← Daring Creativity
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- [00:01]
Radi Malinich
Before we start today's episode, let me tell you about my latest adventure introducing Lux Coffee Company, a speciality grade coffee company inspired by creativity and creatives. The debut range is sourced from some of the best farms in Brazil, Peru, Colombia and Africa offering beautiful flavors and notes. Our single origins and house blends are roasted every Monday for next day shipping. Visit luxcoffee.co.uk and use code podcast for 15% off your first order. And yes, there's exceptional merge too. Lux Coffee Company is where art meets exceptional coffee.
- [00:50]
Jessica Hisch
It's about understanding the things that make you the happiest and most efficient at the things that you're doing. And I think that was the biggest reason why I ended up staying as an independent creative instead of growing a studio. Because I realized how important it was for me to do the sloggy, boring work as well, just for my mental health.
- [01:18]
Radi Malinich
Welcome to Mindful Creative Podcast, a show about understanding how to deal with the highs and lows of creative lives. My name is Radi Malinich and creativity changed my life, but it also nearly killed me. In this season, inspired by my book of the same title, I am talking to some of the most celebrated figures in the creative industry. In our candid conversations, my guests shared their experiences and how they overcame their challenges and struggles. How they learned to grow as creatives. A creative career in the 21st century can be overwhelming. I wanted to capture these honest and transparent conversations that might help you find that guiding light in your career. Thank you for joining me on this episode and taking the first or next step towards regaining control of your creative life. You ready? My guest today is a lettering artist, illustrator, author and self described avid interneter. Living and working in Oakland, California. Her prolific career and self initiated work have seen her working across many different formats and applications. From creating film titles, ad campaigns, logos, even postage stamps and posters, to children's books, and even opening a couple of brick and mortar creative supply stores. This episode goes behind the scenes of the busy creative, sharing honest insights and perspective on delicate balance between commercial success and personal fulfillment. With thoughtful reflections on the importance of mental health in creative work. It's my pleasure to introduce Jessica Heche. Hey Jessica, welcome to the show. How are you doing today?
- [03:08]
Jessica Hisch
I'm good. Happy to be here. Yeah.
- [03:10]
Radi Malinich
It's a pleasure to have you on the show. For those who have may have never heard of you, please introduce yourself.
- [03:16]
Jessica Hisch
Sure. So my name's Jessica Hisch. I'm a lettering artist primarily though I do have my finger in a lot of pies and I Also write and illustrate children's books and a lot of my focus is on very specific, noodley typography stuff. I both like to create illustrated typography, but then also a big part of my business is doing logo refreshes and basically trying to do invisible updates to existing typography. I tend to release a book not quite every year because they are so time invasive or time intensive I should say. Invasive sounds negative, they're very fun, but they take several months and don't pay the bills in the same way that commercial lettering does. So I love it. It's a big passion and specifically love making stuff with kids and getting kids excited about creativity. And I just really like that I'm able to do a lot of different things. It's what kind of keeps me from burning out and keeps me interested in being a creative person.
- [04:14]
Radi Malinich
So let's zoom in on one word that you said, which is time. Books are time invasive and time consuming for sure. You once said that unlike some of your peers and colleagues, they're by age of 40, they're running the agencies and they scaling and they're growing. But you've kept things small and I always wondered what's it like for you? Do you ever have a regrets of actually not growing, not scaling? Or do you actually feel happier because you've got a handle on the work and don't feel as distracted by running multiples studio?
- [04:46]
Jessica Hisch
I feel really lucky that I've just stuck with it because the more I talk to people that have scaled their businesses, the more they tend to tell me like, oh, I wish I could just have no overhead and can just do whatever I want or whatever. Not that they regret the choices that they've made or the life that they've been able to build for themselves, but they definitely look at my situation as being aspirational to where they are. And I think that was something that was interesting to understand. I went to this like really fancy ladies creative retreat where a bunch of the women were like proper, very rich CEOs and things like that. And as they were talking about what their plans for the future were, a lot of their future, this is my dream plans, looked exactly like my day to day life. And so I think that was a very big gratitude inflection moment for me. And also like a thing that was really validating about the choices that I've made. That said, I'm not in a position where I can just have all the money in the bank to walk away and fluff around forever. So you make the choices that you want. My choice was to focus on career longevity and how long can I keep practicing creativity and make it a part of my life, both personally and professionally versus other people's prerogative might be how do I get that bag so that I can do my own thing and live life? I want to live whatever shape that wants to take, whether or not it's about working as a creative professional or about doing something entirely different.
- [06:18]
Radi Malinich
It's interesting when you talk about the CEOs and the founders and the creative directors of big agencies and big companies and you're like, are you okay? Yeah, it's just not good. I'm tired. Everything looks great. You know, your social media presence, you got studio, got amazing clients, you've got amazing work. Yeah, there's nothing like it. I always appreciate your honesty because you're quite busy and vocal on social media and quite transparent with your business practice to actually unmask some of that sort of smoke and mirrors that our industry sometimes just uses too much because it makes you believe that everyone's a millionaire, self certified. Obviously everyone's got amazing clients.
