Burton Rast shares his unconventional journey from punk rock kid in Chicago to design leader at Google and acclaimed photographer. Starting with pirated software on hotel computers, Burton built his first portfolio while working the night desk, teaching himself HTML, Flash, and Photoshop through stolen moments between guests. His story weaves through the dotcom era, agency burnout, and his transformative years at IDEO where he first experienced imposter syndrome among formally educated designers.

The conversation takes a deeply personal turn as Burton reveals how the death of his closest friend in 2016 unconsciously transformed his photography from vibrant color work to the stark black-and-white aesthetic that would define his artistic identity. This realization came six years later while preparing a lecture, highlighting how grief can reshape creative expression in ways we don't immediately recognize.

Burton discusses the evolution from "creating art" to "creating content," the ethical implications of AI training on artists' work, and his current role advising creative AI startups. The episode explores themes of addiction, obsession, creative authenticity, and the importance of personal narrative in an increasingly homogenized digital landscape.

Key Takeaways

• Embrace the generalist identity - Having diverse skills across design, code, and photography creates unique career opportunities and perspectives
• Create without permission - The punk ethos of just doing it, learning through necessity, and not waiting for formal approval or education
• Channel obsession productively - Replacing destructive addictions with creative obsessions can become a powerful force for building skills and career momentum
• Your trauma becomes your art - Personal hardships and loss often unconsciously shape artistic expression in profound and meaningful ways
• Stories differentiate us - In a world of similar portfolios and AI-generated content, personal narrative becomes the ultimate differentiator
• Imposter syndrome hits when you level up - Feeling inadequate often signals you're in the right room with people who can teach you
• Value comes from effort - Things that require no effort (like AI-generated content) are inherently difficult to value personally and professionally
• Language shapes perception - The shift from calling work "art" to "content" systematically devalues creative expression and should be resisted
• Grief changes creative output - Major life events can unconsciously alter artistic style and voice, sometimes creating signature work
• Pay it forward - Success comes with responsibility to mentor and open doors for the next generation of creative professionals

Daring Forever. Podcast with Radim Malinic

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​[00:00:00] 

Burton: I had a great therapist and, believe it or not, the first time that I ever gave a version of that lecture where I talked about the loss and I talk about, all of the struggles. Believe it or not, the first time I rehearsed that was with my therapist. I, I meet with her on Friday mornings and I said, Hey, do you mind if we do something different this week?

and then I was like, wait, fuck you. I pay you. I could do whatever I want, so yeah. she was a huge help. and when you share these kinds of stories in a public setting, as I do, you, you end up connecting with people who have similar stories 

 Welcome to Mindful Creative Podcast, a show about understanding how to deal with the highs and lows of creative lives. My name is Radim Malinic [00:01:00] and Creativity changed my life, but it also nearly killed me in this season. Inspired by my book of the same title, I'm talking to some of the most celebrated figures in a creative industry.

In our candid conversations, my guests share their experiences and how they overcame their challenges and struggles. How they learn to grow as creatives a creative career in the 21st century can be overwhelming. I wanted to capture these honest and transparent conversations that might help you find that guiding light in your career.

Thank you for joining me on this episode and taking the first or next step towards regaining control of your creative life.

You ready?

This is the last episode in the Mindful Creative Series, and I'm eternally thankful to every single guest who shared their story with me. I'm eternally grateful to everyone who has listened to these conversations, and I feel I have just the perfect story for the final [00:02:00] episode of this season. I. My guest today is an artist and designer living in San Francisco, California, and he has spent and enjoyed a range of disciplines throughout his more than 20 year career, from UX leadership, creative direction and interaction designs, photography, data visualization and filmmaking.

Working along with the likes of Google and IDO. In our conversation, he talks about a.com era agency burnout and his transformative years at IDO where he first experience imposter syndrome We cover a deeply personal turn that transform his creativity into his artistic identity. He discusses the revolution from creating arts to creating content, the ethical implications of AI training on artists' work, and his current role in advising creative AI startups.

This episode explores themes of addiction, obsession, Creative authenticity and the importance of personal narrative in an increasingly homogenized digital landscape. It's my pleasure to introduce Burton Rast.

Burton: [00:03:00] Hey, Burton, how are you doing? It's great to have you on a show.

thank you so much. So good to see you. 

Radim: I'm glad to have you on a show because yes, we met at parody seven in person. I feel like we've all bited in the same sphere of talks and festivals in the last decade or so. And yeah, I wanted to talk to you about all of the things that you do, about the things that you've been up to and what you might be up to in the future.

So for those who may have never heard of you, how would you 

Burton: introduce yourself?

 my name is Burton Rast. I'm an artist and designer living in San Francisco, California. born and raised in Chicago. I've been in the Bay Area for about 10 years. I used to shutter at the term generalist, but now I kind of embrace it.

I enjoy that. There's quite a few things that, that I like to do, in my professional life. I'm a designer, in my life outside of getting paid, I'm a lifelong artist, avid photographer. it's funny, I,I always struggle with this [00:04:00] when I give lectures, 

Radim: you said you shut it at the term of generalist. Why? I used to.

Burton: Well, because for the first 10 years of my career, I was purely hard skills designing code. and that kind of separated me from, a lot of the folks who did just one or the other. and it was, if I'm being perfectly honest, itit was always easy to get a job offer when I was interviewing around and looking to move on to whatever the next step in my career because companies were really excited that they could hire somebody who knew, both of those things.

it wasn't until, maybe about 15 years into my career I was interviewing at Google, where ultimately I ended up working for five and a half years. I'm sure we'll talk about that in a bit. and the recruiter to whom I was speaking said, oh, so you're kind of a generalist as she got to know me and as I, I was sort of moving my way through the interview process and.

I talking to different folks, [00:05:00] and like I said, I shuttered like, it, it was like, whoa,no. Like I, I have a very defiant skillset. But then before I responded to her, I thought, oh, okay. Well, I just spent the last seven years working at a design firm called ideo, which really changed me from a purely hard skills person into more of a generalist, right?

Someone who knows the soft skills stuff, whether it's, presenting or research or synthesis or, how do you, do user research interviews and sort of synthesize that data to inform design decisions. so yeah, it took me a moment to learn, to embrace the term and realize, oh, no, that's a good thing.

