Dare to build at the speed of curiosity - Russ Mashmeyer (Meta AI)

0:09I think people get really worried by the idea that AI can replace human cognitive function and creativity, but I actually think that that's not fundamentally what AI models do. AI models compute and deliver the mean at the average of a particular request or topic, and they are trained to do that. That's the goal of the model is to deliver mediocre, average, expected results. And that's just not what pushes culture forward, right? But if you have a particular area where you go really, you're an incredible painter, but you're really bad at writing your artist abstract, well, gosh, you've got a great tool to help you get your words onto the page in a way that can make sense to other people, supporting your intent, driving your painting work forward, but supported by AI, not placed by AI.

1:08Welcome to the Daring Creativity Podcast, a show about daring to forever explore creativity that isn't about chasing shiny perfection. It's about showing up with all your doubts and imperfections and making them count. It's about becoming more of who you already are. My name is Raleigh Malinic. I'm a designer, author and eternally curious human being. I'm talking to a broad range of guests who share their stories of small actions that sparked lifetime discoveries, taking one step towards the thing that made them feel most alive. Let me begin this episode with question are you ready to discover what happens when you dare to create

1:57today i was speaking with russell mashmeyer a product design director at meta who bridges fine art music and artificial intelligence while maintaining an unwavering curiosity about how things work and what becomes possible next from working on early facebook search technology to now being in Meta's current AI team, he works on products used by billions. He's always driven by the belief that software is an artistic medium and technology should accelerate human creativity rather than replace it. In this conversation, Russ discusses the challenges of maintaining creative naivety alongside imposter syndrome, and we talk at depth about the reality of AI models and why human taste is more essential than ever.

2:42It's my pleasure to share with you my conversation with Russell Moshmeier.

2:51Hey Russ, how are you doing today? It's great to have you on the show. Super good to be here, really excited, Rudy. For those who may have never heard of Russ Moshmeier, how would you introduce yourself? Well, I'm a product design director at Meta. I'm working specifically kind of in the AI space and just really exploring what's emerging as possibilities because AI is constantly expanding what it's capable of and that unlocks like a lot of new possibilities I think for the kinds of software we can build and you've had a ton of creative people on and they make different kinds of media whether that's written media or visual media I think of myself really more as an artist working in the software medium I like that answer because I mean have a look through you know your breadcrumbs that you've got online and things that you do and sort of some of the things that you promote that you've created and the artistry through code has been pretty much main path of your life so far right yeah it's funny I mean I started my adult productive life in college studying fine art and so I was deep into drawing like very realistic drawing and painting, installation art, performance art.

4:07I just did a lot of ridiculous, hilarious projects and interesting, you know, investigations as an art student at NYU. And then when I left, I actually found myself like not very excited about kind of the gallery world of fine art. And that was really the immediate direct path out of the undergrad program that I had been a part of in New York. And, you know, obviously there's no better place in the world, I think, to study art than New York, just because of the density of networks and galleries and artists and incredible history there. And so that's really what I went for. And I really expected to come out of that program to become a fine artist.

4:46But instead, along the way, I actually kind of fell out of love with just the way art reaches the world and kind of how the world sees and interacts with art in lots of exclusive white rooms that you know you get side eye at for just occupying you know if you look like you can't afford what's in there and I think that kind of engagement that kind of that mode of creating art and bringing it to the world just didn't appeal to me as much and so when I left art school I was kind of like trying to figure out what to do next and I stumbled my way into becoming a member of a band there was a band at NYU that was really popular as we were going through the years of school and and I was super excited when you know in senior year they you know they were losing their guitarist and they came to a house party at my apartment they saw I had guitars and a keyboard played music and they were like we're losing a member do you want to join and I was like absolutely that's like a dream come true so I you know I spent the next four or five years as a member of this band called the XYZ Affair in New York you know we were kind of part of the Brooklyn indie scene in the early aughts not very successful but it was a lot of fun and and really what it opened up for me is working in digital media, building websites for my band and really turning that into kind of an art form of itself.

6:01This was the age of Flash. So I was just going ham as an art student in Flash and like picking up ActionScript and sort of learning some of that world of development, but mixed with really rich art and animation. That became kind of my playground, was like our band's website. And that led to doing other band's websites and then recording studio websites and then small brands and labels and other things and really branched out from there to do you know kind of a full suite of design services and so it sort of leveraged my early like fine art skills to sort of enter into this world of design and software and the web which was really exciting at the time.

