one of my prognostications about the future. I think in five to ten years and you can argue whether it's closer to five or ten but I don't think there's any argument that the job and the day-to-day of a designer's work will change or evolve right. But one thing that I wonder is whether or not because so much design work that's done today is so copycat, so derivative. I see students work and they're like oh, they modeled it after Instagram or whatever, but it's usually a you know worst version of what's up there that they copied or tried to imitate, and I feel like a lot of design has kind of averaged out to the bottom, like it's. They all look very similar. There's very little original work anymore and I feel like, of course, we still need the innovators to help feed the model. I think that'll be like the 2%. I think that'll be maybe the 10%. 90% probably aren't going to be the original designers coming up with new ideas. That it's outside of the realm of AI-generated work or even design system With design systems systems. Literally, you go to the component library, see if there's a component that's similar to what you need, you pull it in and you just lay it out based off of that. Right, there's no, I wouldn't say there's no design, but there's no work in terms of thinking about the visuals. All of that work has been done. Right, the typography has been done. Right, the typography has been done. Right, you're going to use an H3 here. You're going to use an H2. That's a form label, that's whatever. Right, there's nothing you're creating. Right, you're just being intelligent about what needs to be used in what scenario.
Speaker 2:So, in a lot of ways, I feel like design today is already kind of like ripe for disruption and has already gotten very commoditized. If we think about, like, the evolution of design in the early days of the web and I'm going to sound like an old geezer here, but everything was bespoke because nothing was out there, everything had to be handcrafted. Then we got to an era where you know they're starting to be templates. There's websites like Squarespace. You know you need a restaurant website. We have a restaurant template. Change the photos, change the copy, change the menu, boom. And then you know, but it was still designers creating those templates.
Speaker 2:And then we got into a service model like Canva, where all these templates, thousands of templates. You need an Instagram social media post? We have hundreds of them. Pick one it's free to use. With the subscription, it's already been commoditized. You don't need designers for social media, social media experts. Go to Canva, pick the template and use that for you and charge you a little margin on top right. Ai is going to basically take those templates and just do it for you, right? You don't even need the social media person at that point. It's going to write the copy, it's going to write the headline, it's going to mock it up for you and, hell, it'll even publish it for you. So I'm not sure where the work is anymore. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I've seen designers today create storyboards, customer journey maps using AI right. Yeah. So I mean, obviously the thinking is still needed. Obviously there's, you know, a human needed to do user research. Obviously there's, you know, a human needed to do user research Other than certain pockets of work. I feel like a lot of what, at least for the last 20 years, has been the core of what designers do is evaporating. And.
Speaker 2:I'm not sure what happens. I don't know if those hundreds of thousands of design jobs will be replaced and if it is replaced, by what?
Speaker 1:That's. I mean, that's a great point and I think about just. You talked about some of your history and I actually want to get into that. I want people to get a sense of who you are and kind of the depth of your perspective, having that perspective of being in the early days of the web and being and being able to look at what it is now. You're totally right. I actually saw a conversation that sprouted from a post that cameron maul made on linkedin, basically saying that you know, so much of design has become commoditized and we need to get back to you know. He said that the thing that he was saying was when he was an early employee at Meta, you know, and back then it was Facebook, right he's. When he's an early employee, he it was drilled into him and he became a hardcore believer in you know, done is better than perfect. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that they would drive hard towards just getting something that was good out there. It doesn't have to be great, and he's saying that. He's kind of coming back full circle to realize so many things out there clearly don't have craft to them, so it's so commoditized. There are so many things, it's clear they don't have craft to them. And he's coming back around to craft is important and the only reason that you can get away with having the design system to where you don't have to think about whether it's good typography, whether the colors are good, whether the the layout principles are good, the only reason that you can do that, and even something you know sometimes down to flows, right um. The reason you can do that is because somebody who created it had craft, right um, that their craft was good and they were strong in that. And I do think that AI is going to return us to designers who are able to adapt to a post-AI design field. There's going to have to be a return to craft.
Speaker 2:I would use a different word than craft, although I think that's the more accurate word. I think there's going to have to be a return to craft. I would use a different word than craft, although I think that's the more accurate word. I think there's a sense of joy and love that's been lost. It's become very, I think, with Silicon Valley having such a high emphasis on KPIs and certain engagement metrics or whatever, that you're really over-optimizing for those things. Right, and there's moments in an experience that are very hard to quantify but that give people delight and joy and really go like someone put care into this experience. They thought about this little animation.
Speaker 2:I think about the difference between Apple and Microsoft. Like Windows from back in the day, there was no love in Windows, it was an engineer's product, but Apple would think about even the smallest detail where if an app needs your attention, like the app icon would do a little hop dance. You're like that's so delightful, like who thought of this, it's so pleasurable, like every little detail was thought through. You can't put a metric right on on that, but you can in some ways, like when you talk about customer affinity and and their nps scores. They love apple products, they know that it was lovingly created, that they sweat the details.
Speaker 2:I feel like there's been such an emphasis on speed, on metrics, that we've lost the joy. It's all about numbers, it's all about how quickly we can ship, how often you can ship, and we've lost the human element of it. I kind of feel like we will have that go back to the beginning moment in this post-AI world. Obviously, we're in the beginnings of it, but there'll probably come a time and it might happen like five, 10 years later, where it becomes similar to like a tailor-made suit. It's like a human spent time making it. This was like human created. Designs like like that will become a niche.
Speaker 1:yes, I agree with you. I agree with you. That's the same way, that, and I will say there's a difference. There is a difference, right, like the first time I got a custom suit, I noticed the difference. Yeah, there is a. There is a reason why it costs more. And I said the same thing about when you know the rise of the e-reader and e-books, you know there's going to come a time when the print version of a book is going to be so expensive because it is now considered more of a niche item.
Speaker 1:Right you know, and now I look at you know the price on some paperbacks and the price on the hardbacks. Oh my gosh, like I remember what you know. Like a hardback you could get a hardback book for somewhere between 12 and 18 bucks, and now it's like 30 bucks. I know, and I think it's kind of going to be the same thing. It's like I want a human design.
Speaker 2:It's like okay, be half a million dollars, I don't think you're wrong. I don't think you're wrong because and it's not even that it's like there's a crazy markup even on the suits, right right it takes them hours like not just hours, I mean like hundreds of hours sometimes right to do it. So it's not that they're padding, it's like that's just how much time it takes yeah it's like art yeah like this't science.
Speaker 2:This isn't a factory-made product. I feel like, in the same way that the fashion industry has experienced fast fashion, where outfits are disposable, they're only meant to be worn for a season. They're not made to last your lifetime, they're made to be worn and then thrown away and then replaced by another one. Next season we're going to have fast design because thrown away and then replaced by another one. Next season we're going to have fast design because AI is going to help accelerate that. But there's still going to be room for high quality, lovingly made garments and designs. But my fear is that access to that will become limited to a very small percentage of companies who can afford it.
Speaker 2:That's right and for the small to midsize companies they're going to have to go with the AI. Yeah. And they will. Because it's so cheap. Right, it's like going to Target. Yeah, it's so affordable. You don't need to hire a human for that anymore.