Now, the older that I get and the more that I've grown into design leadership,it's good to have a breadth of skills and, and experience that informs. 

Radim: Yeah, I think in terms of unemployment being a generalist, maybe that sort of confuses people. But in terms of being an artist, designer, coder, that's a benefit.

And as you get [00:06:00] older, your, you, the sort of breadth of your ambitions change. Right. When I got my first design job, I remember talking to my father and saying, oh my God, I get to go into work, put on my headphones, listen to music that I love for eight hours and just bang away on designing code and animation.

Burton: I am going to do this for the rest of my life. Right. Just gimme my marching orders and I will create stuff, so long as you pay me. but yeah, as you get a little bit older, it's like, nah, you know, youlearn more about the process of design and, how do you really create sort of meaningful products or services or experiences that, that actually get at solving for, real human needs rather than just, in 2000 when I started and it was just like crack open Photoshop. 

Radim: What did you listen to when you were coding? 

Burton: yeah, it's funny, I grew up on sort of all things counterculture, right?

Like anything that, that, anything that, that the sort of PTA moms and the parents hated I was into, right? So, uh, I, I came up in the pumpkin hardcore scene in Chicago, [00:07:00] which was really, I didn't know it at the time. I. but that was sort of the genesis of my interest in design, right?

Like, I was always a super artistic kid, always sort of sketching, illustrating, designing and doodling. But the punk scene, right? where my friends and I were making our own clothes, patches, buttons, we were cutting and ding our own hair. We were making flyers and album artwork for all of our friends' bands, really creating,the sort of, creating,without permission, right?

like, the sort of,asking forgiveness in lieu of permission, ethos, right? so yeah, it was a lot of, punk and hardcore, really came up in, in the golden age of hip hop, was deeply embedded in not just the punk scene, but the reig scene. In the early nineties in Chicago.

So like, my friends and I would, we would go straight from like the punk show with our Mohawks up, the punk show would let out at like 11 or 12 at night. And then we would go to the rave Mohawks still up, until 6, 7, 8 in the morning. so yeah, everything from plunk and [00:08:00] hardcore to electronic and hip hop.

 you mentioned that it was creativity without permission when you think about it, because our paths, even though we grew up in a different parts of the world are very similar.

Radim: I was in more of a sort of death metal kid, we were sort of more in a sort of grindy thing and we were making all sorts of stuff ourselves, but I never even thought that. We need a permission. we started a bands before without having instruments. Like we were excited about whatever could be that you see a glimmer of in a sort of distance.

Like, oh, there's a band. How'd you start a band? How would you make, how would you do this? And we just work stuff out because thinking about it, there was no such thing as an imposter syndrome when we're doing this. no one said like, oh, am I doing this? Am I don't feel quite right. we were just too excited and just too focused on this stuff.

Right. It was like, I, 'cause you just said like, without permission thinking, there was definitely no imposter syndrome back then. And especially at this.

Burton: No, there, the, and it's funny, I, I,I knew that we would end up talking about [00:09:00] this, that didn't appear for me really for like the first 10 years of my career. I began my career at a dotcom era startup, and that was just, like I said, oh my God, I get to throw on my headphones and just make cool shit all day.

I went from there to a client side job that was super boring. it was when the dotcom bubble burst, I actually went to the unemployment office 'cause I, I don't have any sort of formal training or schooling or anything, so I didn't know where do you find a job now that this entire industry collapsed, the thing that you thought you were going to be doing for the next 20, 30, 50 years doesn't exist anymore. So I went to the unemployment office, filled out all the paperwork, and then was I was introduced to a recruiter the next day who had no problems, lining me up with this super boring corporate sort of Fortune 500 client side job where the company attitude is I guess we need a website, so we should hire someone who knows how to do that.

 So, [00:10:00] yeah, no imposter syndrome there at all. It's just so easy. I went from there to the ad agency world for the next three years. I don't know whether you've spent any time in the agency world. it is an unkind industry. It's very aggressive, everything that you create, lives in the world for as long as the media buy lives, which is, I don't know, a week, two weeks, right?

So, like, whatever you do, whatever you killed yourself, working on for 70, 80, 90 hours a week, boom, is, disappears just as quickly as it showed up. I really didn't experience anything resembling impostor syndrome, until I got hired at ideo, which was 10 years into my career.

And all of a sudden I'm surrounded by people who. Know things that I don't know right? who have an understanding of design as this holistic process, this sort of research driven, pretty well-defined process. they all went to Stanford, M-I-T-I-T-P at MIU, Carnegie Mellon, [00:11:00] Royal College of Art, EO, CIID, right?

Like all the top design programs in the world. And that was the first time where it was like, oh, wait, I'm surrounded by people who know things that I don't know that I'm realizing I need to know if I want to grow into, to the kind of design leader who I imagine myself becoming. so yeah. but come on, like the sort of punk ethos and learning how to do art and design on your own and creating with your friends.

Like no, that was like the purest time, right? Like there was. there, there was no semblance of anything resembling imposter syndrome. 

Radim: you were creating it with the equals of yourself. there was no one really, there was no hierarchy, there was no, system of this person's more important and everyone was scrappy, everyone was excited, and yeah.

And actually when you, because I know a little bit of your story, obviously when you go to the idea, you were like, oh shit, these people are educated and they know stuff. But it's almost like you've crossed over to like a different group of people. [00:12:00] Like let's say, the different demographic and all of a sudden I'm like, oh, okay,this is slightly different.

But before we get to idea, I wanna talk about those, earlier days because I love the story how you worked for Hotel that you installed a cracked Photoshop on every single computer in a building. that's just genius. We need to talk about that.

Burton: Yeah. So, it's funny, like I said, I don't have any sort of formal training or schooling or anything like that. I was just floundering about, like, obviously I knew I was an artist, but like, I had friends in Chicago who went to art schools and got, degrees and sculpture or this, that, the other, excuse me.

