← Daring Creativity
Daring Creativity
Reclaiming the soul of creative expression in unexpected places - Burton Rast
01:01:42
Loading summary
Transcript63 lines
- [00:01]
Radim Malinich
Before we start today's episode, let me tell you about my latest adventure. Introducing Lax Coffee Company, a specialty 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]
Bertram Rast
I have a great therapist and believe it or not, the first time that I ever gave the version of that lecture where I talked about the loss and I talked about all of the struggles. Believe it or not, the first time I rehearsed that was with my therapist. I meet with her on Friday morning and I said, hey, do you mind if we do something different this week? And then I was like, wait, I pay you. I can do whatever I want. So yeah, she was a huge help. And when you share these kinds of stories in a public setting, as I do, you end up connecting with people who have similar stories.
- [01:31]
Radim 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 Malinj 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 some of the most sad celebrated figures in the creative industry. In our candid conversations, my guests share their experiences and how they overcame their challenges and struggles, how they learn 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? This is the last episode in the Mindful Creative series and I'm eternally thankful to every single guest who shared their story with me. I'm eternally grateful to everyone who has listened to these conversations and I feel I have just the perfect story for the final episode of this season. My guest today is an artist and designer living in San Francisco, California and he has spent and enjoyed a range of disciplines throughout his more than 20 year career from UX leadership, creative direction and interaction, design, photography, Data visualization and filmmaking, working along with the likes of Google and Ideo. In our conversation, he talks about A.com era agency burnout and his transformative years at IDO, where he first experienced imposter syndrome. We cover a deeply personal turn that transformed his creativity into his artistic identity. He discusses the revolution from creating arts to creating content, the ethical implications of AI training on artists work, and his current role in advising creative AI startups. This episode explores themes of addiction, obsession, creative authenticity, and the importance of personal narrative in an increasingly homogenized digital landscape. It's my pleasure to introduce Bertram Rast.
- [03:39]
Bertram Rast
Foreign.
- [03:45]
Radim Malinich
How are you doing? It's great to have you on the show.
- [03:48]
Bertram Rast
Thank you so much. So good to see you.
- [03:49]
Radim Malinich
I'm glad to have you on the show because, yes, we met at Paradiso in person. I feel like we've all been in the same sphere of talks and festivals in the last decade or so. And yeah, I wanted to talk to you about all of the things that you do, about the things you've been up to and what you might be up to in the future. So for those who may have never heard of you, how would you introduce yourself?
- [04:13]
Bertram Rast
My name is Burton Rast. I'm an artist and designer living in San Francisco, California. Born and raised in Chicago. I've been in the Bay area for about 10 years. I used to shudder at the term in generalist, but now I kind of embrace it. I enjoy that there's quite a few things that I like to do in my professional life. I'm a desire in my life outside of getting paid. I'm a lifelong artist, avid photographer. It's funny, I. I always struggle with this when I give lectures.
- [04:41]
Radim Malinich
You said you shudder at the time of generalist.
- [04:44]
Bertram Rast
Why I used to. Well, because for the first 10 years of my career I was purely hard skills designing code and that kind of separated me from a lot of the folks who did just one or the other. And it was, if I'm being perfectly honest, it was always easy to get a job offer when I was interviewing around and looking to move on to whatever the next step in my career because companies were really excited that they could hire somebody who knew both of those things. It wasn't until maybe about 15 years into my career I was interviewing at Google, where ultimately I ended up working for five and a half years. I'm sure we'll talk about that in a bit. And the recruiter to whom I was speaking said, oh, so you're kind of a generalist? Because she got to know me and as I was sort of moving my way through the interview process and talking to different folks and like I said, I shuddered like it was like, no, no, like I have a very defiant skill. But. But Then before I responded to her, I thought, oh, okay, well, I just spent the last seven years working at a design firm called ideo, which really changed me from a purely hard skills person into more of a generalist, right? Someone who knows the soft skills stuff, whether it's presenting or research or synthesis or how do you do useful research interviews and sort of synthesize that data to inform design decisions. So, yeah, it took me a moment to learn to embrace the term and realize, oh, no, that's a good thing. Now, the older that I get and the more that I've grown into design leadership, it's good to have a breadth of skills and an experience that informs.
- [06:27]
Radim Malinich
Yeah, I think in terms of an employment, being a generalist, maybe that sort of confuses people. But in terms of being an artist, designer, coder, that's a benefit.
- [06:38]
Bertram Rast
And as you get older, you have to sort of dread that your ambitions change, right? When I got my first design job, I remember talking to my father and saying, oh, my God, I get to go into work, put on my headphones, listen to music that I love for eight hours, and just bang away on designing code and animation. I am going to do this for the rest of my life, right? Just give me my marching orders and I will create stuff so long as you pay me. But yeah, as you get a little bit older, it's like now, you know, you learn more about the process of design and how do you really create sort of meaningful products or services or experiences that actually get at solving for real human needs rather than just back in 2000 when I started, it was just like, crack open Photoshop.
- [07:23]
Radim Malinich
What did you listen to when you were coding?
- [07:25]
Bertram Rast
Yeah, it's funny. Grew up on sort of all things counterculture, right? Like, anything that, that. Anything that. That the sort of PTA moms and the parents hated, I was into, right? So I came up in the puck and hardcore scene in Chicago, which was really. I didn't know it at the time, but that was sort of the genesis of my interest being designed, right? Like, I was always a super artistic kid, always sort of sketching, illustrating, designing and doodling. But the cult scene, right, where my friends and I were making our own clothes patches, buttons, we were cutting and dyeing our own hair, we were making flyers and album artwork for all of our friends bands, really creating sort of creating without permission, right? Like they sort of asking forgiveness in lieu of permission ethos, right? So, yeah, it was a lot of punk and hardcore really came up in the golden age of hip hop, was deeply embedded in not just the punk scene but the rig scene in the early 90s in Chicago. So like my friends and I would, we would go straight from like the punk show with our mohawks up. The punk show would let out at like 11 or 12 at night and then we would go to the Raid. Mohawks still up until 6, 7, 8 in the morning. So yeah, everything from funk and hardcore to electronic and hip hop.