- [06:55]
Jessica Hisch
Because I didn't grow up rich. I grew up in a middle class household and then my parents got divorced and then it was like not lower end of middle class for a long time. Where it wasn't. We rented and my mom didn't make a ton of money and I really wanted to make my own money. That was a big part of being motivated early on was just wanting like stability through finances. But that said, in terms of feeling like a millionaire, whether or not you're rich, I have this total thing of just if you can buy a $15 sandwich and not blink an eye about it, you're rich. Basically my definition of what being like a rich person is much lower than other people's and I try to keep it that way because I think it's this chase that we end up in once you become successful where it's like, oh, well that's not enough. Oh, that's not enough. And just trying to like understand there's like a certain level of money that you have to make or have in order to live a comfortable safety life. And then anything beyond that is gravy. And just to understand that your life will grow to match whatever finances that you have. So like you can feel poor as someone making hundreds of thousands of dollars because of the life choices that you've made and that you have to spend a lot of money to keep that life going. So I think it's just Always keeping that in mind and understanding that you can scale your life around your finances so that you feel more rich or that you feel just more stability and safety versus letting things get out of control in terms of your spending, which then makes you feel like you're living paycheck to paycheck, even if you're making a lot of money.
- [08:35]
Radi Malinich
Did you feel, you mentioned that your parents got divorced and I'm sorry to hear that. But did you feel your family situation made you more determined to actually make your own life secure?
- [08:46]
Jessica Hisch
I was going to say, without that having happened, I don't think I would have had the career that I have. But that's not to say that our childhood traumas are good for us or anything like that, because I think the majority of people that go through a bad experience or a destabilizing experience don't have the outcome that I had, which was becoming more independent, using it as a fire within to do stuff. Most people get paralyzed by it and it messes with them forever. It becomes something that always feels like a stumbling block. Like I'm the rare case of someone that was able to harness that and turn it into energy just to be more independent. But I think there was a moment where people were celebrating trauma and you're not allowed to like celebrate your success if you didn't come from adversity and all this kind of stuff up. And I'm here to be like, no, because I think part of it is I was really self conscious about raising my kids, knowing that they were going to be so privileged and have two parents who are. I mean, my parents are great. We went through some stuff together, but like having a really stable household and they have two parents that like have been to therapy and understand how human minds work and the impact that you can have on your kids as a parent, like, whatever. I was worried that when they get older that this lack of trauma, that a lack of bad experience, it was going to inhibit them. And then I think that's just what we tell ourselves as people that have been through something that without that thing we wouldn't have succeeded. But also you can succeed without the bad stuff.
- [10:24]
Radi Malinich
I said, my children are parents who went to therapy. And therapy is still something which is almost like a taboo, especially in less developed countries. It's still like a signs of inferiority or someone like, okay, are you broken? Like, why would you go to therapy? Whereas personally, I'm very open about it. It's in my books. Spent more than 10 years in therapy and that's Been the best sort of 10 years of my life. Because it's just you've been lumped with this experience and all of a sudden, like, you're unpicking, you're like, oh, fuck. I'm actually really free. I feel really, really easy about myself. So is it okay to talk about your journey, how you freed up?
- [11:03]
Jessica Hisch
You know, I've been with my partner for 16 years, right? So he's known me since I was 23, 24, and saw me through a lot of transformation, both like, personally and professionally. And I was in weekly therapy for four years. And I did it because I was having, like, panic attacks around, like, certain things. And I had this sort of like vision in relationships within my family where we just always seemed to like, be speaking different languages and things like that. And then because we were communicating so poorly, they would be very reactive to things that I would do and say, and then I would be reactive to things that they were doing and saying. And it would become this vicious cycle. And it was really difficult to not be like in high alert body mode around them where you get that sort of like fight or flight reaction. And I really just wanted that to go away. It took a really long time because therapy generally is a pretty slow process if you want to do it correctly, where you just spend a lot of time trying to form objectivity over things that are happening in your life instead of it being like so subjective and first person point of view, because it then allows you to, like, be more compassionate towards the people in your life that are triggering you and then just makes you understand your role in relationships better. I think that it was incredible for parenting. I feel like all of my parenting tools have come from those years of being in therapy and just understanding the whole thing of just, you can't change what people do, but you can change how you react to what people do, like, that kind of thing. And just understanding that is just a basis for living as a person in the world. And I feel like I tend to now, like, if something flares me up, I'm not like looking at that person being like, you flared me up. I'm looking at myself and going, why did I get flared up by that? And then I'm able to step away and examine that in a different way. Whereas I think before any of that, it's easier to think that external things are what is messing with you or triggering you or creating these problems in your life. And then once you really examine it and try to zoom out and get some objectivity, you understand your Role and your body's role and that you can actually do a great deal of work to control that, which then tends to calm down the external stimulus. Because if we're reacting to an external stimulus, then it becomes like, they then react to that and it becomes this bump up cycle. Whereas if you can stop it in its tracks and be like, this isn't a problem, everything is fine. This is a misunderstanding, whatever. It just completely changes the relationship.
- [13:59]
Radi Malinich
Yeah, lots of amazing points to unpick. But would you describe it about, you know, stepping away and actually, like, how do I flare up or how do I not flare up? Because maybe he had a similar sort of upbringing. Like, when you're little, you don't really understand, like, why do people get angry? What have I done? I haven't done anything. Because it takes time to understand that. Because sometimes nothing to do with it. Like, the thing is not about the thing. That thing is something completely different. And when we take it was that if we are unfixed and going into, let's say, collaborative situations and working with people, client side, account handlers, whatever, like, you get loads of unfixed people. I don't know, I've just invented the term unfixed. But like, lots of broken people. And you're like, three to one, collaborate, do magic. And you're like, fuck, this is not gonna happen. This is gonna be absolutely impossible. The question I want to ask is, like, how did you find that therapy actually improved your creativity?