And you see them graduating with those degrees and it's like, okay, well what are you gonna do with that? So, so I had never really considered art school as an option, but then what do you do? how do you connect your skills as an artist with, a career with, doing something that, that you enjoy, that, where you can pay the [00:13:00] rent.

so yeah, I was just bouncing from one go nowhere job to the next I, and I worked all of 'em, right? Restaurant, back of house cleaning grease traps, unloading semi trucks, like, service, hospitality, just garbage jobs. and I ended up working the front desk at this busted old hotel just north of Chicago.

it's funny for this is 19 97, 19 98. to give you an idea, we had 1 56 K modem for the entire hotel, which is for not just the computers in the offices, but every hotel room. There were 277 hotel rooms. so you could barely get online. My brother and I worked there together. we were learning how to use Napster and all these, the, these programs to, borrow the music that we wanted to listen to.

So the, you could barely get online to begin with at this hotel. And then making matters worse, my brother and I were constantly using the 56 K modem to download, whatever the new Underworld album, right? Or like whatever. whatever it was. but a friend of mine who was going to art school for music production was [00:14:00] learning Photoshop and HK me and Flash this, that, and the other, just in his elective courses.

And he was the one, and I show his photo and I talk about him in my lectures. Jay Hill, he was the one who showed me this stuff, right? He showed me this flash animation that he had created that was, 'cause he was a DJ and a producer. It was a couple of turntables and you could click the mouse and scratch the record and load different songs.

And, so it was, it was audio, it was visual, it was animation and illustration. I had never seen anything like it. and I was just, he opened the door for me because it's like, oh, well, Jay's not even going to school for this, right? This is an elective class. This is just like a fun thing he's doing on the side.

If he can learn it, then I can learn it. So. I learned how to pirate software and then installed all of the software that I wanted to learn on all of the hotel's, computers, so that any moment in between checking in guests, I could keep working my new craft. And I bought [00:15:00] books and,we're a couple of old guys, so I will date myself here.

I bought books on H-D-M-L-D, HDML Flash, this, that, and the other at like Borders and Barnes and Noble. And I would read these on the subway, going to and from the hotel. And then, everything that I just learned in the book, I'm like chomping at the bit. And as soon as I get to work, I don't care about the guests at all.

Like, I'm gonna jump on these computers and put into practice all of the things that I just learned. that's how I put a portfolio together. And I left from that hotel to the.com startup that hired me. My, my first ever design job, that's where I put my portfolio together. 

Radim: I absolutely love that story.

one of my best friends to this day, and my brother and I, we used to use this program called Hotline. It was like a FTP or Napster or whatever the hell, people would just host files.

Burton: You could go to a website to search who had what on hotline service. And of course, we were trying to find pirated copies of Photoshop and Flash and all of these crazy expensive programs that there's no way that we could afford. But on one of the [00:16:00] hotline servers we found just in, because you could poke around all the folders on the server and see what other files they had.

So we saw this curiously named folder and went into it and someone had recreated every state, like all 50 United States state IDs and driver's license templates. So we downloaded the whole thing, right. and that was how I learned Photoshop is, the incentive of like, oh wait, we didn't even care about getting into the bars at that age, right?

We just wanted to see the bands that were playing 21 and over shows that we couldn't get into. so we found there were only two states that were still doing that sort of old school laminated, driver's licenses, Maine and Indiana. And that's how we learned Photoshop is making Maine and Indiana fake IDs,that we just accidentally happened upon when we were trying to learn how to pirate software.

Radim: what can I say? I mean, what a Jeanie story because It's again, it go [00:17:00] again, it goes back to the punk rock like you want it to be in the show, like whatever, with drinking, you wanted to see the band, there's a template, you're gonna do it. That's how you learn it. Because I got my first job on the back of making our band tapes and CD covers, using coral, coral draw.

That's what I was using and I had a rudimentary understanding of it, like align things and do whatever. And just like, I had a couple of summer jobs when I did some stuff with like sign writers and sign makers. But that was enough back then, to actually get a job and just say Hey, I can do some of this stuff.

And you sometimes you find yourself, you could do more than people who were actually employed there. You're like, that's enough. Obviously we live in a much more busier and more complicated place now, but back then it was just a beautiful innocence. can you use it? Well, the answer should be no. But I'm gonna definitely say yes.

Can you use a, can you use a Mackay? No, but I'm gonna say yes. That's the beautiful thing about that.

Burton: Yeah, I mean, and it's funny, and I, I can hear it in in the attitude that, that you're describing when you talk about [00:18:00] not having imposter syndrome when you're much younger and it's this sort of pure time, the thought never crossed your mind that you wouldn't just do it, right? Like, it is like, well, oh my, my buddy is learning how to do this thing that looks interesting to me.

Well, obviously I'm going to learn to pirate software because I don't have a thousand bucks for Photoshop. I'm gonna buy a bunch of books at the local bookstore and just do it, right? Like 

Radim: I think we were lucky there 'cause there was a lot more. Sense a little more time to actually spend on development.

Because I remember having books on freehand, I remember books. I richly, I remember reading a book on Illustrator, like I just wanted to know what, click whatever you click, like what's the shortcuts, what can I do? Like how can I use it as an instrument? Because when you find yourself like click and okay, there's a menu and this is like, I just like, I wanna click stuff.

I wanna make it fast. I wanna make, like naturally rather than sort of be slaves through the software and kind of making this sort of on the basis of making mistakes and happy accidents, like I was like, no, I wanna be in charge here because [00:19:00] I remember trying, I. To do some sort of music production at, in film around 2000 in program called Acid, if you remember Acid.

And it was kicking my ass. I was like, I was sampling Incubus and Don O' Bryant and Cold Cut. And I was like, yeah, this is shit I gave you. I was like, I'm gonna leave this aside, but I can definitely do more of the color draw and Photoshop and illustrate a bit better. And that was my path going forward. I'm glad I stuck with it because, yeah, no, there's, when we look at our choices, it's definitely one of the ones that I enjoyed.

