The Truth About AI Getting "Creative"

Transcript

[00:00:00.000] - Mark Heaps
Here's what the AI doesn't do. Ai is not creative. When it says it generates art, it's based only on what it's been trained on. What I'm telling people is understand how to use it, understand how to influence it. Most designers today are thinking about how it could replace them. What they're not thinking about is how it could inspire them.

[00:00:26.460] - Jesus Ramirez

Today's creator is Mark Heaps, VP of Brand and Creative for the AI Accelerator company, Groq. Mark is an all-around professional creative. He's a published author who has worked for Apple and Google, and is also an accomplished designer and photographer. With his current position at Groq, Mark is deeply involved in all aspects of AI. In this episode, Mark will share his thoughts on AI Art, where the creative industry is heading, and what jobs could be lost or gain because of this new technology. Mark is in the middle of this AI revolution, and he is the best person to tell us about these emerging technologies and how they will affect today's creators. Hey, Mark, how's it going?

[00:01:04.120] - Mark Heaps

Doing well, Jesus. Good to see you, man.

[00:01:06.280] - Jesus Ramirez

Good to see you. It's weird doing these introductions because we've actually been talking for, and I'm keeping track now, for 55 minutes. It's not like we're just tuning in. So it's weird to say hi.

[00:01:16.740] - Mark Heaps

We didn't bump into each other on the internet.

[00:01:19.160] - Jesus Ramirez

Yeah, right. What is that website where people talk to strangers? What video is it? Omegle? I think it's called.

[00:01:25.150] - Mark Heaps

Yeah, I've seen that.

[00:01:26.790] - Jesus Ramirez

Anyway, let us know a little bit about yourself. Where are you from? Where did you grow up? What do you do?

[00:01:30.300] - Mark Heaps

I don't want to go down the long back story, but today. So my name is Mark Heaps. I live in Austin, Texas. I am the Senior Vice President of Brand & Creative at an AI startup company called Groq Inc. There we provide compute technology like a proprietary processor for people that are running AI and machine learning workloads. I'm deep in the AI world now. H istorically, before that, I've worked at graphic design agencies. I was at Google, I was at Apple. If you probably know a big logo in the Fortune 100 space, I've probably done work with them, for them, or partnered with them. You name it on that side, I've done it. I've done every job in the creative sphere, from starting as a teenager working at print shops and literally running plates and press, all the way up to being a senior image expert at Apple, to designing brands for startups and large corporations. Outside of that, diehard foodie, I'm a dad. I love my food, as you know. And then also I live an alternative life as a musician, where I've also been a touring and professional musician, been a photographer a number of things.

[00:02:45.620] - Mark Heaps

So jack of all trades, I guess.

[00:02:47.160] - Jesus Ramirez

You do it all. And this is going to be the weirdest podcast interview because actually you and I are very good friends. You're one of my closest friends in the world, and you're one of the people, probably the only person in the world that I've ever called when I'm stuck with something. You're one of the few people that can help me think more clearly. I've asked you things as small as, How much should I charge for this job? Should I show my face on my YouTube videos? And you're one of the people who pushed me into that. Not only appreciate our professional relationship, but you've also helped me a lot during a lot of personal issues that I cannot thank you enough for. So I wanted to say that publicly. But the reason that I have you on the show is because you know this, I don't know anything. So I need smart people like you to explain things to me. And we were just talking about this. About two years ago, during the holidays, two years ago, you started to tell me that you were going to leave your current company that you had with your wife.

[00:03:43.960] - Jesus Ramirez

You and your wife were running a company and you were thinking about joining this new company, a startup that is involved in the compute space. I still don't know what that means. So I want to know what that means and how that relates to design and people who might be listening to this show?

[00:04:00.580] - Mark Heaps

Yeah. I always joke that it's the Cinderella story. I was working for my wife. My wife is a CEO of her own agency. I've been working for her for five years and having a great life, great experience, great clients, couldn't ask for better. I'm very privileged to be able to say that. We had a client whose name was Groq, and they were a small startup at that time. I'd been working with them for about a year and a half, on and off, little projects like any agency or freelance designer. I was doing presentations. I'd done some video work with them. We'd done some marketing and campaign work with them. All kinds of stuff, basic graphic production. It was a unique experience working with them. The CEO was the inventor of the processor that Google uses for all of their cloud computers, which is called the TPU. He invented the first generation of that. I realized the reason that I liked working with them is I like learning things. One of the great things about being a designer is you get exposed to learn a lot about every company that you work with. If you're passionate and interested, if you're just making illustrative designs for clients to get paid, that's great.

[00:05:10.470] - Mark Heaps

But I find the best designers are the ones that immerse themselves in the subject matter and they understand it, and then they can design more contextually. I hadn't felt this way since I'd worked at Apple. When I worked at Apple, I learned all kinds of amazing things. Google was exciting too, but not like it was at Apple. Then I realized with Groq, I was learning all kinds of stuff from the CEO, and I was learning all kinds of things from the engineers there, the chief architect. Then literally one day, the CEO called me and said, Hey, man, tonight is my legit offer, but I need to know in the next 24 hours.

[00:05:47.680] - Jesus Ramirez

I remember you're talking to me about that.

[00:05:49.700] - Mark Heaps

Yeah, I called you. You were one of the people that I called, right? And I had to decide, am I literally quitting my wife as my boss and also removing one of her top clients to go join them? Because once you hire a lead creative at one of these companies, you don't stick with the agency usually. And so I literally was taking away one of her top clients and leaving. And I did that because it was such an amazing opportunity to go learn about this exciting new world of AI and ML and computing. I've always been a technologist, so I just really wanted to keep growing and learning. And it's been radical for the last two years.

[00:06:31.380] - Jesus Ramirez

I see AI as the Wild Wild West, as an emerging space. As I said earlier, I know nothing about it. So I'm just going to get right to the point. Should I be worried?

[00:06:40.500] - Mark Heaps

I love this question. And I'll say right out of the gate, right, this is hard for me because I'm a three decade career professional creative. I've done stuff with Adobe and designers for a long time. Anybody can find talks I've done online. That's my community, that's my people. That's what helped me get here. Immediately that community is starting to villainize AI and not recognizing some of the advances that AI has already given them. Is it a scary thing? 100 % it is. Is it going to take a job of someone like you who's an amazing Photoshop composite technician, digital artist, production artist? It will take some of your job away, but it won't take you away. When I first started, I remember first time I moved to Silicon Valley, there was an agency there that hired me. I paid my rent for a year this way in San Jose. These two ladies owned an agency and they just needed someone who could cut out photos. This is old school days, guys. I cut out photos with the pen tool and then you had to save this as an EPS with a clipping path. People don't do this anymore.

[00:08:00.180] - Mark Heaps

I paid my rent that way. We even had to use that technique or that methodology for damn near 20 years. And so that went away. And when I see people now going, Oh, look at my amazing composite, and they can select an object, mask it out in a single click and start working a composite, that used to be something that I would pride myself on. And I would spend 12 hours on something, edging and working the hair and doing things. And that went away. I'm no less busy today than I was back then. It's just learning that I have to use the tools differently and I have to think about how I add value differently. Now, for people that are freaked out about AI and most of the people that I've seen who are talking about these new tools like stable diffusion, mid journey, Dolly, Lenza, you name it. I've spoken to senior executives at most of these companies. I was talking to Open AI just last week. I can tell they haven't played with it when they're freaked out by it. Because what's happening right now is people are showing the best examples of what it can produce, and they're using that for marketing to gain traction.

[00:09:04.320] - Mark Heaps

Look, 95 % of what it produces right now is not usable by a designer or in production. Will it be one day? Yes. That genie has been pulled out of the bottle and you cannot put it back. Imagine today if someone said to you, Hey, Z oose, you can't use select subject anymore. How would you react to that? That would be crazy now. But that's AI, that select subject, that's called image segmentation. That is a model that someone built. You and I saw it at Adobe sneaks when they had some engineers from MIT partnering with Adobe. They showed the image segmentation auto masking features, and it's just continued to mature and it's made everyone's jobs easier. Now, the people who are really going to be affected when you talk about the illustrators, the photographers, the people that are generating stock images like our good friend Dave Williams, this will probably have an effect on them. But I'll tell you, if the quality gets amazing, there's one part that a lot of people don't know and understand. And this is the world that Grok lives in. Compute, literally using a processor to generate something is really expensive.

