Dan Roam, The Journey of a Visual Storyteller - SE17/EP01

Sketchnote Army Podcast

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The Back of the Napkin and Visual Thinking Books

Dan outlines his books' through-line, explaining Back of the Napkin and subsequent titles that combine visuals and words into vivid thinking.

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Episode notes

In this episode, Dan shares how his childhood love for drawing led him to discover surprising parallels between visual thinking, biology, and organic chemistry.

He reflects on his journey from the analog days of graphic design to the digital era, drawing comparisons to what is currently happening in the AI space. Dan also reveals the origin stories and ideas behind his bestselling books and how they came to life.

Running Order

Intro
Welcome
Who is Dan Roam
Origin Story
Dan's current work
Sponsor: Concepts
Where to find Dan Roam
Outro

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 and I'm here with Dan Roam, the Dan Roam calling to us from his studio. You can see he's got whiteboards and he's got paintings. He's drinking tea, it looks like.

Dan Roam: Absolutely.

MR: So welcome to the show. Thanks for being here, Dan.

DR: Mike, it is always, always a pleasure. You and I've been talking for a long time, and every time we get to, I enjoy it. So this is fabulous. Thanks for having me.

MR: Same here. Same here. So our history is in 2016-ish, I recorded a podcast with you, and I lost it. Something happened with the audio, and that's bugging me for like forever. And so, having Dan Roam on the show is like a huge get for me. So I feel really excited to have you here. Even though you know, I've been on your sessions and stuff and we've done stuff together. Like, it's always bugged me that I lost this, and we had a really good discussion, which I can't prove. So now we're just got to do it again.

DR: Oh, we'll just do it again and we'll take it into completely different way. And the other thing, Mike, just if I might, is just the fact the nature of our careers and our passion is so interwoven, if you will. Like we keep popping up.

MR: Yes.

DR: I just keep seeing you everywhere. It's like, hey, there's Mike, you know.

MR: Same thing with you.

DR: Yeah, exactly. So it's a pleasure.

MR: So, the couple things I wanted to talk about were your books, of course. I'm kinda curious about your painting.

DR: Hmm.

MR: But we always sort of start the show off with origin story. So I think we all know what you do, but you can start with what you do and then go right into like how did you end up here? Like as a little kid, what drew you into this visual thinking stuff? I think we're both also user experience people. So maybe that had some impact. I'm really curious about that trend. Like how did you get here?

DR: Wow. Well, that's a fantastic question, Mike. And what a great place to start. And the simple, simple answer is, I actually drew something out in anticipation of this.

MR: Nice.

DR: As a little kid, you know, there I am like everybody else, I'm looking at the world and it's awfully confusing.

MR: Yeah.

DR: People are telling you to do things and here's how to act and here's what to learn. And a lot of it was very confusing. And I've spent everything, this is the entire summary of what we're gonna talk about. How can I figure out a way to go from that to that so that things are clear. So, like every kid I drew a lot, but like many kids, I never stopped the drawing part. So I've learned to draw badly really, really well. And I'm sure that people who follow you probably have similar types of stories.

MR: Yeah.

DR: Like the visual thinking side, the visual storytelling side. Maybe can I have, you know, mom, dad, school teacher, maybe could I have a few less words and maybe a few more pictures. And so, that's really the origin story. Nothing particularly unique there. But I would add one thing, Mike, if I could, because that kind of powered me up through university, but I had this kind of critical catalytic moment when I was at university, maybe my second year of school. So I was studying out here in California in Santa Cruz, and I thought that I wanted to be a doctor at that time. So I was on the pre-med track.

MR: Interesting.

DR: So I was taking biology and lots of chemistry. And if anybody's ever taken, you know, organic chemistry back in the old days, pre-digital, anything, you know, you'd build everything out with these models of molecules. And so, organic chemistry was entirely visual. And as a model builder, which I've always been to plastic models, airplane models, that kind of thing the idea of trying to understand what the professors were teaching us about these fundamental concepts of how do atoms bond to create these molecules, And you can model it out. Because there are very specific rules of how each of these different types of atoms is gonna bond with the other ones. So that was really cool. And so I'd be in chemistry class and learning that.

And then I'd go over to painting class 'cause I was also taking painting, and our professor would be talking about you know, fundamentals of really good composition. And he'd be talking about the golden mean and the Fibonacci numbers. you know, you don't have to paint that way. But if you look at the works of Leonardo, or if you look at the works of Michelangelo, if you look at really, really outstanding classic beautiful artworks, the Parthenon, they seem to follow these kind of beautiful harmonic mathematical formula.

And I thought, wait a minute, this is crazy. I'm over there in chemistry, and they're teaching me like visually, how things fit together so that they work. And now I'm over in art, and they're teaching me ways to visually put things together so that they work. And it's like these rules are the same. Isn't that amazing? And so, I kind of created this path happily, as I mentioned, I went to a school called Santa Cruz, part of the UC system, down on the beach in California.

MR: That's Santa Cruz.

DR: And at Santa Cruz, even in the 80s, or especially in the 80s, it was a pretty funky school. And they were like, hey, design your own major. So I designed one that was an intersection between fine art and biology slash chemistry. Because I really found that, you know, an interest—and you can imagine my parents, I get a degree in painting and degree in biology, and you're functionally unemployable. Like what are you gonna do with that, other maybe than do scientific illustration? Which was a potential path.

