In this conversation, Justin Hamacher delves into how drawing became a powerful tool for learning and recounts his remarkable journey through teaching, punk music, and Jungian analysis.

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Running Order

Intro
Welcome
Who is Justin Hamacher
Origin Story
Justin's current work
Sponsor: Concepts
Tips
Tools
Where to find Justin
Outro

Links

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

Tools

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

Tips

Draw where you aren't conventionally permitted to do so. Push your boundaries of drawing.
Have the easiest materials possible that you will use.
Try to have you and your tools as close to each other as possible to develop that relationship and open those channels of expression and communication with yourself.

Credits

Producer: Alec Pulianas
Shownotes and transcripts: Esther Odoro
Theme music: Jon Schiedermayer

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Episode Transcript

Mike Rohde: Hey, everyone, it's Mike Rohde, and I'm here today with Justin Hamacher. Justin, good to have you here.

Justin Hamacher: Hello. Very happy to be here.

MR: So you're an interesting guy. We've been connected for years and years, and you popped back up in my life recently. You've come from the design background a lot like me, but you've done a shift, which I found was really interesting. And it seemed like it could be really fascinating to bring you on the show, not only as a designer and what you're doing now, but you're also a visual thinker, and you've done something interesting in this new direction you've gone by integrating visual thinking into the training that you've taken. So rather than me try to explain it, 'cause I don't know the details, tell us who you are and what you do, and then if you'd like, go right into your origin story, like from a little boy, how did you end up to this moment now?

JH: Oh man. How many hours do we have? Oh, I'll do my best. I'm so happy to be here. This is a wonderful base for the community to learn about individuals and how they use visual thinking.

MR: Yeah.

JH: It's striking to me how relegated it is by the educational system and by our employers and other places, really into a background or kind of novelty identity. For some of us, it's the way our brain works, you know? And it's so hard to have to put things into writing or words or other things without being able to be visual. So I'm really happy this is taking place. Let's see. So, I'll just kind of pop back to when I was little, and then we can work our way forward. Is that okay?

MR: Yeah. Sounds great. Yeah.

JH: Okay. So, one of my very first memories, I swear I'm not gonna talk for hours, I was just joking, is I remember being in preschool and drawing a bird and sitting there and not knowing any other kids. Actually, it was kindergarten because I knew the kids in preschool and, you know, feeling some anxiety, and the room seemed really big and there was a lot of other people around me, I didn't know. I wasn't afraid, but I was a very extroverted kid, you know, but cautious and a little shy.

And I was drawing this bird, and I knew how to draw feathers on a bird. If I look back at the bird now, it's rather comedic, but at the time, for other little kids, they thought that was really cool. And I remember this one little boy coming over and he didn't know me, but he saw me drawing and he said, "Whoa, you can draw feathers on a bird. Oh my gosh." And he knew the other kids 'cause they'd gone to preschool or something. He ran over and grabbed like four kids and brought 'em to the table where I was sitting alone. And they were all like, "Would you show me how to draw feathers on birds? I wanna draw feathers on birds. Oh my gosh."

It felt so good to be expressing myself in a way that was personal. I wasn't holding up the bird feather drawing or something, but to have it resonate with people and to have people wanna learn and share. And then I was able to look at what they were drawing and stuff. It was just a really wonderful start to kindergarten.

So, you know, I knew from being really young, my main identity was an artist. I drew a lot for myself. Scribbled on the interior walls of my closet in my bedroom as a little kid. My mom didn't know about that until we moved when I was around 10, and she was like, "Oh my God, what did you do in here?" There's just, you know, a whole cosmology on the interior. Yeah, it was just scribbles and stuff though.

Yeah, so going through school, it was not easy. I went to parochial schools, so little Catholic grade schools, and they hated drawings. I'm not, you know, universally gonna say they all did, but most my teachers specifically would tell me to stop drawing and to take better notes and to write down what was being said exactly as it was being said. Not to elaborate or have an imagining come off what I was recording.

And that was really stifling because you as a creative guy myself, as a creative guy, other creative people, you have lots of ideas and you wanna kind of suss out the tendrils and see where they go and what they might become. You don't have to follow all of 'em, but that's how you keep your mind alive, you know? So that was really challenging going through all parochial school and pretty much continually being told, "Don't imagine, don't do those things."

I do remember in third grade, there was a big contest for the grade school. The grade school is called Our Lady of Fatima in Seattle, Washington, Magnolia. If anybody out there happens to be from that grade school, what's up. We had a contest for the city of the future. And it was all the students in each grade, eighth grade, seventh grade, sixth grade, fifth grade, you know, down to first grade.

Each student was gonna do a drawing. And then the class would elect one big representative drawing, and then we would make a big drawing and put it on the exterior of our classroom door. Then the teachers would walk around and vote on which class they thought did the coolest one. I was in third grade, and my thing was a city of the future that had, you know, sky cars and floating houses and gardens where people could eat and solar stuff.

It was good surprisingly 'cause most kids like to draw battleships and Star Wars kind of stuff, but for some reason, I laid off that and I drew this. Well, it won for the class, and then it won for the whole school. I remember that feeling so good to see seventh and eighth graders walking by our little third grade classroom and looking at the drawing and being like, "Wow. All right, who did that? Oh, Justin, you did that? What's up kid? Like, dah, dah." I was like, "Oh, man, this is—"

MR: Good job, man. Yeah.

JH: Yeah. This feels good. Some of the other ones were battleships and, you know, big space wars and stuff. I think the teachers wanted to go with a more holistic kind of view of the future. Maybe we could share it with our politicians or something. Anyway, so yeah, grade school, high school, coming more comfortable with an artist's identity, but, you know, at the same time really kind of becoming not—well, there were moments of misanthropy, but like, just, you know, angry at the society and becoming a punk rock musician out of that.

Then my identity in Seattle after college was a punk rock musician for like 10 or 15 years. But in college, I majored in woodblock printmaking. My parents wanted to kill me, but I was inflexible on that point. They made me promise to minor in something they saw some utility in.

MR: Something practical.