[00:10:10.860] - Mark Heaps

And I'm not talking about the world that most people live in. You talk about buying a top end GPU from NVIDIA, you're going to drop $16,000, $17,000 on one of these top of the line GPUs, and you could render some amazing graphics with that. But when you talk about services like, hey, I need to generate 20 images. Right now, these large corporations that are supporting the advancement of these technologies, and I was having a meeting with one yesterday that's a major cloud provider, they're spending millions of dollars a month while everyone's playing with the tools to see what it's capable of. They're doing things like, Hey, let's just let everybody go buck wild and crazy and use this and see what happens. They're using the results to retrain the models, the machine learning models, to make them better. The more people play with it, the faster they're advancing the tool. But here's the thing, unless those companies can turn around and make a profit on that, they're not going to keep providing that as a free service for long. And so does this turn into a subscription model? Maybe does it turn into something where Adobe pays for a license with these services, and then all of our fees go up and you amortize that across a bunch of stuff?

[00:11:24.720] - Mark Heaps

Maybe. Nobody knows. But what I do know, and this is the world that I'm working in today, literally generative compute processing and generating data.

[00:11:34.970] - Jesus Ramirez

What does that mean exactly? Because I'm not familiar with that, what.

[00:11:37.520] - Mark Heaps

Those words mean. So compute is really about a computer processor of some type. And so you're familiar with CPUs, you're familiar with GPUs. There's some that are beyond that when you get into what's called Asics, FPGAs, there's all kinds of processors in the world. But when you say, machine learning is a good example. I've got all this data, so let's think scientific for a second. I've got all this data scanning the seabed. Sensors that are literally bouncing some radar off of the bottom of the sea surface. It sends back signals and those sensors process that data in math. This is no different than Photoshop. If you talk about bit depth, the channels, all these things, it's just math. We see an interface, but it's just math. All of that data, every time it scans something, that has to be evaluated using a program that then interprets it. Machine learning is different than traditional compute. Traditional compute, you say, if this, then that. If it's a five, then make it a nine. You write an algorithm to do that. But machine learning means I've trained it to think about some things which says, if it's a five, then I probably want a seven because I've looked at thousands of fives before now.

[00:12:58.800] - Mark Heaps

To generate that insight, that inference requires compute. It requires a special processor. Every single one of those moments that it generates something costs you something. It costs the provider money. There's electricity, the racks, the hardware, the data comes in, you have data comes back out. All of that generative data throughput is considered compute. Amazon provides this.

[00:13:26.380] - Jesus Ramirez

Sorry for interrupting, but this might be an over simplification, but is that a lot like hosting a website on Amazon S3?

[00:13:32.840] - Mark Heaps

It's a good question. So it's... Hosting a website, you put up some files and there's interpreters by a browser that shows you those files, right?

[00:13:43.000] - Jesus Ramirez

Well, I'm talking about the hosting and the data transfer back and forth, and that's where your bail comes in.

[00:13:47.260] - Mark Heaps

Right. So the billable part of it. So Amazon has cloud services, which is called AWS, and they have APIs. Apis are these little keys that allow you to say, I want to use this program, which is maybe a machine learning model or some application like Dolly. And what you say is, hey, you're hosting that application at the cloud. Now, what I want to do is send it a prompt. So I type in something, I want Jesus playing soccer at night, and I type that in as a prompt. It takes that instruction, looks through the trained machine learning model and says, I see words like night, I see words like Jesus, I see words like soccer. I know what those things are because I've been trained to understand what those things are. Then it literally takes the math of what it's recorded from data it's been trained on, which is like training so expensive, massively expensive. Then I'm going to process that compute and I'm going to spit out an image result. That input and output that you're describing, that is the cloud compute side of the process. Now, most providers today will charge a company, let's say they're providing the service to Adobe.

[00:14:55.890] - Mark Heaps

Adobe has to provision how much time do I want to have access to these servers in the cloud that can run this? They might buy 10,000 hours. 10,000 hours could cost you hundreds of thousands, upwards to millions of dollars, depending on what service agreement you have. So now you've got Google has cloud services, it's called GCP. You've got Amazon that has AWS. You've got Microsoft that has Azure. There's a whole world of cloud compute out there that has to process the data in and out. So our company, we're getting into this space where we have invented a new type of processor. It's a new chip that is specifically engineered to make workloads go faster. So as an example, there's a different model out there that's called style clip. Adobe runs this model. I was talking to John Nack about it. And style clip allows you to take a photo, upload it into the system and say, I want to see what I would look like with an afro, and it'll put an afro on me. So the prompt is afro and the instruction is use this image and it regenerates my image with that afro. Usually comes out pretty silly looking.

[00:16:05.280] - Mark Heaps

But when they first ran that model and John first showed it to me, it took about eight seconds for it to generate a result. Now, if you play with Stable diffusion today in Photoshop, that can take 30 seconds to generate an image. It's only 512 pixels wide, not production resolution, not production grade. In my world, in your world, I need 4K, 8K. I need big images, especially for compositing. When John showed me that, I went back to my team and I said, Hey, I have a copy of the machine learning model. I have all of the weights, all of the data, all the parameters that we need to set this up. Let's install this on our chip and see how it runs. Our chip runs that same mapping in 0.5 seconds. Wow. That's compared to a traditional GPU that everybody uses today. The thing is, right now everyone is running on GPUs. When you say, Hey, well, this thing replace me. Do you remember back in the early 2000s when you would run a filter and then you'd run you'd sit there and wait and it just would process. For me, the 90s, that's where AI Art generative is today.

[00:17:07.300] - Mark Heaps

It takes 30 seconds to generate an image and it's not even at production resolution. Now, they're going to get there. But to get to those bigger image sizes, if you say, Hey, Mark, the default is 512 today and I need a 4K image. Well, now you're talking about eight times the resolution size of the default. That's eight times the generative amount of compute to make that image. Every new scale of compute cost you that much more money. It's not going to replace everybody anytime soon until compute gets more affordable, until services become more accessible, and probably need faster internet because you're not going to run these on a laptop. Your local processor, the coprocessing model, they're not going to be able to run it locally without you buying a $20,000 or $30,000 GPU, and even then it won't run super fast. I guess what I'm saying to people is, you should be aware that this technology exists and that it's coming. Should you be scared that it's going to replace you? Not really. Here's the real problem, and you'll appreciate this, because you know I'm always about the business side of it. Definitely. Here's the really interesting part.

[00:18:15.900] - Mark Heaps

This is the Trump. You ever had that situation where you try to get a gig and get paid for it and you say, Yeah, it'll be 500 bucks and I'm going to bang this thing out. And someone tells you, My nephew's got Photoshop. He could probably do it for 25. So it's the classic story. Sure.

[00:18:31.170] - Jesus Ramirez

Well, now you're.

[00:18:32.460] - Mark Heaps

Going to have every client under the sun saying, Why would I pay you when there's these AI things that just make art for us now? And they don't understand what I just explained. Most people don't, right? Sure.

[00:18:44.570] - Jesus Ramirez

I definitely don't. That's why you're on, so you can explain it to me.

[00:18:49.020] - Mark Heaps

So this is where they're going to be... And I'm sorry, I'm doing all the talking.

[00:18:53.080] - Jesus Ramirez

No, please, no, no, this is great.

[00:18:56.600] - Mark Heaps

This is going to be the new challenge for this next generation of designer, illustrator, production artist, photographer, how do you get the clients to understand that just because it exists doesn't mean that it's production grade, that it's ready, or that it's easy to use? At least today. At least today. And so that's going to be the next hard part. And again, for anybody that's played with it and has actually really spent some time playing with it, you know how hard it is to actually get a good quality image out of this. It's not easy. I was testing a new model today, and I think the prompt I gave it was witch with purple eyes because my daughter's doing a... She's writing a story right now about a witch with purple eyes. I wanted to see if I could make an image for her to use in her short story. Every time I put that prompt in, witch with purple eyes, I never got purple eyes. I only got purple makeup. Every image it generated, it gave me two people, not one. Now, I then wrote, one witch with purple eyes. I still got two witches, purple makeup, different look.

[00:20:04.920] - Mark Heaps

The next time I went, I went, Witch alone with purple iris, still never got purple eyes. I did get one witch, finally. Then I wrote...

[00:20:15.790] - Jesus Ramirez

What was the prompt?

[00:20:17.980] - Mark Heaps

Witch alone for that one. The next time around, I was like, I am going to get purple eyes out of this model because I know it understands what this means. I just don't know the prompt. I eventually had to dumb down my prompt and write one witch alone with purple eyeballs, which sounds stupid to you and me because we would think, Oh, you want to paint the whole eyeball purple? That's weird. But it came back with purple irises. That means the machine learning model was trained to see the eyeball as the eye, and that's what prompted and changed it. Can you imagine clients that can barely describe anything to you as a creative trying to put in prompts? It's going to be hard. It's coming, but it's not going to take everybody's job overnight. There's so many vectors here that are going to affect all of this industry that unless Adobe or very large corporations integrated into their software and then figure out how to get it to the quality that Adobe would expect to generate, because they have very high standards. I'm not worried about it.