Speaker 1:And I do. I agree with you. And there's. You know I try hard not to be a Luddite about this, but there is a part of me that is sad for that change happening to design. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because it is the field in which I've spent the longest time, at least where I've been paid. I've been an artist longer than that, but I've been paid to be a designer longer than anything else, and there is a part of me that laments that change. But I also, just as a tech guy and I love technology. I've always loved technology, ever since I was a little boy. I recognize the genuine gains to human quality of life that technology brings, and so I wouldn't. I'm not trying to stop it. Like you know, one of the things I struggle with is, you know, I see a lot of professional artists, you know, putting up the. You know no AI art.
Speaker 1:And I'm thinking to myself, like you sound kind of like the factory mill worker who got replaced by the robot, like you screaming no, ai art is not going to change, yeah, that the box has been opened and this does produce. It does produce quality of life improvement for humanity, and it's incumbent on us to it. Are you about yourself or are you about your fellow man? And if you're about your fellow man, let's you know my like, my thing is let's do ai art ethically. So, you know, I do think that there may wind up being a reckoning for MidJourney and for OpenAI and on how they have trained their models, you know, because they probably I think it's almost- it's a certainty.
Speaker 1:There's no. They broke copyright laws in order to do it yes, laws in order to do it yes, and I I don't know. I don't know who is the one who to bring the suit and win. Um, but I do think that it has to be done in a way that artists are not being stolen from, and I 100% agree with every other artist that you should not be stolen from. There is a sense in which an artist looks at other people's work and that they ingest that in order to be able to produce their own work. It's a different thing than literally taking a copy of somebody's work and mashing it together with other copies of other people's work to make another image. There are laws that protect that under certain things, and so it's not necessarily because they could. Even I could find the lawyers finding a way to call it collage. I could find them trying to find a way to interpret it as collage and defend it that way, because that's legal. But I don't think we're stopping it.
Speaker 2:It's not going away Like you said, pandora's box has been opened. There's no putting it back in the box at this point. It's out there. It's out there, it's out there. Yeah, I agree with you.
Speaker 2:I think there's a big field and a big debate going on in terms of the ethics of AI and how to do that the right way. The New York Times recently filed a suit in terms of chappy GPT and basically feeding the model with their journalistic tone and voice, so I don't know where that's going to net out, but it's clear that's happened. So my question that I'm still debating I love your input on this it's like what sort of jobs do people have in the future? Because the thing that I worry about is, like we've seen over the last 20 to 50 years that office workers' productivity has continued to go up. Right. I don't know what the percentage is it might be like 40%, 50% at this point but the wage is pretty much flat, right Adjusted for inflation, and we can see that there's more and more work that will be replaced by. In the past, we've thought about automation more in the context of blue collar workers, like factory workers Always thought like, thought, work, service work would be safe. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But we're seeing now that's not the case, right? Right, if we think about AI, ai could be used for replacing paralegals. They're filling out forms, they're doing a lot of like paperwork that could be automated, right? Hey, find me a case law similar to this case. Ai can do that. There's a lot of things that will be completely replaced and obviated by AI, but we live in a capitalist society, so we still need to work to make money and unless that changes, I don't know if, with all these swaths of industries being disrupted and all these jobs potentially needing fewer and fewer people like a skeleton crew, do we as humanity, do we all, become creatives? Do we become content creators? Do we become artists? Do we shift the nature of our work from productivity-related output to creative output? I don't know. That's the part that I'm grappling with, because I don't know where I sit in the future at all.
Speaker 1:I'm grappling with the same thing. In a sense, I think that it's a great question and I've thought about it some. As it pertains to me, I've just kind of always you know, throughout my career, chased my interest and that somehow just you know, has worked out has put me kind of where the puck is going.
Speaker 1:And so you know I would listen to people on podcasts talk about, well, you're going to have to see like people go from this to this and I was like, oh, I did that a couple of years ago, but that's just because I was, you know, adhd guy curious and I got super interested in something and I kind of went down the rabbit hole and found out a way to make money doing it, you know.
Speaker 1:And so I think that there is, in a sense, in a broader, abstract sense.
Speaker 1:I do think that there's going to be a need for humans to focus on things that are creative, and when I say that I mean things that require original thought, things that require things that the machine can't do. That is uniquely human and I don't know. I would be lying if I said I know what that looks like. I would be lying if I said that, but I do think that's what happens. And so, like you know, it's as I've come up in my career. You know, you know making the progression from like working up under other folks and watching how you know how they create, and as a production artist, or you know as a, you know watching how people run a business. You know, as I've come up through my career and gotten into more being the one who is tasked with having the original thought, with needing to have the mental model and then needing to have original thought to go in a certain direction or to make decisions or to create something. Thought to go in a certain direction or to make decisions or to create something, I realized that there's also this sort of thing that's happening behind me, as I'm just kind of chasing my interest. There's also this thing that's happening behind me where there's no going back, like I'm turning around and it's like, oh, holy crap, the road's like falling apart behind me like this I can't. You know, there's no going back to that like I gotta keep going in this direction. I keep going forward. You know, and and uh, I do think that there's, you know, like you see, you know, with this rise of like, all these content creators, and they are really doing, you know, creative things, and you see the same sort of like distribution, right, like there are people who are doing things that are very derivative and there are people who are doing things that are very derivative and there are people who are doing things that are very creative, who are the trendsetters. And I think more and more.
Speaker 1:I think my optimist, because I know there are probably a lot of people who will disagree with me, probably just as much as who will agree with me, who knows? But actually I think that capitalism is good and that it forces you to make something that somebody else wants in order to make money. It forces you know, as a business owner, I am forced to do something that actually helps somebody else make progress in order for me to make money, in order for me to make a living, and that forces me to figure out ways to produce value. I don't get to just keep doing what I'm doing and think that it's valuable just because I did it. It's only valuable if it helped somebody else, if it's something they think is worth money. And so I think that we've figured it out, by God's grace. We've figured it out over the years, over the course of human history, and I think that we'll figure it out again.
Speaker 1:And the optimist view for me is I actually think that there's the possibility that we see just an explosion of innovation and better technology, because humans don't have to be focused on the repetitive remedial things and there will still be people who have to check the output and that will you know, as we move forward, that will become less and less, that it's so systematized. But, like you think about mass production, there's somebody who still has to check the output and some things still make it through. Like we still haven't perfected that right, but like there was a time when every watch, every watch, was handmade. And we've gotten to the point now where if you want a handmade watch, you're going to pay thousands and thousands of dollars for it because you can't rush that process and there are only so many hands to make those watches. And so if you want a Rolex, you're going to pay for it. If you want an Omega, you're going to pay for it.
Speaker 1:But I'm wearing an Orient and this company is owned by Epson, and they figured out how to make good automatic watches mass-produced. And so, guys who are watch nerds like me, I don't look down on a mass-produced watch like this, because I respect the people at Orient and the people at Seiko too, because they also have done it. They're actually both owned by the same parent company, epson. But they figured out how to make a good mass-produced watch and I'm thankful that I can get a great-looking watch that works well, that's reliable, without having to spend $3,000 on it, and I'm not mad at that and I'm not mad at that. And so, in the same way, I don't think I'm going to be mad that if I need a bunch of screens produced now, I can go and write a prompt for that and maybe ingest some things that I came up with.