JH: Yeah. So, English and psychology were the minors. Then fast-forward to life, just young musician, art teacher teaching kindergarten art, which was fricking awesome and my favorite job of my entire life. It was just wonderful how broad their imaginations were. And also, the little boys and little girls, they hadn't quite been pushed into emotional regulations associated to gender.

So there were some really caring little boys that would give each other hugs when they came to class. It was just great. It was just like such a free wild little group of people. Did that for a few years. And then, let's see I was having trouble paying my bills. As you can imagine, traditional woodblock, printmaking in the year 1999, not really—

MR: Hiring per demand. Yeah.

JH: No. Also, it was really hard to get access to presses, like to do litho. There were a couple good places in Seattle, but those presses are huge, and they're expensive, and I didn't have the money to join those memberships to participate in them. So I went back to school, became a designer. Went to Cornish.

I didn't actually wanna become a designer. I wanted to go back and study sculpture and video, but the head of the art department was sick the day I went in to do interviews. The design chair was there, and she said, "You can take sculpture and video as electives. I'll give you a scholarship if you join design." I was broke. And I thought, "Well, okay, let's do it." So did that for two years, got out. All my classmates were in—this is a while ago. There was no Amazon in Seattle, I mean, at all.

MR: Yeah. Microsoft back then up in Redmond, right?

JH: Yeah. That was about it. The big design companies people were interested in, if you're a designer, were Starbucks and REI. Those were the two places young designers wanted to work. I wanted to have nothing to do with that. I still was, you know, pretty central in my punk rock ethos.

MR: I was gonna say punk rock would be resisting all that stuff, right?

JH: Oh my God. Yeah. I'll drink a Starbucks now, but back then you'd have to pin me down and pour it in my mouth. I'm not kidding. So, started my own small design studio and worked with small businesses and I loved it. So coffee shops, bakeries, massage parlors, therapists, artists, websites, boutiques. It was great. That was really what got me interested in user research too. So having those conversations with business owners and really hearing about their needs, and like having to unwire my brain.

In design school at the time, we didn't even talk about UX. That wasn't a thing. We were trained as—I know you love comic books, like, what was gonna be our superpower and how were we gonna be the authority that came and solved in a heroic way, you know, whatever it was we were trying to solve. I really had to unwire that from my brain. I was doing small business stuff for a few years, then I took a UX certificate course.

Well, then the market crashed, right, in 2008. I had a small business. It was doing pretty well. The market crashed. I lost all my clients. I had a lot of real estate development clients in Seattle, like Paul Allen, some of his projects and stuff. I tried to return the deposits to the people, and they wouldn't even return my calls. I don't know if the, you know—

MR: Just, puff, disappeared, huh?

JH: Yeah, were just gone. So I had to go downtown to take a job, which I really did not want to do, but I had to. I'd borrowed some money from my sister to buy a motorcycle, and she was about to have a baby. I was like, "I gotta take care of this." I went down and worked for a consultancy called Slalom, which was a small at the time. Now it's pretty big.

Then they had a educational program where they'd pay you to take some classes. So I took some at UDub, got into UX certificate program. Really liked it, really liked the people, the instructors. That program used to be called Technical Communication, so it had more of a scholarly HCI orientation. Understanding how more humans' interactions.

MR: Academic. Yeah.

JH: Yeah. And I really appreciated that. So anyway, got a master's in that. Then I started switching companies, worked in gaming—went from consulting to gaming, and then from gaming I joined a small Indian company, and that was a crazy ride. That started getting, acquired, like 1500 people, 8,500 people, 16,000 people, 33,000 people.

MR: Wow.

JH: Yeah. And finally, Samsung bought it, and I was along for that ride. And I was the UX director, then. I was a creative director, then. I was a global creative director. And I was going to India and managing a team there, flying there and stuff. But I was not happy. So if you have a line for career trajectory going like that, and you have another line for like, my spirit and my creative soul just like that.

MR: Yeah, was going way.

JH: - Yeah. That led to crisis. You know, not like a explosion or an implosion, but a lot of nightmares at night. Kind of archetypal nightmares about not expressing the self and feeling lost. Anyway, luckily couldn't stick with that. I went to Spain on vacation, and while I was there on the Island of Menorca in a cave, actually, which sounds crazy, I realized I had to just quit that job. I came back, and my boss wouldn't let me quit the job. He kept canceling all our meetings.

MR: Wow.

JH: I wanted to quit, and he kept canceling. I wanted to do it nicely, you know? And he kept canceling all these meetings for three weeks. And finally, I was just like, "Dude, you gotta meet with me." In my head, I'm like, "I'm not gonna be here Monday unless you do this." That led to me going to the University of Washington and becoming a full-time professor there teaching human computer interaction and design.

And while I was there working with graduate students, I really tried to form a bridge between design and the computational realm and the fine arts. That was kind of my personal mandate. They weren't super excited about that. I think the art department was, they were like, "Oh my God, a designer's actually coming over here and talking to us. We love to talk to you guys, but you never do." But for some reason, design was pretty insular and kind of at the time, trapped in a typography spiritual realm or something where they thought it was like the end all be all for all forms of visual expression, right?

MR: Mm-hmm.

JH: But I loved that. I was there for two years, and then I was in an experimental program, so it was funded by departments, and then we free-floated in the middle. They re-orged that, and the director left and I left. Then I went and started training as a Jungian analyst. So that was the big pivot point for me. It was like, all right—

MR: Yes. Yes, that's what I wanted to get to. Yeah, for sure. Make sure we covered.

JH: Yeah. So doing the self-inventory, it was like, what lights you up? What are you most excited about? It was like, I like helping people, working with people, having a chance to hear their personal stories and using creative means to help people self-actualize or, you know get to other levels of their consciousness or other spaces in their consciousness. So that kind of brings us to today. I think I just talked for 20 minutes.

I've been training for seven years as an analyst. First in Boston for two years, then for five years in Zurich. Now I'm what's called a diploma candidate. So I have a small practice here in Portland where I do analysis with folks. I'm also a licensed psilocybin facilitator. I do both those things here in Portland, Oregon. How the visual stuff ties into all this is, you know, as I became a creative director and stuff, luckily you get to set the tone for a lot of your projects. And the clients do—the more high-end and imaginal clients want wild ideas and they want sketches. They like that.