- [08:41]
Radim Malinich
You mentioned that it was creativity without permission when you think about this. Because our paths, even though we grew up in a different part of the world, are very similar. I was in more of a sort of death metal kid. We were sort of more in a sort of grindy thing and we were making all sorts of stuff ourselves. But I never even thought that we needed permission. We started the bands before we found having instruments that we were excited about. Whatever could be that you see a glimmer of in a sort of distance, like, oh, there's a band. How do you start a band? How do you make, how do you do this? Let me just work stuff out. Because thinking about it, there was no such thing as an imposter syndrome when we're doing this. No one said like, oh, am I doing this? Am I? I don't feel quite right. We were just too excited and just too focused on this stuff. Right? It was like, because you just said like without a permission. I was thinking there was definitely no imposter syndrome back then. Especially at this.
- [09:37]
Bertram Rast
We'll be back after a quick break.
- [09:40]
Radim 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.
- [10:25]
Bertram Rast
No? And it's funny, I, I, I knew that we would end up talking about this. That didn't appear for me really for like the first 10 years of my career. I, I began my career at a dot com era startup and that was just like I said, oh my God, I get to throw on my headphones and just make cool shit all day. I went from there to a client side job that was super boring. It was one of the dot com bubble burst. I actually Went to the unemployment office because I, I don't have any sort of formal training or schooling or anything. So I didn't know where do you find a job now that this entire industry collapsed? The thing that you thought you were going to be doing for the next 20, 30, 50 years doesn't exist anymore. So I went to the unemployment office, filled out all the paperwork and then was. I was introduced to a recruiter the next day who had no problem lining me up with this super boring corporate sort of Fortune 500 client side job where the company attitude was, I guess we need a website so we should hire someone who knows how to do that. So yeah, no imposter syndrome there at all. It's just so easy. I went from there to the ad agency world for the next three years. I don't know whether you spend any time in the agency world. It's an unkind industry. It's very aggressive. Everything that you create lives in the world for as long as the media buy lives. Which is, I don't know, a week, two weeks, right? So like whatever you do, whatever you kill yourself working on for 70, 80, 90 hours a week, boom, it disappears just as quickly as it showed up. I really didn't experience anything resembling imposter syndrome until I got hired at IDEO, which was 10 years into my career. And all of a sudden I'm surrounded by people who know things that I don't know, right. Who have an understanding of design as this holistic process, this sort of research driven, pretty well defined process. They all went to Stanford, mit, itp, at miu, Carnegie Mellon, Royal College of Art, umeo, ciid, right? Like all the top design programs in the world. And that was the first time where it was like, oh, wait, I'm surrounded by people who know things that I don't know that I'm realizing I need to know if I want to grow into to the kind of design leader who I imagine myself becoming. So yeah, but Jamal, like the sort of talk eboss and learning how to do art and design on your own and creating with your friends, like, no, that was like the purest time, right? Like there was there. There was no semblance of anything resembling imposter syndrome.
- [13:06]
Radim Malinich
You were creating it with the equals of yourself. There was no one, really. There was no hierarchy. There was no system of this person's more important. And everyone was scrappy, everyone was excited. And yeah, so when you, Because I know a little bit of your story, obviously when you go to the idea, you were like, oh, these People are educated and they know stuff, but it's almost like you crossed over to like a different group of people, like, let's say the different dimensions, demographic. And all of a sudden like, oh, okay, this is slightly different. But before we get to ideo, I want to talk about those earlier days because I love the story how you worked for a hotel, that you installed a cracked Photoshop on every single computer in the building. That's just genius. We need to talk about that.
- [13:49]
Bertram Rast
Yeah. So it's funny, like I said, I don't have any sort of formal training or schooling or anything like that. I was just floundering about, like, obviously I knew I was an artist, but like, I had friends in Chicago who went to art schools and got degrees in sculpture or this, that or the other. Excuse me. And you see them graduating with those degrees and it's like, okay, well, what are you going to do with that? So I had never really considered art school as an option. But then what do you do? How do you connect your skills as an artist with. With a career with doing something that, that you enjoy, that where you can pay the rent. So, yeah, I was just bouncing from one go nowhere job to the next, and I worked all of them, right? Restaurant backup, house cleaning, grease traps, unloading semi trucks, like service, hospitality, garbage job. And I ended up working the front desk at this busted old hotel north of Chicago. It's funny, for this is 1997, 1998, to give you an idea, we had one 56k modem for the entire hotel, which is for not just the computers in the offices, but every hotel room. There were 277 hotel rooms, so you could barely get online. My brother and I worked there together. We were learning how to use naps during all these. These programs to borrow the music that we wanted to listen to. So you could barely get online to begin with at this hotel. And then making matters worse, my brother and I were constantly using a 56 modem to download whatever, the new Underworld album, right? Or like whatever, whatever it was. But a friend of mine who was going to art school for music production was learning Photoshop and HTML and Flash this, that and the other, just in his elective courses. And he was the one. And I show his photo and I talk about him in my lectures. J. Hill, he was the one who showed me this stuff, right? He showed me this Flash animation that he had created. That was because he was a DJ and a producer. It was a couple of turntables and you click the mouse and scratch the record. And load different songs. And so it was, was audio, it was visual, it was animation and illustration. I had never seen anything like it. And I was just. He opened the door for me because it's like, oh well, Jay's not even going to school for this, right? This is an elective class. This is just like a fun thing he's doing on the side. If he can learn it, then I can learn it. So yeah, I learned how to pirate software and then installed all of the software that I wanted to learn on all of the hotel computers so that any moment in between checking in guests, I could keep working my new craft. And I bought books and we're a couple old guys, so I will date myself here. I bought books on HTML, dhtml, Flash, this, that and the other at like Borders and Barnes and Noble. And I would read these on the subway going to and from the hotel. And then everything that I just learned in the book, I'm like chomping at the bit. And as soon as I get to work, I don't care about the guests at all. Like I want to jump off these computers, put into practice all of the things that I just learned. That's how I put a portfolio together. And I, I left from that hotel to the dot com startup that hired me, my first ever design job. That's where I put my portfolio together.