Speaker 1:Or it's a back and forth process where I write a prompt. It gives me some ideas. That creates some original thought. I go, do something, feed it back into AI and it produces high fidelity stuff and that didn't cost me tens of thousands of dollars. I'm not necessarily mad at that, but I also think that's how we get to some of the crazy innovations of the future is freeing up humanity to think about those things, because if you think about one of the things that one of my mentor taught me that I didn't really know about history and wound up, looking back at this is like you didn't see a lot of breakthroughs in literature and a lot of other things until we figured out the oil lamp. Like when we figured out the oil lamp and we could figure out how to get brighter light without you know, without having to have candles, we could work farther into the night. So a lot of points on which humanity innovated because we could work more, because we could work at night. Right.
Speaker 1:And then electricity, Right, and all the innovation that's come because of electricity. And so I mean electricity coming meant that we didn't. There are things that we didn't need as much anymore, and there were markets that dwindled because we didn't need certain things anymore.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that because there's I think it was like a Joe Rogan podcast where someone I think it was the comedian David Carson had said that the biggest industry like in I don't know, it might have been like the 1900 or something like that 1890 or something like that, but was like whaling, because they would use that for light and whatever else, and then, once you know, electricity came out, that entire industry was wiped out. Yeah, it's gone.
Speaker 1:I mean, look at the Rust Belt. Yeah, look at the Rust Belt. I mean we don't have to have humans in factories to make things as much anymore. Now, some of that stuff, we just we outsourced it overseas. We didn't really figure out how to make things as high quality, we outsourced it overseas. There's still an interdependence there, right, like a global economic interdependence there. But yeah, I mean, you're right, there's an element of hey, I need this thing less, but it frees me up to do these other things that I didn't think were possible before before right and now we can, you know, we can look forward to.
Speaker 1:You know, who knows? I mean farther space travel. I mean I just heard, literally heard yesterday, from one of my old design professors. I was talking to him on the phone last night.
Speaker 1:He said devin, they've repeated nuclear fusion three times successfully now and I'm like, and we had a whole conversation about there's a whole industry yeah that is going to disappear yeah there's a whole industry that's probably going to I mean, I won't say disappear, but it is going to be completely remapped because we don't need fossil fuels for energy as much anymore. I'm I am not like I'm not one of those folks who's worried that fossil fuels is destroying the planet at a rapid rate, but I also recognize that there's a better way and I would like us to get to a better way. And so if the traditional power grid changes dramatically because of nuclear fusion and energy becomes super cheap, what does that do for humanity? I mean, there's all kinds of things that makes possible. So I kind of think of AI in the same way. I know that was a super long answer.
Speaker 2:I think you're spot on. I guess part of me is just wondering what that would look like, because there's obviously been the emergence of creator economy recently and it's continuing to grow and more and more people are getting into streaming, right. I can't remember how long ago this was, but I remember when the first time I saw an interview with a kid being done and they asked them who their favorite star was and they mentioned a YouTuber, not a celebrity, not an actor, not a singer. It was a YouTuber, and for the last 10 years that's been true of this younger generation is YouTubers, right. And so now you have more and more people creating content. Podcast has exploded. There's the Substack newsletter creators. There's, you know, people on medium writing, on linkedin writing. There's experts on tiktok, right. Like literally every job is now being like there's a tiktoker for it. There's a legal talk, there's a accountant talk. There's like excel, like you know shortcuts and're like there is a market for everything there.
Speaker 2:I don't know if that's the future, where people just kind of go online. That becomes the way they become, I don't know both fulfilled and financially compensated. I don't know. I don't know where, with all of this innovation and all of this production being automated. Where do we go? Where do we go from here? Right? Do we create even better technology? Probably, in the next five years, there's going to be more and more AI startups. Most of my clients are shifting to AI already, so that's going to be a thing, right. They'll probably be emerging where there's going to be a big player that eats up and vacuums up other players, and it'll be like the AI go-to for law or for software or whatever else. But I just wonder after that, the post-AI right. Yeah.
Speaker 2:When it's peak AI, at that point where it's part of every aspect of your life. Where do we find work? Where do we? What do we do?
Speaker 1:I think that's a great question. I think that the folks working in all kinds of industries throughout human history that aren't really things anymore probably wonder the same thing. We're wondering now, and it's kind of an exciting time to be alive. I think we are at an inflection point in history, be because I think that the intersection or the sort of like this convergence of ai coming, coming into its own and being able to produce, just like you know, three, four, five hundred percent increases in human productivity, you know, like one person being able to do the work of like four or five people I have a friend who does that.
Speaker 1:I'm blown away by it. I actually have a couple of friends who do that, and both of them own businesses and they don't have to have staffs as large because they're able to use AI to produce so much more. But like that that converging with us figuring out cheaper and more efficient ways of creating energy I think that those two things I think that my hope is that in 50 years, like our grandkids, are like looking at us the way that we look at folks who lived in primarily agrarian societies, who don't have all the comforts that we have now, who can't spend all their time doing the things that we do now, because it took all day to make dinner. It took all day to make sure that you had enough to produce for yourself and maybe to sell some right that they're looking back on us and they're like dang, how did you live like that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm with you At heart. I'm a tech optimist as well, so I'd rather see the positive in the future. But it can always go the opposite way. Right, like AI can become available only to the rich, right, and everybody else has to do it the laborious, the hard way. Yeah, and it becomes, you know, a few elite companies. That becomes like an oligopoly that owns everything yeah yeah, that is danger.
Speaker 1:I think that. I think that, because of how much we need each other, if we stick to allowing the market to pick its own winners and losers which is essentially allowing people to pick what they want to buy and how much they are willing to pay for it I think it'll work out and the right people will win because they're producing the most value. I do think that we have to. That's the guard that we have to keep up is making sure that we keep allowing people to make choices. And then those of us who are producing because everybody has to produce something right those of us who are producing, or in the areas of our lives where we produce a better way to say it that we're looking for what produces value and we adapt instead of trying to hold on to what we know to be able to say, okay, how can I really do something that now better serves?
Speaker 1:What does this make possible and how can I better serve my fellow man? How can I make something even more valuable? And I think that's how it winds up working out, and no one person has all the ideas, and so I think that's how it winds up working out. As long as we allow people to make choice, it's going to force everybody to have to make things available, because one of the things that is difficult about being in a business where you have to depend on the people who have a lot of money is there are fewer of them, there are fewer customers to be had, and so figuring out a way to mass produce something means you get to have more customers and there are economies of scale to that, and there are ways that that is more attractive to some folks, and there are some folks who are always going to be attracted to.