If you're a B-rate consultancy, you're gonna give 'em wire frames. If you're an A-rate consultancy, you'll give 'em those wire frames, but you're also getting 'em storyboards, and you're gonna give them some imaginal stuff and really push the boundaries. The people that really love that the most are the CEOs. My experience has been a lot of CEOs are pretty imaginative and do think big.

Some aren't, but you know, some get a bad rap for not being visionary enough. But if you can get 'em in the right context and break them away from all the VPs and everybody else, and do some workshopping with them, they're in incredible. Some of 'em are very imaginative people. I was able to do more and more drawings, but as I got into my training—would you like me to just kind of start into that, or do you wanna break off and completely—?

MR: No, I like the flow.

JH: Yeah, yeah. Okay. So I'll share some visual artifacts with folks too, if you want.

MR: Yeah, that'd be great. That'd be great.

JH: I left the UDub and University of Washington, and I had—my dad had an RV for his business, and I knew I needed to be in Boston to interview at the Union Institute there. I think it was in late June. My dad was a kind of hard ass character, not always very friendly. He called out the blue, and he said, I was expecting to fly there, probably though I woken up like three months earlier in the middle of the night, and I'd done this drawing with a map of the United States and all these different towns and places, and I drew my cat on it.

It kind of became a joke for my students that I was gonna leave the University of Washington to go on this big RV trip with my cat. They knew I was gonna interview to be an analyst, and some of 'em were excited about that, or to train to be an analyst, but I didn't have a way to make that happen. So suddenly my dad calls, and he is like, "Hey, do you want the RV for a month?"

MR: Oh, wow.

JH: At the exact timing I needed, I hadn't mentioned the trip, I hadn't mentioned anything about it. I was like, "Are you kidding? Like, that's insane." And he didn't make offers like that very much. So it was the first bit of synchronicity around that training. I drove across the country, and as I drove, I really wanted to have an open-hearted and imaginative experience going. I decided the best way to do that was with people and meeting people. So each place I went that I met an interesting person, I drew them as a card.

MR: Oh, wow. The same thing.

JH: Yeah. I kept these with me, and then each next town I would go to, at night, I would go to a café or a pub, and I would journal all the people I met. This was so awesome to have done this because I met more and more people, right.

MR: Yeah.

JH: I started with five drawings, and then I'm at a pub drawing, and suddenly more people are coming and being like, "What are you drawing? What's your story?" So I'm meeting all these really cool people by doing these drawings. I did this big deck of all these people. It was really fun. That one's super funny. You can see the guy's crack there with a kid keep going cream at some coffee shops. So I made this big deck.

MR: Wow.

JH: One of the funniest things about it was I got back to—this young woman, was so cool. She was in Rockport, and she had just started a jewelry business and was really making a go at it and out on the end of this pier. So I bought a ring from her and some other things. It's just a great way to remember trips and journeys. Then when I got home, I think the most fun thing about it probably was sitting with my friends, and they were like, "How was your trip?"

And I'd lay these out on a table, like a big tarot deck or something, and go, "These are all the people I met, who would you like to hear about?" And they were like, What?" Then they'd put their finger on one, and I'd be like, "Oh, yeah, that's Josh in Woodstock. He was super nice. When I parked my car, and he gave me some help, and dah, dah." You know, it was just kind of really fun.

I started with that, and that was a great tone setting for the start of my Jungian studies. I was accepted to that institute, and then I came back to Seattle and I got a job at a startup. And I made the startup agree that I could have the first Thursday and Friday of each month off because I had to fly to Boston Friday, Saturday, Sunday of each month. The first part, we had classes there.

MR: I see.

JH: So I was doing that training. So they were into that. This is kind of what I'm super excited about, is to share a few of these.

MR: Yeah. Another big stack.

JH: Oh my God. The very first day I'm in Boston, I fly out there, and I've got my Fabriano Bristol board style drawing pad, you know, it was crisper, cycled nice paper. I was gonna go to Cambridge and draw some of the churches and the buildings at Harvard and other stuff. And I had that, and I had my laptop, and I'm super into this training. I'm like, "Oh, dude, this is gonna be life changing and this is the path forward for me. I'm all in, dah, dah. I'm committed to this. I can't believe I got in." So excited.

The first lecture stands up to start to teach. And I have my laptop open, and I'm like, "I gotta capture everything they say. Oh my gosh, there's gonna be so much here, and we had to read these things beforehand, and I don't wanna miss anything." And I happened to have my sketch pad there with you know, a few architectural drawings, and it was really like this kind of two roads diverged in the wood's moment. It was like this Robert Frost kind of moment.

He started talking, and I took—I hadn't thought about it. I wasn't like, "I'm gonna draw the lectures." It was such a natural decision. I just closed the laptop and I picked up my sketch pad and I just started drawing. And I hadn't ever really sketch noted. I'd always had this distinction. I'd write my notes and then on some other pages, I might draw some wild drawings like, Ooh, here's whatever, and now, I'm not gonna mention—

MR: Separate from each other. Yeah.

JH: Yeah, yeah. Almost cognitively. Like, here's the purely imaginal realm. Here's a pollen air, you know, thinking function realm where all that's being captured. So I sat down and I just did it, and I didn't stop. So for seven years I've drawn all these lectures in real time. And they you know, they're—

MR: Pretty detailed.

JH: - they're done with—yeah, they're really detailed and they're done with crisp—you know, I use a Staedtler architectural pen, and then I use a Copic marker. And I've got just a ton of them.

MR: Wow.

JH: Yeah, and they're each really specific to that lecturer on that date and that topic we were talking about. So we're trying to make a book of these. I have about 180 pages, and it would be—this one's kind of cool, shows you how to analyze dreams.

MR: Oh, wow.

JH: Got like a body scan methodology we learned about and some other things. Yeah. So this will be a book and also my thesis when I finish my training. The book is about how people—well, it has all those artifacts. So it's kind of like autoethnography art space research, looking at myself, but then there's a companion portion, which is how do people creatively process psychically rich material, or heavy material? What are the means we do that by?

