Episode 8: Mike Monteiro’s Dream Band
In this episode, Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale speak with Mike Monteiro, author, speaker and Co-Founder of Mule Design.
This episode spans a vast range of topics, including the early days of the web, how change happens in companies, Mike's newest work, My People Were in Shipping. Also discussed are topics like what's next for Mike Monteiro, the difference between a concert and a show, and Mike's dream lineup for an all-time desert island super group.
Transcript
Announcer:
Welcome to Surfacing. In this episode, hosts Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale speak with Mike Monteiro who is an author, speaker and Co-Founder of Mule Design. This episode spans a vast range of topics, including the early days of the web, how change happens in companies, and Mike's newest work, My People Were in Shipping. Also discussed are topics like what's next for Mike Monteiro, the difference between a concert and a show, and Mike's dream lineup for an all-time desert island super group.
Mike Monteiro:
Andy, can we talk about what's to your right in your little room there?
Lisa Welchman:
Oh my God.
Andy Vitale:
Yeah, yeah. So, I've got a decent amount of shoes that I collect.
Mike Monteiro:
No, decent's not the word I'd use.
Andy Vitale:
This is half of it. So these are the Nike's, the Jordan's and Air Force 1's and Air Max's and Dunk's to the Yeezy's, but I have Converse and Vans in another room.
Mike Monteiro:
Wow. And how many pairs of those shoes in bins do you own, Andy?
Andy Vitale:
It's about 150 pairs. It's been my thing over the last few years. I wear them all, so I'm not proud of...
Mike Monteiro:
So you do wear them?
Andy Vitale:
I do. They're not display, I wear them. I just didn't want all of the boxes because they didn't look as cool, but I kept some of the special boxes. But yeah, they're all been worn.
Mike Monteiro:
So, on any day of the week, you could point to one of those bins and you would wear those?
Andy Vitale:
Yes, 100%.
Mike Monteiro:
There's no shoes in there that are in the stay mint forever zone?
Andy Vitale:
No, no. I don't believe in that.
Mike Monteiro:
Okay.
Andy Vitale:
But yeah, we started talking about collecting things and it's another conversation I've ironically had today about difference between collecting it on a shelf and actually using it. So, you're a huge record collector. I see that on social... we went record shopping in Minneapolis to a few different places, so I wanted to ask a music question, someone who really takes pride in what they listen to, listening to a lot of music, if you had to pick your all-time your five-member super group, who would it be? Who's in it?
Mike Monteiro:
Oh, no way. No way. I'm not taking the bait on that.
Lisa Welchman:
You can't do it?
Mike Monteiro:
No, you can't do it because, I mean, you could pick your favorite guitar player, bass player, drummer, and you put them together in a group and they suck, because you got to get people who can play together and people who compliment...
Lisa Welchman:
You don't have an intuition about who that might be?
Mike Monteiro:
Oh, Lord. This question could take two hours.
Andy Vitale:
I spend about two hours thinking it would turn into..
Mike Monteiro:
Who did you come up with?
Andy Vitale:
Yeah. So I spent...
Lisa Welchman:
I knew it was coming back, I saw it spinning in your head and it was going to come back at it.
Mike Monteiro:
And that's boomerang.
Andy Vitale:
As I spent time thinking about that it would come back today, I realized I listen to a lot of what I think is good music and a lot of people would think would be terrible. So, I don't know. I was thinking who would be the vocalist, and is it, I don't know, my favorite all-time is Bon Jovi, but it wouldn't be Bon Jovi.
Mike Monteiro:
Oh, wow. No, that's objectively bad.
Andy Vitale:
I know. I love bad music though. So, maybe it's Taylor Swift, I don't know. But ultimately, if I'm picking a musician, it's Corey Taylor. Corey Taylor from Slipknot, Stone Sour, I watch him perform cover songs and he sounds just like the original artist, so now I'm building a cover band in my head. So who...
Mike Monteiro:
Andy, you have possibly the worst musical taste of anyone I know.
Lisa Welchman:
I wasn't going to say anything, but I was like, we can't go on a desert island with the same thing. It's not going to happen.
Andy Vitale:
It's true.
Mike Monteiro:
Slipknot-
Andy Vitale:
I mean, I don't love Slipknot as a band-
Mike Monteiro:
... seriously?
Andy Vitale:
... but Corey Taylor as a singer is good.
Mike Monteiro:
Okay. But Corey Taylor, and I don't even know who this individual is, but Corey Taylor, if he's that good a singer, has decided to lend his talent to Slipknot.