I do know that software, I, I, my brother and, a number of my friends ended up 

Burton: going into music production and starting bands and this, that and the other. And if I'm being honest, I'm, I've always felt really fortunate that my interest was more sort of visual design and art and photography, animation and code, because I.

music is one of the disciplines that, that I refer to personally as the showbiz disciplines, right? Whether it's, music or acting or writing or, any of these disciplines where [00:20:00] you might be the best in the world of what you do. But if you don't have that moment of luck and connection where you're,recognized and identified by the industry, like I said, you could be the best in the world at what you do and you won't necessarily make a career of it.

Whereas in our industry, if you work your craft super hard and you put a portfolio together, you might not end up working your dream job, but you will find a job that pays the rent and you can do this for a living. so I've always felt fortunate that for whatever reason, I was drawn more to the visual arts.

Radim: than I don't know many musicians who would end up being generalists in that way. But what I wanna talk about, obviously, around that age when you were, traveling between Chicago and San Francisco and, being a punk rocker, there was a few setbacks. there was an accident, there was addiction, and it's kind of almost like a coming of age story because like you just go with the scene, you do your thing, and then Yeah.

Burton: [00:21:00] As a setback. How did you deal with that?

yeah, I mean, it's funny with the benefit of 2020 hindsight,it's easy to look back,and pretend that it was a. Sort of neat and tidy and linear story and, oh, I just, I overcame whatever setback or whatever issue and then moved on to, to, become the person who I'm today.

But that's, it's a lot messier. we like to think, and it's funny, I was just talking to a friend about this the other day, another speaker friend. the challenge,of having only 45 minutes as we typically do to tell our stories in the context of a talk, is that it naturally presents as linear when the reality, and I know this is an audio podcast, but I'm here, I'm pantomime this sort of squiggle, right?

Like the life is, the story is not linear. It's way messier. it's sort of this hairball of a mess of a thing that. You do your best to hope is moving forward in the [00:22:00] aggregate. the fact of the matter,and I don't wanna go too deep into it today, but the fact of the matter is,I have kind of a bumpy childhood and, that led,I ended up in a friend group of folks with very similar stories to mine.

And, many of us did, fall victim to, to addiction and to a period in our lives where that was sort of how we coped and managed, what it was that, that each of us went through. But the long story short is,you know, I mentioned my buddy, Jay Hill, who sort of turned me onto the software and made it accessible for me.

He showed that to me at a time that I really needed something. that I needed some kind of purpose and direction, and I was coming out of that period in my life, but I didn't really see a path forward. what I did know is the moment that I found it, I became so full tilt obsessed.

I knew that I was [00:23:00] taking all of the energy that, that I had put into addiction. 'cause addiction is a full-time job, right? it consumes your whole life. It consumes your every day. it takes a lot of time and energy. And I knew that I was taking all of that energy and putting it into this new thing.

And I knew that I was probably doing so like in an unhealthy way. like, I mean, I let it completely consume my life. but I was okay with it because it felt purposeful, because it felt productive. it's okay if this is all I'm doing morning, noon, and night. provided it's leading to something and what it led to was, a portfolio that got me a job.

Radim: There's definitely something about replacing addiction with obsession, because you can, like, when you start seeing the things happening in front of your eyes that you just created, even have rudimentary, there were back then, you were like, oh, this is me. I'm doing this, and actually there's someone having an opinion.

This is actually, this is going somewhere. This is actually showing me the way, because obsession, I think is the right word to use [00:24:00] because I can relate to it. you can easily work 17 hours a day and you wish there was 48 hours a day and you wish you cloned yourself because all of a sudden you got actually, you're in charge.

Because when you talk about, childhood, like a challenge in childhoods. They usually come with very little control of your destiny. Like you don't always have that chance of like, okay, how is this gonna pan out? what decisions gonna make? Like, no, this is, I'm not fully in control. I'm not old enough on this.

Whereas when we get to actually having been able to get hold of our lives, it's a beautiful hideaway. Creativity is a beautiful hideaway of like, okay, you know what? I can live with my life. Just in like the traumas and the past, the escapades, I'll deal with them a little bit later, but for now, I'm gonna actually cut myself off, not from the world, not get into the zone, and actually just me and my creativity.

We'll, pretend like we are okay for now, because that's, you can almost like when you reached, I mean, especially back then, I would say we can easily reach a state of flow and go in, you know what, I'm not distracted. I'm [00:25:00] focus in a hundred percent on what I'm making. In fact, like having headphones on, trashing out like snow.

Burton: I mean, I had to replace number of back tablets because I just destroyed them by drumming. Sounds like a perfect snare drum. it's perfect. So, but yeah. And then you realize, ah, shit, actually it's, maybe it's time to face no, my, my demons face no face on and make a bit more sense of our lives because it's, yeah, maybe that overworking might be a bit unhealthy because that's a, I mean, it's funny, like, 'cause it's still, that's who I am to this day. And the people who know me best, like I was at a show with a buddy of mine at this great little art nonprofit called Gray, or in San Francisco. And I'm with one of my closest friends. And, he knew that I was in the middle of working on something and like really working out, like something that I was proud of.

And I was like a challenge that I was really looking forward to solving for. And he said to me, he literally said, we're on a Sunday afternoon, it's a all day show. And he says, oh man, you've got [00:26:00] that. Look in your eyes. go home. Right? he's like, I know you need to do it. You need to do it.

Go home. 

Radim: It's impossible to grow out of. Absolutely impossible. yeah, you can have, yeah, it's nice that you're got supporting people around you going, you know what, go and sort it out. obviously mentioned you've worked with Google, you've worked with IDO, and along that journey you've discovered photography and to the point where photography became one of your comes almost like a leading, I wanna say identities

it has. And,it is the thing that is infinitely more meaningful for me than, I am very fortunate to have worked, some dream jobs and for companies and clients and certainly alongside incredibly talented,fellow designers, certainly that I never saw coming when I was younger.