I'll interview a bunch of Jungian analysts to talk to them about how they, in their training, learned all the stuff that was required. Like, how does a choreographer or a dancer get through this material? You know, how does an architect, how does a painter, how does a designer, how does an artist, a musician, accountant, you know, how do people handle this material?

You know, it's a matter of how do you embody it? How do you retain it? How do you comprehend it? How do you spark other areas of your imagination with it? And then how do you socialize it? How do you come back to the community and enrich your learning and their learning by talking and sharing it? Yeah.

MR: Wow. Wow. There's so many questions I have after you kind of revealed this. Maybe I'll just sort of go in with the first one on the top of my head. It seems to me that your decision to choose between the laptop and drawing was really critical for you, now looking back. Also, it seems to me like the preparation before, like doing those little single squares over your trip out east almost primed you for that moment. And it's an interesting choice because right now personal knowledge management is this huge space really valuable, right?

Using these text editors, like Roam Research or Obsidian, there's all kinds of tools out here, but it's very text-based. I think sometimes even through the exclusion of attachments, although that these systems do handle visuals in some basic way, and that you could have gone in that direction and had this searchable database, but you chose to go in this other direction and that you were primed there.

Would you say that all of this travel and that—I think the other thing that's fascinating, is that you limited yourself to this square, which to me says that you kept yourself from being overwhelmed by having this small space to work in. So you knew you could handle it, right? I could do this, like I could take a lunch and I can draw a square. I can handle that. You had reasonable minimums.

But then you had the option to, later on you talked about going to a pub or something, or in your hotel or whatever, and then reflecting on that experience after having drawn it and then writing in more detail. Which then led you to when your friend said, "Tell me about John and Fargo or whatever." That you could look at that image, that it would bring back all the memories, and then it would kind of tap back into the writing that you had probably done, whether it's long or short, that sort of sparked all these memories that you could then tell a whole story out of these seemingly limited artifacts.

Even if you were to read the writings and look at the picture, there's way more in you that's tied to that, that only comes out when you're asked, right. So it's almost like you have to turn on that memory bank and then that stuff comes flooding out, and you probably remember things as you're talking, and it gets broader if you could probably keep going, right. It's really fascinating.

And it's sort of, I guess for me, in this big long ramble, reinforces this idea that visual thinking in this way, sketch noting, if you wanna call it that, using visuals as a way to remember is really powerful, right? I think you're sort of living proof in a lot of ways that this is actually doable and it's not—and I think the thing I love about it is there's not a huge expectation or extra work that you had to do to enter into it.

JH: No.

MR: Is that fair way to kinda?

JH: Oh, yeah, totally. You know, if we think about a divergent energy and a convergent energy and things that are defined and things that are undefined, you know, if we think about things in that way, these kind of panel drawings and sketch noting are so wonderful because they are really are launching points for more divergence. If we have an AI capturing all the text, or we have a volume from the philosopher or person we're interested in reading, that's concrete, you know?

MR: Mm-hmm.

JH: Thoughts and ideas can come off of that. Often, we're so devoted to the physical artifact and what it contains, that we don't allow our minds to go beyond that container. And that's why I love these kind of things 'cause every time I tell the story, it's different. If I had written down three paragraphs, "Josh and Fargo worked at such and such place. He wore these clothes and he helped me park my car. He seemed—" If I were to do it, you know, then I come back. My friends also don't really want to hear that, like, as a story. That's not a story. That's like there's something else, you know?

MR: Yeah.

JH: So they're great for story building. And then if we're trying to have a living knowledge rather than a fixed knowledge, we need to feed the process somehow. Images are great for that 'cause images often lead to more images. If you have a dream or you meditate, or you do psychedelics or something, and you have an image, it's like a river going by. Very naturally. Next comes another image, next comes another image. Some you might wanna grab others, you just let float by. But they seem like a very divergent and rich starting point for narratives.

MR: It's really fascinating when I compare, like that work that you did, the travel, the panels, the writing, and then sketchnoting, basically your whole education, and I compare that back to you started out by saying, I went to this parochial school, and all the teachers at least in that location, were sort of trying to beat that out of you. And it focused toward a known, structured, rigid, listened to what we tell you and remember the things, you know, very rote, stuff would almost be like, in some ways the opposite pole of like what you ended up doing with this work, right.

Because the stuff that you captured, I almost think of it as like, these things you did are the essence of the concept, and they can be endlessly generated from, right. So those squares, I would think—the other thing I think that's interesting is context, right? So you draw a square of this person in this place, if one person asks you to tell the story, you would consider their context and maybe tell them a different story. And then this other person has a different context or interest, you would tell the story differently. It would probably reveal other details or things you were thinking that because that person asked you in their context that would come up, that might not have come up in the other story.

So in a lot of ways, it's like this inexhaustible resource. I dunno, it's probably exhaustible, but I mean, it's generative, right? It's like we think of generative AI, and it can only work with the stuff that exists, and it's often not very good. But we as people are like the original generative, you know, thinkers. So this sort of provides these generative starting points that you can just keep on, you know, using them in an interesting way.

JH: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. We have our unconscious. You know, we have that working for us. So if we start with an image, you might not know why or how, but a few other images that are associating with it. And you might mention one of those to a friend as you're telling the story, or just even more empathetically, you might know they're a gardener, and you're like, "Oh, dude, I got a shoot. I met so-and-so at the Bread and Puppet theater in Vermont, Olivia, she was so cool. And she showed me her pictures of her sunflowers." There's no sunflowers here, but I know—

MR: It's embedded. Yeah.

JH: - my friend is a gardener, you know?

MR: Interesting.

JH: Yeah.

MR: Probably for those who don't know, l would include me, what are the basic tenets of a Jungian approach to analysis of people? What are the components? And then I'm really fascinated, like, how do visuals kind of fit into that? It seems like they were open to you doing this. Did they have a reaction to you sketch noting every lecture and having this collection? What's the reaction from the Jungian space getting exposed to this visual thinking thing?