[00:21:24.540] - Jesus Ramirez

What do you think is an artist's role in AI today? And where do you see that role heading to, say, in the next five years.

[00:21:31.280] - Mark Heaps

Here's the thing that I'm really excited about. You have prompts, which we talked about, and then you have what's called seeds.

[00:21:40.940] - Jesus Ramirez

Seeds. What's a seed?

[00:21:42.620] - Mark Heaps

When you generate an image, let's say ou say, I want...

[00:21:47.500] - Jesus Ramirez

And by the way, for context, I've never actually opened up any of these AI programs. Oh, it's a blast. Yeah. So I haven't tried it at all. So keep in mind, I know nothing.

[00:21:57.050] - Mark Heaps

Great. No, I think that would probably help some people. So when you give a prompt, that's a description of the scene you want, right? So let's imagine you needed to do a series of images like my daughter's story. She maybe needs five illustrations. I write in there witch with purple eyes. It generates an image that has a character. And you have to remember that it's making that from nothing. It's not pulling Google images. It's not pulling any images. It's making it from nothing.

[00:22:25.620] - Jesus Ramirez

[00:22:26.820] - Mark Heaps

Get a witch with purple eyes. Now, for the next scene of the story, as I read my daughter's story, it says the witch was laughing. Well, a seed is a digital key that is generated when you make the image. And so the first image gets the key and that means that when you put that key in and write the next prompt, the witch is laughing, that key tells it, the seed key tells it, please render the same character. Now it can make a second image, but it will use the same witch. This is the crazy thing. When you're on Twitter or Instagram or TikTok or whatever you're watching and you see someone say like, oh, we made a sequence of images and you can see the person turning and it's like got a weird choppy effect today, literally someone is generating a key, a seed, every single image and then rendering a new prompt. So to get one second, they're doing 30 of those images, and by the way, they're still at low res. It's an unbelievable amount of work. So it's just going to change the workflow. So how does an artist fit into this?

[00:23:32.740] - Mark Heaps

Well, think about this. If you were an illustrator who was being hired to illustrate a story, illustrate something for the New York Times, and you had to do a sequence of images or a stock library, an asset library. Now, instead of you having the pressure, this is way off in the future, by the way. If you currently have the pressure of like, Oh, my deadline, I've got to render 20 images. That's a lot of work. But imagine you could spend, and every designer wants this, every illustrator wants this, you could put all of your time into the first image and you make that. And you can actually now upload that image and say, Re render this image, but with these prompts. So you draw a character and now you want to see that character on a skateboard. You want to see that character in a car? You want to see that character in these places? The bot can do the rest of that for you, but it still needs you to generate that high quality first image that it can reference and build over. So the time it saves, the amount of money that an artist could generate by producing that many more assets.

[00:24:34.340] - Mark Heaps

Remember, you have to understand how it generates it, how it's using your seed, all of those things. I just realized how horrible that sounds using your seed. Having that as a key, I guess. That's where these artists are going to be able to leverage this. Or how many times have we done a photo shoot and you take a shot and you're just like, Oh, I wish I'd caught a frame just before it when they were jumping, or I wish they had turned their head a little more. And we've all dreamed about the 3D tool, making it magical, or you and I have done some horrible magical things with Free Transform and warps to try to fix a bad shot. But you're going to be able to take that shot, put it into one of these engines, say this image smiling, if they weren't smiling, or the blink with the eyes closed and you say eyes open. It's going to be able to take that scene and generate those edits for you. Now, if they're not great and they usually aren't. You'll be able to take pieces of that and composite it of your original image.

[00:25:36.350] - Mark Heaps

But maybe you're lucky and you get a good one every once in a while and that's usable.

[00:25:40.300] - Jesus Ramirez

Which is exactly what I've done now with the current AI systems inside of Photoshop. All this Neural Filter stuff, people complain, Oh, they're not perfect. Of course not. But if it gets me 70 % of the way there, and then with masking or whatever, make it work, then that's when it becomes beneficial. Yeah, I trust you because you're my friend. But at the same time, I'm like, This guy's working for the man. Should I trust him? I was getting ready to jump out the window.

[00:26:09.660] - Mark Heaps

Yeah. Well, I'll say on Twitter, I've got some really good friends that are designers who have thrown up some posts that have said, and illustrators who have said, anybody that is exploring, supporting or endorsing AI art, I can't be friends with you. I won't follow you. It's the usual social media drama. And I felt really bad about that because it showed me that they're afraid of what it could be versus trying to understand what it could be. We are at a very pivotal moment where as creativists, we could influence how this becomes a tool, or we could step back, fight it and give it a reason to replace us. I think that's the poor decision. I see a lot of people leaning that route. And one of the classic examples I use, you have a digital camera, there's probably photographers that are listening to this. In the early days, people fought the idea of autofocus. They said, well, it can't be anywhere near as sharp as what I can do. I started shooting as a kid. I literally had prismatic lenses where the diffusion on the lens would line up to let you know it was in focus.

[00:27:19.000] - Mark Heaps

It had these textures in the display. That's looking through true glass. There's no digital side of it. People fought the idea of autofocus. Today, it's not even autofocus. Today, your Sony camera, your Fuji camera, etc. They recognize smiles. They recognize eyes and you'll see it tracking the smile. You can even set a digital camera to say, like a mirrorless camera on NICON says, take the picture when you see the person smile and it auto shoots it. That's AI. That was a trained model that was made to run. It was embedded as a program on a chip. It was put into that camera system and that's AI. Now, it doesn't interact with you, so you don't think of it that way, but it's AI.

[00:28:01.520] - Jesus Ramirez

Sure. That's how I've been wanting to think about this. But one of the reasons I always want to talk to you, we always talk text, whatever. This is not unusual for us to be discussing these topics. But everyone else I've talked to has been freaking out about AI in one way or another. I had a guest who was worried about her losing some clients now. Now, she did mention that some of these clients were the low hanging fruit, the $200, $300 deal clients that are probably not going to pay much more than that anyway. She did specify that the higher end clients are still there, but she's already not liking this new technology because she lost a small part of her income because of AI already. And she's worried it's going to get worse. I was talking to a different guest about his concerns about the copyright issues.

[00:28:56.380] - Mark Heaps

That's a different topic altogether, for sure.

[00:29:00.260] - Jesus Ramirez

And everyone is freaking out for different reasons. And this is why I wanted to talk to you because I know you're in the middle of it. I know that with Groq, you've had an opportunity to talk to not only AI systems that are generating images, but all types of different AI. So you're looking at the entire pie, not just the graphics part of it, which is why I think your insight is very valuable. I've mentioned in other shows that I don't know if I should be freaking out. I'm not at the moment. I see it as an opportunity because I guess it's just the way that I think. I never freak out about anything. So I think, well, this may take away certain things away from me, but I feel like there's got to be an opportunity in here somewhere. There's going to be an opportunity here with AI, excuse me. What opportunities do you see now for an artist trying to get into get into AI. Because I know you mentioned these other things that are in the future where you draw something and then it does a 360 thing and all that. That'll be amazing when it happens.

[00:30:08.040] - Jesus Ramirez

But what about now? Should people dabble in it, not worry about it? What would you recommend people do now with AI?

[00:30:15.680] - Mark Heaps

I lead a team of designers. I'm a VP of Brand. I have a team of creatives. I've told all of them, start playing with this stuff. Become comfortable with it because here's what the AI doesn't do. Ai is not creative. Now, we're moving into a creative era of AI, but when it says it generates art, it's based only on what it's been trained on. That gets into some of the... Some people are freaked about the copyright issue, like, well, it's being trained on other people's art. That's a whole deep thing I could explain, but what I'm telling people is understand how to use it, understand how to influence it. Most designers today are thinking about how it could replace them. What they're not thinking about is how it could inspire them. Imagine how many times you've had an idea and you said, Man, wouldn't it be cool if I saw a rock climber climbing a face of Yosemite while it's under the Aurora Borealis, which would never happen? But you had this fantastical idea, and then you never did anything with it. You just never did anything with it because it took work to make a concept into some reality.

[00:31:37.520] - Mark Heaps

You're literally going to get to a place here, I suspect, in the next 12 months where you're legitimately going to be able to say, I just got out of this meeting with a client. Here's the way you can use it. I just got to meet with a client. I'm going to describe the idea into my phone as a prompt. I'm going to let it generate a comp image, and then I'm going to send that to the client and say, Hey, is this what you were thinking about? Now, if you think about the work that you and our lovely friend Lisa Kearney do, when Lisa and you work on movie posters and some of these amazing pieces you've done, and I bow down to both of you, the work you do is amazing.

[00:32:15.320] - Jesus Ramirez

Thank you.