- [14:51]
Jessica Hisch
Well, I think it really improves your ability to collaborate with other people, like you were saying. Because what it does is when you discover that you are just a human being that has been hurt and you have hurt that has not been dealt with, you understand that literally every person in the world is the same. You know that if people are behaving badly or reactive or seem to always be like a nudge in the process or whatever, you can view it as, oh, this is a human being that has some unchecked, unaddressed inner hurt stuff that makes them react poorly in certain environments. And it gives you so much empathy towards every person. And it makes you understand that different people need different things as you're working with them. And because of that, you can anticipate their needs a little bit better. Which means that as you're working with them, you can be like, I can tell that this person, based on this reaction early on, got burned by another creative. And so what they need more than anything is trust. And so I'm gonna do my best to build trust. You can get a sense of the need that you need to fill in the relationship which then enables creativity part to be smoother and then everything else in terms of doing a lot of inner work and self awareness work, it's about understanding the things that make you the happiest and most efficient at the things that you're doing. And I think that was the biggest reason why I ended up staying as an independent creative instead of growing a studio. Because I realized how important it was for me to do the sloggy, boring work as well. Just for my mental health. And it's one of the reasons why like my husband is like super into AI and is like a director of the AI team at Meta. Like he's like fully in AI. But for me, like the promise of AI is oh, we'll do all the things you don't want to do. So then you can spend more time ideating and doing concept work and being a brain and being as creative as possible and la la la. And I like that work. But I also find it really intimidating. And if my whole schedule was only the big ideation stuff, I would absolutely crumple. I need my schedule to be a mix of big picture ideation and scheming and dreaming, but then also just hours and hours of just little noodley vector stuff where I can just put on a television show and go into autopilot mode and just really pull from that super deep well of repetitive motion knowledge that I have from doing this activity for so long. And that's the time where I feel like I'm filling up my tank to be able to do the high level work. And if I don't do that, then my tank is just always that empty. Like I just never have the mental capacity to do the high level creative work if I'm not spending a lot of time doing the super low level repetitive just nuts and bolts.
- [17:53]
Radi Malinich
I think this sort of transparency is really useful for people who are at earlier stages of their careers. Because I'm sure once upon a time you were happy just to sort of work as many hours as you can physically fit in the working day. Because what you said is just like that heavy ideation, you need to metabolize it. Actually, you know what? I'm going to fuck off in my head and just do something completely different. Because the world as we get older gets heavier in a way that you've got more humans, got more bills to pay, you've got other things to run, you've got different businesses and that sort of genuine creativity if it's condensed into 20 minutes. That's sometimes the most productive and most successful time of day. If I told you that and you're not to your 20 year old self, you'd be like, what do you mean? As we talked about different businesses and different things, you are known for standing still or sitting still because you always come up with something new. And in your talk of Barcelona you mentioned that you are very risk adverse, that you don't do things that are too scary. Whereas again, to somebody looking from the outside in be like, what do you mean? You've got like this many books, you've got this many projects, this many things, you send out emails, you publish this, you also have a couple of stores. What do you mean?
- [19:04]
Jessica Hisch
I think taking yourself out of your comfort zone is different than taking risks. I think you can make yourself mildly uncomfortable if you know that you can like reel it back in pretty easily. Whereas like when you take a risk is something where recovering from it would be difficult. You know what I mean? If you with setting up the shops, for instance, like it didn't feel like a risk because I was like, my studio that I'm in right now, I own my studio, right? So the space downstairs that my shop is in, I own. And which means I'm not paying rent. You can la la about me having lost income because I'm not renting it to someone else, but I'm not having that monthly, oh shit, here's $2,000 out the door for this thing that might not be making money. Like I'm not thinking of it from that perspective. And so it was a big upfront investment and at that time it actually did end up being like quite risky and I was sort of like saved by a big client project because it cost more money than I thought it would to set it up. But I have faith that after all of these years of doing stuff I can zoom out again and see it as there are these cycles where there's times where I'm busy and making decent money and times where I'm almost dead. And that's my, like, I'm going to make a big time or I'm going to do another project time because I want to keep myself busy because I like working. But I can see that there's these like ebbs and flows. And so if I'm in like a low point, I know that the high point is down the line and that I actually have to actively try to make it happen and I just try not to make it that my bank account ever gets so scary that I feel Paralyzed, because that's the whole thing. If we want to tie back to the trauma and safety and whatever. If you actually feel unsafe and are scared, if you have so much debt that you, like, don't know how you're going to pay your bills, or if you have so much whatever, instead of it being a motivating factor, it becomes a paralyzing factor. And so I never take a risk where it might trigger that paralyzation. I'm always like, if I'm going to invest in myself and my business, I need to make sure that there's a safety net. I need to make sure that I'm not overspending so that when I get to that low point, I'm going to hit that paralyzation point and then not be able to recover or create that uptick. That's just something to always keep in mind, is that it's worth investing in yourself, it's worth investing in your business. But if you aren't smart about how you do that, or you overinvest it or do it in a way where there's no fallback, what can happen is that you get really stuck and then you feel fucked and you're like, I don't know what to do now. Because if you think about being in debt or something like that, if you have a $2,000 credit card bill and you make decent money, that doesn't really feel like debt. If you have a $30,000 credit card bill and you make decent money, that starts to really feel it because you're like, there's not a way for me to just one off, pay this off. And if you have a hundred thousand dollars in debt, even if you're making great money as, like, running a studio and really raking it in, that's not debt that can get paid off in one or two chunks. That's debt that gets paid off over years. And then that starts to feel paralyzing when you have this really long timeline to getting back to zero. And so it's about like, whenever I take a risk, I think, can I make myself whole within three to six months? And if the answer is yes, then it doesn't feel so risky. If I can't make myself whole within that timeframe, I tend to not do it. So the things that I'm more likely to do are the things that I can make myself whole almost immediately. So if I buy a letterpress, like my letterpress was $15,000, I was like, I know that if I sell prints online, this will pay itself back. Within a year and it will be like this slow and steady pay it off situation. So I can ignore it cuz I know that's going to pay itself off. If I spend a lot more money on something then I'm like I need to have a path towards paying myself back for that thing I invested in. So I tend to not invest in things or buy things for myself or invest in the business in a way that I don't foresee, a way to become profitable or pay myself back over. We'll be back after a quick break.