- [17:03]
Radim Malinich
I absolutely love that story.
- [17:04]
Bertram Rast
One of my best friends to this day, and my brother and I, we used to use this program called Hotline. It was like a FTP or Napster or whatever the hell. People would just host files, go to a website to search who had what on Hotline servers. And of course we were trying to find pirated copies of Photojournal Cloud and all of these crazy expensive programs that there's no way that we could afford. But on one of the outline servers we found Justin, because you could poke around all the folders on the server and see what other file they had. So we saw this curiously named folder and went into it and someone had recreated every state, like all 50 United States state IDs and driver's license templates. We downloaded the whole thing, right? And that was how I learned Photoshop is the incentive of like, oh wait, we didn't even care about getting into the bars at that age, right? We just wanted to see the bands that were playing 21 and over shows that we couldn't get into. So we found there were only two states that were still doing that sort of old school laminated driver's licenses, Maine and Indiana. And that's how we learned Photoshop is making Maine and Indiana fake IDs that we just accidentally happened upon when we were trying to learn how to pirate software.
- [18:24]
Radim Malinich
What can I say? I mean, what a genius story. Because it's again, it go again. It goes back to the Pancrug. Like, you wanted to be in the show, like, whatever, drinking, you wanted to see the band. There's a template. You're gonna do it. That's how you learn it. Because I got my first job on the back of making our band tapes and CD covers using Coral. Coral Draw. That's what I was using. And I had a rudimentary understanding of it, like, align things and do whatever. And just like, I had a couple of summer jobs when I did some stuff with like, soundwriters and sign makers, but that was enough back then to actually get a job and to say, hey, I can do some of this stuff. And if sometimes you find yourself you could do more than people who actually employed that, you're like, that's enough. Obviously, we live in a much more busy and more complicated place now, but back then it was just a beautiful innocence. Can you use it? Well, the answer should be no, but I'm gonna definitely say yes. Can you use a. Can you use a Mac? Nope. I'm gonna say yes. That's the beautiful thing about it.
- [19:22]
Bertram Rast
Yeah, I mean, and it's funny. And I can hear it in the attitude that you're describing when you talk about not having imposter syndrome when you're much younger and at the sort of pure time, the thought never crossed your mind that you wouldn't just do it, right? Like, it's like, well, oh, my buddy is learning how to do this thing. That looks interesting to me. Well, obviously I'm going to learn to pirate software because I'd gone at a thousand bucks for Bone Shop. I'm going to buy a bunch of books at the local book door and just do it, right?
- [19:52]
Radim Malinich
Like, I think we were lucky because there was a lot more, in a sense, a lot more time to actually spend on development. Because I remember having books on freehand. I remember books. I literally remember reading a book on Illustrator. Like, I just wanted to know what. Click. Whatever you click. Like, what's the shortcuts? What can I do? Like, how can I use it as an instrument? Because when you find yourself, like, clicking, okay, there's a menu. And this is like, I just, like, I want to click stuff. I want to make it fast. I want to make it naturally rather than Sort of be slave to the software and kind of making it sort of on the basis of making mistakes and happy accidents that I was like, no, I want to be in charge here. Because I remember trying to do some sort of music production in around 2000 in program called Acid, if you remember acid. And it was kicking my ass. I was like, I was sampling Incubus and Donna Bryant and Cold Cut and I was like, yeah, this is shit. I gave it. I was like, I'm gonna leave this aside, but I can definitely do more of the Coral Draw and Photoshop and illustrate a bit better. And that was my path going forward. I'm glad I stuck with it because, yeah, there's. When we look back at our choices, it's definitely one of the ones that I enjoyed.
- [20:58]
Bertram Rast
I do know that software, I, I, my brother and a number of my friends ended up going into music production and starting bands and this, that and the other. And if I'm being honest, I'm. I've always felt really fortunate that my interest was more sort of visual design and art and photography, animation and code. Because music is one of the disciplines that, that I refer to personally as the showbiz discipline. Right. Whether it's music or acting or writing or any of these disciplines where you might be the best in the world of what you do, but if you don't have that moment of luck and connection where you're recognized and identified by the industry, like I said, you could be the best in the world at what you do and you won't necessarily make a career of it. Whereas in our industry, you work your craft super hard and you put a portfolio together, you might not end up working your dream job, but you will find a job that pays the rent and you can do this for a living. So I always felt fortunate that for whatever reason, I was drawn more to the visual arts.
- [22:01]
Radim Malinich
I don't know many musicians who would end up being generalists in that way. But what I want to talk about, obviously around that age when you were traveling between Chicago and San Francisco and being a punk rocker, there was a few setbacks, there was an accident, there was addiction. And it's kind of almost like a coming of age story because like, you just go with the scene, you do your thing and then. Yeah, as a setback. How did you do with that?