MR: Yeah, that's true.

DR: But I did not really have a talent at that, which is a side note as to why. And so, what I did instead is I became a consultant. I had worked my way through school doing graphic design, like basic, fundamental pre-digital pay stuff, like Exacto knives, wax machines, Galley of type on paper.

MR: I've done that.

DR: Like all that. So that was a skill that I had. So I was able to get a job with a newspaper in San Francisco. And I was working in the advertising department, like doing longhand analog advertising design. And I realized I was really interested when I would talk to the advertisers to custom build for them an ad, you know, for their furniture store, for their car wash, or so for their dance party or for their theater production. Talking to the people who are buying the ad to find out what is it that you're really doing? Like what? That's cool.

You know, what is your theater production, or tell me about the strategy behind your car wash. Like how does that overlap? Because I really wanna make an ad that's going to appeal to what you're trying to achieve. And long story short, Mike, that became really the career path, is talking to people who have an idea, asking them what they're trying to do, and then translate it using these visual skills and, you know, abasta, that's the story. So does that make sense?

MR: Yeah, that totally makes sense. That's really interesting. You talk about this connection between painting and biology and you know, debating if you should be a medical illustrator. So I mean, what did your parents think when you went through this whole degree and then you're doing, you know, like layout at this newspaper, like where they bummed out? Obviously, it's worked out pretty well, but what did they—and maybe the lesson I'm asking for is sometimes you make these decisions to go and do things that don't always make sense in the moment, but if you still have a vision for it, that it makes sense in the long term.

And then the other thing that I was commenting to someone on Substack the other day where they talked about, they did this weird job that if you thought about it, it would make no sense in your future career, but in the context of looking back, it totally made sense. And I have one of those experiences too. I was a wash rack kid at a car dealership. So I got to negotiate with salespeople and learned who were the good guys and who were not the good guys and how to kind of do stuff. And that's really influenced my whole career. So now I'm like totally off on this question, but you get a sense what I'm thinking. Yeah.

DR: Everything only makes sense when you look at it backwards. Like, how did any of us—and I'm talking about you me, anybody who might be watching this or listening to this, anybody—you know, you ask someone, how did you get where you are? And everybody will say, "Well, it was a long and winding road, but I ended up here." And it all kind of makes sense when you look at it backwards. And it's really interesting 'cause just the other day I have a friend who's a school teacher who teaches 10th grade and he asked me to come online and we do it a virtual session with his 10th graders. And they had similar questions.

'Cause hey, you're a published author. You, you know, you've, you managed to have created a career of things that you seem to have been passionate about your whole life. How in the hell do you make that happen? And you know, the 10th graders, I'm like, kids, you know, I wish I could tell you, but the, the fact is, you gotta think between what is a kind of applicable, practical part of what you wanna do because you are going to have to eat. Like that's true.

MR: Right.

DR: There is an applied practical element to life. You have to put Cheerios on the table every single day. And so, in order to do that, you've gotta make some money. So you have to have some practical side. But on the other side, let's not forget the aspirational side because if you're just eating breakfast and you're not dreaming, why are you even living? So you've gotta be able to do the practical and the aspirational. So you gotta eat and you gotta dream. And you're lucky, you're lucky as heck if by building upon the practical and loving your creative side, your dreaming side, you can weave them together into something that will get someone to pay you a dollar to do that.

And kind of explaining it—and again, same thing Mike, you're saying, is it only makes sense looking backwards. Something you were starting to ask me, how did my parents think about this sort of weird mishmash education? Well, they were delightful. Maybe it was a little bit of a different era, but by the time I left home and went to college, like you're out of the house, you know, parents are like—

MR: You're not my problem.

DR: "You've got agency now. You're self-propelled. Godspeed, good luck. We're here if you need us. But you know, we're moving and not leaving the address behind." So they were just delighted by the fact that I was able to earn money doing graphic design.

MR: Cool.

DR: And then I'll tell you though, and this is gonna be relevant to where this conversation right now might take us. The really critical moment when I was working for that newspaper, doing that advertising design, perhaps there were two. One was learning to ask people, I can draw you the picture, but to what end? To what purpose is your ad? If I know what you're trying to achieve, I can make a whole lot better creative advertisement. So one was learning to ask good questions and listen, then convert that into a visual or a story.

The second one is just by virtue of luck. Being in the right place at the right time. the newspaper I was working with was one of the first in San Francisco, which was kind of on the bleeding edge at that time, given proximity to Silicon Valley to move to digital layout tools. This was in the late 1980s. And so, at that newspaper we got the first Macs, we had the first Adobe PageMaker, we had free hand. These are tools that to folks today are the ancestors, the legacy—

MR: Yeah, archaic, too.

DR: -to what Adobe is. Now, Adobe barely even existed at that time. There were other companies.

MR: Right. Right.

DR: The trick there, why I think that's important is not only are you learning to be creative and tell a visual story using tools analog or traditional, but now you're meeting at this intersection of this arrival of new technology that is scary as heck and seems to put a lot of your skills out of work. Because if PageMaker is gonna set up literally the page for me and run the right line length for my text and do the letting and suddenly gives me options for, you know, in the early days, 75 different fonts.

Well, a week before I was running that through a Linotype machine. And this is, you know, old man telling stories that don't matter, but that was a trade. Like you had to know how to spec things by eye. And now the computer's doing it for you. And it's like, well, it's putting me outta work, but it is enabling me to focus on the parts of layout that were compelling anyway. So we're gonna get to that 'cause This is where I think we're at another inflection point right now.