[00:32:16.080] - Mark Heaps

But you guys are literally reproducing the concept of a designer who mocked something up in a way, right? Is that accurate?

[00:32:24.050] - Jesus Ramirez

Yeah. So the job title is Finisher, and what that means is that there's a sketch, if you will, and then you take that sketch and finish it.

[00:32:32.930] - Mark Heaps

And in some cases, that sketch is like a storyboard doodle. In some cases, it's like a Photoshop file and you have to redo it.

[00:32:39.980] - Jesus Ramirez

A lot of cases, it's like a very bad Photoshop file, but a Photoshop, nevertheless.

[00:32:44.700] - Mark Heaps

It looks like a horrible cut out glue and paste together mock up, right? So all that work to get that idea captured and represented still has to go to someone who's a finisher, who can work, by the way, again, at very high resolutions. You and Lisa are producing things that are getting printed on sides of buildings. So this is where the artist can get their idea captured, get sign off from a customer, be very clear in your communication saying, This is a concept rough mock up. It's not going to be perfect. We can't use this in the final execution. However, is this the idea? You can generate ideas in seconds to minutes and then take that and build something. Today, however, one of my designers, Dan, was messing around through the piece and he says, Hey, I just need a picture of a hand holding a flame. I'm trying to find something that looks good. And you and I immediately, Okay, hand, picture of a flame on a black background, drop it into screen mode, get rid of the black. Boom, boom, boom. You're already mapping it in your head. But he tried to use stable diffusion to do that.

[00:33:46.490] - Mark Heaps

And he said, Open hand holding flame. He tried for half an hour and it generated a bunch of random arms with hands that were broken that had nine fingers that were on fire. Another one had fire in the back. It couldn't do it. It couldn't do it. It's trained. It understands what fire is. It knows what a hand is, but it could not make the thing that he asked for. After 30 minutes he was like, Dude, I'm just going to go make this. I'm like, Please just go make it. It's still going to require us to execute. It's still going to require us to make it a viable execution. Now, there's some areas that it's going to do the job for us, and this sucks for the people who make a living making social media graphics or use things like Adobe Express for people that want to generate quick banners, it's probably going to do a lot of that. Now, it's not going to design them with text and dates and details and font choices. We're getting there. If you saw Adobe sneaks this year, they showed some custom font and custom design AI models.

[00:34:52.460] - Mark Heaps

Microsoft has it already built into PowerPoint. You can literally type five bullets on a slide, hit Smart Design, and it'll generate a whole layout with icons and everything based on those five bullets you type. That's coming.

[00:35:04.940] - Jesus Ramirez

Something I wanted to talk to you about, and again, I know nothing about this, so you might tell me, Hey, you know what? That's BS or whatever. But I was looking online at, I don't know if it was TikTok or something, but I got fed a video of a guy using chat GPT. Are you familiar with it? Very. Yeah. And he was asking it to provide, generate, I think if I'm using the terminology correctly, generate code to input into Adobe After Effects so that... I forget exactly what the animation was, but the AI was generating that code. To me, that seemed amazing. But what I want to know is that as amazing as it seems? Is that just a random use case?

[00:35:50.740] - Mark Heaps

Where are we with that? If you think designers should be freaked out right now, and it's amazing to me that engineers aren't. Github started working for people that aren't familiar with it. Github is this massive repository for engineers, coders, developers, and they share. It's a massive community. They were acquired, but they started building this tool. I got to see this a little over a year ago that now has become public. That's called Gitflow. Gitflow, literally, you can write a little bit of code and it will respond to you as an AI bot and say, Oh, it looks like you're trying to make this type of software, or this type of web page, or this type of thing, and it'll just auto generate based on asking you a few questions, and it will make all of it from there. So if you think like, Oh, wow, it can generate images with Dolly or stable diffusion or whatever. That's cost people millions of dollars to train those models. Think about all of the open source code that exists in the world that these engineers for a decade have been uploading to GitHub that can now be used to train Gitflow.

[00:37:00.160] - Mark Heaps

Wow. That's going to write itself. In the next five years, a lot of applications, Python, tensor, Java, it'll just write itself. Now you're going to have to clean it up. You're going to have to tweak some things. You're going to have to debug it, etc. But to your point, 60, 70 % of the work, it's going to get done. And it'll be bad first. It'll make very bad applications and very bad websites and very bad things until it learns to get better, which is the same way that autofocus worked on cameras. It took time for it to get better. Chat GPT, which is embedded with this other machine learning model called Da Vinci, is what's called an NLP. It's a natural language processing model. We've used these for years with chat bots, everybody is engaging them at some point. You've spoke to Alexa, Siri, hey Google, whatever, and it's interacted. But now it's been trained on so many dialogs and so many conversations that you can go in and say, hey, what's a really good hiking experience? And now to write a whole narrative. For people that write blogs, you can write a 1200 word blog in five minutes.

[00:38:10.200] - Mark Heaps

Just give it a couple of prompts on a subject matter. Howard Pinski, a friend of ours from Adobe, literally asked chat BGPT to write a Photoshop tutorial on Selections, and it did. And he posted about this.

[00:38:22.920] - Jesus Ramirez

Oh, wow. I got to talk to Howard about it because I was actually thinking about doing that. And I actually have an AI just generated a tutorial for me. He did. And then use the script to use my voice because I've actually trained this script to memorize my voice. And it's crazy. I haven't shown it publicly, but I can actually type a sentence at play and it's my voice. And it's your voice. That's a trained model. You might be like, is this who's drunk or something? He's a little off about him, but it sounds like me. If it's just one short sentence, you cannot tell it's not me. But I wanted to have chat, GPT, generated tutorial, feed it into the script, hit play, and have it just use my voice. Now I want to talk to.

[00:39:02.750] - Mark Heaps

Howard about this. But see how you're thinking about it? You're thinking about, if I use A to connect to B, I'll generate C, which enables me as a service provider, as a business professional to create more content because you're a content creator. Y ou're thinking about how these tools are going to generate content.

[00:39:19.780] - Jesus Ramirez

Well, I mean, it's more of an experiment. I'm not sure if I want to just sit back at the pool with a Margarita every day and have the AI generate tutorials. But I want to see the capabilities with what I do. Is it going to replace me. From now on, people don't need to go into the Photoshop training channel anymore. They just go into chat GPT and say, Selections tutorial. Then they could even use my voice.

[00:39:39.770] - Mark Heaps

But see, here's the thing about humans versus bots. Bots have no motivation. So chat GPT isn't motivated to write a Photoshop tutorial. So it has no purpose or reason to do it. So it becomes a tool to help you execute better, faster. So I made a joke with somebody that, wouldn't it be great to take an accessibility tool that looks at a video and while the video is playing, it's describing what's happening in the video. We see this all the time for people that are partially blind. So it describes to them what's going on. Now, that's a text file that's generated. You could take that text file and actually use that as a prompt in an image generator and generate all new images based on how it described a completely different video. Wow. And that's evaluating it and then generating something else. You could then take the description of what it just generated and use it to generate chat GPT content. So there was a guy at a recent, and I think this was very unethical, by the way, there was a guy at a recent content creator conference, and he talked about how his real estate business went from generating three blogs a month to almost 40 a week.

[00:40:50.180] - Mark Heaps

And again, I wanted to be very clear. I think this is personally unethical, but this is me. He said, What I do is I look for trending videos on YouTube by people that talk about real estate. I pull down the video, I then run that through a speech to text model, which is basically like doing closed captioning. He's like, I take that narrative and I run that through another AI model, like Jasper AI, and have it rewrite it. And he can put prompts in there like, be more friendly or be more business. And it'll change the words, it'll refrase, it'll change the tone to sound like that. But he didn't create that. He didn't create the thing that it's modifying. He stole it from somebody else's video. And then what he's doing is after Jasper rewrites it, he's then taking descriptors out of that and going into a chat GPT and saying, Hey, write me a paragraph about this. And if that paragraph is good, then he inserts it into his article. At the end of the day, he's still doing work. Despite the ethical conflict here, he's doing work and he's finding a way to build out a new piece of content.

[00:41:53.410] - Mark Heaps

But what it's done is it's taken him from doing three blogs a month to 40 a week. Now he has a massively trafficked website about real estate, which is landing him more customers. So I get it. From a business standpoint, he's executing. From a creator standpoint, I have some conflicts with this. But just like you just did, he's figuring out how to connect the tools together to generate new things in different ways.