- [23:39]
Radi Malinich
If you're enjoying this podcast and would like more support and information on your creative journey, you can pick up one of my books to help you do just that. My titles cover branding, Graphic design, illustration all the Way to Career business advice with ideas how to navigate the highs and lows of the creative process. You can pick up signed paperbacks at no extra cost from my store@nobmberuniverse.co.uk and we are shipping worldwide use code podcast for extra 10% off your order and you can find the links in the show Notes Any day should be a new book day as you said. Like there's a difference between risk and a comfort zone. And I think we sometimes relabel like how that sort of is perceived because to someone, for example, if you say I bought letterpress for 15 grand, they'd be like I need to save up for this first. I'm like they make a big plans but the way you've rationalized it make actually perfect sense. Yeah and I can actually understand why when you say you're risk adverse, but you mentioned that sometimes you're quiet and again people might be thinking, Jessica H. Being quiet. She looks almost busy with your work ebb and flow. Is there a seasonal sort of start to your work or does your work happen in different phases? Or how does it go? Because I would imagine you were always busy.
- [25:03]
Jessica Hisch
No, I have the interesting problem of looking fancy. Therefore my schedule is not always full. And also that it's by design too. Because as a parent, like I have three kids, I don't want to be working nights and weekends unless I absolutely have to or want to. Like sometimes. Like I was up until 1:30am two nights ago because during the day I had pilates, drum lessons and my hair color. It's just like I can't work today so I have to work tonight. And that's a choice that I can make for myself as an independent creative. But I try not to work at night unless it's by choice. Unless I Feel like I'm working at night because I will be more efficient at doing that work or because I look at it as. I haven't watched that chimp crazy thing yet. And if I can just watch that whole series tonight while doing production work, that would be very satisfying to me. But when you're trying to make sure that you're not working nights and weekends, you have to basically always keep your schedule at most 80% full. It's like 70 to 80%, because when you send out proposals for jobs, there's like a chance you'll get nothing or a chance you'll get everything. And so people will come to me and ask me to, oh, send a quote, we're sending it to a few other people, whatever. And most of the time, I won't get every job that comes my way because they're looking at other awesome folks as well. And there's different directions that they're deciding to take it in. And maybe my direction is not the one that they chose. But every now and then everybody says yes, then it's like chaos for three or four months where I feel like I've got no time to myself. I'm like, I have to be super rigid about my schedule. I have to work, actually work during the day, like work, work from like 9am to 5 and then take a break and then from 8 to 11 or like whatever. Right now, like, generally, my schedule is like a little loosey goosey on work stuff. So there's always tons of administrative things to do. And I feel like that eats up like a fair amount of time. And so I really probably only do four to five hours of design work a day. And that's on a really good day because, like one we were talking about being more efficient and you can get the work of 10 people done in four hours. As both like a creative that's been doing it for 15 years, and then also as a parent, you just get so deeply efficient and like cutthroat in how you make decisions and all that kind of stuff. So keeping my schedule at somewhere between 60 and 80% full means sometimes there's times when there's really not that much going on and it is seasonal with the commercial lettering work. I think for campaigns and things like that, I tend to get busy in the late summer, fall, sometimes mid summer if there's a bunch of Christmas campaigns. But I haven't gotten like a big Christmas campaign in like maybe two years. So I did a Neiman Marcus one, and that was crazy. But last year I didn't get a big holiday campaign. So my July was very normal and quiet. This year was also pretty quiet, but I was also traveling a bunch, so I wasn't mad about it. And then it's like super busy until the end of the year, and then it's like pretty dead until March. I feel like things don't really pick up again until end of February, March. And that's for commercial lettering and then for logo clients. Those are on a schedule of however much I talk about it on the Internet. So if I post about a logo project, I'll typically get a couple of inquiries within several weeks. But I try not to have more than a couple of them on at a time because they involve a lot more intensive work and meetings and things like that. And I don't want to be on Zooms every day. So, yeah, I feel like I have a bit of control over my schedule. But then also there's this perception that I'm like, fancy and expensive, which means I don't get as many, like, short burst bread and butter projects that I used to, and I'm still available for those. It's just no one assumes I am. One time I got a. Actually, this was like a year ago, maybe I got a client brief and they forgot to erase a thing in the client brief that said, might be too expensive next to my name. So I feel like because of being successful and on the scene for a long time and also talking about money and budgets and like, how to get paid appropriately for bigger projects, people assume I don't want smaller projects. So the smaller stuff doesn't always come my way, even though I'd be happy to do it.
- [29:29]
Radi Malinich
You mentioned somewhere, I think may have been your talk when you said, if someone wants me to do development work for $150, I'll be happy to do it because I'm entertaining opportunities. And I think there's this sort of different tiers of creatives who, if you said, hey, look, can you help us out? We've got $150, fuck off. I'm like, this is below my level. I've worked for this many years. But I think the magic happens in these real small projects that actually then flourish and grow into something really exciting. Because I think there's been a few illustrators in the past that they have grown to the level, especially like the Renaissance illustration, right early 2000s, where people were commanding big fees and then they found themselves producing all the potential clients. All the campaigns were like, I'm not getting any work because everyone Thinks I'm not too expensive. But I think one of the main sort of messages of this conversation is like, how you are perceived on the outside because people think you might be expensive, but your setup necessarily isn't. You don't have to feed another five families and pay five different pensions and five different mortgages. So it's just almost like, how do you educate people? Because you don't want to be talking about your prices openly online to everyone, but you still want to have that sort of balance. Like, how do you do it? But do you get ebb and flow in terms of social media and work from there, or is your work coming from all sorts of directions? What is your main sort of stream of new work?