JH: Yeah. I've just been doing it for myself, and I was kind of that dude sitting in the back of the room constantly drawing. Then a couple people were peering over my shoulder and they're like, "What are you doing over there, man? Like, that's wild." I was like, "Oh, thanks. This is just how I process and remember things. I have to do it this way. There's no other way." I would've quit if I wasn't allowed to do this 'cause I would've been bored out my skull.

I think if you're an artist too, you have to generate. We don't wanna sit in a class and have a unidirectional podium delivery. We're not there to catch the confetti from what other people say. We wanna be a part of the process and co-generate and co-create. So that's the other beauty of these kinds of notes, is they're co-creative. So the person's giving you information, you're adding that part of yourself to it, and then you come out with this melded thing, which has so much more energy for me, and for probably for you, and for people like us than just sitting there and writing things down.

MR: Right.

JH: Man, you put me on the spot with, what are the foundations of the Jungian stuff?

MR: It's probably huge, right? That might be a podcast of its own, right?

JH: It is actually, or a series, but I'll do my best.

MR: Okay.

JH: Images are foundational.

MR: Oh, really interesting.

JH: Yeah. Because what Jungians are trying to do in analysis is take the unconscious elements of it, bring it into consciousness, observe it, understand it, see where the blockages are, which we would call complexes, and where the opportunities are and where people wanna be in their future selves, and then integrate it. So bring it all together.

Well, we know the unconscious is just full of images. It's a cauldron being stirred and bubbles come up, and you know, dream, or you know, you're on a long drive and your mind wanders, and you're dissociating. You're like, "Where on earth did that memory come from? Or that image come from?" So it's all image based and it's pre-language. If we go back through biological anthropology, before we had the spoken word and language, we had image. So the basis of this psychology is image based.

We do that through a lot of dream analysis, working with fantasies, creative practices, sand play is part of the Jungian realm where you take figures, little kind of action figures even almost and in a sand tray, you will recreate a scenario or describe it there, and then the analyst will work with you to understand what it's about. It's really super image based, but there an issue in the Jungian realm.

Particularly, there's such a strong intellectual component, and the educational environments have trouble letting go of the thinking function and really wanting to create taxonomies and categorize and microscopically dissect and understand things with so much intentionality that they can lose that divergent free-flowing engagement with personal narratives and the unconscious.

So that's a thing. I think if somebody doesn't get this book that I'm working on, you know, they're kind of like, it's a parlor trick, or it's like a gimmick or something like, "Ah, that person just sits and listens to things." Then people that get it though, it's like, "No, that's how they embody it." We all have our own ways of doing that.

MR: Right.

JH: You know, a child in class, they need a break. You know, if they're learning to spell words or something, they might prefer to go out on the playground and do jumping jacks while they spell words. You know, orange, O-R-A-N-G-E. That works for them 'cause there's a somatic pathway into retention and embodiment and learning.

The biggest challenge for all of us, I think in the world, is calling a time out from the conventional realm and from the pressures and the voices and the demands, and beginning to understand individually how we learn and how we grow and how we can master this life experience, you know, in a healthy way. That timeout is probably the hardest thing 'cause we know there's so many demands from society, family, and finances and things like that.

MR: Wow. That's really fascinating. If someone was wanting to go a little deeper, is there like a primer that they could look at or something to watch that might give them a little bit more depth? Because I would imagine it's a huge ocean of resources that you could get easily swept away in and lost in without some—and maybe that's something you give me a show note link. Like you'd have to think about and give me some links if someone wanted to look further into the Jungian space and understand what it means.

JH: Yeah. I can give you some links to some books and some other things. Yeah, because it is really heady. I think what happens is people might pull the book off the top shelf and go, "Oh, dang. This isn't for me because I can't intellectually grasp it." But there's an entire other way to get into this knowledge, and that's what I'm trying to do here.

MR: Yeah. You're sort of coming at it from a different perspective.

JH: Yeah.

MR: Let's come back to the Jungian space and those practitioners and the other ones like you that maybe aren't as visual, or maybe they just haven't released the visual capabilities because they haven't really thought about it that way. They just came to it from, you know, schooling, right? You learn how to type stuff or, you know, you write things. What has been their reaction to the sketch notes?

You talked about people, you know, being surprised. How has that continued as you've—because obviously you have been dedicated, I see that stack of sheets, and that's a significant investment. Obviously, you needed to do it 'cause that's the way you work. But like, there had to have been a reaction by not only students, but professors. How do they react to that? Do they want copies of it? Do they wanna know how to do it? I'm curious about that side.

JH: Yeah, absolutely. I have had professors request the sketches of their lectures because they were gonna deliver additional lectures on that topic and they thought that would be useful and good to share. I think a lot of the analysts that are running the institute in Zurich are pretty forward thinking and imaginative. They really do want to shift more into a feeling and artistic and visual space. So that's great there. There's a real health around that.

I think there's a lot of people—I love what you just said about "maybe they haven't discovered that capacity yet" because, you know, if you've ever taught little kids art and then watched them go through school and seen them as adults or our friends or ourselves, people have tremendous capabilities which get shut off by society.

So it's important to have those small classes. I know you do a bunch of these and they're fantastic. To just help people get back in touch with that, to oil the machinery, and with, you know, no sense of shame, no sense of deliverables or a timeline just in a very open way, go into it slowly and try to build that capacity. And folks are interested in that. You know, when I began my training, I told a friend that was a poet and another friend at the university that I was starting this, you know, switch into this part of my life. They didn't like it. They were very dismissive.

MR: Really?

JH: Yeah. They were like, "Carl Jung, that that's crazy stuff, or that's a cult, or that's weird, or dah, dah." And I was like, "Man, oh, that's so strange my good friend just said that. Conversely, one of my bosses in the tech space who was a VP business guy, MBA, one of the most boring people you can imagine on the surface, but had a lot underneath going on, told him out at a coffee, he just lit up.

MR: Wow.

JH: And he was like, "What? That is so incredible. Oh my gosh. That's so cool." And then you, you learn, he majored in art history in college. He had this whole other side, an undeveloped part of himself. There's an opportunity for all of us to look at those underdeveloped parts of ourselves and through this kind of activity or another activity or something else, begin to open those up. Yeah.