Speaker 1:I want to work with the high net worth people who can afford this bespoke thing that is not as figured out, and all this stuff. There are going to be people who are always more attracted to that and there are going to be people who see more value in producing the thing that can be consumed by many Apple in the spectrum of things in the tech world. When Steve Jobs talks about what he always wanted to accomplish, he wanted, his vision was for the computer to be in everybody's house and for it to be like a lamp. He didn't want a computer to be this complicated thing that you had to turn on and it had to boot up and all that stuff. Like he, he said that he wanted to get to the point where turning on a computer was like turning on a lamp. And now we have the iPad the iPad. I don't ever turn off my iPad. Really.
Speaker 1:I never turn it off. It's always running Like the screen may be off. Right.
Speaker 1:Like I almost never turn off my phone, right Right, like I go up to my phone and I pick it up and the screen lights up yes, no-transcript to make it better and faster and cheaper. And I think that's what's going to happen with AI, because right now it definitely feels like, oh, it's like the people who are on the edge, who are like tinkering with this, like know how to mess with it, or people who are really tech savvy the folks who are not as tech savvy are kind of being left behind and we have, like you know, I think there's also a lot of money to be made and people making ai for dummies right, like teaching, teaching. You know a book? There should be a book. You guys are listening. Hey, send us a check, send me a want to check.
Speaker 1:Ai for dummies. Go make a lot of money, but I think there's value in that. So I think there's, I think the ways I just always think about it like all right, so we're worried about this group of folks over here who's not going to be able to necessarily catch up as far as these younger folks or people who are really into this. How do we bring those folks along? And those folks are willing to pay money to be helped, and as long as you don't have this mentality that you're trying to usuriously extract from somebody, like make the thing five dollars and it will make you rich and everybody will be able to for it. Make it five dollars and everybody will buy it right, and then everybody gets to move forward you know, yeah, I agree with that.
Speaker 2:There's a potential convergence that I kind of think about, which is, if you think about meta calling themselves meta, right where everyone's going to basically inhabit this digital universe. It already happens in the gaming world, right?
Speaker 2:if you play video games, I play league nice like like you spend money like buying new skins, which is basically a new outfit for like a digital character that you play, and there's people in Sims or in Second Life that will buy outfits, digital outfits for their characters. Like real money, like $50 that you can buy on real clothes to pay for a digital thing for your avatar right I'm wondering whether or not with ai, with you know the vision pro with all these things, like we don't go outside, we just live in the digital, it's just your computers.
Speaker 2:There's no turning on the computer's, just on your face all the time at that point I worry about, about that.
Speaker 1:I do worry about that. You know, when I see people out in public with a vision pro on their face, I'm just like this can't be the answer. This can't be it. I like Apple, all right, okay. Like I think this is the first run, this is, you know, if we're talking design, this is first comp, man, this isn't final comp.
Speaker 2:Well, it's going to get smaller, right, they're probably trying to. Everything will get miniaturized to a certain point, so maybe it'll become more like the Google Glasses of yesteryear.
Speaker 1:Yes, did you ever have Google Glass?
Speaker 2:No, I tried it. I played around with it a little bit. I was like, okay, I would never use this. It doesn't solve enough problems for me to make it useful yeah.
Speaker 1:It was a more in my opinion. Just like, if you're going to have something like that on your face, like even now, I think Google Glass is a more acceptable version of that, just visually, like walking around seeing people with that stuff, but like. So I used to work for an agency and they bought us one, just like you, like we begged them to buy us one to see what we could do with it, because we could imagine all kinds of applications Like we never did any of those things.
Speaker 1:But it turns out one of the developers like basically took it to his house. Most of the time At least somebody was using it. But like it would get super hot man, dude, it would, would burn your, it would feel like it was burning your temple.
Speaker 1:It gets super hot because the whole computer was contained in this little thing right here, yeah and uh, yeah, it's like you couldn't wear it for that long and the thing would be cooking your, cooking your face. But, like I and people were uncomfortable. They were very uncomfortable with seeing, because they were wondering if you were recording them. Yeah, like it was a lot less common back then for people to just be, you know, recording things with their smartphones out in public, yeah, and so people were very uncomfortable, like if they saw you walking around with that thing, they assumed you were recording them and you could see people you know yeah.
Speaker 1:So that was kind of a neat social experiment for us.
Speaker 1:It's like walking around with it in public and seeing people not okay with us walking around with it at that point, yeah yeah, I mean, clearly, people have less of an adverse reaction to people walking around with apple vision pro, which is much more obtrusive device, but I don't. I know that reality matters. So, like you know, it's funny.
Speaker 1:Mkbhd asked a question last night on Twitter. He said hey, if you had a device that you could put over your eyes and like, its resolution and audible clarity and spatial awareness was so good that it tricked your brain into thinking it was real and it could somehow mimic the wind on your face and smells and all that, and you could put that thing on and travel to the Grand Canyon with that, would you still want to go in real life? And I answered and I said, yeah, I would still want to go in real life. And I answered and I said, yeah, I still want to go in real life because I know my body has not entered that physical space and reality still matters, like I. I know that I was only in taking somebody's interpretation right of that physical reality.
Speaker 1:It wasn't the actual thing, and there are things that their interpretation are not going to be able to reproduce moment for moment. They might have reproduced a certain moment or an amalgamation of a certain moment, but they're not going to be able to probably accurately reproduce everything at once. And even if they could, I still don't get to ever say that I was there oh you know, I wasn't actually there, so that it still matters to me and maybe maybe our grandkids like 50 years from now.
Speaker 2:I don't you know, maybe they don't care, you know, but I care yeah, I I think I agree with you in part, so like I don't think it's a replacement, but I do think we have such limited ability to do all the things in life right. Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's just so much time in the day, so much resources and energy, but if you can teleport yourself to any part of the world instantly and rather than looking at it on video, but actually feeling like you're there without being there, I feel like that's still something. It's still valuable right, yeah.
Speaker 2:I agree with you that you wouldn't necessarily replace it, but I think there's different kinds of needs. Right, but I think there's different kinds of needs. There's one where it's about the life experience, and then there are others where it's more about education and exposure. And when we think about, for instance, this is a stupid example, but in the US we have the benefit of being able to eat cuisines from all around the world. We don't have to go there to experience those cuisines, we can experience it where we are right. I think that is incredibly valuable from a cultural exposure standpoint. So I see us being able to do that more.
Speaker 2:Maybe someone will come up with a cool name spatial tourism or something, but there's still. I think there's something intrinsically valuable about that, because it's so expensive to travel around the world and get jet lag got to go to customs you know there's a lot of. You know passport, all of that and for some people, for a lot of people, they don't have the means. And if you can afford to do it this way and see 20 of the greatest cities around the world, I don't know. There's still something valuable about that. I guess the risk is people start to take the easy road and substitute that for the real thing, and I think that will probably happen as the technology gets better, Like people won't feel like they need to go anymore because they feel like they already experienced enough of it, right Like 50%, 60% and that's good enough for them. So maybe tourism gets sacrificed.
Speaker 1:Man, we keep killing industries.
Speaker 2:On this podcast with ai it's just where things are going I think you're.