MR: I think so too. Yeah, it's a great discussion.

DR: If I might share one more story, this was learning and it's gonna be relevant for today, is I was working at a small scrappy newspaper here in San Francisco. And at that time The San Francisco Chronicle was the big daily newspaper, former Hearst Newspaper, you know, William Randolph Hearst, all the stories. Big money, long history. And it was really interesting, and I don't know how this is gonna land with people, but we went over to visit the Chronicle production room and they were a union shop. And it was really fascinating 'cause we came in to say, these are some of the digital tools we're bringing to bear. And they were highly resistant. Because looking at it, if we move to those digital tools, a lot of our journeyman production people are gonna be outta work.

MR: Yeah.

DR: Well, I have no particular opinion about that. I know what I'm gonna do. I'm not part of a union, I'm not part of a labor force to the degree that I know, but I'm gonna go ahead and use these tools 'cause they amp up what I do and we're in a scrappy little shop, da da da da da. And you know, it's kind of interesting how that played out 'cause None of those people—if you didn't make the move to digital, you were out of a job. Within a couple of years, it was done. And then a decade later, I found myself in New York working for a very fancy design firm right at the beginning of the internet, boom, 1997, 1998. And I was working for a very famous former magazine designer who'd been smart enough, a guy named Roger Black.

MR: Oh yeah, Roger, yeah.

DR: Who had been the designer of Time Magazine, Newsweek Magazine, Smart Magazine, Vanity Fair. I mean, he was the original art director for Rolling Stone Magazine under Dan Wener back in the glory days for them of the 60s. Suffice it to say Roger was very smart, and he's like there's this thing called the internet and all these publications are coming to our design studio and they're saying, can you help us make a website out of our magazine? And he's like, let's do that. So again, by the luck of being in the right place at the right time, technology revolution, one, digital or rather analog paste up to digital paste up, been there, learned a lot.

Transition two, let's go from print media to online media. And so, we were there, we were designing, again the original time.com. We were doing ibm.com. We designed the original Barnes and Noble.com before even anybody knew what Amazon was. And again, forgive me for the old man stories, but it's relevant in the sense that once again, how many of those magazine design people are even around 10 years later. This is the nature of this beast that we have. And you know, we're in another inflection point right now, which you can imagine where we might wanna talk about. I'm gonna stop there. But that's the origin story. Looking back, how does that land with you?

MR: That sounds great. And we have so many parallels because I was fortunate, I was a student coming into the industry when that analog, the digital transition happened. So I learned how to use a Haber rule, and you probably know what that is.

DR: I do.

MR: This weird yellow plastic thing to measure typewriter type. You could calculate it and send it to a typographer who would then send you the galley of type, which then I would wax and cut and layout. So I immediately saw when the Macs started coming in. Like that was a huge leap forward in what was capable. And it favored me, again, being there at the right place at the right time. Same thing with the internet. Kind of, almost the same story shifting away from graphic design. So I feel those stories. And for a long time, I felt like, you know, the AI stuff that we see happening in a similar way presents us with a challenge and an opportunity. And the question again is how do we as curious people that think visually adapt to this situation. So maybe that's a good place to—

DR: You said it first. You said AI first, but let me tell you, I got a backside to this whiteboard, which I've already prepared. So that's where we're gonna go. And it's gonna get contentious as all heck, but why not?

MR: Yeah. Yeah.

DR: I just came from a remarkable presentation last night. Again, I live in San Francisco, so I'm just across the bridge from Berkeley. And there is an organization at Berkeley in their computer science school called the Simons Institute for the Future of Computing. And every month they'll put on like a symposium about something that's related to obviously the fundamentals of computing. And last night they had three leaders, one from Google Deep Mind, one from Anthropic and one from not OpenAI, but was one of the founders of OpenAI. And they were talking about why are we so surprised by the sudden arrival of AI and where are we gonna go next and when are we gonna hit AGI, you know artificial general intelligence.

MR: Right.

DR: And it was a fascinating, fascinating conversation. We'll get there, but that is the technological transition that we're in right now that's gonna impact every one of us that draws for a living or writes for a living. And it's a challenge and an opportunity and we gotta nuance that, so.

MR: Yeah, it's definitely a mix. I mean, you know, just last week we're recording this in April, we got the Studio Ghibli feature in ChatGPT where you can drop an image in and it'll turn it into a, is it Miyazaki is the—

DR: Miyazaki. Absolutely.

MR: Miyazaki, it'll take that style, which, you know, I have real mixed feelings about it, honestly. It's cool what it does. My son did a picture and sent it to me and he thought it was cool. And people are posting it. And at the same time, I feel really strange about someone scraping all of Studio Ghibli's stuff and turning it into just another filter in a tool, right? Like it's sort of like both at the same time. I dunno how to describe that. It makes me uneasy and excited. How do you deal with that? I don't know. I dunno if I have the answer for that, but it is an interesting time that we find ourselves in.