MR: Well, and I would suspect so, the book that you're trying to produce here and that you're producing, I would guess the consumers of that are probably two, at least that I can think of off the top of my head. One, are Jungian practitioners of some level, right. Because it would be a reference. "Let's go look in the index. I wanna learn about dream interpretation and the body thing you talked about." You could find the page and look at it. "Oh, that's right. Yeah. I remember learning that."

That would just like your little squares, it would spark their memory from probably learning similar things in their education that's maybe easier to enter into than to read like a really dense book about the process where you could actually look at it, just be reminded and, "Oh, that's right. Okay, let's try this. Maybe we'll put a little spin on it and do this other thing and experiment a little bit." So that would be one space.

JH: Yeah.

MR: I think the other space would be maybe someone like me, I don't know anything about Jungian thinking, it might be really fascinating to think of this as a primer in a way. Of maybe it's a little deeper than that, but to be able to look through and understand like, oh, okay, this is kind of, you would form an opinion off of it, but it's more approachable and accessible than a very dense, you know, tome in in German or something. Where you'd have to learn German to read it and understand it in the original language or whatever, right. Because Jung I think he was Swiss. I think. He was a contemporary and a little bit of a—I always remember that he and Freud were sort of like frenemies, I guess. I dunno. Like they—

JH: That's a good way to frame it.

MR: Is that the right way to describe them.

JH: He was a protege and then they were arch enemies after really falling out.

MR: Really.

JH: Yeah, unfortunately, or at least Freud exiled Jung from the realm because their theories diverged in places that were irreparable apparently.

MR: Interesting.

JH: But no, you're right. One thing is this book is not an explainer text. 'Cause we have to remember these are all live drawings. These were done in the classes. There's a lot of stuff that didn't make the drawing.

MR: Oh yeah, sure.

JH: You know, it's in the hour it's me going, "Oh, that's cool. Oh, that's cool." Like you said, they're just sparks. You could look at the page and be like, "Oh, that's a reference to such and such writer. Maybe I'll go read that person. Oh, here's this thing, maybe I'll go explore that." So there's that. You know, the other thing for me is it's a memento. It's a milestone of the training. It's like, "Dude, here's seven years of your life. You gotta turn this into a book." Because someday when I'm like 83 and I'm talking to my grandkids or whatever, I wanna be like, "See, I did a thing. You kids never listen. And I actually did a thing, whether you wanna believe it or not."

Then for lay people, I think there's also kind of this mystique around if people even know what Jungians are. There's probably people listening to this podcast that are like, "I have no idea what this particular episode's about." But for people that do know the history of psychology and the different methodologies and ways you can work on your psyche, they may be very curious about what the training is. It's kind of this Hogwarts sort of thing with a big door, you know, and you, how do you walk through the subway portal in the brick wall? What goes on in there?

This is a nice snapshot into, these are the courses that were taken, this is the material that was covered. The book also has reflections. So it has 180 pages of this, my personal reflections, dreams. So I found key dreams from my training, and I can put those in there. And then exercises. So it has exercises I developed over those seven years people can use. This one with the travel is one of those exercises I talk about.

MR: Yeah, I that would make sense. Yeah.

JH: Yeah. I want it to be more fun than just, "Here's these drawings." You know, I want it to be active. Yeah.

MR: Yeah. Yep. You wanna have some practicality out of it as well with, you know, actions that you can draw from it. So that, you know, explaining that, it seems to me like maybe your primary audience are Jungian practitioners, and maybe they could be people in college who are considering picking a Jungian path and wanna know, like you said, there's a big dark door and lots of thick German writings that I don't have to like—you know, unless you're a German reader, which there's a fair amount of German people that listen to the podcast and watch it.

So but like, you know, there's lots of opacity to getting an idea of it. If you were in a point where you're like considering maybe one approach versus another, this could be a good way. Maybe you check it out at the library, right. Maybe you see this at libraries, right. So that's your gift to the world. And then some kid in the future who's considering this path could get at least some kind of a sense of where this might be headed, right. That could be another thing, right.

JH: Totally. Totally. And maybe if people are going into heavier thinking function-oriented trainings, they can understand, you know, via you and your work and your podcasts and your classes and this book and other things, can see like, oh, it's okay to process in other ways. I'm not bad. My second grade Nun which I had, is not hitting me with a ruler because I'm drawing in the margins of my spelling journal or whatever, You know?

MR: Yeah, yeah.

JH: Yeah.

MR: Well, that's really interesting. We just got back from the International Sketchnote Camp in San Antonio, and there was a little bit of talk afterwards. I mean, one of the sessions was about how to make this a business. And I think that's a valid thing, right? Is how do you take these visual skills you have and then use them as a way to share with companies to hire you to do this work for them. I think I'm most fascinated by more like this stuff where people keep their day jobs, but they find ways to integrate visual thinking into the work they do.

They don't have to leave the thing that they're good at. Like say you're an accountant, or something like that. That's really fascinating is how do you integrate this visual skill in your unique context. And I think that in some ways can be powerful 'cause I think it can reach a lot deeper inside of organizations and reach to individual people, maybe more than a professional coming and doing visual thinking on demand, which has got value, right Especially if it's interactive, but it feels like it can reinforce this idea that, oh, only the professionals can do that.

You know, "I'm not a good artist. I could never do that." And it kind of reinforces. A lot of the work that I've done has been trying to break down those ideas and then just set the bar really low. Like, you don't really have to be a great artist to do this work. Now, if you're really good at it, you could elevate to that level. It's really interesting to hear this and think the work you're practically doing is could impact the Jungian space in a way that maybe hasn't been done since the beginning. I don't know. This seems pretty unique to me.

JH: No one's ever drawn all their classes. It's the first. Either I'm a madman or I'm onto something. I don't know. Maybe both, but per your comment, think about how much rigid thinking there is in society.

MR: Oh yeah.

JH: How, just in terms of politics or arts theoretical spaces or other things where people are either here or they're here. Having just a civilization that has more plasticity in our thinking and a way to look at things from different directions, doesn't mean we have to agree with them, but we can at least examine 'em, open up, feel things through. I mean, that would be so wonderful to have scientists thinking that way, to have mayors and people leading towns, politicians, you know, teachers, everybody just kind of drawing as a way of thinking. 'Cause it is so divergent, you know? It's really like that. I mean, at some point it comes back in, but it's just a wonderful, rich external exploration, you know?