6:38I love that story absolutely love it because it's the power of music that kind of leads you onto the next because what I want to know about your 45 years as a musician did you guys play gigs did you i mean as you said the band was fairly famous fairly successful we recorded a full-length album a couple of eps we toured nationally we unfortunately were not good enough or popular enough to get a tour manager which is what you typically like work with in order to set up these national tours but we you know we worked with other bands that we were friends with we made contacts in other cities and we set up our own kind of like national tour and hit South by Southwest and did a bunch of other like really really fun shows along the way and it was incredible oh my god like how many people get a chance to like stuff themselves into a conversion van with three of their best friends and just drive around the country like goofing off and playing shows and trying to make something kind of happen in the creative space it was it was really exhilarating what was your life for music like what was the thing that made you pick up a guitar was there any particular band any particular song what was that I've always really love sort of more confessional quiet artists folks like elliot smith i mean i love jeff tweede and wilco it's just like his voice has just been like a lifelong sort of thread in my life of just different albums and different eras uncle tupelo and of course wilco and his more recent solo stuff with tweede and you know his kids which is man what a lifelong dream to be able to like be a musician but then you know make music with your kids i'm in my studio space today which is you know not only a space for me to build stuff and get creative but it's also kind of like a rehearsal and music space you know my son is is learning drums and so we're we're getting pretty excited about just rehearsing and playing and just having fun together with music as a family i think it'd be really amazing so some of that is drafting off of i think jeff tweede's vibes and aura there that's amazing because i had your wife on the podcast a while ago and she was telling me like she was learning to play drums and it's amazing because i think having our kids to see that flow of music and creativity from us is a gift because i've spoken to so many people and some people have totally non-creative parents and they're created now but i think there's a little advantage when you just show them a real time that sort of opportunity of what they can do of just having fun and just appreciating that.

9:08You never know where you find a pocket of creativity, right? I think kids really need to see adults play, right? They need to see that continuity, that that behavior that they just engage so naturally in as kids is okay in adulthood. Because so much of adulthood is about sort of taking care of priorities and getting down to business and getting stuff done. but opening up that window to let your kids see you flub a line or fail but do it with a smile and having fun and like doing something together in synchrony with other people that creates moments of beauty and wonder and awesomeness man i wish i grew up a little bit more in a space i mean i was very lucky my parents were very supportive of my you know my my desire to study art and explore art and music, but they themselves were not very creative people.

10:01Where did you grow up? I grew up in Georgia, so the American South. I grew up in a little suburb outside of Atlanta called Alpharetta. I actually haven't been there in 20 years. My folks moved to Florida in the mid-aughts, and so I actually haven't been back to my hometown, but my friends tell me that it's just absolutely transformed as a place. It used to be mostly like horse pastures. And, you know, when my family first moved there, I was born in Tennessee, very much foreign spread in the American South. I went to NYU, obviously, when I was 18 for college, but until then, you know, grew up entirely in Tennessee and Georgia.

10:40And yeah, no, apparently my hometown is now unrecognizable. It's just luxury condos in the downtown and just every like fancy brand and store you can imagine. And it used to just be like a little greasy spoon diner and like an old bank and like the 75 year old high school. And that was the whole downtown when I grew up there. And so I'm looking forward to actually bringing Jess someday because she's never been there either. Yeah. I mean, would you moan the demise of the old greasy spoon and a small bank? It'll just be a totally different place. I think it'll just be more of a curiosity visit than a desire necessarily to connect with, I think, what used to be there, which I think is, you know, most likely long gone.

11:22But I've still got a number of friends, you know, from high school and other things down there who are still in the old, you know, sort of neighborhoods I used to live in and sending their kids to the same school by name. It's a new building, new place, but same name. And so I'll look forward to catching up with them when I head there. What was the jump like? So you go from quieter place into into new york to study and change of scenery what was that effect on you like how did that inspire you you know i mentioned a little bit about my hometown how when we first moved there as a family it was mostly like horse pastures it was on a crazy growth trajectory as a population center as an exurb of atlanta it just became kind of the place or one of the two or three places that if you were an upwardly mobile person moving to Atlanta, which was exploding as a commercial and business scene during the time I was growing up, there were just a handful of places you would really move if you didn't want to live in the city itself.