- [22:31]
Bertram Rast
Yeah, I mean, it's funny, with the benefit of 2020 hindsight, it's easy to look back and pretend that it was a sort of neat and tidy and linear story. And. Oh, I just, I overcame Whatever setback or whatever issue and then gone to become the person who I am today. But that's. It's a lot messier, we like to think. And it's funny, I was just talking to a friend about this the other day, another speaker friend. Challenge of having only 45 minutes, as we typically do to tell our stories in the context of a talk is that it naturally presents as linear when the reality. And I know this is an audio podcast, but I'm here, I'm pantaliming this. So wiggle right like that life is. The story is not linear. It's way messier. It's sort of this hairball of a mess of a thing you do your best to hope is moving forward in the aggregate. The fact of the matter, and I don't want to go too deep into it today, but the fact of the matter is I had kind of a bumpy childhood and that led. I ended up in a friend group of folks with very similar stories to mine. And many of us did fall victim to, to addiction and to a period in our lives where that was sort of how we coped and managed what it was that each of us went through. But the long story short is, you know, I mentioned my buddy Jay Hill, who sort of turned me onto this software and made it accessible for me. He showed that to me at a time that I really needed something, that I needed some kind of purpose and direction. And I was coming out of that period of my life, but I didn't really see a path forward. What I did know is the moment that I found it, I became so full tilt obsessed. I knew that I was taking all of the energy that I had put into addiction because addiction is a full time job, right? It consumes your whole life, it consumes your every day. It takes a lot of time and energy. And I knew that I was taking all of that energy and putting it into this new thing. And I knew that I was probably doing so like in an unhealthy way. Like, I mean I let it completely consume my life, but I was okay with it because it felt purposeful, because it felt productive. It's okay if this is all I'm doing morning, noon and night, provided it's leading to something. And what it led to was a portfolio that got me a job.
- [25:06]
Radim Malinich
There's definitely something about replacing addiction with obsession because you can like when you start seeing the things happen in front of your eyes that you just created, even have rudimentary they're wear. Back then you were like, oh, this is me. I'm doing this, and actually there's someone having an opinion. This is actually. This is going somewhere. This is actually showing me the way. Because obsession, I think is the right word to use, because I can relate to it. You can easily work 17 hours a day, and you wish there was 48 hours a day, and you wish you cloned yourself because you all of a sudden you got actually you in charge. Because when you talk about childhood, like a challenge in childhoods, they usually come with very little control of your destiny. Like, you don't always have that chance of like, okay, how is this gonna pan out? What decisions can I make it? Like, no, this is. I'm not fully in control. I'm not old enough on this. Whereas when we get to actually having been able to get hold of our lives, it's a beautiful hideaway. Creativity is a beautiful hideaway of like, okay, you know what can deal with my life just in like, the traumas and the past that it escapades. I'll deal with them a little bit later, but for now, I'm gonna literally cut myself off from the world. You know, get into the zone and actually just me and my creativity will pretend like we are okay for now. Because that's. You can almost like when you reached. I mean, especially back then, I would say we can easily reach a state of flow and go in. You know what? I'm not distracted. I'm focusing 100% of what I'm making. In fact, like, having headphones on and crashing out like snow. I mean, I had to replace number of bakcom tablets because I just destroyed them by drumming. Sounds like a perfect snare drum. It's perfect. So. But yeah. And then you realize, ah, actually it's. Maybe it's time to face. No. My. My demons. Face no. Face on. And make a bit more sense of our lives. Because it's. Yeah, maybe that overworking might be a bit unhealthy because that's.
- [26:57]
Bertram Rast
It's funny, like, because it's still. That's who I am to this day and the people who know me best. But I was at a show with a buddy of mine at this great little art nonprofit called Ray Oriented. And I'm with one of my closest friends, and he knew that I was in the middle of working on something and, like, really working out, like, something that I was proud of. And I was like a challenge that I was really looking forward to solving for. And he said to me, he literally said, we're on a Sunday afternoon. It's all, all day show. And he says, oh man, you've got that look in your eyes. Go home. He's like, I know you need to do it, you need to do it. Go home.
- [27:33]
Radim Malinich
It's impossible to grow out of. Absolutely impossible. Yeah, you can have. Yeah, it's nice that you're supporting people around you going, you know what? Go and sort it out. Obviously you mentioned you've worked with Google, you've worked with ideo, and along that journey you've discovered photography. And to the point where photography became one of your almost like a leading, I would say, identities.