Speaker 1:I think you're right, man, I think you're right. Like what, people are willing to spend money to get on a plane and go see shrinks. I think it does yeah that's I'm so like, I'm curious. I'm curious about what you think will happen with technology development and maybe we can, like you know, get into a little bit of your background, because I think that that's an interesting look into why you have the answer that you have. But, like, before we get into that, like what you know, how did you wind up in design?
Speaker 1:oh like how did you get there? And you know where do you see yourself right now in your career yeah.
Speaker 2:So I got into design, kind of like by accident really. So I was studying engineering because my parents forced me to essentially, or pressured me into it, and I happened to be attending U of I, which was like the birthplace of Mosaic, which is like the first graphical browser. It was like the predecessor to Netscape. So this is how old I am. Kids. There was a time in the early days of the web where you would browse websites through the terminal it was through the command line prompt. Browse websites through the terminal it was through the command line prompt and so being able to see and experience the web through a graphical interface, through a browser, that was pretty eye-opening and it really was like a portal to experience all sorts of things. Of course, you know, we had pornography, but it also had games. It had, you know, a bunch of like soundbites from the Simpsons, which I loved, and anime and all that other stuff. And so I fell in love with the web and it made me want to make my own website and just by the process of having to learn how to do that, I got exposed to design, although I didn't even know what that was at the time. I learned how to basically do markup and CSS, and then I saw some cool sites using JavaScript. I was like, how did they do that? Back then there was still Java applets too, so also played around with that. But that was my entree into design and I was so early that there wasn't any classes for it, there wasn't any degrees for it. There was maybe like two books on the subject matter at the time. So when the dot-com boom happened, they were looking for anybody that had any knowledge in terms of building websites, and so that was kind of like how I transitioned from being more like an engineering. I ended up getting my BS in math and my master's in computer science. But that was how I segued into. Design was being self-taught. So I am a completely self-taught designer. I had to learn everything the hard way, every single thing about typography, grids. I made all the mistakes and, kind of like through trial and error, figured it out, I guess. But I've been doing design for over 20 years. So there's kids that were born in the 2000s that I was doing it longer than that, and so I've been doing design for over 20 years. So there's kids that were born in the 2000s that I was doing it longer than that, and so I've seen the industry go through all of the major changes right. So, starting from, everybody needs to be on the website. That was largely brochureware, but then, you know, we had Web 2.0, where it became more functional. There were features, there were things that it can do for you. You can buy online, you can have accounts. And then we had the with mobile, with the iPhone was a watershed moment, because now we have all these mobile apps and mobile development, and so that transitioned me into doing more product design, and I also led a design bootcamp at one point one of the first UX design bootcamps in the country, which ultimately got acquired, and so I've been in design for a long time doing design leadership. I run my own product design studio now doing consulting work for clients.
Speaker 2:What I'm really passionate about is that intersection of creativity and technology. So I love generative AI and the promise that it holds. But there is some, you know, important questions around, because I think the difference now, when compared to the tools of the past, as I think about it, is when you had people doing hand setting of, like print material. You know, having software like photoshop was a game changer. It made things so much faster and all the tools since have been accelerators.
Speaker 2:I think what's what's profoundly different for me now is that it isn't just about making something faster, it's about wholesale doing it for you. Now you might guide it, you might be thinking and you're still the architect for it, but it's doing the legwork and that's very different. It's not the same right in that regard, the same right in that regard, and that's where I have a lot more pause and hesitation around what this means for the future. But I'm excited for it and if clients need AI consultation, of course I would provide it and of course, I use design today with AI. Yeah, I do wonder, of course I use design today with AI. Yeah, I do wonder what the future will hold and how the industry will shift. I think the skills that we will continue to need to exercise is problem solving, to be thinking, to be empathetic, to really think about who our users and customers are, what the customer experience ought to be. A lot of the actual design, delivery, the solutioning that part of the work, I think will start to fade away.
Speaker 1:That's interesting and that's really cool. It's really cool to know that you're self-taught. You know, honestly, I've met a couple of self-taught designers. I mean, I started self-taught, I did eventually wind up going to college for it and I wound up dropping out. I ran out of loan money, I dropped out, but I had some great instructors and it was very valuable. But I've worked alongside some self-taught designers and I'm just like dang dude. I mean you save saved.
Speaker 2:I didn't save money because I still went to college, remember?
Speaker 1:oh, that's right, it was just for something different. Yeah, that's true, that's true, dang, but like that's really cool, it's really cool to hear that and you know, like to see some of your. You know your work was like no, Juan's good. Appreciate it. You taught yourself well.
Speaker 2:Well, I think it's a good skill that anyone can have is just learning how to learn. That's one of the key things you're supposed to take away from going to school, because you need to constantly be evolving as a designer, whether it's the tooling, whether it's the methodologies, the thinking, design trends are constantly changing, so staying on top of that. But if we just even think about, like the software, right, like what was it before? It was like Photoshop, then there was Sketch, there's XD, there's, you know, figma, now you, now the tool is constantly changing and the medium is changing, whether it's a screen on a phone or a screen on the computer, desktop to a laptop, and now on watches, now spatial apps.
Speaker 2:And I think with AI, a lot of the interaction models will change too. It's not going to be a user interface in the traditional graphical sense, right, it's going to be dialogue based. It'll be conversational. So what artifacts are you creating now, when it's all derived around questions that people may have and what prompts you need to help anticipate that a person might give the AI to assist them? Right. What do?
Speaker 2:you show them when the results come back. Like that's very different from even like the screen, because it was easy to think about miniaturizing or shifting the layout of something that is two-dimensional into a smaller footprint. This is like not even. It's not even that. It's like it's audio. It could be just voice-based, right. It could just be the AI talking back to them.
Speaker 1:That's right. That's right, yeah, I mean, I think it's going full circle back to browsing a website via the terminal. It's going full circle.
Speaker 2:That's very true, yeah, but you just don't have to memorize the commands anymore. It's just like it could be. Just, it could just be whatever free flowing question you may have. Someone brought this up and I think it was from a product coffee conversation I had. They were saying that customer portals might no longer be needed. So if you think about your phone bill, you log in, you look at your payment history or billing, you have to go through a navigation. You have to think about what nav to click on to get to where you want to go. Well, with AI maybe, the first screen you see is just like an input field for typing in what you want and they'll know like oh, you want billing history for August, here you go. You don't need a person picking around, going into the billing section. Where's the billing section? Let me sort by year, click on the exact month that I want and then see a PDF.
Speaker 2:They'll just know, that's what you wanted right. So that interaction model, that all of that work that we've built over the last 20 years in terms of like information architecture, like that will change that information no longer needs to be organized in that hierarchical manner that people are thinking about. You don't need that Mental models like they have a question. You need to know that billing is a keyword and it maps to this, and then everything else will be automated you know it's similar to you.