Burton: and I feel very fortunate, for my career as a designer. but photography, it's, it has always been a passion. but, [00:27:00] I feel like everyone is sort of trying to figure out, what is their personal brand and what is their look and what is their, whatever it is. and now that, everyone has a high resolution camera in their pocket, I feel like it's never been more difficult to sort of define whatever your aesthetic.

you've seen my lectures, so, so I know that, but, I know that your audience does not. for anyone who's seen my photography, it is very stark, very contrasty, very sort of, exclusively black and white. And it didn't used to be that way. I used to take very vivid, colorful, images.

and I was actually doing a series. I was living and working in Lima, in Peru, with a big I client down there for the spring and summer of 2016. and I was doing, I was literally doing a series. I had one of the clients help me to work out the name. Forgive my terrible accent, but it was called, uh, pal Para, right?which translates to roughly translates to the color palettes of Peru. So literally a series of [00:28:00] bold color images of this stunningly beautiful and vividly colorful place. And, right in the middle of it,I've never had a more exhausting project. we had a partner team in London. the client, CEO split his time between, New York and San Francisco.

 my sort of career as a speaker and a lecturer was really starting to take off. So in the middle of all of that, I had, some talks that I was giving, and workshops that I was doing at conferences in Europe and in the States. and right in the middle of all of that, my oldest and dearest friend in the world, passed.

He,he died of heart failure at only 37 years old. To say that this shattered me during a time that I was already constantly traveling, like I said, living and working in Peru, I was already exhausted. And then this happens. and that's when my photography forever changed. And the wildest thing is I didn't notice it at the time, because you're just [00:29:00] so emotionally shellshocked and, I was kind of on autopilot.

It was like, I just, I've gotta do right by my company and this client. I've gotta get through the project, then I'll get back home to the states and deal with it, I guess. which of course is not what happened at all. when I came home, I just started obsessively photographing everything, about what was still a relatively new city to me.

I had only moved to San Francisco about a year earlier. I ended up doing a series called The Shapes of San Francisco, that ended up getting some attention first from the local press. Then from some pretty big photo blogs that I've been following for years. Adobe reached out and asked, I mean, I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, I think I'm allowed to say this.

I didn't sign an NDA, Adobe basically asked would I like, give them my look for free, and I said no. we ended up working out a deal where I did build a series of color filter profiles that are still live,in all of the versions of Lightroom on desktop and mobile, the, the [00:30:00] artistic series of color profiles.

That's mind, believe it or not. and ultimately it led to,apple featured me on their Instagram, and that's when things really kind of blew up. and I feel like people started to. identify this as who I am and aesthetic that I've created. that's sort of uniquely mine.

I, I cannot express to you in words how much more meaningful it is than anything that I ever did at an idea or a Google, because I'm proud to have worked at those places. They were very generous places,to work. And they did wonders for my career, and I learned quite a lot. But I didn't found those companies.

They don't belong to me. whereas this style of photography is very much mine. And believe it or not, it wasn't until I was, putting a talk together for off Barcelona, in 2022. It was the first time that I gave a lecture that was much more deeply personal. I talked about losing my friend. I talked about, some of the struggles of my past and how all of that informs who I am in the work that I do.

And I am, [00:31:00] I don't know about you, but I am a wildly. I'm a cliche designer. I could not be more unorganized if there was not, command space spotlight, search on Mackay. I would never be able to find a single file on my machine. So when I'm putting a talk together, and especially when I'm telling a chronological story, I just scroll through Google Photos and pull the images that I need from whatever that time period.

And I'm scrolling through my time in Peru, in 2016 and really kind of tensing up because I'm like, ah, like I'm about to like retraumatize myself, right? Like I can see chronologically that the loss of my friend is coming up. And of course, I, I get to that moment and as I keep scrolling, all of the color disappears from my entire Google photos and I.

I don't even rem remember this, but I had gone back to some of the same beautifully colorful places in Lima, in [00:32:00] Peru and recaptured those places. But then the edits were just super dark and more and more desaturated over time. And like I said, this is to put a lecture together in 2022. That loss happened in 2016, in the six years since I had never connected that.

Like that's why my work changed. that all of the color from my emotional life was disappearing. and that was showing up in my artwork. And as I realized this, as I'm scrolling, it's gonna fuck me up talking about it. Like I just, sitting in this chair in my studio just started inconsolably bawling.

Right to realize six years later that, oh my God, like the thing that has come to define me as an artist was born out of the loss of someone so meaningful to me. and at first I was really shook by that, but now, I [00:33:00] see the beauty in it. 

Radim: well, I mean, it's a beautiful story. Thank you for sharing that.

I mean, it sounded like he's around, he's still with you because I wanted to ask if it's okay, I mean, it's interesting you said when I was going through this, it made sense why this, why the colors disappeared. And as I was making notes as you were speaking, it's like that was your way to deal with grief.

That was the way of like, just again, addiction, obsession, grief. obviously we go into that space where we just block out the reality, the truth, sometimes like, okay, what is the best way? Sometimes forget about things or just to deal with them. And then again, we can face them head on and have someone, teach us well for hours and hours as a therapist, like how we can do stuff, or we can just go and take photos and make a career out of that, whereas at Yeah.

Did you, yeah, that's what I wanted to ask you. Like, did you ever think about seeking professional help or for grief, or did you 

Burton: just work through it?

I had a great therapist and, [00:34:00] believe it or not, the first time that I ever gave a version of that lecture where I talked about the loss and I talk about, all of the struggles. Believe it or not, the first time I rehearsed that was with my therapist. I, I meet with her on Friday mornings and I said, Hey, do you mind if we do something different this week?

and then I was like, wait, fuck you. I pay you. I could do whatever I want, so yeah. she was a huge help. and when you share these kinds of stories in a public setting, as I do, you, you end up connecting with people who have similar stories and my closest speaker friends on this earth, right?

Like, Marcel Zu, pj, pj, Richard, Richardson, Tiago, Maya, like all of us connected because we share the things that we do. so. No disrespect to my therapist, but those connections might be even more valuable 

Radim: when you think about it. [00:35:00] It kind of connects it back to the punk rock, just connects it to another band of brothers because you have friends in the industry coming from similar backgrounds, doing similar thing, understanding your problems, understanding, the nuances in the feelings and in the work.

So it makes sense. But you know, when we step back and look at it, like, okay, yeah, okay. that's, it's kinda like I've already thought, but I never thought of asking a therapist like, can we rehearsal talk fair play? but might be cheap. might be, it might be cheaper than a speaking coach.

you and, you've seen my lecture. It's like, that I love to do like, research driven deep dives, right? Like, I, I don't wanna just talk about imposter syndrome. I wanna understand like. What do we as a humanity know about this? What have we learned about this? what have people shared about this that, that, that they have learned through their research and their efforts?