- [27:58]
Bertram Rast
It has and it is the thing that is infinitely more meaningful for me than I am very fortunate to have worked on dream jobs and for companies and clients and certainly alongside incredibly talented fellow designers, certainly that I never saw coming when I was younger and I feel very fortunate for my career as a designer. But photography, it has always been a passion, but feel like everyone is sort of trying to figure out what is their personal brand and what is their look and what is their whatever it is. And now that everyone has a high resolution camera in their pocket, I feel like it's never been more difficult to sort of define whatever your aesthetic. You've seen my lectures, so I know that you have a. I know that your audience does not. For anyone who's seen my photography, that's very stark, very contrasty, very sort of exclusively black and white. And it didn't used to be that way. It used to take very vivid, colorful images. And I was actually doing a series. I was living and working in Lima in Peru with a big idea client down there for the spring and summer of 2016. And I was doing, I was literally doing a series. I had one of the clients helped me to work out the name, forgive my terrible accent, but it was called Palettes de Color Caruana. Right? Which translates to, roughly translates the color palettes of Peru. So literally a series of full color images of this stunningly beautiful and vividly colorful place. And right in the middle of it, I'd never had a more exhausting project. We had a partner team in London. The client CEO split his time between New York and San Francisco. My sort of career as a speaker and a lecturer was really starting to take off. So in the middle of all of that, I had some thoughts that I was giving and workshops that I was doing at conferences in Europe and in the States. And right in the middle of all of that, my oldest and dearest friend in the world passed. He died of heart failure at only 37 years old. To say that this shattered me during a time that I was already constantly traveling, like I said, living and working Peru. I was already exhausted. And then this happens. And that's when my photography forever changed. And the wildest thing is I didn't notice it at the time because you're just so emotionally shell shot. And I was kind of on autopilot. It was like, I just, I gotta do right by my company and this client. I've got to get through the project, then I'll get back home to the states and deal with it, I guess. Which of course is not what happened at all. When I came home, I just started obsessively photographing everything about what was still a relatively new city to me. I had only moved to San Francisco about a year earlier. I ended up doing a series called the Shapes in San Francisco that ended up getting some attention first from the local press, then from some pretty big photo blog that I've been following for years. Adobe reached out and asked. I mean, I don't know if I'm allowed to say this. I think I'm allowed to say this. I didn't sign an NDA. Adobe basically asked would I give them my look for free? And I said no. We ended up working out a deal where I did build a series of color filter profiles that are still live in all of the versions of Lightweight on desktop and mobile. The artistic series of color profiles, that's mine, believe it or not. And ultimately it led to Apple featured me on their Instagram. And that's when things really kind of blew up. And I feel like people started to identify this as who I am. An aesthetic that I've created that's sort of uniquely mine. I cannot express to you in words how much more meaningful it is than anything that I ever did at an IDEO or a Google, because I'm proud to have worked at those places. They were very generous places to work and they did wonders for my career and I learned quite a lot. But I didn't found those companies, they don't belong to me. Whereas this style of photography is very much mine. And believe it or not, it wasn't until I was putting a talk together for off personal op in 2022, the first time that I gave a lecture that was much more deeply personal. I talked about losing my friend. I talked about some of the struggles of my past and how all of that informs who I am and the work that I do. And I am. I don't know about you, but I am a wildly On a cliche designer, I could not be more unorganized. If there was not command based spotlight search on Mac, I would never be able to find a single file on my machine. So when I'm putting a thought together, and especially when I'm telling a chronological story, I just scroll through Google Photos and pull the images that I need from whatever that time period and I'm scrolling through my time in Peru in 2016 and really kind of tensing up because I'm like, like I'm about to like retraumatize myself, right? Like, I can see chronologically that the loss of my friend is coming up. And of course I, I get to that moment and as I keep scrolling, all of the color disappears from my entire Google Photos. And I, I don't even remember this, but I had gone back to some of the same beautifully colorful places in Lima in Peru and recaptured those places. But then the edits were just super dark and more and more desaturated over time. And like I said to put a lecture together on 2022, that loss happened in 2016. In the six years since, I had never connected that life. That's why my work changed, that all of the color from my emotional life was disappearing and that was showing up in my artwork. And as I realized this, as I'm scrolling, it's going to fuck me up talking about it. Like I just sitting in this chair in my studio, just started inconsolably bawling, right? To realize six years later that, oh my God, like the thing that has come to define me as an artist was born out of the loss of someone so meaningful to me. And at first I was really shook by that, but now I see the beauty in it.
- [34:29]
Radim Malinich
Well, I mean, it's a beautiful story. Thank you for sharing that. I mean, it sounded like he's around. He's still with you. Because I wanted to ask if it's okay. I mean, it's interesting. You said when I was going through this, it made sense why this, why the colors disappeared. And as I was making notes, as you were speaking, it's like that was your way to deal with grief. That was the way of like just again, addiction, obsession, grief. Obviously we go into that space where we just block out the reality, the truth sometimes. Like, okay, what is the best way sometimes forget about things or just to deal with them. And then again, we can face them head on and have someone teach us for hours and hours as a therapist, like how we can do stuff, or we can just go and take photos and make a career out of that, whereas. Yeah. Did you? Yeah, that's what I wanted to ask you. Like, did you ever think about seeking professional help or for grief or did you just work through it?
- [35:25]
Bertram Rast
I had a great therapist. And believe it or not, the first time that I ever gave a version of that lecture where I talked about the loss and I talked about all of the struggles, believe it or not, the first time I rehearsed that was with my therapist. I meet with her on Friday morning and I said, hey, do you mind if we do something different this week? And then I was like, wait, fuck you. I pay you. I could do whatever I want. So, yeah, she was a huge help. And when you share these kinds of stories in a public setting, as I do, you end up connecting with people who have similar stories. And my closest speaker friends on this earth, right? Like Marcel's little P.J. richardson, Thiago Mayo. Like, all of us connected because we share the things that we do. So no disrespect to my therapist, but those connections might be even more valuable.
- [36:27]
Radim Malinich
When you think about it, it kind of connects it back to the pancrok. It just connects it to another band of brothers because you have friends in the industry coming from similar backgrounds, doing similar things, understanding your problems, understanding the nuances in the feelings and in the work. So it makes sense when we step back and look at it. Okay. Yeah. Okay. That's kind of like a valid thought. But I never thought of asking a therapist, like, can we rehearse a talk? Fair play. But it might be cheap. Might be. It might be cheaper than a speaking coach. You.
- [36:56]
Bertram Rast
And you've seen my lecture. It's like that. I love to do, like, research driven deep dives, right? Like, I don't want to just talk about imposter syndrome. I want to understand, like, what do we as a humanity know about this? What have we learned about this? What have people shared about this? That. That. That they have learned for their research and their efforts? So she loved that. She was like, oh, my God, I didn't know about the economic treadmill and these. These authors and psychologists, so I couldn't recommend it more.