[00:42:20.260] - Jesus Ramirez

And to be completely open here, the one thing that I thought, I don't know if you remember this, Mark, but when I first started with the Photoshop training channel, I used to write a Photoshop tip of the day. You did. I remember. And it was a couple of sentences long. And I did that for, I don't know, two, three years, whatever the number was. So I still, on my website to this day, you can go and look at the archives. One Photoshop tip for two years or whatever it was. I was thinking of feeding that into an AI somehow and it generate content for Instagram Reels and things like that because that is my content stuff that I wrote. And do I use this script to read it for me? And then even if it's manual labor for my editor or whatever to put that together, but then that puts a little bit less work on me. And we don't have that ethical issue that you're describing with your real estate story because it's content that I wrote. I just wrote it back in 2012, '13, and maybe even '14.

[00:43:14.140] - Mark Heaps

So this is a good case study for where the problem exists. You, although you're a baller, do not have the resources to train a machine learning model based on your exclusive content. So what's going to happen is, is you say, Hey, I want you to use this, and you give it a Photoshop tip of the day and say, generate a new script based on that tip, it's still going out on what it was trained with to generate all of that content. So you're the prompt, but it was trained on other content. But here's the thing.

[00:43:47.490] - Jesus Ramirez

Maybe just use the script to read it. I could literally say, Hey, here's two, three years worth of content. Now it's an audio file with my voice. Maybe a couple of words sound weird, but now I have my content because I wrote it. I might have written it 10 years ago, but it's still, quote unquote, my voice. And then have my editor put it together and do a screen. He does it, maybe, the screen capture. And then I have more time to record more podcast and more YouTube videos.

[00:44:15.140] - Mark Heaps

I don't know. Now you're landing in the same place that that other guy landed in, which is, I can use this to generate more volume. What we are facing right now, moving into the generative age of AI, and it's very early stages. We're still two or three years away from even really being in a place where this is helpful. But the same thing that happened with the industrial revolution, if you're a history geek like I am, when they talked about manufacturing cars, then the unions threw a big fit about this. There used to be people whose job, their skill, their trade, their craft, was that they could shape steel and aluminum consistently every time so that every car door, every Fender looked beautiful and was the same. And then one day they got a machine that could push that over a mold, did it faster. But they still had a guy running it or a person. Then one day there was a robot arm that picked up the steel, put it down and it pushes the button and runs it and it's got a bunch of sensors and now there's no people to do that job.

[00:45:17.780] - Mark Heaps

So what happened was the goal wasn't to replace those people. The goal was to increase volume of production. This is what the people that are not running away from the technology are realizing, do I want to be the person in charge of the volume of production, or do I want to be the person who fights this and gets pushed off the factory floor? So today there's more people working in automotive industries than there ever has been in history. The difference is they have a different type of role. So if you're the type of person that says, Yeah, but I don't want a different role. I don't want a different role as a creative, as today's creator, which is why I love the theme of your podcast. Then yeah, you're going to struggle. If you say, Hey, I just want to be left alone to drink my matcha tea, listen to my amazing music, and just sit here and draw the way that I love to draw, you're going to have a niche and you're going to have to find clients that respect you and it's going to be harder to brand yourself. That's a niche.

[00:46:24.460] - Mark Heaps

But if you say you love my work and I can produce 40 illustrations in a week that used to take you a month, and you're still the artist that made the first illustration, in three or five years, your production volume goes up, you're highly replicable, and it doesn't mean you need to charge less. It just means that you'll be able to generate more. And if there's anything, there's more cars on the road, there's more people working in automotive, there's more content on the internet, and there's more people generating content. It's actually a very similar paradigm.

[00:46:57.720] - Jesus Ramirez

Well, I for one, welcome our new AI overlords.

[00:47:02.320] - Mark Heaps

It's the classic quote, I for one, welcome my robot overlords.

[00:47:05.870] - Jesus Ramirez

Yeah, it's, oh, my God. We're all going to lose our jobs.

[00:47:09.370] - Mark Heaps

Well, I don't want to scare people, right? But when I was touring as a musician when I was younger, I remember being really upset with electronic producers because they could produce something using these libraries and these patches. I'm like, Man, I spent my whole life learning how to play these instruments. You don't even understand music theory, and you're just pulling stuff together and making songs. Now those are artists that are wildly successful and everybody listens to them. I'm sure your listeners all have a favorite electronic artist or something similar where they're just auto generating music and then stitching it together and doing things. That's been happening for 30 years. And it just keeps getting easier for them. We trained a model at work to where I can literally go in and say, I want a rock song. I want five instruments playing that rock song. And this was one of our engineers developed all of these models himself. And you can say, and I want that rock song, the leading influencer to be Dolly Parton, which is not a rock artist, and the trailing one is Billy Eilish. But it'll take an influence from all of their music and write a brand new song with five instruments.

[00:48:24.860] - Mark Heaps

And it's awesome. But when I get the final output of it, I now see that I can do something with that. I can play over it. I can add more to it. I can mix more with it. I can express it differently. It's going to be the same thing, dude.

[00:48:40.280] - Jesus Ramirez

Yeah. I don't know if it's exactly the same thing, but the way that I feel about it, and again, I'm always optimistic, so maybe I'm just blind and who knows? But a lot of people, especially in the position that I am with the Photoshop training channel, Adobe may come up with a new tool, implement it into Photoshop, and then inevitably there will be a comment that says something along the lines of, Well, what happened to the artistry? This is not the purity of Photoshop anymore. What does that even mean? Where do we draw this line on the sand that this is what it's pure? Because at one point, Photoshop had no layers. Photoshop too.

[00:49:25.530] - Mark Heaps

That's when I started.

[00:49:27.960] - Jesus Ramirez

So everybody who was a master at Photoshop without layers. Yeah, Bertman Roy. Bertman Roy, exactly. Good friend, Bertman Roy. Yeah, exactly. And he's still a master today, no doubt. But the point that I'm trying to make is those people could have made the argument, Photoshop is not pure and no more. These tools are doing the work for you because I needed to do all this work without a layer. But then people today wouldn't even consider touching an application like a photo imaging application that did not have a nondestructive workflow. Layers, for example, they just wouldn't. So then the question goes back, Well, where do we draw that line that this is what it should be? Because every generation could say, Oh, well, you have it easier because you have this tool or AI or whatever. So that's the way I like to think about it. Again, maybe I'm naive, I don't know, but that's the way I see it that it's an inevitable progress of technology. And as you mentioned with your car analogy, we may not be pulling that lever anymore or using those cats or whatever, but we will still have a job at the car factory.

[00:50:40.260] - Jesus Ramirez

It might not be doing those old jobs.

[00:50:42.780] - Mark Heaps

That's exactly spot on. If you love cars, you're happy to be working in an industry around cars. If you love being creative, you're going to want to find a way to use these tools to be creative. For the people that are the true purists, and Bert Munroy is a great example. The guy literally helped mature Photoshop. We wouldn't have brush tools that we have. There would be no Pyle T Webster. Those guys would not exist without Bert Munroy.

[00:51:11.940] - Jesus Ramirez

Photoshop user number six or number four.

[00:51:14.210] - Mark Heaps

I forget. Yeah, I have his book on my shelf over here.

[00:51:17.700] - Jesus Ramirez

First book ever and then Photoshop. First book ever. 1990, I think it was.

[00:51:21.610] - Mark Heaps

And here's a guy that has never slowed down working. He's never. Still an amazing artist, still in high demand. Layers didn't cut him back. He didn't decide to not give away his brush ideas. He just built over it. And here's a guy like Bert who theoretically you could argue AI could do a lot of what he does. But Bert works at a resolution that AI literally cannot produce right now. Oh, God. And it won't. And by the way, the compute level for that won't produce in the next 10 years. So if people figure out how to leverage it, figure out how to use it, and don't take quite an elitist purist mindset to it and say, Hey, I'm a creative. What can I do with this? I think we're going to find that creators take the technology themselves and figure out how to advance it. And that's truly, like I said, there's more people working in automotive today than ever in history. Maybe there's less iron smiths or blacksmith or steel smiths or whatever those jobs were, right? Steel forger. There are some people that do those skills and they're highly sought after because they're specialized.

[00:52:35.600] - Mark Heaps

But there's tens of thousands more people that understand the application of material sciences, the people that run the operations and the logistics in the automotive factory. They are creative and they are professionals and they are equally using their brain and their skills and their hands to do their work. It's just different. And what really happens here is the generational divide. So I have a 13 year old daughter and an 11 year old son. I've shown them Photoshop. I've shown them illustrator. I've tried working with them in it. They think it's stupid. They literally do. When I show them, they're like, Why is this so hard? They literally think it's insanely hard.

[00:53:21.680] - Jesus Ramirez

It was designed in '89. It hasn't changed much.