MR: This has been really fun to see. We'll definitely have to have you take a couple shots of maybe a couple of pages and, you know, some samplings of these little squares so we include those in the show notes, maybe throw 'em on your site or something or social media or wherever so people can see, if they're listening, you can click on the link and see those images.

JH: Oh yeah.

MR: We'll do that as for you. So that brings me to—typically, this is where we talk about tools. I'm really curious about the tools that you chose here. It seems like you went really simple, right? You had a pad, you had you had a fine liner and then a Copic for shadows. And that was pretty much it. Tell me a little bit more about the tools you chose and why.

JH: One trick you know well, and I know and others that have been drawing for a little while, is if you're gonna do a set, find your most comfortable tool and stick with it throughout the whole set. Probably don't switch. So I just happened to have my architectural drawing tools on that day in Boston. And it was a 0.5 Staedtler.

MR: Yep. Fine liner. Super popular.

JH: Yeah. And a Fabriano pad, which I'll get it, it's right here.

MR: I think I've had Fabriano pads in the past more like a spiral bound notebook?

JH: No, it's this recycled paper and bleached and it's so—

MR: Oh, wow.

JH: I love this. I you may have trouble ordering 'em 'cause I ordered so many 'cause I—

MR: You cornered the market.

JH: I wanted to make sure—yeah. But these are great. It's this really crisp white paper. It's sort of between paper and Bristol.

MR: It's something like a sticker card stock almost.

JH: Yeah. 94 pounds.

MR: Okay, so somewhat heavy. Yeah.

JH: Yeah. Those, and then for other illustrations, I do, I use the Neuland markers, which I —

MR: Oh yeah. They're great. Yeah.

JH: - learned from you and like that gives a thicker line like that. And then I use a Copic N2 grayscale.

MR: Adds some tone.

JH: Yeah, and that's it. Just keep 'em real simple. The book will not be digitized. So this is gonna be a print-only book which I do that for a number of reasons. I might have to self-publish it. I've had some good conversations with publishers, but the response has been basically, "We don't know how to handle 180 pages of—we don't do that." You know, "That's beyond where we're at." Some of the graphic novel publishers, it's not really in their—

MR: Yeah. It sort of falls in this middle space in a way, right?

JH: Totally. So if anybody's listening and they wanna gimme a holler about a book deal, if there's any agents out there or anybody, please don't hesitate.

MR: Wow.

JH: Yeah.

MR: And then for the little squares, did you just take that same pad and pull them out of the book and then cut them in quarters? How did you produce your little squares? Or are they—

JH: Those exact?

MR: Okay.

JH: No, totally same. So they're six two-page, they fit. 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. And I draw them in here, and then I cut them out.

MR: And then you cut them out. Got it. Okay.

JH: Yeah.

MR: You probably use your maybe a pencil to stroke the break points for the six panels, and then work your way through them and cut them out at the end. Probably good for managing, like, on that trip. Right. You would keep them in a central place so that they wouldn't get lost 'cause I would think with loose squares like that, like ordering them then becomes more complex than if they're bound into a book. At least maybe while you're doing the production.

JH: Well, I actually cut 'em out every night because the payoff was like, if you spread like 55 squares on a table, it's pretty visually impactful. And I wanted to talk to people. I didn't know anybody as I drove across the country. So if I arrived in Minneapolis and was at some cool cafe, you know, oftentimes another artist would come up and be like, "Oh dude, what are you doing? Like, that's really cool." And I was like, "Hey, who are you? What do you do?" You know.

MR: Make another square.

JH: Exactly. Exactly.

MR: Interesting. It's like the thing beget more things in a way.

JH: Yeah. Kind of is.

MR: That's funny. So we'll definitely have to—we'll get some links specifics for you guys out there listening if you wanna check out these pads. Let's shift into practical tips. So this is where I invite people to do tips for listeners. And the way I frame it is, imagine there's a visual thinker listening. Maybe they've reached a plateau or they're just feeling a little bit burnt out, or, you know, they just wanna see a change. What would be three practical or theoretical things, tips that you might offer them?

JH: Yeah, totally. The first is gonna be draw where you aren't conventionally permitted to do so. Like, push the boundaries of drawing. So if everybody else on the bus is on their phones, they're staring out the window at the raindrops, draw. If you're at a lecture, if you're at the symphony, if you're at a very boring social function with your in-laws, you've gotta be careful there, but just draw. Start to push the edges and in the massage of that boundary, you will start to loosen up your own expressive capacity. So that would be one is, is draw where you're not really encouraged to draw.

The other would be have the easiest materials possible that you know you will use. You know, sometimes people wanna get into photography and they think that means buying the, you know, four-foot-long telescopic lens and dah, dah, dah. That's not true. The best camera is the one you're going to use.

So find tools that feel good in your hand. The pen should feel really good. You should have a relationship with your pen and then paper that feels really good. For some people that's gonna be more granular. Other people, it's gonna be smooth. For some people, it'll roll up nicely. Others will be really firm. I just love thick card. I don't know why. Maybe it's my printmaking background or something.

MR: Yeah. It could be.

JH: So that would be the second one. And the third would be the way I learned how to play guitar when I was a punk rock musician—I've had other younger guitars say, what advice can you gimme on learning guitar and stuff? What they expect is you to tell 'em some scale technique or something. That's not it. This sounds so weird, but to fall asleep with my guitar. So to actually at night play it—this is a long time ago, I learned to play guitar. You're watching like David Letterman on TV around midnight or whatever it was on, playing guitar. Always was in my hand.

As in college, in my apartment, that guitar was in my hand. I'd fall asleep and that guitar was with me. I might wake up in the middle of the night and kind of remember a melody and I'd pluck it out. I'd kind of fall back asleep. It was always there. So, related to that, try to have your drawings and your materials with you as often as possible. Another reason these are the size is because one of my favorite coats has an interior breast pocket right here.