Burton: So she loved that. She was like, oh my God, I didn't know about the hedonic treadmill and these, these authors and psychologists. So, I couldn't recommend it more. 

Radim: Well, I mean, we need both sides of the coin, don't we? but yeah, I mean, the honesty in talks, I feel is something I'm, and [00:36:00] I can relate to because when you lay, when you put it all out there, you don't have to remember anything.

You just,you're telling your story, you're telling the truth. Obviously, you don't pretend to be anybody else. You don't want to be anybody else on that stage. But you want your story to actually, send it out there and see actually who does it relate to? Who, who can actually, you know.Find something in it. because be because we look for, I mean, with all honesty to some of the speakers, like you, you've got a portfolio talker and then you got a live talker. You got like a live experience designer, live experience creative artist saying like, Hey, this is artist life.

This is how we live. this is the experiences you might have and that Baha might influence your work. Or you have that sort of early egoistic sort of sense of identity going, Hey, look, I'm looking for acceptance here on this stage. Please tell me you like this. Tell me you like my work because I'm still working on myself.

Whereas when you go past that stage, you're like, life's can, life can be really tricky, but, 

Burton: that's how we, that's how we deal with it.

[00:37:00] Yeah. it's funny, and I'm sure. given our age and our place and our careers that we've each done a thousand portfolio reviews. and I always tell young artists and designers, whether you're putting a portfolio together or putting a talk together, in this industry, and really most any industry differentiator is everything.

And our unique individual stories are what will forever differentiate us from everybody. so the more of that you're willing to give and the more that you allow,you, you allow people in, to see that, to see past sort of the veneer of the portfolio. and like you said, we're, we're all artists.

We have, a lot of us have very interesting stories with respect to how we got here and what informed our careers and what informed our work. but yeah, that's it. it's like anything else. There's no trick to it. Different. 

Radim: In your lectures you talk about emotional hardship. Is it necessary, can we create work that 

Burton: be done without any hardship?

[00:38:00] I mean, yeah. So there's a great exchange, that I've shown in a few lectures between, Anthony Bourdain Rest in Peace, and the artist David Cho, where they are discussing precisely this, right? and, and David Cho asserts that, Hey, you can make great artwork if you're not suffering right? But the best art in the world, in his assertion.

Comes from intense suffering. and then the punchline is, he says that his sort of thought experiment is, do you then intentionally put yourself as an artist in situations that will cause you pain, for the purpose of making great art? And of course, it's David Cho, so he says yes, like you do.

And I mentioned in my lectures that are like when I first saw that exchange, I was [00:39:00] like, oh God, this is like, when you're putting a talk together and it's like, oh God, this like perfectly illustrates what I'm talking about, or what I want to talk about. And I tell the audience that, I always feel this sort of twinge of like reluctance.

when I know that clip is coming up, because I don't know that when you're given a station, when you're given a platform, when you're on a stage, I do feel that I have a respon responsibility when I'm on that stage. And am I sort of compromising that responsibility by suggesting that, that emotional hardship is a requirement of making great art?

I wonder if it's irresponsible to express that. but then,and the sort of missing piece, to that part of my lectures that, that, that I've been offering more recently is a piece that someone really close to me, sent me, that was written by the musician Nick Cave, about the utility of suffering and understanding that suffering is this sort [00:40:00] of universal unifying force, right?

Like we, all of us have suffered in different ways, but no matter how we've suffered. Each of us has. and we do understand that as part of the human experience. so I don't know that you have to experience emotional hardship or loss or suffering to create great art. but I do know that the best art that I've ever made in my years on this earth, and I didn't know it for six years after I started doing it, but ultimately came to realize that yes, it was born out of the biggest loss and the most intense.

Radim: I love how you joined the dots and I mean, it's a great example of Anthony, an I and you can argue that Anthony Bourdain created, most of his body work Within like. Suffering deep, deeper within, because he was a complicated character. But, one that sort of connected on so many levels with so many people.

And I, I think basically I go for kitchen confidentials at least once a year. [00:41:00] Just,to get to that sweary part when it's just like, if someone calls you an asshole, you might be in trouble of everything else is a compliment. But,

Burton: it's funny also that it's a Bourdain moment because I never read Kitchen Confidential. My, my buddy who I lost was always trying to get me to read it. and I only read it in the wake of his loss. I literally read the eulogy of his service, flew to Barcelona, did off Barcelona for the first time, dedicated my talk to him.

Radim: yeah, I recommend, I mean, for even Greater afa, I recommend the audio book because he's read by Anthony Bourdain and as someone who writes books, I'm like, how do you get that tone so good? But the tone is obviously influenced by his life, by his experiences, by like, being a bit of a sort of outcast and aloof and, just winging it most of the time it's like, yes, that reminds me of the nineties, how he did stuff.

like, that reminds me of, the crack copies [00:42:00] of Photoshop on the 56 K modems. like that reminds me of the things that, we were blagging in, like getting the jobs there. We were un, I mean, we were not even qualified. Even the person giving you the job wasn't particularly qualified for the job back then, So it was just like we were just making stuff up and I think that innocence and that space, and it was slightly different because I. We did have almost a little bit of a chip on the shoulder, like, what is this life gonna offer me? Like what can I do with this? Because talking about, emotional hardship or intense suffering in some do, I mean, I would say like we were microdosing of it, like on, on those, we had our sort of tumultuous don crazy childhoods and I think like we were dealing with things that were somehow, pushing us into this lane.

Whereas you can argue like, is the world a bit easier right now? Like, are we creating different hardships? are we creating different sort of sufferings? I mean, I'm not saying that we've, no,we've solved parenting and everyone's got amazing childhood, but like, as a life of an [00:43:00] artist, for a newcomer it's a different story because the accessibility is different.

Like, you got resilience of different examples of what has been done in the last 20 years. It's a 

Burton: bit of different landscape, isn't it?