- [37:22]
Radim Malinich
Well, I mean, we need both sides of the code, don't we? But yeah, I mean, the honesty in talks, I feel, is something I can relate to. Because when you lay, when you put it all out there, you don't have to remember anything. It's just you're telling your story, you're telling the truth. You don't pretend to be anybody else. You don't want to be anybody else on that stage, but you want your story to actually send it out there and see, actually, does it relate to who can actually, you know, find something in it? Because. Because we look for. I mean, we've told you honesty to some of the speakers, like, you've got a portfolio talker. And then you go a live talker. You go like a live experience, designer, live experience, creative artist, saying like, hey, this is artist life. This is how we live. This is the experiences you might have. And that's probably my influence, your work. Or you have that sort of early egoistic sort of sense of identity going, hey, look, I'm looking for acceptance here on this stage. Please tell me you like this. Tell me you like my work because I'm still working on myself. Whereas when you go past that stage, you're like, life. Life can be really tricky. But that's how we. That's how we deal with it.
- [38:28]
Bertram Rast
Yeah, it's funny. And I'm sure, given our age and our play in our careers, that we've each done a thousand portfolio reviews. And always tell young artists and designers, whether you're putting a portfolio together or putting a talk together in this industry, and really most any industry, differentiator is everything. And our unique individual stories are what will forever differentiate us from everybody. So the more that you're willing to give, the more that you allow people in to see that, to see past the veneer of the portfolio. And like you said, we're all artists. We have. A lot of us have very interesting stories with respect to how we got here and what informed our careers and what informs our work. But, yeah, that's it. It's like anything else. There's no trick to it.
- [39:19]
Radim Malinich
In your lectures, you talk about emotional hardship. Is it necessary? Can we create work that be done without any hardship?
- [39:28]
Bertram Rast
I mean, yeah. So there's a great exchange that I've shown in a few lectures between Anthony Bourdain, Rest in Peace, and the artist David Cho, where they are discussing precisely this, right? And David Cho asserts that, hey, you can make great artwork if you're not suffering, right? But the best art in the world. And his assertion comes from intense suffering. And then the punchline is, he says his sort of thought experiment is, do you then intentionally put yourself as an artist in situations that will cause you pain for the purpose of making great art? And of course, it's David Cho. So he says, yes, like you do. And I mentioned in my lectures that when I first saw that exchange, I was like, oh, God, this is like when you're putting a talk together and it's like, oh, God, this, like, perfectly illustrates what I'm talking about or what I want to talk about. And I tell the audience that I always feel this sort of twinge of, like, reluctance when I know that clip is coming up, because I don't know that when you're given a station, when you're given a platform, when you're on a stage, I do feel that I have responsibility when I'm on that stage. And am I sort of compromising that responsibility by suggesting that that emotional merchant is a requirement of making great art? I wonder if it's irresponsible to express that. But then. And the sort of missing piece to that part of my lecture is that that. That I've been offering more recently is a piece that someone really close to me sent me that was written by the musician Cave about the utility of suffering and understanding that suffering is this sort of universal unifying force. Right. Like, we, all of us have suffered in different ways, but no matter how we've suffered, each of us has. And we do understand that as part of the human experience. So I don't know that you have to experience the multiple hardship or loss or suffering to create great art, but I do know that the best art that I've ever made in my years on this earth, and I didn't know it for six years after I started doing it, but ultimately came to realize that, yes, it was born out of the biggest loss and the most intense.
- [42:07]
Radim Malinich
But I love how you joined the dots. And I mean, it's a great example of Anthony. You can argue that Bourdain created most of his body work within, like, suffering deep, deep within, because he was a complicated character, but one that sort of connected on so many levels with so many people. And I think I basically. I go for Kitchen Confidentials at least once a year just to get to that sweary part when it's just like if someone calls you an asshole, you might be in trouble of anything else is a compliment.
- [42:35]
Bertram Rast
But it's funny also that it's a Bourdain moment, because I never read Kitchen Confidential. My buddy who I lost was always trying to get me to read it, and I only read it in the wake of his loss. I literally read the eulogy at his service, flew to Barcelona, did off Barcelona for the first time, dedicated my talk to him.
- [43:01]
Radim Malinich
Yeah, I recommend. I mean, for even greater effect, I recommend the audiobook because he's read by Anthony Bourdain. And as someone who writes books, I'm like, how do you get that tone so good? But the tone is obviously influenced by his life, by his experiences, by like being a bit of a sort of outcast and aloof and just winging it most of the time. It's like, yes, that reminds me of the 90s, how we did stuff. Like that reminds me of the crack copies of photoshop on the 56K modem. Like, that reminds me of the things that we were blagging in, like getting jobs there. We were. I mean, we were not even qualified. Even the person giving you the job wasn't particularly qualified for the job back then. So it was just like we were just making stuff up. And I think that innocence and that space, I mean, was slightly different because we did have almost a little bit of a chip on the shoulder, like, what is this life going to offer me? Like, what can I do with this? Because talking about emotional hardship or intense suffering in some do. I mean, I would say, like, we were microdosing of it. Like, we had our sort of tumultuous, crazy childhoods and I think, like, we were dealing with things that were somehow pushing us into this lane. Whereas you can argue, like, is the world a bit easier right now? Like, are we creating different hardships? Are we creating different sort of sufferings? I mean, I'm not saying that we've. No, we've solved parenting and everyone's got amazing childhood, but like, as a life of an artist, for a newcomer, it's a different story because the accessibility is different. Like, you got zillions of different examples of work that's been done in the last 20 years. It's been a different landscape, isn't it?
- [44:40]
Bertram Rast
I love that you brought this up because I was just having a conversation with a good friend in la. He's an ideal buddy of mine about. He's our age. We came up in the industry at the same time and we were talking about, if we were starting today, would we feel empowered at how accessible everything is, or would we feel completely overwhelmed? It used to be that you could just crack open a text editor and start writing some HTML and put a portfolio together. Now you have all of these crazy build tools and that's like in sort of the pre AI era, right, where it's like all of these frameworks and all of this complexity. And then what would Imposter Syndrome feel like if all of a sudden you could pop open your phone and see all of the incredible artists with their millions of followers on social media? This, that, and the other. Like I said, would we feel our thought experiment, would we feel empowered, or would we feel so overwhelmed that it's like, oh, no, I'm just gonna keep unloading trucks for a living.