[00:53:24.380] - Mark Heaps

Yeah, exactly. We'll call Mr. Knowles on that. They don't think about those tools. They go, Well, can't I just go to this? Hey, I have this one app. It auto generates a thing. Oh, I want my face to be this way. I'll do this. Or, Oh, I want to see what I look like with blonde hair. Boom. They get it. They cut. There's auto mask apps online, they do not see it as the proprietary skill. What they care about is getting the job done. And they want to do a job at a high quality. So this is the part where I challenge a lot of folks. And again, I love my community, but you know me, I'm a diehard foodie. When I go eat somewhere and something's amazing, I don't sit back and go, Wow, that was really good. I immediately want to see if I can meet the chef. I'm like, Dude, how do you do this? What are the spices you use? What was the technique here? How long do you have to smoke that barbecue for? I want to understand the craft and the skill it took to make that thing. But most people don't.

[00:54:29.880] - Mark Heaps

Even these people who are purists, who are not supporting other artisan and craftspeople trying to understand the quality of what they do, some people do, but they're not really trying to understand it. The general audience, the general market, who pay us to do what we do, they don't care... Truthfully, I mean, this was right. They don't care what it took for you to make the piece. They're not paying for the 20 hours you worked on something. And some people say, Oh, I charge by the hour. That's a different topic and you're making a mistake. You heard me before, preach about not charging by the hour. But they're paying for the finished piece and the value that finished piece adds to whatever their needs are. Y ou want to be respected for quality of output. If AI can help you increase the quality of output and allows you to take on more customers when we know that there's more demand today than ever in history for content and production, there's no reason you shouldn't be successful with these tools existing.

[00:55:39.640] - Jesus Ramirez

You bring a really interesting insight because you mentioned that you've been a photographer, designer, musician. You've been involved in the creative industry in so many aspects, and now you're in the middle of it with AI. Deeply. Deeply. Yeah. Side story. Mark invited me to an event that you ran, and then I realized, Oh, my God. I'm way out of my league. I got to get the hell out of here because you were like, Oh, yeah, that guy is a millionaire. That guy is the CEO of Dropbox or something, and that guy is Slack CEO. And I'm like, What the hell am I doing here? I didn't even want to talk. I hid under the table. I'm the brokeest person in this party. I'm the least educated. People are like, Yeah, I'm the CEO of whatever tech company. What do you do? I have a YouTube channel. So thank you for the invite. Great food.

[00:56:32.680] - Mark Heaps

The funny thing is, after that event, so many people asked me, that dude says he has two million subscribers online. I'm like, Yeah, at least, if not more, across multiple channels. And they're like, We're a massive tech company. We barely have 30,000 subscribers. How does he do it? So context is everything. They were blown away by you because they can't figure out how to decode, deengineer the way that you have and grow followers and make valuable content that people really want to engage with. So it's all relative.

[00:57:05.820] - Jesus Ramirez

The point of that story was that at this event, I got to see some of the stuff that you guys were working on. So I knew that you had an interesting perspective. As I said, I've talked to other people about this particular topic, but you're the only one that actually is right there boots on the ground dealing with it every day, talking to all kinds of different companies. So your thoughts and input helped bring at least some relief and not having to worry about me jumping out the window or something because the computer is going to take over my job. Now that I hear Howard Pinski is getting AIS to write Photoshop tutorials, I'm.

[00:57:42.510] - Mark Heaps

A little worried. He showed me the video of that, or he posted the video of that online, and it was really exciting to see how good a job it did. He could have published it that night and it would have been a good tutor. You could do a Photoshop tip of the day through chat GPT and never write anything yourself.

[00:57:57.560] - Jesus Ramirez

And there's enough content. All right, well, I'm going to definitely edit this out because I'm going to stay.

[00:58:02.980] - Mark Heaps

But I'll tell you, here's where I balance it. And above my own selfish needs and wants, I want to see the world be a better place. I want to know that when I leave it, it's better than when I started being a part of it. And I got to work on a drug discovery project with a national lab that was trying to find a new drug to help with the COVID problem. And their current level of compute, so they have a model, they tell this model here's a drug compound, the ingredients of the drug, and do they stick to this protein? Because we know this protein is part of COVID. And every time they had one ingredient shift by one degree, they'd have to run that model, massive amount of data in the library would take them three and a half days to run it. Wow. That was on the existing GPU systems that were in the market. This is massive NVIDIA system. They got that model up and running, and it took a long time, but we got it up and running on our hardware at Groq, they could run that model in minutes.

[00:59:08.680] - Mark Heaps

Incredible. What I know is this solution sped up discovery for drugs with COVID. Now, I've spoken to that senior scientist there. I asked, What are you guys doing today? He said, We're using the same model to try to figure out what happens when a drug attacks cancer now. He says, And we're able to accelerate workloads by hundreds of X performance, which means if we thought we were on a trajectory to discover a cancer treatment that was radical and effective in 10 years, we might have just shortened that to two. When I think about image generation like Dali, we're all thinking about the artists and the illustrators, but imagine the scientist who can simulate and say, Okay, I've trained you on all the images of tumors. What would it look like if we blasted it this way, or we cut it this way, or we came at it this way. And it can generate an image so realistic that the surgeon can see it and go, Oh, my God. We hadn't thought about that. I'm willing to invest in this technology and make the trade offs to get us to that place that is better for everybody in society.

[01:00:18.660] - Mark Heaps

So that's really where my heart is in this and why I'm so deep in sticking in it because image generation, yeah, for stock assets, things like that, that's great. But think about what it's going to do for self driving cars, what it's going to do for the medical industry, what it's going to do for pharmaceutical. Now there's going to be some weird ones like advertising. There's just going to be noise. But at the end of the day, the trade off is an advanced society where we can really help some people. And that to me is worth it.

[01:00:53.200] - Jesus Ramirez

100 % man. And I think that's a great spot to end the AI talk. Sure.

[01:00:58.980] - Mark Heaps

I would want to have.

[01:01:00.000] - Jesus Ramirez

A lot of AI. No, seriously, you know this. I do have some worries, reservations around it, but I do believe that at the end of the day, even though it could be, I'm not saying it will be, but it could be detrimental for my creative industry. I realized that for other areas, like the medical industry, it's just going to save thousands of lives, and that is incredible. So I'm excited to see what companies like yours do in those areas. I like to end the show by asking a series of lightning round questions. Okay. These questions.

[01:01:33.280] - Mark Heaps

Can be... Let me get up.

[01:01:34.840] - Jesus Ramirez

Let me settle up here. No, man, these are going to be some interesting questions, I hope. You can give me a short answer, a long answer. You can go into a story. You can say skip, no pressure. Okay. Cool. The first question is, tell us a shocking fact about yourself.

[01:01:50.630] - Mark Heaps

My favorite sandwich is peanut butter and ketchup.

[01:01:52.700] - Jesus Ramirez

You know what? You're the only other person in the world who shares my love for ketchup. You eat as much ketchup, if not more than me. And I eat a lot of ketchup.

[01:01:58.880] - Mark Heaps

I eat a lot of ketchup. It was in my wedding vows.

[01:02:02.900] - Jesus Ramirez

What was your.

[01:02:03.840] - Mark Heaps

Wedding vows? In my wedding vows, we wrote in there that if our house ever does not have ketchup, then it voids our contract and I can leave this marriage.

[01:02:13.760] - Jesus Ramirez

You know what's funny, Bayly? My last name on her phone is ketchup.

[01:02:19.520] - Mark Heaps

That's awesome. I'm a big fan of ketchup.

[01:02:24.360] - Jesus Ramirez

So am I, man. When was the last time you felt proud of yourself?

[01:02:31.100] - Mark Heaps

Oh, wow. You hit home on that one. I don't normally. I don't feel proud of myself. A lot of people see things that I do and they're like, Wow, it's amazing or impressive. You should be really proud. I'm not because... Well, there's a lot of reasons, but I always want to do the next thing. I will say the proud moments for me these days is my kids.

[01:03:01.740] - Jesus Ramirez

I was going to stop you because I was going to... Because you're one of my best friends and I know what the answer is. Your daughter won a... What was it?

[01:03:10.630] - Mark Heaps

Jutsu Championship?

[01:03:12.010] - Jesus Ramirez

Taekwondo. Taekwondo Championship. And I know you're immensely proud.

[01:03:15.800] - Mark Heaps

I am, yeah. So I'm very rarely proud of myself, but I'm proud every day of my kids. I just have two amazing kids. She's a competitive taekwondo athlete competing at a national level. My son is 11 years old and he's writing in Python and developing his own apps. We have him in this after school program. He's just doing amazing stuff that I couldn't even have imagined doing when I was 11 years old. I could barely put my pants on at 11. And he's literally 3D printing Pokémon model to give to his friends. That's super cool.

[01:03:50.640] - Jesus Ramirez

What is the best compliment you've ever received?