I love that you brought this up 'cause I was just having a conversation with a good friend in la He's an idea buddy of mine about, he's our age. He, we came up in the industry at the same time and we were talking about if we were starting today, would we feel empowered at how accessible everything is or would we feel completely overwhelmed?

it used to be that you could just crack open a text editor and start writing some HTML and put a portfolio together. now you have all of these crazy build tools. I'm talking sort of the pre AI era, right? Where it's like all of these frameworks and all of this complexity and.

and then, what would imposter syndrome feel like if, all of a sudden you could pop up in your phone and see [00:44:00] all of the incredible artists with their millions of followers on social media, this, that, and the other. like I said, would we feel our thought experiment was, would we feel empowered or would we feel so overwhelmed that it's like, oh no, I'm just gonna keep unloading trucks for a living 

Radim: Yeah, I think you, you summed it up quite beautifully.

One of your talks when you said that what we create now is content. 

Burton: What we used to create was odd

God. Yeah. I, that, that term, it's just so bothersome that you would call an unbelievably talented artist, a content creator. Like it just takes all of the heart out of the, and that the passion and the learning and the struggle and, like. Y Yeah, I, you're right. I, in one of, I, I gave a talk about the need for regulation in the AI space, and I do wonder how much different the landscape would be and what the present moment would be if, like content [00:45:00] creators, like content is what you feed to the machine, right?

Like, oh, sure. open AI and Google and Anthropic and everybody else. They're just scraping content, right? What if we talked about it differently? What if we said, oh no, they're stealing art. Like they're stealing, beautiful prose and writing and photography and visual art and, I do feel like, language matters and the way that we have sort of systematically devalued creation by referring to it as content.

Hell, I could do an hour on just that. 

Radim: I mean, we could easily go for an hour because I would like to, but you nailed it. You absolutely nailed it. Because yes, we feel like we are, not old timers yet, because there are people in the industry who are older than us, but that snackability, that availability of magic has been demystified.

I mean, that the addition of the AI tools like generative fill [00:46:00] in Photoshop, I learned how to retouch. I used to work as a retouch for, and about, a year like I was, you'll learn how these things work. And I was like, oh, I don't have to spend half an hour trying to make this up.

The AI will actually fill the space for me. Actually, they can do this, they can do this. But when you look back, when you look now at people who are at the beginning of their careers, they're breaking it because ai, they believe that AI will steal their job. But as you just beautifully said, like they are mostly content creators.

It's like, what is the value? What is your expression of your soul? Like, what do you put out into this world that is your own, of course, put into musical terms. Like when you start your own first punk rock band or your metal band, you're gonna play covers. you're gonna do things, you copy, you'll learn the scale.

Like when you are a young creator, you're gonna copy Chuck Anderson and you're gonna, copy Joshua Davis. Like we all had like the rock and rollers that we sort of, you know, in that respect, like who were leading the charge in their creative 'cause they [00:47:00] had signature styles, whereas now. As, quite rightfully call it, is an acidification.

Like, it's just a, it's just a mash, it's a salad. It's just like, basically like a top color tapestry that it just looks the same. And the language matters. Because if you were, an art creator, if you were someone who doubles down on your identity, especially the one that can transcend you into another places, like, okay, you know, we believe in our typists when we, they take them upon.

It's like, I believe in what I do 'cause it gives me some power that gives me identity. It gives me, you know,a direction and purpose. I can you find ever content creation? I don't think you can.

Burton: You hit the nail on the head when you said the word value and so for the listeners, we. met when we spoke at an event called Paradiso in Mexico last month. And one of the speakers was a guy whose work I have long looked up to. His name is Robert Hodging. he's one of the, I mean, he's just on a different [00:48:00] level.

Like his version of creative code is like, he's playing a different sport than everybody else. He's so good, and it's fun. he's become a friend and now we check in and we have calls regularly. but I told him just the other day, I talked to him just, last Tuesday. and I told him that I took a note from his talk that is still in my phone that I will never erase it.

It, he was talking about this moment and he was talking about creating with ai and I'm looking at the note right now. He said, and I quote, things that take no effort are hard to value. And that hit like right in the gut. Right. What does A, a younger artist or designer who is learning to create with these AI tools that do not require your sort of Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours of craft expertise, right?

Because it's Trained on a bunch of stuff that was made by people who did put in their 10,000 hours of Malcolm Gladwell [00:49:00] expertise. What does that young kid growing up in the industry creating primarily with AI tools, feel now? Like, do they feel that their work, do they personally value their work and do they feel that their work deserves to be valued as much as,someone's who did take years and years?

Radim: my daughter. she's turned nine a few weeks ago, and one day from school, she's on her Chromebook in a taxi on the way from school, making images in Firefly.

She's like, I wanna have a BNY on the back of her zebra or something. Or like, and she's making it like, that's the, that's just a digital native 3.0. Like that's just, it's happening. It's happening Not on 50 4K modem, it's on 5G phone. And she's on a personal hotspot of my phone in the taxi doing this.

And I'm like, well, it's exciting because it's driving her imagination. But how do we explain, I don't know. I mean, we don't 

Burton: have a manual, do we? Like, we dunno where we're going with [00:50:00] this.

So I'm dying to know like what kind of a conversation that you have with a 9-year-old who's creating these tools. Like does she understand. How Firefly is able to do what it does 

Radim: I mean, I don't think they, I mean, when you're eight or nine, I don't think you go too deep into the ethics of, generating AI code.

She just literally said, oh, what's on your screen, daddy? It was like, it's Firefly. Okay. Well, yeah, we use it in school. Like the school is preparing for them for what's coming. It's not gonna be a surprise when they get to 17 or like, oh shit, there's been AI for the last 10 years.

 But it's a good question. Does she know where Dovey Mitch has come from? I 

Burton: don't think she's ever cared, you know?Yeah. I mean, it's, most folks don't know. And I've mentioned this in a lecture, that there's a site called Have i Been trained.com, which is a very unfortunate name for a website. But of course what it means is have my images been used to train these [00:51:00] models and, I was shocked to find my photos in there. and I currently serve as a design partner at Strange Ventures. We literally, our whole job is advising and investing in early stage creative AI startups. I very much enjoy playing with these technologies. it's been a big part of my identity for as long as I've been in the industry.