12:21And Alpharetta was one of those places. So it just grew insanely fast. I think we were, our house was in one of the first large planned communities in Alpharetta. But then over the next whatever 18 years or whatever 16 years that I lived there probably 40 more sprung up and there was like this whole mall and my point is the whole town was basically built during my lifetime and it really didn't exist before then and so my early childhood experience was spent in this place where everything was new all the time and that's really exciting and really fun it's oh my gosh there's this new mall there's this new store there's this new restaurant but they were all chains They were all the same places you could kind of like get everywhere else in the country.

13:05There was really no unique commercial history, business history, industrial history. And when I went to New York and toured NYU for the first time, just to see what it might be like as I was touring, touring potential schools, the thing that struck me when I just walked into the streets of New York for the first time was how old everything was. And that was fascinating to me. I loved being in a place with so many layers of history, not just in the creative sphere, but in every sphere. Buildings were old. The culture was old. The networks were old. Just like everything about New York was so much older than anything I'd experienced.

13:49And, you know, as somebody growing up in the UK, Europe, you know, you're kind of constantly surrounded by history. and that was really what I was lacking growing up in Georgia was any real history to the place that I grew up in and so that was what really enchanted me and sort of drew me to New York was trying to be a part of and learn from you know kind of that history and just really enjoy it live in that persistence of that history. It's interesting what you said about New York and what you said potentially about and for example my experience of London is just once you start looking up beyond the shop windows and start seeing all the details and you know what i said do you know do you mourn about the demise of the quiet pastures and you know the horse trails because we need to observe some of those details because the modern architecture because it goes up so quickly and detail is not there sometimes people get it right sometimes they don't and you kind of think like how much time did they spend on this building of this magnitude of that layers of that detailing because that's what we appreciate now that's what that's why people travel from different countries not saying hey you've got new high rises let's see those no one says that they go hey i really want to see that detail of that past and when you start digging into the stories and as you said the layers of history it's fascinating utterly utterly fascinating so yeah i love when you said you know it surprised me how everything was old coming from place because the quote you said when you were growing up that everything is new and when you think about what you do now through your love of action scripting making band websites you know being into the code where does it take you on a commercial path of a working designer coder and now director of product we'll be back after a quick break this episode is brought to you by lax coffee co the first creative speciality coffee company building a platform to shine the light on emerging global talent with a mission to make a positive impact on a creative industry and beyond lax coffee co offers exceptional coffee sourced from around the world through ethical and sustainable practices and you can discover the current range of signature blends and single origins, coffee hardware and accessories, along with exceptional apparel at luxcoffee.co.uk.

16:18You can use the code podcast to get 15 % off your first order.

16:31you know so i i had this kind of grounding in fine art and then you know i i sort of consider my band my first startup in a lot of ways right i mean that's really what it is you're trying to get an entrepreneurial effort that creates products that people love off the ground and so there's just a ton to learn through that experience and that entrepreneurialism And then, you know, somewhere along that path, obviously, I was, you know, kind of continuing to do website design, brand design, you know, this kind of work for a string of clients, both in small agencies and, you know, on my own. And sort of sharpening my skills transitioned out of the era of Flash into the era of web standards and WordPress sites and skinning WordPress sites and sort of building out this online infrastructure for small brands and businesses.

17:20You know, whether that's just like a marketing site or whether it's a small product they offer to their customers. Just doing really simple stuff like that in the early web when like applications were really starting to come to life for the first time in Web 2.0. And along the way, Jess actually told me about a new program, grad program, at the School of Visual Arts in New York where we met and lived together. I was in the band at the time, but we were four or five years in. We had released an album, a couple of EPs. It wasn't really gaining momentum, I would say. When she shared this program in interaction design at FDA, I went down the course list and the class list and I was just like, I am so excited to learn every single one of these things.

18:09It was just like right place, right time kind of thing. And the program hadn't existed the year before. This was like the first class. They were just spinning it up. Liz Danzico was the chair of the program. She's incredible. I went and I met with her and talked with her about the program. But I was just so excited to learn about things like just like really to level up my nerdery, learn about things like cybernetics, strategic entrepreneurialism, actual like development, software development, but also lightweight UXR. Obviously, you know, core design principles, content strategy, just like everything that kind of is core to what we do today within product design.