- [45:44]
Radim Malinich
Yeah, I think you. You summed it up quite beautifully, one of your talks, when you said that what we create now is content. What we used to create was art.
- [45:53]
Bertram Rast
Oh, God, yeah. I. That. That term. It's just so bothersome that you would call an unbelievably talented artist a content creator. Like, it just takes all of the heart out of the passion and the learning and the struggle. And like, yeah, you're right. I gave a talk about the need for regulation in the AI space, and I do wonder how much different the landscape would be and what the present moment would be if with content creators, like, content is what you feed to the machine, right? Like, oh, sure, OpenAI and Google and Evravik and everybody else, they're just scraping content, right? What if we talked about it differently? What if we thought, oh, no, they're stealing art. Like, they're stealing beautiful prose and writing and photography and visual art. And I do feel like language matters and the way that we have sort of systematically devalued creation by referring to it as content. Hell, I could do an hour on just that.
- [47:04]
Radim Malinich
I mean, we could easily go for an hour, because I would like to. But you nailed it. You absolutely nailed it. Because, yes, we feel like we are not old time as yet because there are people in the industry who are older than us. But that snackability, that availability of magic has been demystified. I mean, the addition of the AI tool, like Generative Fill in Photoshop, I learned how to retouch. I used to work as a retoucher for about a year. Like, I was. You learn how these things work. And I'm like, oh, I don't have to spend half an hour trying to make this up. The AI will actually fill the space for me. Actually, they can do this. They can do this. But when you look back, when you look now at people who are at the beginning of their careers, they're breaking it because AI, they believe that AI will steal their job. But as you just beautifully said, like, they are mostly content creators. Like, what is the value? What is your expression of your soul? Like, what do you put out into this world that is your own? Of course, put into musical terms, like, when you start your own first punk rock band or your metal band, you're going to play covers, you're going to do things you copy, you learn the skills. Like when you're a young creator, you're going to copy Chuck Anderson, Are you going to copy Joshua Davis? Like, we all had like the rock and rollers that really sort of in that respect, like, who were leading the charge in their creativity because they had signature styles. Whereas now, as you quite rightfully call it, is initiatification. Like, it's just, it's just a mash, it's a salad. It's just like basically like a top color tapestry that just looks the same. And the language matters because if you were an art creator, if you were someone who doubles down on your identity, especially the one that can transcend you into another places, okay, you know, we believe in our titles when we, they, they come upon, like, I believe in what I do because it gives me some power, that gives me identity, gives me, you know, a direction and purpose. Can you find it if God in creation? I think you can.
- [49:07]
Bertram Rast
Now when you hit the nail on the head when you said the word value. And so for the listeners we met when we spoke at an event called Paradiso in Mexico last month, and one of the speakers was a guy whose work I have long looked up to. His name is Robert Hodgson. He's one of the. I mean, he's just on a different level. Like, his version of creative code is like he's playing a different sport than everybody else. He's so good and it's fun. He's become a friend. And we check in and we have polls regularly. But I told him just the other day, I talked to him just last Tuesday and I told him that I took a note from his talk that is still in my phone that I will never erase, that he was talking about this moment and he was talking about creating with AI. And I'm looking at the note right now. He said, and I quote, things that take no effort are hard to value. And that hit like right in the gut, right? What does a younger artist or designer who is learning to create with these AI tools that do not require your sort of Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours of craft expertise, right? Because it's trained on a bunch of stuff that was made by people who didn't put in their 10,000 hours of Malcolm Gladwell expertise? What does that young kid growing up in the industry creating primarily with AI tools feel now? Like? Do they feel that their work, do they personally value their work? And do they feel that their work deserves to be valued as much as someone who did take years and years.
- [50:47]
Radim Malinich
My daughter, she's turned nine few weeks ago and one day from school, she's on her Chromebook in a taxi on the way from school making images in Firefly. Like I want to have a bunny on the back of a zebra or something. Or like and she's making it like that's the, that's just a digital native 3.0. Like that's just, it's happening, it's happening. Non 54k modem, it's on 5G phone. She's on a personal hotspot of my phone in a taxi doing this. And I'm. Well, it's exciting because it's driving her imagination. But how do we explain? I don't know, I mean we don't have a manual, do we? Like, we don't know where we go with this.
- [51:29]
Bertram Rast
So I'm dying to know like what kind of a conversation that you have with a nine year old who's creating these tools. Like does she understand how Firefly is able to do what it does?
- [51:44]
Radim Malinich
I mean, I don't think they, I mean when you eight or nine, I don't think you go too deep into the ethics of generating AI code. She just literally said, oh, what's on your screen, daddy? It's like Firefly. Okay, well yeah, we use it in school. Like the school is preparing for them for what's coming. It's not going to be a surprise when they get to 17 or like, oh, there's been AI for the last 10 years. But it's a good question, does she know where those images come from? I don't think she's ever cared, you know?