Speaker 1:Know, I thought I think about ai a lot, very as being very similar to when, when I'm ready to buy a particular thing or I'm going in store I'm looking for something. I would love to just be able to walk up to somebody who works there and knows the place or knows more about the thing, and say, hey, I need something that does this. Or hey, I need to find this. And they're like, oh right, this way. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Instead of me figuring out how to navigate the store. You know, the goal is not for me to become good at navigating the store. The goal is for me to get the thing so I can go and accomplish another goal that I have in my life right. There's a different job to be done that I would like for not having to navigate the store to get in the way of. I think it's the same way with the interface, that I think it's kind of a both-and situation where there are certain things that a visual interface provides for you faster than dialogue. But it may be faster to get to that interface with the dialogue than it would be trying to peck around to find where that interface is. And also, I think we are going to rapidly move and I think design systems have given us the ability to get there where that interface is not.
Speaker 1:It is not something that somebody thought up ahead of time around that information and gives you you know, like I'm thinking about dashboards gives you a dashboard that it made for you in that moment that shows you specific things and you can decide to save that dashboard if you want to see it like hey, this is great, I won't, like you know, save this.
Speaker 1:If I say, show me Devin's dashboard, it brings up Devin's dashboard again and I don't have to go through the same process. But that was a creative thing that happened right then, where it made that dashboard off of you dialoguing or typing something in. You didn't go around pecking and a designer didn't design that dashboard ahead of time. A designer maybe, put the rules and this is where I think maybe the future for folks like us comes is. We are now thinking in terms of rules that we give the AI to create products. We give rules for interfaces and information that we present to somebody, or controls that we present to somebody. There are rules to make sure it's a good experience, but the AI is presenting that at the time and those things don't have to be prefab. Like you said, screens you know screens, the way that we talk about it in you know design. World like that's going away, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think that's a great point. I think that's part of, I think, where the shift in terms of what designers will need to think about and be able to do will go is also thinking about how to structure conversations, how to anticipate needs, creating or defining those heuristics. I think there'll still be some people that will need to help lay down some of that foundational work, like design systems. But once that initial work is done, then a lot of it will. I don't know. It'll probably look less like what designers spend their time doing right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, where it's laying out UI. Now it's going to be thinking about all the possible ways in which a person might have a prompt. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And how to facilitate that. Yes, I think you're right in terms of if they're asking for billing history, maybe you have to think about okay, so maybe that's something that happens where you want that as a save, save it as a shortcut in the future, so then that becomes the link that someone could click on so they don't have to type in that prompt. It's like they can look at it and be like okay, that's the thing that I want to do enough times that we should have like a visual representation of being able to do that, like redo that action or save that dashboard.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's crazy because we have data scientists now creating those infographics, right? Yeah. Bar, graphs, charts, and it's not hard to imagine AI being able to do that work for you. Show me the sales from August to September and then break it down by geography or something. Yeah, and it's like boom. You don't need to know databases how to make that query, how to actually pipe it into some data visualization like d3, like yeah, I could do that oh my gosh.
Speaker 1:Now, yeah, this guy who I might be a I might have been a front-end developer, but I am I don't try to trick anybody into thinking I'm like a real I say a real developer, like a real software. It's like database queries and stuff like that like I've never had to write database queries or anything like that. I always worked with, never had to write database queries or anything like that. I always worked with great people who did that. The idea that I could like figure out a way to make software and just tell AI, like what information that I need to be able to draw, tell it what information I need to be able to store, tell it what information I need to be able to draw For AI to be able to intelligently figure out what the right data model is. It's not to say I can't think of a data model. I can think of a data model. I just don't know how to write the code to build the data model.
Speaker 1:But like even getting to the point where I don't have to come up with the perfect, most efficient data model, I tell AI what I want and it makes the data model. It's the same way now where I go into Webflow and I don't worry about what code Webflow's writing and I cared a lot about that. Like I said, there was a point in my career I cared a lot about that and now I don't care anymore because I know it's good enough that it's not creating a really crappy output that's going to, on the other side, create a bad experience potentially. It does the job. I can see it getting to that point where I can create software. That's okay. I'm not going to make innovative, groundbreaking stuff without a developer, probably. But I could make an app and not need a developer yeah, I mean that's.
Speaker 2:I feel like that's what the trend has been right for the last five years. Is those no code tools?
Speaker 2:yeah you know there's no code web websites, but there's also no code through like bubble which will, you know, help you create databases and do any sort of server-side type of thing. And yeah, I think AI is just going to continue that trend where hopefully maybe that is a good thing that the creative product that people create will be AI-assisted right, so it'll help them but even if they don't know programming languages, that they can get development done. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, affordably. That totally. I mean obviously we see it, we see it going in that direction already. So you know we we talked about how that's probably going to happen in design. I already see it happening with development to a certain extent. And there's also danger there because you know there is a side of development where if you don't have the right data security, all that stuff, you can create real problems for others and yourself. But I do think it's going to trend, continue to trend in that direction. So, like I have another question for you to think about, kind of as we close here, like what do you think you know, like now, owning your own product design business? Do you think this changes the business of product design? For you.
Speaker 1:How has it changed and how do you think it changes it over the next couple of years?
Speaker 2:Well, one immediate change is in terms of my workflow. I think that in the past you might have to work with Well, one immediate change is in terms of my workflow. I think that in the past you might have to work with, say, like a copywriter. I have now relied on AI for almost all copy. So I don't work with, like a content strategist, x copy even right, like AI is pretty good at generating and you can even be very specific like give me 25 options for a CTA here. Boom, done right. Like it has been such a great accelerant because I've used it not only for copy but also research. Bard is great in terms of you don't have to do a search and then go through all the results. It kind of summarizes the findings right. So it's been great in terms of changing the workflow.
Speaker 2:But one other part of the way that I've structured my business differently maybe than I have thought about businesses in the past is the design service industry is kind of like a pyramid scheme, right. If you're an agency owner, the way that you make money or increase profit is you have more projects. You're one person. You can't do multiple projects, so then you need to hire more people. Well, how do you continue to scale? You need more clients, but once you hit a certain threshold, you have to feed the beast. You need to maintain cashflow. You have a huge headcount at that point, and you need ongoing business development to be able to maintain staff, and so it becomes a I don't know like a never ending loop.
Speaker 2:You're always looking for new clients, you're always pitching, and so I feel like what AI has done now is that you don't have to scale because you can do things more lean, and so it almost allows you to structure the business not so much like a solopreneur where you're doing all the work, but it also doesn't mean that you have to do all the work anymore, because it takes some of that burden off of you, and so one thing that it's done is help me sort of restructure the way that I think about my business less as something where I want it to be a 20, 50 person agency and more about having a business, that where I can do good work, work with people that I enjoy, but also be more deliberate about the scale, like I don't need it to scale, like the technology has enabled some of that.
Speaker 2:I think there will be a little bit of a window, and that's the opportunity that I'm hoping to capitalize on. We're leveraging these emerging tools to be able to service more clients without having to burn the midnight oil and hire a bunch of people and you know, know, start to go into that. I don't want to call it downward cycle, but like having to have you need more money, hire more people, and then it just becomes like that doom loop, like you're like stuck, you're stuck, you don't want to fire anyone, and so it just becomes like a ongoing stressor in your life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that that makes sense. I I that is one of the things that that I think about, that you know I've worked in professional services for most of my career and that that is a thing that I see at almost every firm. It's the thing is, like you, you get to a point where you got to feed the beast and you're taking work that you don't want to do because in order for all those people to still have gainful employment or for you to make payroll, you gotta have the work coming in, and so I I also see it as a as potentially an answer to to some of that, and I also think it. I also think it potentially makes it easier for people to be solopreneurs and other people who want that.