DR: We don't have the answers, but I've been spending, like you, a lot of time trying to form some opinions and I have some. And they're always open to shift. But if we want to go there before this hour is up, I'd be delighted to flip this whiteboard over and talk it through. And in fact, you know, your show, there is a bit of a through line that I could throw out there. You'd said, let's talk about your books. So I did a—yeah, it was a really good exercise for me because like, you, you write your books and then you move on. And it's interesting sometimes I think to go back and reflect on how did I write that one? What was it about, what did I learn and how did that affect the next ones? And again, the same thing we're talking about like these life stories.

MR: Yeah.

DR: In hindsight, there's a through line at the time there's not, but it's interesting. I mapped them out, identified a through line and I would love to share it with you if you think that's appropriate.

MR: Yeah. I think we should do that. And then we can tie it to AI and sort of wrap up on the AI discussion and just sort of state where we're feeling 'cause I think like you, I don't have any hard and fast opinions. And then I do have a couple, I guess. So it'll be interesting to see where we fall on that. And I'm totally open to being, you know, convinced of different ideas too, so.

DR: Oh, well, that's the way we have to be.

MR: Yeah, yeah.

DR: Yeah. Well, you remember what F Scott Fitzgerald said of, you know, great Gatsby fame. He said the sign of a good intelligence is someone who's able to keep two competing ideas in mind at the same time and not lose their shit. That's a paraphrase. But that's close to what he said. So let's hope we're all intelligent enough to keep the two. You know, life is a balance.

MR: Yeah, it is. Definitely.

DR: Let's try to keep both sides moving. Yeah.

MR: Yes. So start with Back of the Napkin. That's the one that I was introduced to and it blew my mind. I was like, wow, people are writing books about visual thinking. I was just starting to get into it. I'd met Dave Gray, I went to one of his events and it was starting to like form in my mind and like, I looked backwards and I was doing it in college and doing it in my work, but I didn't know what to call it. And so when your book came out, it was like, wow, okay, this is cool. So let's start there and then work your way through the books and how they tie together.

DR: Mike, let's do it. Okay. So on the whiteboard, here we go. Let's grab a red pen. And we'll do through, it's really, really quick. And again, this was a useful exercise for me just before this call. I went and mapped things out. So back in 2004 I thought, let's write a book about thinking with pictures 'cause nobody else had done it that I could find. So it took four years for that to happen. So that book finally came out in 2008. And that was number one, and it did really well. And I was more surprised than anyone. My publisher was surprised too. It sold a million copies, it's in 27 languages. It was like—

MR: Wow, that's awesome.

DR: That literally allowed me to quit my day job 'cause I was still working for an agency at the time. We won't name any names, but I had gotten to the point where I hated it. And this was the thing that enabled me to say, I'm gonna go out and do my own thing. So that was the genesis of it. And the idea was how do I kind of codify the tools that I've developed on my own to try to take this complexity and make things clear by drawing it out. So there was a lot of cognitive science, there was a lot of triangulations with what was going on in people who were studying, how does the human visual mind work?

And then the outcome was, sort of, the key to The Back of the Napkin is there's a formula at a macro level for neuro mechanically, how the human vision system processes the world. And when you understand that, you can hijack it. So the idea of The Back of the Napkin was if you seek to deconstruct something really, really complicated with your visual mind, here is a formula that you can do, use that. That was the big breakthrough.

And then the second book was, well what about words? So I wrote a book called Blah, Blah, Blah. It took me two years to get out that. And it was really about combining the pictures and the words. So here's, I've got the pictures and the words, and we came up with something—I came up with something I called vivid thinking. Which is really verbal plus visual, move them together into one notion. So let's be vivid. Let's use both our words and our pictures. And then I was doing a lot of public speaking and people were saying, well, how do I present effectively using those words and pictures? So that was the book Show and Tell.

And then the publisher was really happy 'cause the books were selling and they said, hey, it's time for you to do a greatest Hits album. So I came up with a book called Draw to Win. This I think was about 2016. And what this is, is it's a short series of maybe 12 very simple, very fast lessons on just how to really quickly use your visual mind to solve things, sell things, teach things, understand things. A lot of the same principles that you talk about in Sketchnoting, a lot of the same things.

And then I started to become really enamored of the work of Joseph Campbell. And you and I were talking about Star Wars there and the hero's journey, like the classic story. So I said, well wait a minute. We've got these pictures, we've got these words, we've got this ability to present, we've got all these skills now. Wouldn't it be awesome if we could figure out how to make a very persuasive slide deck that's just 10 slides long because if you really break the Hero's Journey down, you can break it down meaningfully into 10 very discreet beats.

You know, and for those who are not familiar with what we're talking about, the Hero's Journey is exactly the storyline that George Lucas used, line for line when he created Star Wars, number one. And he had discovered it from a guy named Joseph Campbell who passed away several years ago. But Joseph Campbell lived through almost, you know, from 1910 to 1990, something like that, and traveled all over the world and was a collector of great stories from all the myths and all of the great stories from cultures around the world that had withstood the test of time, whether it was like Indian Upanishad or whether it was stories from the Old Testament or whether it was great myths from Southeast Asia, what have you.

And he realized that these stories that stand the test of time and get told over and over and over and become these cultural touchstones for humanity, all follow a virtually identical storyline and it moves along these beats. And so, what I did is I wrote a book called The Pop-Up Pitch, this is three years ago now. That really took everything and put it into a kind of a formula of saying, look, if you want to create a pitch in a PowerPoint deck or Google Slides or on a whiteboard, and you're trying to share an idea with someone with the idea of convincing them, or well, more persuading them, gently persuading them to at least understand your perspective and perhaps to take action, the building of the slide order has already been done. This problem has already been solved. And so, I just codified it. So that's the through line. Does that makes sense?