Andy Vitale:
Yeah.
Mike Monteiro:
So I question Corey's judgment.
Andy Vitale:
That makes sense.
Mike Monteiro:
He's like...
Andy Vitale:
He did a great Prince cover after Prince died of Little Red Corvette, that was amazing, and I don't know. So, forget it, let's go Chris Cornell, right? That's a voice. I watched him do... he did one from U2 with a different song, and mashed it up, and it was amazing. So I would go Chris Cornell if I had to really think vocalists that's strong, powerful, well-rounded. Then I'm fucked after that. My drummer is not going to be Tico Torres, maybe it's Dave Grohl. I don't know.
Lisa Welchman:
You guys are killing me here because it's all pop rock nonsense-
Mike Monteiro:
It is. It's...
Lisa Welchman:
... music, and when you say band, like band members, I'm like Alice Coltrane on jazz harp with-
Mike Monteiro:
Well, I think Andy...
Lisa Welchman:
... Bob Marley singing in the background, or somebody like that. We obviously have different tastes in music.
Mike Monteiro:
I think Andy grew up in a Hot Topic.
Andy Vitale:
It's true.
Lisa Welchman:
So, here's what we don't want to do with you, Mike Monteiro-
Mike Monteiro:
Uh-oh.
Lisa Welchman:
... so we know a lot of your feelings about large dot com's, in particular, social media companies, so I think anybody who follows you on Twitter or whatever gets your perspective on that, and I don't think amongst the three of us, anyone disagrees that they're out of hand, out of line and kind of insane. I think all three maybe have a different perspective on that on how to fix it, and so, so much has shifted in that space and not in the last year with the pandemic, with more elections or whatever, do you think there's any technology company out there, particularly in the social media space, that's getting it right?
Mike Monteiro:
I'm sure there are. I'm absolutely sure there are. And it's not the big ones. But I think what I'd rather focus on is not whether a company is getting it right or a company's getting it badly, but whether companies are capable of learning, and companies can't learn, but whether there are people inside these companies that are actually capable of affecting change. I mean, I've made a lot of jokes about changing things from the inside and what bullshit that is, and mostly, it's because people who generally say things like that are bullshitting.
Mike Monteiro:
But I think we're seeing something happen to Twitter right now, and it's still kind of vague, but I think we're seeing a change in leadership on the inside that... I mean, when Trump was kicked off of Twitter, I mean, I don't know of the details of this, but you remember Jack was off on a French-Polynesian resort or something, and he didn't even find out that this was happening until it had already happened. Someone took the reins, someone at leadership at Twitter took the reins and ran with it while the idiot boy king was away getting a massage. So that's really interesting to me.
Mike Monteiro:
Is change actually happening inside that company, because I'm out here yelling and I'm out here waving my arms in the air, but I can't really do anything. And real change within these places happens very, very quietly and it happens very, very slowly, and it's not done by people like me screaming at them. I mean, I can bring attention to some of this shit, I can make people aware of it, but the people who are doing the real work are doing it very, very quietly behind the scenes, and I think that's what we are in the middle of seeing inside Twitter right now. And I think maybe in about a year, we'll have the real story.
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah. I mean, I think that's fair. I mean, I'm biased because of the stuff that I work on, which is just grossly stating, I mean, it's digital governance, but it's really change management, getting people to behave differently around that. And so there's a lot of different takes on that, whether or not it's an organization that existed pre-web, whether or not it's a big dot com, who you are and what you are makes a big difference. And I think a lot of these dot com's and social media companies, it's just a maturity problem. It's a maturity problem that has to do with human beings. In other words, they're run by people who started the company when they were immature and framed it around an immature sensibility, and so [crosstalk 00:10:02]-
Mike Monteiro:
And never had a reason.
Lisa Welchman:
... yeah, and because they're king or queen of the top of the palace, they don't have to change, right? They don't have to actually grow up because everybody's sort of nodding their head at them the same time.
Mike Monteiro:
That's a fantastic point. I mean, one of the reasons that we grow is because we fuck up and people tell us we screw up.
Lisa Welchman:
Or they fire you. They fire you or they drop you or they break up with you, and you're like, oh. And then you have to go in the corner and reflect about it a little bit.
Mike Monteiro:
Yeah, or they pull you aside. They pull you aside and say, what the hell? What just came out of your mouth? That cannot come out of your mouth. And, I mean, we all had this happen to us throughout our lives. You would do something and somebody would tell you it was stupid, and you would learn. You would learn not to do that again. And when you're 25 years old and somebody hands you $50 million to go build a company, nobody's willing to do that because you're their gravy train.