- [30:48]
Jessica Hisch
A lot of it is just referrals. People that have seen projects and want to work with me and things like that, or someone had recommended me for a project. With social media, it's less that I'm getting projects by new clients through social media. It's more that people that have followed me for a long time remember I'm still alive when I post on social media and they're like, oh, I forgot about you. And if it crosses their plate at the right time where there's a project where it works out, then it's great. That's what happened with Are youe There, God? It's me, Margaret. When I did the movie titles for that, the creative director from Lionsgate had been a follower for a while. And I posted about this piece that I did for the Wonder Years. I did the main title design for the Wonder Years, and it just happened across her plate the exact week that they were starting to think about the new title design for that film. And she was like, oh, my God, how did I not think of you? This is perfect and this is totally in the same zone. But I feel like all promotion, like, for me now is just about reminding people I'm still here. You know, less about acquiring a massive new fan base or anything like that. And I think that also ties into whether or not you're too expensive or unavailable or whatever. It's a really fine balance showing people that you're open to new projects without looking too thirsty. Because nobody wants to work with people that look like they're desperate for work. And so part of it is just looking like you're having a good time. I used to be very, very, very, like, transparent about everything, where it was like, all the positives, all the negatives. And, you know, you hit some real challenges when you're a parent and you're older. So I definitely, like, deal with stuff in my personal life and whatever that I don't always share online now because I think it's like the overall perception from people which is the truth. So this isn't me not telling the truth. It's me focusing my attention on the positive things that I'm doing rather than letting the negative things be the focus of the attention. Because I think that's something to understand is like people that are curating their online presence. There's a difference between curating it in a way that is a false narrative and then there's curating it in a way that shines a light, that is truthful on it, that doesn't overly emphasize the hardships.
- [33:13]
Radi Malinich
I guess what you describe and I think the word curation with social media presence, like, it's always going to be filtered. Unless you put a camera on yourself for 24 hours, there's always going to be the things that you choose and then you don't choose. And one of our mutual friends, Liz Mosey, she was on my podcast a while ago and I was like, I feel like I know a lot about you. And she's no, there's a lot you don't know about me. But it feels like the amount of content and the frequency, personally, I just, I found it that I kind of done with it. And I just. Sometimes I just show up and people say, are you still alive? Are you still doing stuff? I'm like, yeah, we've never been busier, but I don't have almost that energy anymore, like, to actually be having squabbly conversations about something that's just so innate and unimportant to me.
- [34:02]
Jessica Hisch
There's different ways of being a person on the Internet. I feel like the reason why I am who I am online and in person is because I genuinely like interacting with people. And this is what's been interesting. When I talk about curation online, you didn't used to have to think about it because people saw everything that you made. So, like, if you posted on Twitter or posted on Instagram and you posted 10 posts and eight of them were lovely and I'm having a great time and two of them were, oh, yuck, I'm having a bad day. All of your followers would see all 10 posts and they'd be able to garner like a picture that was very accurate of what's going on in your life and who you are now. It's very unpredictable which posts they're going to see. And so you could be posting the Same amount you could be posting eight positives, two negatives. But maybe they only see the two negatives and one positive. And then all of a sudden their perception of what your life is like and what you're going through is incredibly inaccurate. And so in that way, I think actually the algorithm and way that social media has shifted towards algorithmic views, it creates a forcing function where you have to curate because otherwise it's going to favor the negative, because the negative sometimes gets more attention. And then that shifts the perception of who you are as a person, what you're interested in, what your life is like, what your availability is like, whatever. So you end up having to curate, understanding that people aren't seeing everything and you don't want them to see only the couple of things that were like, I'm hurting today. And then. So that is the only thing that, in terms of why I curate, that's why it's like, because I don't know what people are going to see. And I don't want people to get a false idea of what's going on. I want them to get a true understanding of who I am and what I do. And then like, engagement bait. People don't do it because they're bored. They're doing it because they think it's going to help them in their business or personal life. And having a lot of followers and having a lot of engagement totally gets you cool shit in your life. It does. So I understand the motivation to do it. If I didn't have all the followers that I have, would I get all the opportunities that I get? Would I get invited to speak at things? Would I get asked to be on the board of Things? No, it's because they want my followers to hear whatever it is that they're saying. So I get it. But at the same time, I think a lot of people that approach it from like a very intentional, formulaic way, or like where their angle is specifically about getting followers or specifically about getting the engagement, you can just see right through it. And then it just kills the whole vibe. It like kills the party. It's like a person throwing a party for their friends and having fun versus a corporation throwing a party and only inviting a couple of people that they perceive as being high value people. Those two parties have really different vibes. Like, which one do you want to go to? Do you want to go to the one that like some random vodka company is throwing and you know that you're only there because they want to get something from you? Or do you want to throw the one with people that care about you and want to engage with you in a real meaningful way, a very conscious.
- [37:29]
Radi Malinich
Way of using social media. How much would you say that actually operates or like looking after your account and using social media? How much of a time in a day does it take for you? Is it sporadic? Is do you have sort of dedicated time? Do you try to stay away off your phone when you're with your kids? Like, how disciplined are you with your own engagement right now?