18:47That's really what the interaction design program was. Strategic innovation, just so many things that I was just so excited to get my hands dirty with. After many years of mostly making like brochure wear for brands, I really wanted to make products. I wanted to make things that people could use in their everyday lives that would unlock something new for them. And that's really what I've been kind of trying to do ever since is like getting into that space of new possibility and seeing, hey, this just came out last week, this new framework, this new API, this new model, this new AI model, like what now does that make possible that wasn't possible last week?

19:25That's amazing because as you were sort of reeling off the modules and the features, there'd be lots of regular listeners looking around the room. What do you mean lightweight UXR? It's like literally you speak in different language to most of the people, but where was the passion? when you got introduced to this course which obviously didn't exist even a year before you knew what these things were and i want to sort of find out where was that sort of guiding light inside you i want to know more about this because it's a part of my book i'm writing daring creativity i'm thinking about the topic of now versus how most of the things that we do we don't necessarily start because we know how to do it we want to start now because we've got sort of a library of ideas, library of influences, inspiration and information, kind of putting it all together and going, you know what, I want to start this now.

20:17I don't know how to do it yet, because if I knew, I don't think I potentially would be even interested. So in your case, that moment when you knew, what was the hundreds and thousands of different sort of decisions coming together and saying, that's my calling? That's a great question. I think it was a number of threads. you know since i was a kid i've been fascinated with the future and sort of like thinking about how to kind of predict the future like sort of like futurists do you know they sort of like they sort of keep track and tabs okay well what's emerging in different fields what do the experts think is like kind of the next wave and how do we like think about what that's going to do in terms of you know what it unlocks for people's everyday lives, but also what the downstream implications to society might be and all the ways you kind of built the world.

21:07And I think the future, right, is like one thing to kind of pin on my like mood board of what drove me here. And then the other is just like a real curiosity to understand how the world works. For some reason, since I was just a little kid, I have just, I have just needed to understand how everything that exists works. how does it get made? How does it work? Where does it come from? Who makes it? I certainly don't have comprehensive knowledge of everything. I'm only 43. I've got a number of years left to go and lots of fields to investigate and learn about. But certainly, the places where I've been really interested is software computers.

21:49As a kid, growing up in the 80s, they were just becoming so powerful. The personal computer had emerged. I played video games and then the early web. But I didn't understand fundamentally how any of it worked. It just seemed to be this like magic sort of experience. And it was really important to me to fundamentally understand how humans made this thing. I mean, how it works. And so that kind of insatiable curiosity to just mechanically understand the world has been kind of another one of those things that I put on my mood board as a key pin for what drove me in. And the program itself seemed like a way to open those doors to really understand how so much of what we use in this world, I mean, certainly around technology, not just the software and the screens that we look at and the information conveyed there, but the hardware itself wrapped around it, the sensors and the networks and the cloud infrastructure that makes the experiences that we have possible.

22:44It's just been an endless source of fascination as just like an engineering-oriented kind of mind. if i'm doing my maths right most of this stuff of your curiosity satisfaction was actually pre-internet what was your way to actually find that information because with fine art it's a little bit easier you know potentially you can pop into a gallery or buy a book but some of the stuff that you described that you really wanted to know how it was made who made it and where did come from that's a little bit hidden that's not in a plain view yeah it's interesting i mean i think i don't know how much it came from the environment or just intrinsically i've always loved there's a story from when i was a kid and my my older brother had one a sort of early handheld video game console it was called the lynx it was made by atari and you know he brought it home it had some california sports game on it and a couple of other like games you know he played it and enjoyed it for a while but as a kid he had a bit of a temper and so he ended up like throwing the handheld game set against a wall or just throwing it somewhere and it hit and kind of didn't work anymore after and i was like oh and i was i was all of seven at the time maybe eight and i was like i don't know maybe i can fix it and so i like literally grabbed a screwdriver and opened up the back of this microprocessor driven video game console as like a seven-year-old and i'm like oh i can figure this out and just looked at it didn't understand anything about what i was like it was a bunch of capacitors and resist you know i now have a sense of electronics and how those things work but back then it was all greek to me but i like you know i saw a little capacitor that looked kind of folded over and i was like oh maybe when i push that back up vertical it'll like work again so i like just futzed around a little bit closed the backup and I swear to god the thing turned on immediately and I think for me even though I probably did literally nothing to fix that Lynx video game system that experience of opening up something very complex that was broken to tinkering around closing it and having it work was like incredible like that fast feedback loop and I think that's really what drove me to software as well is just the speed of the feedback loop of creation is so fast you make a couple changes as you look at it you play with it you can experience it immediately and so few other art forms barring maybe photography you know kind of have that level of immediacy and that immediate feedback loop i mean you're talking about feedback loops and yeah i think that dose of dopamine of being the fixer of consoles might be quite amazing at seven but feedback loop also takes me back to music because i don't think anyone i've ever known would say that my band was my first startup.