I, I just love taking the tires on whatever the new shit and figuring out how it works, and most importantly, figuring out how does this better enable us to, to sort of run the whole of the design process. now I have in all the robots do txt files on all of my site, all of my sites. I have, protections in place that, you can say, Hey, all of these bots do not crawl this site.

but the challenge is, like I said, my, my project and my work. back around 2017 started getting a fair amount of press and attention, those sites, all of [00:52:00] those, Adobe and Apple and all of the photography blogs and, publications that interviewed me, they don't have those protections on their side.

So it took me a minute to figure out, wait, why do they only have those images of mine and not all of 'em, right? Well, it's because those were the images in each of those blog posts. You, so the better known that you become as an artist or designer, the more at risk you are of having your work used to train these models, because you have no control over whether or not, these sites that interview you and feature your work have any security mitigations in place.

and the reality of course is that most of them don't, because if they did, there would be no AI chat bots, that's a challenge But I, but I've certainly thought about, I have a couple of godsons who are six years old and, they have an older sister who's very artistic. She just turned 12.

and as they start playing with this stuff, I'm like, wow. Do they get to your point,it's not like a, your average [00:53:00] 9-year-old has considered the ethical implications of how an AI model is trained. but I am always curious, like, do they know how this magic happens? 'cause it's not magic at all.

Radim: Would you, would, you were describing about the,the bot file, and the scraping, in the mid two thousands when we put our portfolios up and we had like a million page views a year. But like, this is a great stuff and I've checked my analytics just for a joke recently. Like, oh, we're back to million page views a month.

Oh yeah, that's all the AI crawlers. All the AI crawlers are just basically just scrap scraping around because you hear about it. I put a notice in a site by file or in a bot file, and you're like, I'm just two years too late. It's just like the website is been already in the public.

It's been scraped so many times. Like it, what can I do? And, enjoyed. I think enjoyed is the wrong word to use. I was, mesmerized by the talk by Carol Kala from Observer who did, a TED talk recently on the topic of, [00:54:00] big tech and ai, like how all of these models have been trained already, to mimic us quite well.

like she was giving an example like have, you can write an article in her style of journalism. She says it's pretty close. The only problem is I never give them permission to teach 

Burton: their AI on my content.

Yeah. and you probably won't be surprised to hear that, when I was at Google and I left in, early 2023, but, I was still there when chat GPT launched. And when it did, it was like, oh yeah, we have like dozens of these internally that we're testing because of course we do.

Right? Like Google published the first paper on a transformer chat. GPT stands for general purpose, pre-trained transformer, right? Like Google had the tech right. They published a paper on it. but there were a million reasons that we did not release these publicly, right? Obviously the copyright and ethical considerations.

all of the harm that can [00:55:00] be done, right? We're seeing sort of identity theft and, phishing scams just popping off like crazy. We're seeing scams where folks are using technology like 11 labs to, what do you need, like 30 seconds of audio to clone someone's voice. And then, you can call some unsuspecting family member and pretend to be another family member in trouble, who needs money, right?

Like all of these things like we talked about internally and we knew this is why we're not yet putting this tech out into the world. But then of course, OpenAI launches theirs and all of a sudden there's the first meaningful challenge to Google's core search business. And, at the time, what, 25 years?

so you know, your shareholders are gonna scream bloody murder and say, Hey, where's your version? Right? and now here we are. when we should have been having a conversation as a society about, here are all of the potential benefits and all the potential downsides. let's mitigate [00:56:00] those before we launch these out into the world.

Radim: let's finish on a positive note if there's one.

Yeah, let's go to summit. So where do you see yourself, using what you know, what you've done and the sort of the possibilities of where your work can be actually within the next few years? With everything that we've got around, because there's just reflect with everything. there's time and place to embrace it and do something that actually then enhances the expression of your soul, of your creativity, of your art, 

yeah, if I could figure out how to do things that bankroll me, traveling the world and making beautiful images and creating photography, books like that would be the dream. But,I haven't yet figured out, what exactly that is. I'm doing a lot more lecturing than I have been in years past, ever since I left Google, because I have more time than I'm able to do it.

Burton: a big part of my lecture is I talk about, I highlight, I show photos of everyone who has ever opened a door for me in the, in, in my career. Everyone [00:57:00] who, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude, for working the places I have for, for succeeding in the ways that I have. they are as big a part of it as I am.

So, when I think about my future, in the next, 20 odd years of my career as a designer and a design leader, that is the thing that I prioritize the most is growing that next generation of design leaders. at the same time, I've been leaning more into lecturing. I have a couple of agencies who represent me now in my talks so that, that may end up, becoming more of a priority than it has in the past.

so that I'm certainly looking forward to. I have a photography book that, that I plan to put out this year. I'm completely obsessed with, visiting, experiencing, and photographing the most beautiful metro stations in the world. I think in part that is because, in the United States, we don't really prioritize train, travel or public transportation.

If you've ever seen our most storied metro lines, whether [00:58:00] it's in my home city of Chicago or New York, you would not describe them as beautiful. so I'm certainly taken, when I visit, these, Eastern European countries and seeing these sort of palatial, stations,I've amassed a collection that's big enough now that I can, that I believe I can put out a book.

yeah. Beyond that, just sort of being open to seeing where the day takes me. I don't have a concrete plan for what comes next and I'm embracing and celebrating that. 

Radim: Well, it takes us back to what you said at the very beginning. It's creating without permission, so salute you, keep doing what you're doing.

It's amazing. Thank you very much for your time today. 

Burton: Thank you. This, this has been a blast. you're a wonderful interviewer and this is a, I knew this would be a fun conversation, so I appreciate. 

Radim: Thank you for sand those words. Thank you. 

Burton: Cheers. [00:59:00] Hey. Thank you for listening to this episode of Mindful Creative Podcast. I'd love to know your thoughts, questions, or even suggestions, so please get in touch via the show notes or social channels. This episode was produced and presented by me. Riding mileage, editing, and audio production was massively done by Niall Mackay from Seven Million Bikes Podcast, and the theme music was written and produced by Jack James.

Thank you and I hope to see you on the next episode.