- [37:49]
Jessica Hisch
My discipline is very low. What I'm bad at right now is that I'm obsessed with platforms like Threads and Blue sky because I was like a massive Twitter addiction. Massive. That's my top platform in terms of me being obsessed with it and unable to put it down because it's just little micro new stuff. And I love throwing random things into the universe and hearing back from people. It's very fun for me. Instagram feels like work for me for the most part, except for stories. I like sharing in stories, but I drag my feet to post on Main and Instagram. I know I have to, and therefore I don't want to. Anything that feels like I have to do, it becomes a thing that I absolutely don't want to do. And anything that's fully optional, where it's just for the fun of it, that's when I have a hard time putting it down or putting it away, especially with Threads. Threads is. I don't know if it really serves me right now in terms of my professional life because I get no likes and no engagement on anything that has to do with my professional work and only get engagement on stuff that's just me being like, just riffing around, hanging out, like, whatever. And so you could say that maybe that still helps because it makes me top of mind for people or whatever. But I devote way more time to it than it probably deserves and I'm very addicted to it and I need to put the reins on.
- [39:05]
Radi Malinich
I think I'm sure you'll agree that we missed the old Twitter, the old sort of early 2008, 9. It was such a good time because I think it was your conversation with Liz on your. On her podcast when you talked about, like, how we were all new to this. Like we were this generation. We're like, hey, this is new and we are happy and do what you love and will never work day in your life and that kind of stuff. We were like happily naive and happily excited. And that's something that I guess we will never recreate. Being a teenager in 90s that's only going to happen once in our lifetime. But with the change of platforms and the way we work. And you mentioned your husband works for AI team at Meta. Do you even talk about work at home? Do you talk about AI or do you stay in different camps and just keep a neutral conversation? Because obviously AI as a sort of proper label has caused so much chaos to so many people's minds. And we were talking about trauma at the beginning of this conversation where if you don't have your confidence in what you do, if you're like, oh shit, and he can unearth me within a second, that's quite an event in most creatives lives. Whereas speaking from my experience, I am as most comfortable personally and professionally as ever I've been because I've already gone through all of these twists and tumbles. But I can totally understand that being new, being illustrator, trying to borrow ideas and try to sort of create things for yourself. It's a big cocktail of emotions and things to do. So obviously there was this big hoo ha about Meta wanting to use people's images for machine learning and for the. What's the official term? But you get people who are like, okay, do it. And there are lots of people like, oh, don't touch my stuff. This is my original idea. Only to realize it's not really your idea. Like you like something 10 years ago, then you recreate it in that way. You're pushing on sort of the human evolution of creativity. So you've already borrowed stuff, but just because it's machines now actually using it, why are you upset? Just because you've got no control, is it lack of control? Where do we stand on this? So what's it like in your household and have conversations about AI with someone who's behind the enemy lines.
- [41:06]
Jessica Hisch
We had a very, very tense three months when he started getting really into it, where it felt like we couldn't talk about it. Because my standpoint is that the folks that build AI don't always acknowledge the realities of the disruption that it will have in the short term. I think like a lot of them that are very optimistic about oh, this is going to enable all this stuff and la la la. And certainly in certain industries it's like a no brainer, like in medicine and like whatever. But people that are like this enables creativity, this allows this to happen. You like folks that come at it from that angle. I think that they approach it from more of a loosey goosey making art in general and not a making a career in art approach. And so it took a lot of us having uncomfortable conversations for him to understand that while AI might benefit art in the long run by making people value the human touch in art and like whatever, like maybe it helps elevate craft in a way that has gotten neglected, or maybe like certain kinds of fine art become that much more valuable and rare from everyone, not just people that are already entrenched in the fine art world. But it took a long while for him to grok how commercial art and fine art, or just art making in general, are two totally different beasts. And that AI has and is going to have a very real impact on the commercial art world. And I can just see that already because of the impact that influencer culture has had on commercial art and illustration. Where prior to social media being a requirement for everyone, when it was just funsies, you would be, you would have to beg to get your name onto work. If you got hired by a client, even if you got paid really well for that thing, you'd be like, oh yeah, put my name on it. They'd be like, absolutely not. What are you crazy? And now it's like the only jobs that exist are ones in which they want to use your name and your followership and your personality as a part of why they're hiring you. And so I saw that transition happened where there's just way less bread and butter, nameless, just work a day, illustration and lettering and whatever. And so I was like, this is going to be like the next tier of that. Because creatives can do so much with AI in house and not have to collaborate with other people. They're going to still be able to hire illustrators, but it'll be for like special issues and whatever the feature thing of the year or the month or whatever. And not everyday little stuff. The everyday little stuff is going to just all happen in house. And the argument that AI is only as good as the people who use it, where it's just oh like AI can't replace your job because you need to be creative and you need to have ideas and AI doesn't have ideas and AI is not creative. I was like, what do you think creative director is? Like it basically everybody's going to turn into a creative director. Everybody's going to be in this entirely ideation world and less production world. And creative directors are going to be able to do so much that does not involve having to have someone else with specialized skills do picture of what they have in their minds. They'll be able to accomplish a lot of it on Their own. But the negative to that is that I feel like is going to become more of a privileged industry where people that can go into it and focus on it have to come from a place of privilege and safety from the jump, rather than knowing that you can slowly build up a career on these little teeny tiny projects.