25:39When I think about it creatively, when you talk about really fast feedback loops, you know in music if something works and if something doesn't because, again, that hit of dopamine when you start writing a song with your friends, that's unrivaled. Absolute mega load of dopamine. This is the best thing in the world. And then you play it through the room of people and they're like, what? And you're like, I've lost all the dopamine now. It's literally like, where did it all go? Because I thought this was great. So where do we go from SVA, from you completing a course and taking you all the way to California these days?

26:16Yeah. I spent two years in that grad program as part of the premier class, the first class of the interaction design program at SVA and made incredible friends. Just every class ended up being such a banger. And it's such a different experience. I was very excited about my undergraduate program and everything I would learn and do there. But it was so different to go out into the world and work and try to build something on my own as an adult, realize where my gaps are, what things I like, what things I don't like, and then to come back to school to an environment where it's just about learning and trying things with no fear of failure.

26:56And there was something so special about being back in that environment, coming back from the world of professional life. And I really dove in just headfirst, you know, worked startup level crazy hours because I was really passionate about the ideas I had and the concepts I was trying to build and projects I was doing. And then after those two years, chatted with a few companies, small startups, agencies, places like IDEO, etc., And I ended up talking to folks at Facebook, which was still relatively early. This was like 2009. Not early, early, early, but still relatively early. When I went and interviewed there, I think the team, the design team was still 25, but that was like large to them.

27:42That was the largest they'd ever been at that point. And met people who just blew my mind with what they were thinking about, the complexities and scale of the kinds of software challenges they were trying to like. make progress against their openness to feedback and questions and trying to figure out what's the best idea we can get to together. And that like core ethos that was really part of the core of Facebook in the early days just was so immediately apparent in my conversations with the early Facebook team when I interviewed. And man, I just got so excited about the idea of working with those really curious, really earnest, really humble people on really big, hard problems in a space where I felt like I could apply my skills as a designer, as a software thinker, developer, person thinking about the future and how we can make the future like really exciting and better and incredible for all of us.

28:41I went to work for Facebook in 2009 and started as a product designer there. I started on groups, Facebook groups. We were just turning that into a mini Facebook inside your college campus. So if you had a nyu.edu email address, you could be part of the parent NYU group and only meet and find other students at NYU. So it was sort of like seeding little college-based Facebooks inside of the big now mega sort of everyone is invited Facebook. That was incredibly successful. We managed to seed and grow these incredible communities across pretty much every college campus in the country using Facebook groups.

29:22And then I rolled on to working on Facebook search, which was going through a huge redesign at the time. This was one of my first opportunities to really try and push on the state of the art for what an experience could be. At the time, obviously, Google was the top name in web search. we were trying to unlock a completely different corpus right the content you and your friends share on facebook certainly only the things that are actually shared with you not everything and you know your friends and you know their experiences and their likes and dislikes and sort of try and extract some try and help people sort of like find value in the networks that they had built and the things that they and their friends had shared places they checked in and try and build something really powerful that you could query just like you do today with natural language to say, hey, show me places my friends have been in New York, like the best coffee shops my friends have been to in New York City.

30:18And it's boom, we'll just go and we'll look at all the places that your friends have shared. They've been in New York City. We'll look at your profile and sort of rank those against our understanding of you and kind of give you a really great answer that's actually connected to your social network and the things that are relevant to you in your life. And that was a really interesting project. But unfortunately, we were just too early. the AI models, like large language models, were not, certainly not what they are today. We built a really impressive, but little brittle and futsy natural language engine that would parse anything you typed in into a set of like logical components and then try and answer those logical components kind of one at a time.

30:59But it was not as flexible and as robust as the LLMs that we have today that can just take literally any text you put in, understand it and give you back like super relevant results. So we were a little early on that, but it was a lot of fun. I obviously learned a lot about the space that I'm now of course applying now that those models exist and we can leverage those. And, you know, a lot of my like early excitement about how to take what I had learned in grad school and apply it to pushing the state of the art forward kind of really started with graph search and thinking about natural language search.