MR: Yeah, that's sense. I love the way it's sort of builds. So you see it's starting with these componentry and over time it's building up into—eventually you're getting to the point of like, how do you use all these skills to then convince people or get people to open their minds to a different idea or an idea that maybe they didn't consider and move them forward into that direction.

DR: Yeah, exactly.

MR: That's pretty cool.

DR: Yeah.

MR: Yeah.

DR: Well, and again, it's like where we started, Mike, it's like this all makes logical sense now, but that's only again, looking back. Is you can kind of see, oh, that came from that which came from that. There was nothing that said, here, let's start in order to achieve that.

MR: Mm-hmm.

DR: No, it didn't work that way. And I don't often think that it does. Our life is always a meandering journey and it has a direction. You know, the direction is always back to this original one. This makes me uncomfortable, this gives me some comfort. And I'd rather be comfortable than not. And just expanding sort of the scope of that processing of complexity and confusion to understand it, to clarify it, and then to be able to share it with someone else, so that hopefully you then pass the baton to them pass. And they can do the same thing. So that's up till now. With your permission it ain't over. I'd like to flop the board.

MR: Go for it.

DR: Here we go.

MR: Let's do it.

DR: Drum roll. Okay. So let me tell you for a moment about the consulting work. All those books lead to three types of businesses that I do. For anybody who wants to pursue this path and how do you make money doing this? Well, number one is if you have an opportunity to do work for a client, we'll call that what I would call the consulting side of the work. Someone pays you by the hour or by the project to use your tool sets or your talents or your skills to help them solve a problem. Cool. So I make money doing the consulting side. Then the second thing is, if you're paying attention to what you're doing, as you do that, you might have a couple of interesting ideas, which could become a book. So you could write a book.

Now whether that's published traditionally or self-published or a series of blogs or posts on LinkedIn, they're all cool. But the idea is you're creating content. You're creating a book, a corpus of knowledge based on the things that you've learned from your consulting work. That's cool. And once that's out there, you get recognized as a bit of a thought leader, hopefully. And then people will ask you to come in and talk to them or train them for making money. So now you've got three ways to make money. You do the work, you write about the work, and then you get to talk about what you wrote about.

And the beauty of those is they then are also a self-fulfilling cycle because then you're out there in front of people talking about the book, about the work, and someone says, "Can I hire you to do some more work?" And on you go. So over the last 10 years, the consulting work, I started to map this out. I have been blessed with the opportunity to do a fair amount of consulting work with people in cloud computing companies like Snowflake. I've been doing a lot of work with Snowflake. So they're a ginormous multi-billion-dollar cloud computing company.

Cybersecurity. So companies like Mimecast and Proofpoint and some of those companies that provide cyber protection for all of the data and whatnot. So I've been doing consulting work with them. I live in the Silicon Valley, so I've been doing technology-focused work forever. And these are both tech companies, as you can imagine, work with Microsoft, work with Google. All of those are focused on innovation, you know, a real thing. And then over the last two years, interestingly enough, I got a consulting gig to work with an electricity company.

MR: Interesting.

DR: Yeah. So, I never expected that to happen. So a consultancy that's here in California that works primarily with our three big utilities in California, so PG&E, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas and Electric. So if you think about it, I think California by itself is like the world's fifth largest economy just in the State of California. And those three utilities are together, far and away collectively the largest of electric and gas utilities in the country. And what's been interesting is to have a chance to work with them. And I didn't know anything about the electricity industry, but I sure as heck do now. And it's fascinating 'cause Mike, everything, every single thing comes down to power.

MR: Yes.

DR: Everything comes to power. It's amazing. Without energy and specifically for the way we live, without electricity, nothing else happens, right? Like you talk about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, like baseline, you gotta power this stuff. And I was unaware of how it works, how is it monetized, how is it evolving? And the fact that electricity, while theoretically infinite, which it is, the sun, is an infinite power source for us. An infinite, giant thermonuclear reactor that's right there in front of us. Not 24/7. You know, 12 and maybe five if you will. It's not always visible to us, but suffice it to say we are surrounded by energy. And yet using it, finding a way to generate it, store it, transmit it more often than not, becomes as contentious as anything else in human life.

So it's fascinating and I wanna wax too poetic about it, but suffice it to say cloud needs more of that, cyber needs more of that, all tech needs more of that. And along the way, I still continue to work with a lot of different businesses and I continue to work in the realm of creativity. Now, if you were to look at an intersection of all of these, are you ready for the unveil?

MR: Go for it.

DR: There she is, ladies and gentlemen.

MR: Right in the middle.

DR: Right in the middle. This is it. This is the revolution of the day. And AI in particularly generative AI, which is the one that has the ability that, you know, large language models, the fusion models have completely captivated my interest, completely captivated my interest. The good and the bad. The challenges is the opportunities. Like you said, your son getting to use you know, ChatGPTs, new diffusion model to generate studio Ghibli style drawings from a stick figure drawing. Well, good for him, and tricky.