- [45:03]
Radi Malinich
What's your view on people who use AI? Especially when you mention like companies now come to people with followers. And sometimes the people with followers are not always a result of actually creating a high crafted illustration is literally being able, being very good with algorithms. So you sometimes you get people like, is this the person with the right opportunity? Like, is sometimes you try to validate what is the output of the work. Because when you have people now saying, oh, I'm an artist and you look at their work and it's like all AI generated with prompt. Look, I'm not judging, but I'm from the times where we had to create this stuff bit by bit. Like you beg, borrow and steal, like stock imagery and put things together and actually create realistic scenes. Whereas now that foundation, that breakthrough barrier is so much lower. So if you want to do something, it used to be like a someone's skill, that's now a filter, that's now a click of a button, which saves us time to actually evolve and go and produce potentially bigger and better things. But when you think about longevity of our careers, it's an amazing that we can evolve and we can actually be something tomorrow that we have not been. And we're building on this sort of foundation of what we created for ourselves. But do you agree that AI is potentially good for the evolution that pushes people to actually try harder? Because as you said, illustration might be very niche kind of thing. It might be just like for the selected few because there'll be fewer opportunities. Do you need to be like. In my opinion, you need to be so good that people will want to work with you. Because AI aside, what we've been creating is basically projection of our souls, projection of our creativity for other people to connect with. Because I think what gets muddled in this conversation about AI is that we still create work for other people, for ourselves, for our moms, for our granddads, for our friends, for passing traffic. Because AI doesn't create work for AI. This is the thing. Like I think that sort of this mystical algorithm or knowledge of my machine learning will somehow like bypass and just say, everyone love me because I'm AI and I'm creating most amazing work. There's going to be very little connection so my question is, does it give us a chance to actually push harder? Does it give us a chance to evolve in our creativity and maybe try what we were sometimes comfortable with, to actually say, you know what, that was just a chapter of my life and I have to actually go and develop. Because our predecessors where look at Quentin Blake, he was just Quentin Blake all his life. He didn't have to grapple with typography or changing of styles or whatever. Like, this is me, this is what you get. Whereas now we get through careers with five or six different iterations in 10 years or 20 years. Is AI do right, kick up the art to do and try better?
- [47:49]
Jessica Hisch
I think there's really different ways of using it. I think that it can be a good tool to like unstick yourself and you know, this is what we should talk about it. As long as it's ethic like being ethically created. There's people that train AIs on their own work in order to spit out different sketches to get their mind flowing about what they want to do. And then they use those ideas that are generated from their own work in order to make new work. Like that's a different thing if you're using a model where it's been trained on data that is owned by the company or has been officially licensed and all that kind of stuff. Ethical model, like that's different than models that have scraped the world and done it without the permission of the people in the model. So first cover that. But to me it can be a very good first draft machine just to sort of like spitball a bunch of stuff. And rather than it being like the output of the final work, it can be a good addition to a process. I feel like I use the chat based things sometimes. What's the difference between me Googling what are human emotions? List of human emotions? Like if I'm making a kid's book about emotions or something like that, what's the difference from me Googling list of human emotions and finding some SEO website about it versus asking Claude, what is a list of human emotions? To me, I use it almost like a more reactive web browser for that kind of stuff. And also too like in terms of using it to help with writing. If you are a strong writer with a very specific voice, you can use it as a way to create a super bare bones draft that you then heavily edit to be in your voice and rewrite. Like I'm really bad as a writer of going through a really official process, like a more typical writing process of super rough first draft, better, second draft, clean it up, third draft, then we're in the final draft. I tend to be one of those people that's like writing for the final draft from this get out, which is so stressful. It makes writing really hard. It makes it feel very intimidating. It makes you hate your writing. And so I feel like I could see a world in which I utilize AI to help break me out of that cycle by helping me do that early rough draft that I then completely transforms over the course of me rewriting and editing it into something that is my voice and my writing. I think that's the thing with AI if you transform it, then it's a hundred percent valid and can use it as an assistant to the things that you're doing. I think what people react or think that is happening more than anything is people just ask it to do a thing, it does a thing, and then we accept it at face value, which certainly happens. So people that are like, that's not how it works. That definitely is how it works. Think about magazine art directors that are getting way underpaid. They're making 30k a year at their job and have no budget to hire people and don't give a fuck about a certain article because they're just like, you know what? They don't pay me enough to think about this. If I were them, I'd be like, done and I would go home and I would live my life and I would feel great about it. So no shade for them doing that. But like to say that doesn't happen, it's wrong. That does happen. And the problem is because that does happen because so many industries that hire artists, it's already so hard for good creative directors to get budgets to do that kind of stuff. They're getting so much pressure from the people with the money just to do the thing and get it out the door. They are going to end up defaulting to just spitting out some mildly edited AI stuff for low pressure articles. It's going to happen and then whatever. If you just chop out the bottom of any industry, what happens is the top industry falls down to fill that gap of the chop. A lot of people are very optimistic that, oh, AI is going to make us so efficient and we're going to be able to do 10 times the work but still make the same amount of money. It's not true. The budgets are going to adjust to match what they perceive the work is. And so you're just going to end up doing 10 times the work for the same amount of Money or like for what is equivalent and just working a lot more. I think that the idea that AI is going to free us and we're going to do a bunch of stuff, I think it's an idiotic idea in a society in which there's no universal basic income and where there's no social net, there's no safety net for people to actually have free time. We live in a hyper capitalist society and capitalism's whole thing is just like extracting value from people as much as possible. And so that's what will happen. That's my perception and that's why I'm not the most optimistic AI person. But that said, I'm not binary about it. I understand that two things can be real at the same time. It can both be an incredible tool for helping people further their creativity and for pushing themselves to do things they couldn't previously do and for allowing them to make work that normally would cost millions of dollars to make and they wouldn't have the opportunity to ever touch. I understand that can be true, but I also understand that it can totally bork how the world works in terms of getting paid to do normal creative work.
- [53:20]
Radi Malinich
Wow. There's so many different strands that we can talk about for hours. I'm sorry to hear that you had quite tough three months at home on the topic of AI.
- [53:28]
Jessica Hisch
The conversations around it were like very. He was like, I feel like you don't appreciate my work. And I was like, I appreciate you, but I don't know if I appreciate the thing you work on.