Speaker 1:I'm not like there are some people who are like hardcore, like solopreneur life, and like there are other people who are like I want to, like I kind of have a team. Like it's selfish to just want to be a solopreneur and I'm like I think there's room in the world for both. Like I don't I'm not hardcore about either one, but I'm with you on responsible scale, on intentional scale. Like if you're scaling, it's because, okay, this person, this person is bringing something that is needed, that can't can't be provided by any other means, and that person is bringing something unique to the business and I also think that also creates like another question for me and in my mind.
Speaker 1:I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts. It's just like you know, I think and you touched on this a little bit earlier like that can tend to trend things towards more senior people being the ones who are making, you know, more of the money. It's like you know, how does the junior, how does the junior designer or the junior practitioner of any field really? But we'll keep it focused to design for the thought experiment, like how do they break in? Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know what are your thoughts on that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So that's actually a question that I've thought about long and deeply. I had a website for a while called designapprenticeshipcom that I created with a co-founder to to at least champion the apprenticeship model, because I think that's one answer. That's one thing that when you look at Europe, they have more than one pathway for a career. It's not just everyone has to go to college. You can go to vocational school, you can learn a trade, you can do a technical thing, and I don't think the US has enough alternate pathways to a career other than you go to college. And even now, getting a college degree means nothing. It used to be in the 50s, right. It doesn't even matter if you had a social sciences degree. They're like you can get a good job because you have a college degree. Now it's table stakes. Like everybody has a college degree. It's meaningless. Now it's table stakes. Like everybody has a college degree. It's meaningless. And you could be someone with a BS degree and a barista at this point you have a very expensive debt but nothing to show for it. You could have been a barista straight out of high school. So I feel like we need more options for young people and I truly believe that an apprenticeship model.
Speaker 2:Alternative to what? Because I was part of this. You know boot camps, right, they're for profit. There's a profit motive there, like I would love to. You know. This was one tension that always existed. It's like having full enrollment versus making sure it's the right people in those seats. You would love to be hyper-selective, but when you have a gap in terms of ideal enrollment, you might lower the standards a little bit. Right To get the revenue, because that's the challenge. So, and it costs a lot of money to go to those bootcamps and people take out loans to go to those bootcamps. This is after college, so stacking debt on debt, and you know you don't get a job straight out of graduating a bootcamp. It takes months sometimes, in some cases maybe a year.
Speaker 2:So one answer that I see is like an apprenticeship model. People need experience to get their first job because, no, you know that's always the rub, right, it's a chicken and egg problem. How do you get your first job if you have no experience? Like, if every job requires experience, how do you get the experience? You need a bridge, you need something to gap fill that. And you know there's only so many students who are able to participate in an internship program at undergrad? Most people don't. There's like what? Maybe a handful of open seats for internships. So I feel like an apprenticeship model where someone is an understudy and maybe it could be a couple years right, and then they've learned the trade, they learned the craft, they know how to do it because they've mirrored somebody, they've shadowed them, and so they've had that opportunity to get practical experience. I feel like that's one answer, but I do have.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think AI is somewhat of an aid. There was a moment back in the mid 2000s where I was like okay, I have to not only know Photoshop, illustrator, but I also need to know HTML and CSS. I also need to know how to do stuff in Flash. I also need to know how to maybe do dabble in 3D. I'm just like dude, like how are you going to learn all these things? You don't learn them in school, and so I think the barrier to entry was very high, like you had to learn a lot of software just to be able to do the thing. Now you just kind of need to know Figma, and maybe with AI it's going to be even less, but I think the foundational stuff is always going to be important. Honestly, I do worry about the quality of education in some of these design programs. Yeah, because I see a lot of portfolios from boot camp graduates and they all look the same.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's been my concern. Actually for a while that's been my concern with boot camps, because, trying to hire people out of boot camps, I noticed that, like it was clear they didn't. They. Their grasp of the fundamentals wasn't super strong, like they knew how to do derivative things, but their grasp of fundamentals wasn't strong and you could tell they were copying patterns they'd seen, but not well, yeah, and so that that was a concern that I had. But you've, you know, I've heard of people coming out of boot camps and I'm just like dang, like awesome, you know, and I think a lot of it depends on the person who's going through. I went to the Art Institute for profit. I saw them compromise on who they let into the program there. I mean, they were we would talk about it as students, you know, we would have friends where it was like we. You know, it's like dang, like. Why did they let them in? Like they're stealing their money, like this person's not going to be good enough to get a job.
Speaker 1:They're not going to get a job. That's not fair to that person. No.
Speaker 1:Because, like this is an expensive school, private, for-profit institution. This is an expensive school, private, for-profit institution. This is an expensive school. Yeah, Even compare it. I actually found out it was more expensive. I originally wanted to go to SCAD. I originally wanted to go to SCAD. Went to Art Institute because I thought Art Institute was less expensive. It's just the way they framed it, because I was a dumb 18-year-old like the way they framed it made it sound like it was less expensive. No, it was actually more expensive?
Speaker 1:oh no it was it wound up being 23 000 a year to go to the artist's hut versus 18 000 to go to the scat. So when I heard that 18 000 number, I freaked out and then it, you know, taught the scat. But they didn't talk in the same, they didn't frame it in the same way. Yeah, it's a little bit predatory in my opinion. Oh yeah, but like you know, I I still I got a good education there, so I'm not mad about that. I mean, obviously you've seen all the stuff that's happened with the art institutes because of some of their predatory practices, but, like I still got a great education. But I agree, like there is a concern for me as well, of you know how some folks are, are getting educated in some of these programs, because it does seem a lot more popular for somebody to go now through a boot camp than to go to design school yeah I still don't see a lot of people choosing to go to design school well, I think a lot of.
Speaker 2:So some I I have a few observations that I've made, so just to start unpacking some of them like, in terms of design as a profession, it's still kind of it's not very common knowledge. It's a viable path, right, everyone's heard about engineering, everybody heard about other fields in tech data scientists, maybe even product manager but design is still sort of hidden as a profession. So I remember in high school the career counselor never mentioned design as a thing. I didn't even know what that was then, right. So, really, and coming from a first-generation immigrant family, like engineer, doctor, lawyer, high, high paying, stable jobs, but no, like design was never in that conversation, and I think part of it is the lack of visibility. So what ends up happening is a lot of the people who end up going to bootcamp they graduated, they realize that's not what they want to do. They hear about design, maybe from a friend or somewhere else, and they're like oh actually, that sounds more within my wheelhouse of something that I actually want to pursue.
Speaker 2:Oh wait, I don't want to go back to school for this. I don't want to go, you know, apply for a master's program. They don't have rolling enrollment, right? So it's going to be like I have to wait until the fall to get admitted and then pay the tuition. It's a two-year degree. Wait, there's another pathway. It's three months. It's less money when you think about it, two years versus three months and it's open enrollment and it's rolling enrollment, meaning like at any point you can sign up and there's going to be a cohort that gets started a couple months later.