So that's where I'm putting my attention. I'm digging deep into—specifically I'm interested in the image generation AI, so tools like you were talking about. We can dive into all kinds of detail. And I do have some opinions about sort of the ethical side of it, which may or may not be of interest to anyone. But for me, here it comes, my friends, sometime within the next year to two, expect a new book called The Back of the Napkin 2.0: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with the Robot. So the Robot is Here, and earlier I'd mentioned, you know, the production teams at the newspaper who didn't want to upgrade. My perspective is that if we are in the creative industry, we have to.

MR: We have to pay attention. Yeah.

DR: Not more than that, Mike. More than that. We have to learn how that thing works. We have to learn, it is a tool set. That's what it is. Maybe it's paradigm shifting, maybe not, I don't know. We hit paradigm shifting technologies all the time. This is a big one. And it was pretty fascinating being with that panel last night over at Berkeley, where they were talking about when does AI become sentient, if you will, and lots of debate. One of the guys said not for 20 years, one of the guys said never. And the woman on the panel said, "I think it's gonna take place within the next 12 months." So, and these are the experts. So fascinating stuff.

I would love to talk about it more, but that's where I'm going. How does all the stuff you saw on the other side of the board, how do I use my visual mind to declutter a complex world? How do I use my visual mind in concert with my words and my verbal mind to understand what I'm talking about and convey it to someone else? How do I do that beautifully, effectively, efficiently, thoughtfully? All of that's gonna change with this, and I want to try to figure that out.

MR: Hmm. Yeah. That's a big question.

DR: Yeah,

MR: Part of me thinks a little bit about both using these tools, but also remembering that the way we operate still requires people to do some of it. Like going back to the transition from say, analog to digital and then into internet, I would—let's go back to the one that's more analog to digital. I was there for that. I was a student, so I was more on the digital side because I didn't have any old habits necessarily to unlearn. I was pretty new to it. I could do all those things. The beginning of my job began that way, but ultimately, I could see the benefits. My dad had computers to get us ready for the computer revolution. So when the time came, not only was I an art director, but I was a system manager and I managed the network and ran the backup tapes. And like I was into it. Like I've always had sort of this blend of the two.

So on the one hand, I'm excited about the capabilities and I've certainly used the tools. And on the other hand, my concern is, how we use them, how we fit them in so that we don't lose the thing that makes us unique. So in other words, rather than sketching and thinking, if I'm just asking the tool to generate it for me, like where does that line cross and where's the machine doing the work that maybe I should be doing? And then the other thing that I've seen being in technology is knowing that you can become dependent on the way a thing works. And we know that technology never stays the same. So what happens when that thing changes if you've offloaded too much of your agency to the system and you can't do it on your own, like the power goes out or something like that, what do you do?

The last thing I'll say is, so in this time period when the new technology came on, I was in a small design firm, system manager, designer. When the power would go out in the area we were in, because it was growing, everybody would just be sitting around with twiddling their thumbs 'cause Cork Express and their Macs were off. Nobody could work. And you know, not to brag or anything, but I had been trained in the old way. So I just got sheets of printer paper out and started sketching and kept moving and had stuff. By the time the power came up, I was ready to go and I just brought it in the machine.

So I always thought of the machine as a tool. And I think maybe that's what I'm kind of getting at is how do you remember that it's a tool and not give away too much of your skill to the machine or selectively give it to the machine when it makes sense. Maybe that's kind of where I'm sort of sitting. Not even talking about any of the ethical things about you know, learning, which I think probably could be a whole nother podcast. And maybe it doesn't make sense for us. It's kind of foregone conclusion probably at this point. So, anyway.

DR: How are we doing on time, Mike? 'Cause I've got a little model that I think I could draw out that's evolving in my mind. I've been putting a lot of cycles into this and I'd love to share a little bit of a thought exercise. It's gonna take maybe five minutes. Are we good for that?

MR: Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, let's do the five minutes.

DR: All right. So, let me just kind of map out here starting from some basic principles and some data, how I think a story starts to emerge that could be interesting not to answer those really good questions you had, but just a way of thinking about them. So I just wanna start with some research that I've seen lately that says that one third—and this is research that's been conducted for people who are interested. Adobe every year does a creativity survey and they go and talk to thousands of business people across the United States, and I think around the world. And they ask 'em things about creativity.

So it turns out the Sharpie and Papermate, the company that own them. Interesting. They also do a creativity study. Mckenzie does a creativity study. So I've gone through them and one piece of data that emerges, which I think is quite fascinating, is one third of adults think that they're as creative as they could be. So one third of adults think are as creative as they like to be.

MR: Kinda of satisfied where they're at, or?

DR: Yep. Which makes the two thirds have said, I want to be more creative than I am. Only one third are saying I'm as creative as I'd like to be. And I'm given the opportunities at work and at life to be creative. Two thirds of adults most wanna be remembered for their creativity. Like, when you die, what do you wanna be remembered for? I wanna be remembered—my legacy to be my creativity. What did I put back out into the world? What did I write? What did I paint? What did I share? So we've already got a creativity disconnect, so something's up. But here's the truth is there is a way to span this. And that is AI generative tools.

Now there are lots of ways, there's a thousand ways for people to expand their creativity. There's a thousand ways for people to meet this. But one of the ways that is true, especially for people who struggle with their creativity, I don't know how to be creative. I'd like to be, but I don't know how, I don't know how to draw all the things that we've heard forever, generative AI tools actually offer a solution because they are a relatively straightforward. Assuming you have enough money to have a computer and an internet connection and you can pay, you know, individually, I'm going to just say AI generative tools represent a solution to empower creativity.