31:31And then, you know, I worked on a number of other things and then was there for about six and a half years. I actually didn't expect to be at Facebook that long. And so after about six and a half years, I was like, wasn't I only supposed to be here for two years, learn a lot, and then go do a startup? Oh, maybe I should get about that. And so after about six and a half years in 2008, I left to start a new adventure. Before we talk about your next, I want to still stay in 2009 for a short while because what you're describing that's quite a move that's quite a jump again as i told you at the top of our conversation like there's a lot of creatives artists musicians and there's a lot of people from that sort of sphere where i talk to who would openly say i've had an imposter syndrome or i didn't feel like i was enough needed to define my enough maybe i was in too big of a room too early you know i need to know learn more about myself i was going through stuff and you're like hey i just arrived on facebook and these people were crazy clever and i'm like how is ross doing how are you feeling this because these people are magical but how did you feel yourself in the set did you feel like hey i'm ready and any sort of insecurities were going aside or how did you do that i still very vividly recall there's so much happening in my life at this moment kind of exiting grad school, interviewing at Facebook, which at the time, it was not a sure thing.

32:59Like all of my teachers were like, why are you, do they have a design team? What are you, what? And I had just asked Jess to marry me. I remember being in the parking lot of Facebook, waiting to go into my interview that morning and like finally getting my dad on the phone, sitting in the parking lot in my car to just tell him that I had proposed to Jess and that we were, I walked in at an interview. So there was a lot of wild stuff. There was a lot of excitement in my life at this time and sort of changing phase. Obviously working at Facebook back then meant moving to California. So it was a big decision for Jess and I to move out to California.

33:39She was not having it at first, but sorry, to circle back to your question earlier, we talked about kind of two things, two drivers for me that we sort of pinned, right? One is like the future. the other is understanding how things work and I think you're kind of hinting at a couple of others that are I think really important one is just like a constant desire to learn I get really sad when I'm not expanding what I know about the world or how things work or what I'm able to build and do and and achieve in the world right so just that constant expansion and feeling challenge is like really important to me and so when I had these interviews with folks that I was just like oh my god like I hope I exit this experience as smart and thoughtful and humble and insightful as you.

34:20And it just felt like a growth space, like a place where I could grow a lot and learn from really smart, really capable people. And I did. And the other thing that I would put on this mood board of things were pinning drivers for me in my life is what you're kind of hinting at, which is a little bit of this naivete. And there's two sides to this. On the one hand, there have been so many situations, potentially constantly. In fact, it's probably more the norm than not that I feel under capable of delivering what is being asked of me. Like that imposter syndrome is real. No matter how far along you are in your career, you're always seeing stuff that other people are doing.

35:01You're like, oh my God, that's so good. I'm terrible. I'll never come up with anything that good. But you know, you do, you model along, you come up with some cool stuff along the way. But there's a flip side to that, which is that sometimes you just sort of like assume Some things are going to be easier than they always end up being. And I think keeping a little bit of that magical thinking of how hard could it be? They did it. It's like really healthy to keep with you because honestly, at the end of the day, so many things that are emergent, that are just becoming possible, right? That are in the space of futures.

35:36No one knows anything about. No one's an expert in what that thing is. We don't understand what that thing is for the most part yet. and it's a really interesting space to be both excited about learning new things feeling a little bit of imposter syndrome and feeling like always a little bit like you have to prove yourself but also having a kind of like how hard could this be kind of attitude about things i think there's just the right amount of breadcrumbs that you can see okay these people have gone somewhere they're leaving some clues what they've created i'll follow this because it's interesting when you talk about imposter syndrome just is it even imposter syndrome or is it just sort of that thing of am i just a few steps behind this person because they're already ahead of me they're not necessarily better they're not necessarily wiser they just done those reps a few times before and that's what you know makes them look confident but they might be feeling exactly like you because they're trying to prove themselves to somebody else or to themselves so it's just thinking about it it's just a journey but it's really i think what's really interesting to this conversation that you work in a you know slightly different field yet the feeling and the perception is universal it just doesn't matter just because you're not proving yourself with your brush strokes and you know choice of canvases and colors you know the feeling of being enough doesn't matter what you do because ultimately it's about you know how you perceive yourself within your environment.