- [53:37]
Radi Malinich
I guess you've got the unknown because we still grapple with the reality, like what it is. Because what's really interesting, you actually mentioned the hyper capitalism. You've got all of these companies being built like scraping the Internet now. I advise you to check your web analytics because I just checked mine for a joke because my developer changed my Google. Was it Google Analytics? So I just checked my hosting analytics. I was like, oh, shit, we had 1.3 million page views. This is 2008 stuff.
- [54:03]
Jessica Hisch
Yeah. That's crazy because my page, I haven't looked in forever.
- [54:07]
Radi Malinich
No, no, when you look at it, it's all Claude. It's all the AI bot crawling through, like what used to be Googlebot and real people. It's basically Claude is like a 700,000 page view. That was at the time when my website was out of date. That's why the data about me on the website on Claude is out of date. But we talk about the ethical scraping and we talk about the Ethical learning. Whereas what's happening behind our backs without even knowing, it's absolute wild west. But would you agree to do this? I'm like, no. Okay, so you've been tagging your faces on Facebook since 2007 for machine learning, like how to understand. We've been clicking on captcha. Oh, is this a tractor? Yes, it's a tractor. It's not a cat. We've been doing this for so long. Actually, are you happy to part with your ideas for the maybe for evolution or. No, you can't have my ideas, but you can have my face, you can have my identity. Are like Kings of Leon or whatever. It's just such a weird juxtaposition of ideas that when we feel like we have a choice, I fuck yeah, whatever. We can have it. Do I feel like out of control here? Maybe a little bit. Okay, you can't have this. And I just feel like we've got this cocktail of kind of constant evolution that trips us up so much that I think when we look back, we're like, you know what? It was just a part of evolution. We just needed to learn how to work with it. Because I feel like we could have another conversation about books and writing. And I understand how you use Claude because it got me unstuck in times when I was actually writing book to inspire this podcast. Because it's the view to the world. Because you've got your POV going. That's how I want to tell the world what I can see. Right. Actually, let me ask AI, how does the world being seen through this massive safe or the filter? Like, what is the sort of average of these ideas? And where can I take the strands and go with the next? So, yeah, I think we should leave that particular conversation about books to maybe for another time. But I want to finish this conversation with drum lessons. You mentioned Pilates and drum lessons. And where did drum lesson come from? Is it something that you've always been trying to do or it's a new thing?
- [56:08]
Jessica Hisch
I grew up, I played piano as a kid and I've been wanting to take up music again. My husband plays piano or plays guitar all the time at the house. It's one of his like, self soothing things and I love it. I'm just like, play this. And he plays me my favorite songs. It's very fun. And he's. He will. He gets shy about me telling. Saying that he's great at it, but he's very good. He's a good guitar player and he's a really good singer. But we've been looking for ways to play together, and I feel like I'm so stuck in, like, classical piano, like, exercise y kind of stuff. I've never been a person who can riff. I'm not a riffer. Just in general. I feel like when I shared a studio with Eric Marinovich, I was always so envious of how experimental he was all the time. He would just be like, I'm just doing this now and just trying all kinds of crazy new stuff. And again, with the not being a risk taker thing, I tend to stick pretty close to home with everything that I'm doing. If I'm learning a new thing, I'm adding, like, a little 20% on top of the thing that I'm doing. I'm not like, let's turn this on its head. Like, I'm not doing that very much. And I feel like, because that's generally how I operate, my ability to play music in a way that is more loose and collaborative is nothing. I put too much pressure on myself to be perfect and get it right and whatever. I can't riff. And so we had this really fun little jam session. He bought, like, a little drum pad, which I didn't like. I think it's fun to play with, but it's like, just a finger pad. And to me, like, I do a lot of, like, air drumming and stuff in the car. It's kind of my fidget thing to, like, just tap and drum on things. And he was like, oh, maybe you'll like the finger drum. And I was, it's not a body thing, but he was using the finger drum. And then I was, like, messing around on a bass guitar. And we were just making these little rhythms where I was just like, whatever. And it made me realize that I really wanted to learn a rhythm instrument so that I could play with him and not try to steal the show. In terms of being the lead instrument, I was. I'm completely happy having him be lead and me just being a supporting character. And I felt one of the things when we do hang out and play music together is I'll just be sitting there, like, pleasantly listening. But then I'll be like, you drop the measure after the chorus. I'm like, I keep time like crazy. And I'm. I'm like a pedantic backseat musician, because I'll be like, nope, that's actually. You only did the four count, but it's an eight count there. And, like, whatever. I just get really, like, nerdy about it. And so I felt like me. Learning the drums is both a way for me to like, turn my pedanticism into something that's productive in terms of our playing together, because then I can be the one to keep the rhythm and then he's not in charge of that. And then also just a really low pressure way for us to play together. And it's been really fun.
- [59:10]
Radi Malinich
Jessica, I loved learning more about your world and about how you work and what you do because we. I think you have to come back another time to actually talk more about books because that's something really in common. So thank you and I hope to speak to you soon.
- [59:22]
Jessica Hisch
Of course. Yeah, it was great.
- [59:32]
Radi Malinich
Hey, thank you for listening to this episode of Mindful Creative Podcast. I'd love to know your thoughts, questions or even suggestions, so please get in touch via the show notes or social channels. This episode was produced and presented by me, Radi Malinich. Editing and audio production was masterfully done by Neil McKay from 7 Million Bytes podcast, and the theme music was written and produced by Jack James. Thank you and I hope to see you on the next episode. Hey, just a quick note to say thank you for joining me on this episode. If this is your first time or you're a regular listener, please take a minute and rate the show on your chosen platform. A short review helps every show to be more visible to new listeners and provide them with value. So thank you for helping out. Thank you.