- [52:10]
Bertram Rast
Yeah, I mean it's, most folks don't know and I mentioned this in a lecture that there's a site called haveibeentrained.com, which is a very unfortunate name for a website, but of course what it means is have my images been used to train these models? And I was shocked to find my photos in there. And I currently serve as a design partner at 3inventures. We literally our whole job is advising and investing in early stage creative AI startups. I very much enjoy playing with these technologies. It's been a big part of my identity for as long as I've been in the industry. I, I just love taking the fighters on whatever the new shit and figuring out how it works and most importantly figuring out how does this better enable us to, to sort of run the whole of the design process. Now I have in all the robots Txt files on all of my site, all of my sites I have protections in place that you can say, hey, all of these bots do not crawl this site. But the challenge is, like I said, my, my project and my work back around 2017, started getting a fair amount of press and attention. Those sites, all of those Adobe and Apple and all of the photography, blogs and publications that interviewed me, they don't have those protections on their side. So it took me a minute to figure out, wait, why do they only have those images in mind and not all of them? Right? Well, it's because those were the images in each of those blog posts. So the better known that you become as an artist or designer, the more at risk you are of having your work used to train these models. Because you have no control over whether or not these sites that interview you and feature your work have any security mitigations in place. And the reality, of course, is that most of them don't, because if they did, there would be no AI chatbots. That's a challenge that I, but I have certainly thought about. I had a couple of Godsons who are 6 years old and they have an older sister who's very artistic. She just turned 12. And as they start playing with this stuff, I'm like, wow, do they. To your point, it's not like your average 9 year old has considered the ethical implications of how an AI model is trained. But I am always curious, like, do they know how this magic happens? Because it's not magic at all.
- [54:39]
Radim Malinich
Would you. What you were describing about the, the board file and scraping in mid 2000s when we put our portfolios up and we had like million page views a year. But like, this is a great stuff. I've checked my analytics just for a joke recently. Oh, we're back to million page views a month. That's all the AI crawlers, all the AI crawlers are just basically just scraping around because you hear about it. I put a notice on the sidebar file or on the board file and you're like, I'm just two years too late. Just like the website has been already in the public, it's been scraped so many times. Like it, what can I do? And enjoyed. I think enjoy is the wrong word to use. I was mesmerized by the talk by Carol Kadwala from Observer, who did a TED talk recently on the topic of big tech and AI. Like how all of these models have been trained already to mimic us quite well. Like she was giving an example, like how we can write an article in her style of journalism. She says it's pretty Close. The only problem is I never gave them permission to teach the AI on my content.
- [55:48]
Bertram Rast
Yeah. And you probably won't be surprised to hear that when I was at Google and I left in early 2023, but I was still there when ChatGPT launched. And when it did, it was like, oh, yeah, we have like dozens of these internally that we're testing because of course we do, right? Like Google published the first paper on a transformer. ChatGPT stands for General purpose pre trained transformer. Right. Like Google had the tech, Right. They published the paper on it. But there were a million reasons that we did not release these publicly. Right. Obviously, the copyright and ethical consideration, all of the harm that can be done. Right. We're seeing sort of identity theft and phishing scams just popping off like crazy. We're seeing scams where folks are using technology like Aladdin Labs. Dude, what do you need, like 30 seconds of audio to clone someone's voice? And then you can call some unsuspecting family member and pretend to be another family member in trouble when it's money, right? Like all of these things like we talked about internally and we knew this is why we're not yet putting this tech out into the world. But then of course, OpenAI launches theirs and all of a sudden there's the first meaningful challenge to Google's core search business. And at the time, what, 25 years, so you know your shareholders are going to scream bloody murder and say, hey, where's your version? Right. And now here we are, when we sure have been having a conversation as a society about, here are all of the potential benefits and all the potential downside. Let's mitigate those before we launch these out into the world.
- [57:30]
Radim Malinich
Let's finish on a positive note, if there's one. Yeah, let's go to Summit. So where do you see yourself using what you know, what you've done, and the sort of the possibilities of where your work can be actually within the next few years with everything that we've got around? Because there's just like, with everything, there's time and place. To embrace it and do something that actually then enhances the expression of your soul, of your creativity, of your art.
- [57:56]
Bertram Rast
Yeah. If I could figure out how to do things that bankroll me traveling the world and making beautiful images and creating photography books like, that would be the dream. But I haven't yet figured out what exactly that is. I'm doing a lot more lecturing than I have been in years past, ever since I left Google, because I have more time than I'm able to do it. Big part of my lectures I talk about, I highlight, I show photos of everyone who has ever opened the door for me in my career. Everyone to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for working the places I have or for succeeding in the ways that I have. They are as big a part of it as I am. So when I think about my future and the next 20 odd years of my career as a designer and a design leader, that is the thing that I prioritize the most, is growing that next generation of design leaders. At the same time, I've been leaning more into lecturing. I have a couple of agencies who represent me now in my talks so that that may end up becoming more of a priority than it has in the past. So that I'm certainly looking forward to. I have a photography book that that I plan to put out this year. I am completely obsessed with visiting, experiencing and photographing the most beautiful Metro stations in the world. I think in part that is because in the United States we don't really prioritize train travel or public transportation. If you've ever seen our most storied Metro lines, whether it's in my home city of Chicago or New York, you would not describe them as beautiful. So I'm certainly taken when I visit these Eastern European countries and seeing these sort of palatial stations, a domestic collection that's big enough now that I can, that I believe I can put out a book. Yeah. Beyond that, just sort of being open to seeing where the day takes me. I don't have a concrete plan for what comes next and I'm embracing and celebrating that.
- [59:59]
Radim Malinich
Well, it takes us back to what you said at the very beginning. It's creating without permission. So salute you. Keep doing what you're doing. It's amazing. Thank you very much for your time today.
- [60:10]
Bertram Rast
Thank you. This has been a blast. You're a wonderful interviewer and this is. I knew this would be a fun conversation, so I appreciate it.
- [60:17]
Radim Malinich
Thank you for saying those words. Thank you.
- [60:19]
Bertram Rast
Cheers.
- [60:30]
Radim 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, Radim Malinich. Editing and audio production was masterfully done by Neil McKay from 7 Million Bikes podcast and the theme music was written and produced by Jack James. Thank you and I hope to see you on the next episode.
- [61:06]
Bertram Rast
Foreign.
- [61:20]
Radim Malinich
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.