[01:03:54.560] - Mark Heaps

Oh, wow. Oh, wow. I don't know. I've received a bunch. I can tell you one of the coolest moments, and it has nothing to do with being a designer or this industry, but I was touring in a band. One of our songs was being played on a radio station in Sacramento a lot, and we played at this place called the Boardwalk. And this kid came up to the side of the stage during the show, and he was obviously had some medical physical ailment. He was on one of those really intense crutch systems, could barely stand up. And he asked if he could come up on stage, and we're in the middle of playing. I put my guitar down, I ran over, I helped bring him up on stage. I was the front man of the band. I was like, What do you want? There's a crowd, there's hundreds of people. I'm like, What do you want, man? He says, I want a Crowd surf. I'm thinking like, Oh, my God. I'm going to kill this kid. I can't put him on the... What if they drop him? He's clearly fragile. I was really worried. He literally said, Just put me at the edge of the stage.

[01:05:06.340] - Mark Heaps

And I did. He fell off. I watched near 600 people carry him safely to the back and put him down very carefully. His dad was back there. After the show, his dad came up to me and he says, You have no idea what you just did for my son. You're one of the best human beings I've ever met. Oh, my God. That was a really powerful compliment that I really did nothing for, but that I got it in that moment. So for me, that was a really powerful... That was nearly 20 years ago, and that still sticks.

[01:05:43.880] - Jesus Ramirez

With me. It would with me as well. What is the best piece of advice you've ever been given, whether it's personal or in business?

[01:05:52.020] - Mark Heaps

A valuable lesson I learned from one of my instructors when I was in college in the UK was he said, Artists only have one person to please, and that's themselves. Designers provide a service and they have clients and audiences to please. He actually went up to my final illustration, which was pre computers. I had this huge poster I had to design, and he actually took a brush with white paint on it and he flipped it right across it. I got really upset and I legitimately thought about punching him. And he said to me, he goes, Why are you getting upset? I was like, You just ruined my piece. And he said, Do you have the skills to be able to execute that piece? And I said, Yeah, I did it. And he goes, Can you redo it? I said, Of course. And he goes, That's what it's like being a designer.

[01:06:37.770] - Jesus Ramirez

Oh, my God.

[01:06:39.030] - Mark Heaps

What a lesson. And it was a very valuable, tough lesson. The other one that I love is have a short memory. It's really easy to obsess about the things you did wrong, things that you failed at, things that you struggled with. You know a bit of my personal story. It hasn't been an easy journey. If you keep a long memory about those things that you're struggles, you included have had a really colorful journey, it becomes a distraction from accomplishing your true goals and you're reaching your full potential. Someone told me once, have a short memory in business and in life. And that has served me very well.

[01:07:19.920] - Jesus Ramirez

Very good pieces of advice for sure. Have you had an I made it moment?

[01:07:28.420] - Mark Heaps

Man, you're hitting me with some good ones tonight.

[01:07:30.490] - Jesus Ramirez

Jeez. Yeah, we're recording pretty late at night. You already had.

[01:07:35.340] - Mark Heaps

A full day. That's true.

[01:07:37.700] - Jesus Ramirez

Not going to be able to go to bed now.

[01:07:38.800] - Mark Heaps

Have I had an I made it moment? I've had a few in varying degrees, right? The first time I heard one of my songs played on the radio, that was crazy.

[01:07:48.640] - Jesus Ramirez

That must have been crazy.

[01:07:51.480] - Mark Heaps

The first time I was invited to speak at Adobe Max, that felt like an I made it moment, right? Which a lot of people are like, Oh, you're just speaking at a conference. But not even two or three years before that, I was sleeping in my car at the parking garage outside of the conference, the convention center, because I couldn't afford a hotel. Just hoping I could attend and learn as much as possible. And just a few years later, I was speaking at the event. The first time I stepped on stage, I really felt like... Not I made it like, I'm somebody, but I'd rounded a curve. And all I hoped at the end of that event was that I helped some people. And when I got the survey results back, the comments were so kind and so appreciative, made me feel like I'd helped some people. And that's all I ever really want to do. The whole reason I do all of this is I hope that it helps somebody.

[01:08:51.000] - Jesus Ramirez

And I'm going to brag for you, you were at my first Adobe Max, you were ranked the number one speaker out of 200 plus speakers. So everyone evaluates each speaker on a number of categories, and they'll give you a score from 1 to 5 comments included. And out of those 200 plus people, you had the highest ratings out of anyone. So congrats still to this day.

[01:09:15.940] - Mark Heaps

Incredible. Yeah, thanks, man. I appreciate that. Those were the moments where it was like, like most creativists, I'm riddled with self doubt. I have terrible anxiety. I have all kinds of emotions. Nobody got into this field because they felt like they were brilliant. I was a comic book nerd who skateboarded that wanted to do stuff. And so the feeling like you were respected is a great I made it moment experience. And being able to prove you could help people change their production, their workflow, whatever, really made me feel like I'd accomplished something. So yeah, that was probably up there.

[01:09:58.140] - Jesus Ramirez

I've interviewed a mutual friend, Aaron Nace, from Flerne as well. And when I asked them this question, he asked me, What's your answer? I said, I've had several where... Sure, I can say I got invited to speak at this conference, that conference. You and I went to Sydney, Australia for a conference. That felt pretty good. Getting invited across the world. You, me, and our friend Theresa Jackson to give a presentation in Sydney. It was amazing. But all that feels great to know that. But to me, the big, huge I made in the moments are so silly. I remember getting a text message from Burtman Roy, who we were just discussing, asking me if I had time to help him with a Photoshop question. And that to me was like, Oh, my God. I made it. Oh, my God.

[01:10:42.970] - Mark Heaps

The master becomes the student.

[01:10:45.940] - Jesus Ramirez

I mean, God, no. But it was a good feeling. And it's funny because that was private. I guess I'm saying it public now, but that happened many years ago. It's not like it just happened last week. But the point is that that had such an impact and I was so excited for a week. I'm not trying to say that getting invited to do events and all that and singing my name up in different places doesn't feel good. It does. It feels great. But those little things somehow.

[01:11:12.280] - Mark Heaps

Top that. They all add up. One of your other guests is a mutual friend of ours, Colin Smith. I worshiped Colin in the early days of Photoshop, which is funny to say, but I was teaching.

[01:11:26.310] - Jesus Ramirez

Because we're all friends.

[01:11:27.020] - Mark Heaps

Yeah, but I was teaching at a small college. Colin was really making a breakaway name for himself in Photoshop User Magazine and other outlets. I remember coming to my class one night and saying, Look at what this guy has done in Photoshop. I remember looking at this watch and guitar illustration he'd done and sitting there, I spent no lie, I probably spent 100 hours deengineering how Colin made this I've Been His Guitar illustration in Photoshop, and I wanted to understand it. And then same thing, I remember years later, Colin Payme goes, Hey, man, how do you do this? I was like, This is a cool moment. Not because it's like you surpass the master or whatever like that, but I was like, Oh, my gosh, we have a mutual respect. That's awesome. And that feels very t's.

[01:12:14.250] - Jesus Ramirez

What it is. That's what it is. When I realized that I had the mutual respect of people, I looked up to growing up. That's right. That's what it is. Yeah, totally. Not that I think I'm better than them, but the fact that they consider that I'm at whatever. If you want to divide things up into level, that we're on the same floor.

[01:12:31.320] - Mark Heaps

That makes it. Oh, dude, the first time I ever got to hang out with Ben Wilmore and just geek out on stuff, and he was like, Hey, I saw you did a thing. Why do you do it that way? And literally inside I was like, Ben's asking me questions.

[01:12:44.380] - Jesus Ramirez

It's crazy. It's pretty funny. This will be an interesting one for you. What's your favorite city in the world besides Austin, Texas? Because I know you would have said Austin.

[01:12:57.840] - Mark Heaps

Right away. I would have said Austin right away because that's why I moved here. Okay, so I love travel, so there's so many answers to this question. I know. I'm going to be a little... Where do I go to recharge my creative juices?

[01:13:13.580] - Jesus Ramirez

Good one. New Orleans. You know what? It's so funny that you like it so much. I didn't like it as much. Sorry to anyone listening to us from there. I've only been once. And it was actually with you. We were together there for Creative Pro, but it was mainly work, so I didn't really get to experience it. I only got to experience Bourbon Street, so I didn't really get to experience much of it. Bailey, my partner, that's her favorite city in the world as well. So it's interesting that both of you who are really close to me, that's your favorite city. And I'm like, Oh, yeah, I didn't like it. But again, it's just Bourbon Street for me. So then I really.