I capture my dreams too. I'm a Jungian, I draw various dreams I've had. And then I will take those dreams. And this is an exercise in the book actually. I will put 'em in the breast pocket of that jacket in the winter with my big scarf on. I'll walk around the city and I'll sit at cafes and then I'll pull the deck back out. I'm not trying to meet people or socialize during this exercise, but I'll reflect on things, put it back in my pocket, walk some more throughout the city. Might take an hour or two to walk. I walk a lot. Go to the next place, pull 'em out, look at 'em, shuffle 'em around, have a relationship with them.

So it's the third bit of advice is that like, try to have you and your tools as close to each other as possible to develop that relationship and to open up those channels of expression and communication with yourself 'cause that's really what's going on, right? You gotta talk with your deeper self to get in touch with these processes.

MR: You want the tools to kind of step out of the way and be there when you need them and perform enough to do that.

JH: Yeah.

MR: I've been bullet journaling for years. I just recently bought a leather—I could show you this leather thing that I had made.

JH: Nice.

MR: So just a leather wrapper for my Neudstram. I had my little logo put here in the corner.

JH: Oh, cool.

MR: And then I decided to get a Lamy safari fountain pen.

JH: Oh, nice. I love those.

MR: It feels great in my hand. It's got weight to it. I actually just shifted the tip from a fine to a medium 'cause I wanted more juice out of my ink. I like juicy inks. They need to flow. I've noticed that it's changed my relationship with writing. I really enjoy the writing a little more. All I did was change the tip, which is really easy on a Lamy, you put scotch tape and you pull it off and you just stick the other one on. You can even do it with ink inside. It's crazy. So it's a really good trick.

JH: Wow.

MR: Yeah.

JH: I didn't know that. I love Lamy. What kind of tip did you put on it? Like a more fine one, or?

MR: Yeah, I bought it with a fine tip on it, and it felt scratchy to me and it kept bothering me especially when it would run out of ink. And I thought, you know what? I'm gonna do it. The ink is low. This is the time to do it. So I looked up a video and it showed do, you could do it when it was loaded with ink 'cause the tip sits on top of, whatever, the feed, and you just use some scotch tape and you put it on and you pull out and down and it just pops off. You take the other one and just snap it on there and start writing. It's a really ingenious design from Lamy with their tips.

JH: Oh, I gotta look at that. I gotta look at that. Do you use Noodler's ink? Are you a Noodler's guy or what are you like?

MR: I have not tried Noodler's yet. For this one, I bought the Lamy ink. I kind of wanted to go all stock with it. I've heard good things about Noodler's. I haven't tried it. I think it's water resistant or if not waterproof. So, yeah, I think I just have found going back to this tool, which, you know, I mean, I think the pen was like $40 for this heavy pen. But it changes my relationship with my writing. I've noticed that Neuland markers do the same thing, like the quality.

Like there's something to be said by using cheap pens that are available at the grocery store, and the truth is, is that you get really excellent pens at a grocery store or a corner drug store, like, you know, Energels or G2s really amazing. Like the technology is improved so much that they can also be, you know, something that you like. But it seems like my relationship with writing and reflecting in the bullet journal context has changed by switching the tools that I use. And it makes me more expressive. It's little, it's a small friction, but it's definitely works.

JH: I hear you. I think their stock tips, especially for the fine ones can be really scratchy like you're saying.

MR: Yeah. Yeah.

JH: Yeah, yeah.

MR: So, you know, you gotta find—I think it goes back to you finding what are the tools that are right for you? And don't feel like, just 'cause everybody uses this tool that I have to, you can break from the pack.

JH: No.

MR: You know, be a punk rocker like Justin was. You know, find the thing that works for you. Well, this has been really fascinating and fun and enlightening and I'm looking forward to seeing your book published. I'd love to see it when it comes out and have a print copy.

JH: Oh yeah.

MR: Tell me a little bit more about where people can find you. This is especially helpful if someone has ideas—If you're in the publishing space and you have ideas for Justin about how he might go about it to reach out to him. Do you have a website? Are you on socials? How would you like people to reach out to you and see your work or chat with you?

JH: Yeah, yeah, totally. I have a few things. For my Jungian work, it's cascadejungianservices.org. So if people wanna learn about Jungian stuff or psychedelics in Oregon and how we support that as well here with licensure in the state, they can go to that. For the book. I just got the Instagram handle, The Visual Jung, J-U-N-G.

MR: Good.

JH: So that's that. I'm gonna just start posting stuff there. Then for my work as an artist Justin_hamacher_artist on Instagram. Those are the three best places to get in touch about all those things.

MR: We'll put those in the show notes along with all the other resources. So if you're curious, you can go in there and dig in there and follow your passion and find out more. Well, thanks so much, Justin. This has been a lot of fun. I've really enjoyed the discussion. I know a little bit more about Jungian concepts. Not enough to practice, but enough to play Jungian on TV, I guess. I don't know. Not really. Not really.

But it's been really fascinating. It's makes me want to dig in a little bit more and understand Jung and like how we got to these ideas and maybe do some research on how could it apply to me? What are some practices that could help me? So it's interesting.

JH: Oh yeah. Yeah, active imagination is a big one. That's the most visual. I'll send you some links and some books if folks are interested in.

MR: Yeah, we'll put 'em in the show notes for sure. I think as visual thinkers, this audience might be well suited for this kind of work, these kind of practices potentially.

JH: I think so. It really resonates. So much image basis in the unconscious in the Jungian space too. Yeah.

MR: Interesting. Well, thanks so much, Justin. Thanks for being on the show and thanks for the work you're doing. Thanks for helping people in the way that you do. I think it's important that we each find that way and you found the way, which is great. Listening to your story and how you got to where you are, all that background's gonna help you, I think. So thank you for your contribution.

JH: Thanks so much, Mike. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for hosting this podcast. It's really fun to see all the folks out there doing visual thinking.

MR: I'll never run out of people to interview, which is really great.

JH: Cool

MR: Well, everyone, if you're watching or listening, this is another episode. Until the next one, talk to you soon.

Episode 78: Inspiration from Board Games

Roguelike Radio

Board Game Constraints Fuel Design Creativity

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