But to your point, there's a big downside. Number one, they steal. They steal other people's work. They scrape the whole internet and they use that as the models from which they're gonna feed you. It is awful that there is now a way to turn anything into my Miyazaki style. Because he of all people who has thrown away all technology, get it out. He is the one animation studio on earth that still does everything longhand, but they steal. The second thing they do is they generate an incredible amount of crap.

MR: Yeah. I think I've heard slop used as—yeah.

DR: Oh my God, just awful, awful stuff. Number three is they displace people. And number four, they burn a tremendous amount of electricity.

MR: Electricity. Yeah.

DR: So there's probably other downsides. But here's the thing about creativity. So all of these by themselves, AI steals, AI generates crap, AI displaces people, and AI consumes a lot of electricity is non-sustainable. All right, so here's the way creativity works. Creativity thrives against constraint. If I say I need you to get to the moon and here's the thousand dollars, you're gonna be a lot more creative in your thinking than if I say, get to the moon and there's an infinite amount of money. Okay, creativity thrives under constraints. So let's just say that these are our constraints. So how do we reframe every one of these constraints into a positive?

Well, you know, Austin Kleon. Our good friend Austin Kleon. How? Steal like an artist. Steal with honor. There are good ways to steal and there are bad ways to steal. So if you're gonna steal, do it well. How? Acknowledge your sources, be open, steal primarily from yourself, be thoughtful, acknowledge where things come from. Read Austin's book, Steal Like An Artist. Picasso was the one who said it. Steal like an artist, steal with honor and amazing things are gonna happen to your creativity. So what you've done is you've taken a negative and turned it into a positive.

All right. If it generates crap, well how are we gonna do that? Let's be very, very thoughtful. Let's not generate crap. Let's make things that matter. So let's be very thoughtful about what we create. Don't accept that it's shit. You know, I don't need another AI generated image of dogs playing poker that looks in the style of Van Gogh. I mean, look, the fact is that's gonna burn itself out very fast. If you look at the home screens from most of the visual AI tools, the excitement, we get over it really fast. And we get overloaded and begin—

MR: Pretty faddish. Right?

DR: So be thoughtful, displace people. Okay, the only answer I can give to that is become irreplaceable. Become one of the people that can't be replaced. And how do you do that? Because you figure out how to take advantage of this thing. And then the third one, and this is a stretch and this is what I've learned about the electricity piece. This is absolutely fascinating. And at the risk of like over pontificating, the trick with electricity is that for the most part it can't be stored. I never knew that.

MR: Mm-Hmm. Yeah.

DR: Yes, there are batteries, but they are highly inefficient.

MR: Inefficient. Yep.

DR: They're incredibly expensive and they don't even come close to one percent of what any functioning society needs. The trick with electricity is that it has to be consumed as it's being generated. You can't store that stuff. You have to figure out a way to consume it. And here's an amazing thing. I never knew this install until I started working with PG&E, you know, Northern California electric utility. Every time I plug this in, every time I turn on a light, every time I turn on my water heater somewhere in the world, a turbine spins up to generate electricity in real time to account for the action I just took. The fact that it works at all is a miracle.

You know, there's a lot of downside. California, we've been having a lot of fires that have been, you know, most likely, in some cases completely likely generated by poor electric infrastructure or poorly maintained electric infrastructure. There's a lot of downsides. Specific Palisades fire. We're gonna see how that came out. Northern California fires. Anyway, the idea is this, bear with me 'cause it's gonna be a stretch. One of the ways to store electricity is you can store it in a battery. Another way, and let's say that's a battery, is that you can actually convert the electricity into data, store the data, which doesn't require electricity to be stored. Store it somewhere. And let's assume that that data is valuable, that that is insight or data or information has value. Later on, you pay money for that data and you reconvert it back to electricity.

Now this assumes that electricity is abundant and it will be abundant again. Safely? We don't know. But there's a really interesting notion here that says if you're gonna burn electricity, what possible use could be ever better than being able to use it to realize your dreams? So the idea is if you're gonna be burn electricity for AI, be thoughtful. Recognize that every time you put in a prompt or draw a picture, you're burning electricity. But if you are generating something of value, you're actually converting electricity into storable value.

It's a stretch, but I wanna work on that because there's something there. If you are creating valuable work that someone else is gonna look at your AI generated images or texts or ideas later, and they will be valuable enough down the line for that person to say or that robot to say that's valuable. You're actually gonna be retaining the energy in the form of data. Anyway, that's my pitch. I don't know how that lands, but that's where I'm going.

MR: It's funny when you talk about the last one, I think about, well the poster behind me, Back to the Future, he says, "You made a time machine out of DeLorean." And he said, "Well, if you're gonna make a time machine, you might as well do it with style."

DR: You might as well. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So, I don't know. I think, to me—-

MR: Interesting,

DR: -I wanna learn how to steal with honor, I wanna learn how to be thoughtful about the things I produce, I wanna become irreplaceable, and I want to be able to dream big and understand that my dreams are burning electricity, but what else would I do with that electricity that's more valuable than dreaming big. Not me, everybody. Why not? So anyway, that's where I am on it.