[01:13:46.820] - Mark Heaps

Haven't seen it. Yeah, you have to get away from the party central, right? But to me, there's a soul there that Silicon Valley doesn't have. There's a grit and a texture there that is so creative. And there's so many cultures that mash up there between Spanish, Creole, French, American, and Southern culture, which is a big part of my life. I grew up around the South. Obviously, this big part of my story is being in New Orleans at one point. And so there is a soul there that just I've never experienced anywhere else in the world. And it's a different city today than it was when I was a kid. I probably wouldn't walk around it in the way that I used to. But it has all of those categories. The food has soul, the art has soul, the music has soul, the people have soul, the fashion has soul, the parties have soul. It's just so pure. And yet it's so poor and it's so not well served that it deserves better. But it always comes out with just this soul that I can't find anywhere else.

[01:15:00.790] - Jesus Ramirez

Fair enough. You know what? I got to give it another try.

[01:15:03.520] - Mark Heaps

Yeah, man, you got to go back with me.

[01:15:04.760] - Jesus Ramirez

I have to. I have to. We'll take Bayly and.

[01:15:06.600] - Mark Heaps

It'll be great. I will say, though, a city that I'd never gone to that blew me away, and I traveled with you, we went and go get a talk at Mexico City. Yes. And I'd never been to Mexico, and I didn't know what to expect. At all. Ever, right?

[01:15:20.560] - Jesus Ramirez

That was your first time. Yeah, I remember.

[01:15:22.100] - Mark Heaps

And I still think about that city.

[01:15:24.780] - Jesus Ramirez

It's a great city. It's one of my favorites. I got to explore it, perhaps more in depth with you than other times I had gone, but I had already had a soft spot for it. Do you have any favorite quotes?

[01:15:38.520] - Mark Heaps

One of the ones that really sticks with me a lot is, and I forget who originally said it. I think it's just an open adage, but it's keep your feet on today and your eyes on tomorrow. And I use that one a lot. One that is going to sound so egotistical, so I'm going to apologize in advance. But when I was 16, I wrote in a sketchbook, and it became my life mantra. I wrote, persistence is the truist test of patience. And what I mean by that is, you never run out of your abilities. You will never go backwards in your skills. You'll never go backwards in what you're capable of. What you will run out of a lot is patience. So persistence is actually the test. It's the truist test of patience. It's not a test of your skills or your craft or anything else. So I very often remind myself when I get frustrated, when I want to give up, when I'm not liking the way things are going, it's not that I'm failing in that moment is that I've run out of patience. And so I need to step away, gather myself, find my patience, and dive back in.

[01:16:53.500] - Mark Heaps

So I offer that quote to anybody else that it might help.

[01:16:58.880] - Jesus Ramirez

Great. No, I love it. Of course, Mark, you're the only person I've asked so far that actually quoted themselves.

[01:17:04.060] - Mark Heaps

I know I feel terrible about that, but it's.

[01:17:08.090] - Jesus Ramirez

[01:17:08.220] - Mark Heaps

Good one. It's one of the ones that I live by.

[01:17:11.380] - Jesus Ramirez

I'll say this, I know you, so I know it's cool. But other people, I don't.

[01:17:14.810] - Mark Heaps

Know how people are going to think I'm an egotistical jerk now.

[01:17:18.620] - Jesus Ramirez

No, but that's what I think, too.

[01:17:20.740] - Mark Heaps

I'll quote David Blattner, Stop Working and say, Okay.

[01:17:23.400] - Jesus Ramirez

There you go. Yes, there you go. What's the most difficult part about being a creative? I know that now includes you working at a Croc, so do you want to switch it over to your Java Croc or just being a creative in general?

[01:17:40.670] - Mark Heaps

Yeah. I think the most difficult part about being a professional creative is accepting the fact that you play a part where when other people can't come up with the idea or they don't know how to start something. They look to you to do that. They look to you to have the idea. Whether that's your friends going on a road trip with you, where should we go? Where should we go to dinner? You're generally going to be the person who they turn to for the idea. Not a lot of people are ready for that responsibility. So to me, that's the most difficult thing is there are days where I'm like, You guys decide. I'm tired. I don't want to do that. But ultimately, that is the task of being a professional creative is you should always be able to generate some ideas, even the bad ones, even the ones that are terrible, that fail, get them out of the way. But you always have to be able to generate the idea. And I think that's one of the hardest things today.

[01:18:41.060] - Jesus Ramirez

What is something that people often get wrong about you? Any misconceptions about Marquise? Besides being egotistical and quote, unquote.

[01:18:50.380] - Mark Heaps

There was one, I'll quote, somebody that came up to me at a conference and she said to me, I really thought you'd be way meaner than you are. Really? Yeah. And I.

[01:19:00.650] - Jesus Ramirez

Said, Why do people assume you're mean?

[01:19:02.670] - Mark Heaps

I said, Why? And she goes, Well, you're like a big dude. I'm not small. I'm 6'3, 230 plus pounds and I'm covered in tattoos. I think between that and maybe the directness in the way that I speak sometimes at events, I think she assumed that I was mean. I hope people who have that assumption, maybe it gets corrected and they get to meet me at some point. The other part that I think a lot of people expect is, and this is more in my personal life is, they know that I played in tour in rock bands and metal bands and things like that. They don't expect me to like no jazz, no country. I love all music, I love all art, I love all creativity. And so I think a lot of people make an assumption that because of the way that I look and my background, they assume I'm a certain type of persona, but I'm not. I really love all things.

[01:20:02.360] - Jesus Ramirez

My misconception about you...

[01:20:04.420] - Mark Heaps

Oh.

[01:20:04.550] - Jesus Ramirez

Yeah, this will be interesting. In that context of you being in a rock band and touring and all that was, Oh, my God. This guy's going to like to party. Oh, yeah. That's true. You and I have been to Vegas many times, and I don't party. I mean, you know this. I'm a little mouse. I hide in the corner. Compared to you, I'm jumping off a chandelier. I was just expecting even just a little bit. You have zero.

[01:20:32.060] - Mark Heaps

Of that. Yeah, I would rather be the person that drives you home. I'd rather be the person setting up the lights. I really don't like being the center of the party and I don't want to be in the mix of the party. I want to make sure everyone else is having a good party. But yeah, I almost never drink. To this day, I've never taken a creative, enhancing chemical. Same here. I got nothing against people that have done it. I've got great friends that do that and good for them if that's their path. But a lot of people, I get offered a lot of stuff at a lot of events because of the way I look and people know my background. I'm really lame, man. I met my wife when she was 18. We've been together 26 years. I never did anything when I toured with bands. I'm pretty boring.

[01:21:20.480] - Jesus Ramirez

You're a dad.

[01:21:21.700] - Mark Heaps

And now I'm a dad, right? And I'm hopefully a really effective.

[01:21:24.900] - Jesus Ramirez

Boring dad. Well, all your free time goes to your kids. I know that. That's true. The last question is, what would you like to be remembered for? What mark do you want to leave in the world? Oh, man.

[01:21:34.430] - Mark Heaps

This is going to get dark.

[01:21:37.740] - Jesus Ramirez

Let's do it.

[01:21:38.150] - Mark Heaps

I have a joke that I tell all my friends. I'm sure I've told you at some point, but someone asked me, What will happen when you leave the world? I said, If I've left the world effectively, the day that my friends get together to discuss what to put on my headstone, like, What was he? Was he this? Was he that? I want them to end up in a huge argument because if I've lived life to the fullest, they won't be able to decide. I love this idea that my job is to live so much that nobody could put one thing on the headstone. A good friend of mine, Phil Toole, said something to me one day that was really prolific because I didn't have a definition of this lifestyle. He said, You're a Renaissance man. I didn't really appreciate that. And then it stuck, right? I love cooking and I love drawing and all the things that I do. And so I hope when I leave this world, people remember that.

[01:22:44.140] - Jesus Ramirez

Well, if I'm part of that conversation. You're just.

[01:22:46.000] - Mark Heaps

Going to say ketchup.

[01:22:48.690] - Jesus Ramirez

Ketchup, yeah. No, being completely serious, I would say he would want nothing more than talk about his love for his children. That is something about his kids, whether it's the love for the kids, how proud he is of his kids, how he feels about his family. I think that'll top any professional achievement. I hope so.

[01:23:10.060] - Mark Heaps

I hope so. And anybody that's been to any of my talks knows I get really bad anxiety going on stage. So I start every talk talking about my family because they're everything.

[01:23:20.660] - Jesus Ramirez

100 %. Well, my friend, thank you so much for joining us in today's creator. I know I'm going to have you back. There's so many things I want to talk to you about that we can actually record, things that we talk about all the time. But thank you so much for joining me today.

[01:23:33.850] - Mark Heaps

Thanks for having me and thanks for doing this so that people can learn from your network and all these amazing people that you're connected to. I consider myself fortunate to be maybe included in that circle. So thanks, man.

The Truth About AI Getting "Creative" - w/ Mark Heaps

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