Speaker 2:It sounds like the right answer right when you look at it from that standpoint, the students that I found who are most successful are the ones who are either career transitioners meaning they've been working and they're just trying to like, like, go somewhere adjacent. Maybe they were a developer and decided, realized they actually like the creative part more than the technical part yeah and they want to go to design school.
Speaker 2:Or there's someone who's trying to level up Someone who came from a graphic design background, a print design background. They're like you know what I need to get into UX design. That's where it's heading. I can make more money. They have the foundations. So what they're really building on top of that are understanding about UX, understanding HCI, and that's easier because they have the funnel. They even know the software so they can, even if it's not Figma, they can pick it up pretty quick. Those are the most successful students, the ones that come from nothing, like they have. Maybe they were an English major. They know nothing about the software. They have no understanding of anything related to graphic design. They have, maybe, an eye for design. They have no understanding of anything related to graphic design. They have maybe an eye for design, but that's it.
Speaker 2:Maybe they've used apps and that's their reference point for how to design a user flow and interaction model, but that is all they've got to build on. So three months is never enough for them.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, that makes sense and that was, yeah, my thought is, like man, like three months is not long enough, but that was always my like with front-end development, because you know there was a boot camp program that I, you know, I would try to hire out of and yeah, it was a three-month program. And I'm thinking to myself, like this person knows, nothing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you're telling me that you're going to. You're telling me as an employer, that they're ready to come into my company and be productive after three months. And I interviewed a lot of them and I was supportive of it. I was like because I wanted other paths other than college, because it was so inaccessible. I wanted other paths. I wanted to believe, but then I saw the output and I was like, like, this person's not ready. They're not ready. I could try to get them the rest of the way there, but I don't. I'm going to still be teaching them. Really, I can't assign them work and then pick up the extra. They then become extra capacity in my team. They're not ready to do that Like, and they're actually probably going to piss off the rest of the team if I bring them in under those auspices Like, hey, this person's going to help us do this and they'll be like yay, and then they're going to see the work and they'll be like Devin, what were you smoking? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Like you know, that was what was going to happen. So I really I think we only hired a couple of people out of those programs, but it was interesting to see like some of those folks were making. They were already working in something else, they were making a transition and those folks were fantastic. They are One of the guys that I worked with, one of the best developers I ever worked with. I mean he was the guy was just magic. I mean he was a linguist.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow, and he became a front end developer learned you know Angular and React and all that stuff, which is not what front end development meant when I was a front end developer.
Speaker 1:It shows how old I am, but he, I mean, he was amazing and he was a linguist, he worked, he was hired because he could speak multiple languages. That's what he did before went to a front-end boot camp and picked it up and just, he's hands down one of the best developers I've ever worked with and we were, I mean, it was like man, it was like playing basketball with somebody that you just know how to play with and you're doing behind the back passes and alley-oops and like I'd talk about something I just talk about. So I've got to go to a client's office and I don't even have time to work up designs and I talk about it and I come back from like a client trip and he'd be like devin, I built it and I'm like I didn't even give you designs.
Speaker 1:what are you talking about? You didn't even know how to do it before I left and I'd come back and he'd show it to me. I'm like are you an alien? And he was a linguist before and he went through a boot camp.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, it's possible. I think linguists, there's a lot of commonality, because programming language is a language. Yeah, that's true, it's actually a simpler language than, if you think about it, than the written word. So it's really just a matter of like wrapping your mind around. You're passing instructions to a computer to do a thing and you have to anything. You have to tell it step by step, in its own, in a very specific way, using the programming language syntax to tell it how to do it.
Speaker 2:That's right. Using the programming language syntax to tell it how to do it, that's right. And if you can wrap your mind around that, which is very foreign to most people, they just take things for granted Like oh, this is how you do it. You've got to decompose it into its very individual steps to make it clear what you need to do, Like everything they're like oh, Then you can be a good programmer, but it's a different way of thinking. But you're right, there are definitely people who are very successful. I have many students who have gone on to work at the FANG companies Google, Meta senior or leadership-level roles in their companies boot camp students.
Speaker 2:But I don't take credit for any of it, because I'm like they were good you know what I mean Like I kind of think of it as like they had the intrinsic skills to be good. They just needed to be taught, like, what to read, what to think about.
Speaker 2:And then they kind of took it the rest of the way, which is why I feel, like you know, there needs to be I don't think bootcamps need to disappear, I do think they need to you know there needs to be some sort of agreement on what the main things that they need to, like students need to pass, Like they need to learn these things and they shouldn't all be automatically graduated. Like they need to graduate like not rubber stamp through the factory mill, which is what they do now, and I also think an apprenticeship model for people who can't afford that, where they you don't get paid. As an apprentice, you watch, yeah, yeah, you observe day in and day out and maybe you know you'll pass them some small, like repetitive tasks so that they get their feet wet, but then you start building up and then after two years, you have a ready-made employee that you can hire. Like that feels right to me, Cause if it's a culture fit you know it's a culture fit because they've been apprenticing for you with you for those months.
Speaker 1:I think that's I think that's fantastic, and I've been an advocate of bringing back the apprenticeship model. I a hundred% agree, and I honestly think that it would bring some folks into the fold that otherwise couldn't afford school and also some of their education might actually be better Now. Granted, there is a science to helping people learn right. So I'm not discounting the gains that we've gotten from the university system. There's a lot that we've gained from that. So I'm not trying to discount that. I just don't think it's for everybody. And I think that the apprenticeship model I mean how many great painters have we had that came through that model? How many great architects you know different things that we need in society came through that model. So I think it would be a fantastic thing to see happen. And, quite honestly, like you know, I realized like guys like you and I are positioned essentially to be able to offer that you know to be like hey, you want to learn how to be a designer. You can be my apprentice. Yes.
Speaker 1:You know, like we have businesses, we can come be my apprentice and you know, like you, this is what you're going to see day to day for two years and at the end of that then we'll talk about maybe you know, you know being a part of this, or I'll help you get a job. And I think that, if you're that forces, you know, essentially sort of like almost like an economy of designers where it's like people want to apprentice for that designer because she's amazing, right, like you know, like and being able to say, like you came out of so-and-so, being able to say I came out of one used studio like oh crap came out of.
Speaker 1:You know it'd be like saying you came out of SCAD, right, like came out of SCAD. Like when you heard that somebody came out of SCAD was like one of the applicants to the same job you're going after. I think there's a lot of value to that man. This has been amazing, I definitely. I know you're living all the way in Gwinnett, man, but you got it. You got to come back on the show. The fantastic conversation, man.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I loved every minute of it. It was a great time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so. So where, where can folks find you on like, where can they find you, juan? Where can they find you online?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so they can find my company on wjystudioscom. They can find us on Instagram. Wjystudios is our handle and, yeah, connect with us if you're interested.
Speaker 1:Awesome, awesome, juan, thanks so much for coming on the show man, it's been awesome.
Speaker 2:It's been a pleasure.