MR: Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, you know, like I said, I don't have a hard fast thing. I'm sort of torn in between, and I think maybe a lot of people are in the same place, or maybe they're now coming to that. Like if they start digging into it, like, oh, there's some problems here, but there's some promise here. And I just keep going back to both these transitions you talked about and you know, the old timers had a lot of boogeymen around these technologies and I just looked at 'em logically and said that that doesn't totally make sense because we're eliminating the part that's takes the most time in design, the laying out the boards.

I mean, I used to draw boards out with my Rotring pens and blue line pencils. And you know, it was tons of work, right? I mean, I could do it. But when we switched over to, I think we were in Cork Express, you know, that took that whole process out of the loop and I was now focusing on, well, what kind of interesting layouts can we do? I think you think about like David Carson and other Californian, like some of the crazy stuff he did. And he came from a not design background. He did some really crazy design stuff that probably pushed people in other places to go in different directions than they might've.

Like where would we be if—I mean, I don't know what he would've done if there was no technology. Maybe he would've found a different way to do it, but he's a pretty resourceful guy. So yeah, I just think there's an opportunity to do something with it. And then the question is what do we do with it? And how do we do it in the way you're talking about in a thoughtful, honoring way that makes what we're doing useful for other people that we're working with or we're serving, right?

DR: Yeah. Hey Mike, can I give it a one more? Are we outta time or we got 30 seconds more?

MR: Yeah, we got 30 seconds.

DR: I've been thinking this through and I want like make another thought model illustration for those of us who are maybe struggling with how do we deal with this revolution that is coming about because of AI. And the fact that the AI revolution is contemporary to other revolutions that are taking place around us, is just notable word, a very interesting inflection point. You know, it's funny 'cause just the age I grew up and you as well and you know, there was this kind of notion-like back in the 1990s, the Cold War's over, the Berlin wall is done, history is over. It's all easy from here on.

Well guess what? History and over history comes back with a vengeance and history is looking at us right in the face right now and saying things are upside down. There's a lot of revolutions going on right now, and one of them happens to be AI. The fact that they're all coming at the same time is quite fascinating. I mean, academically fascinating. May you live in interesting times? We sure do. But to give myself a little bit of solace to give myself a little bit of calm, I think through the following thing. Imagine this. Imagine Music. Are you a music person?

MR: Oh yeah.

DR: I see it. Looks like a turntable back there, you've got? You've got some vinyl.

MR: Yep.

MR: Okay. So think about this. That's a perfect example. In the world, in the entire history of humanity, up until about 1890, so roughly 130 years ago, the only way any human could ever hear music was to have it played live. Either you played it yourself or you hired a band. Or if you're really rich, you hired a court composer, a Mozart or a Bach or a Beethoven. And then if they wanted to perform their music, they would, you know, build a big concert hall and people would come and hear it because there was no way to record that music. None. The gramophone is invented.

Imagine the moment prior to 1890 entire conservatories universities, cultures, industries were created around the creation of live music because everybody loves music. There was no radio, there were no iPads, there were no earbuds, nothing. Think about the revolution that represented if you had dedicated your life to studying harp because you were in demand, because at every wedding someone needed a harpist, and they're gonna pay you. And now it can be recorded. Holy smoke. I'm at my next wedding and I have a gramophone vinyl recording of a harp. I put that on. How many harpes have I just put outta work?

MR: Yeah.

DR: All of them except the one who was recorded. But here's the deal, why I can find some sort of comfort in this. Music isn't over. We actually now after these multiple music revolutions of technology have more music, more availability. And I think the same thing's gonna happen. It's a scary inflection moment, but it ain't gonna kill us.

MR: Yeah. Well, and you know, live music is now coming back with a vengeance in a lot of ways because digital music is, eh, normal, right?

DR: Exactly. And now with the sheer amount of crap that gets generated. Even in these early generations of, of image generation AI, actual paintings become even more valuable, not less.

MR: Yep.

DR: I've got a painting show coming up here in San Francisco starting on May 1st. Live paintings. Can't wait to do it. I love to paint in large part as a remember your roots. And if you're gonna steal, steal honorably, even if it's from yourself. So what I've done is I've digitized all my paintings. I've fed them in to my own diffusion model, which is the type of model that an AI engine does. And now I'm trying to teach the robot to paint like I do.

MR: Like you. Like a student.

DR: Not to replace me, but because it's frigging cool and I can feed in ideas and see what it does. It's like I never would have thought of that.

MR: Yeah, it's crazy.

DR: I've got a sidekick now, it's awesome, which I never had before, so.

MR: Wow.

DR: There's a lot there. Thanks for letting me share so much, Mike. I really appreciate it.

MR: Yeah, this has been great. Thanks, Dan. Is the best place to go find you is danroam.com, I'm guessing?

DR: Yeah, absolutely. So just good old danroam.com. Instagram is dan.roam. And then LinkedIn of course. And I'm gonna start posting. All of this is gonna go up on LinkedIn as I ramp up to working on the next book. You know how it is. You gotta feed the beast, so.

MR: Well, thanks so much for being on the show and talking about this. We didn't really didn't plan this, but it turned out really great. So I'm really happy you were on to talk this way. So thanks so much.

DR: Well, you're a great interviewer, Mike, and I really appreciate you giving myself and other people you're talking to the time to, you know, let us go off on our weird tangents. I appreciate that.

MR: That's my job.

DR: And you're good at it. You're very good at it.

MR: Well, thanks Dan.

DR: You got it.

MR: You have a great day, and we'll talk to you soon. For everyone listening or watching, it's another episode. Talk to you soon.