Andy Vitale:
It makes sense. It's weird because you would think people that are in the immediate satisfaction of that gravy train would want to extend that. So having the ability to speak up and try to drive that change so it lasts longer is what I would do. Obviously, people aren't doing that, and the people are just like, oh, I'm just going to let it slide because I'm getting paid a shit ton of money. I would say, how do I make this last longer, how do we shift this organization over time so that I'm in this role forever and continue to grow. So, it's interesting to see, I guess when you're in that spot, you don't hire those people that challenge you, you hire those people that just agree with you so that you don't have to worry about...
Mike Monteiro:
Yeah. I mean, you're saying that's what you would do if you're in that role, but I don't think you would ever find yourself in that role.
Andy Vitale:
Exactly.
Lisa Welchman:
People are, in my experience, and I'm including myself in this, very limited to the scope of their experience and there are people who are more traveled, less traveled, more read, less read, reading different things, and I don't even mean from whatever perspective you want to talk, we were just talking about music, you listen to one thing, I listen to another, and there are limits to what people can take in. So I think you've got this culture, particularly around Silicon Valley, which I'm not around a lot anymore because I usually working with a big enterprise, where everything just reinforces itself, right? They're all packed in and they're believing this concept of what is going on and the money is telling them that they're right, and they're not thinking broadly about, oh, I want this to be good and I want this to last forever.
Lisa Welchman:
I don't think people are doing that. I just think they're very narrowly in their world, going to work everyday, getting their mindset reinforced over and over again, and it just keeps happening. So, it's going to be really interesting to see what's going to happen. I've got a question, it just popped in to my head, about maturity of the internet and web technology. So one of the things that used to be a pet peeve, I'm not a designer, was when people, maybe 10 years ago, or 10 years ago, maybe even 15 years ago, were starting to talk about we're in generation two of the web, we're in generation three, like generationing out the internet and the web, and I remember thinking, we're not even halfway in one, right? And so that just really used to bother me because basically, what they were talking about was interface design, right?
Lisa Welchman:
Things used to be a giant image, clickable image map, and now we're not doing that anymore. Now, it's this. Now, it's that. It was all sort of about the design look of it. But lately, I've been thinking to myself, are we actually really reaching this next generation of the web, that being we have driven the web and use the internet far and wide enough to work ourselves into a shit show, right, so we actually understand what can go wrong and what can go right. And now, we're actually at the point where we can step into the next generation where we're going to fix those things. And so, not that those number generational things mean a lot necessarily, but it feels like a serious gear shift, which just means an opportunity to make it better, opportunity to make it better or make it worse in this next rev of what we do. Does any of that resonate with you?
Mike Monteiro:
Yes. That all makes sense and I agree with it all, which makes for a really boring conversation, but you're right. I mean, hold on a second. Okay. All right, I'll tell you where my mind went. I got my vocalist.
Lisa Welchman:
Okay, who is that?
Mike Monteiro:
It's Aretha.
Lisa Welchman:
Oh, okay. So, we have one person, it's Aretha.
Mike Monteiro:
Yeah, because I started with Aretha, and I keep trying to come up with reasons for not picking Aretha, and there just aren't any.
Lisa Welchman:
Okay. So, Aretha in the front, I've got that written down.
Mike Monteiro:
She barely ever unleashed, that's why to me, it's Aretha. We very rarely got to see her at full strength because she rarely needed to go full strength. So, when we started this web thing, we were gun slingers going into the Wild West, there were no rules, there was no set way to do any of this shit, we were figuring it out as we went, and it was fun. It was fun. We got a lot of crap wrong, like image maps, for example.
Lisa Welchman:
I liked them.
Mike Monteiro:
I did too. I did too. Oh my God, table layouts, we did that.
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah. Oh, that was so great.
Mike Monteiro:
It made so much sense at the time.
Lisa Welchman:
It did.
Mike Monteiro:
It was ridiculous.
Lisa Welchman:
It totally did.
Mike Monteiro:
And it was so much fun to do that crap.
Lisa Welchman:
And the blink tag.
Mike Monteiro:
Right. Oh my Lord, the blink tag. But this is all the shit that you do at the beginning of an industry when it's just kind of people are holding and like, what the hell is this? Well, you try shit. And then, like every other industry, it matures. And as it matures, set ways to do things happen. And I think some of those things are good, some of those things are horrible, all of those things might be really boring to people like us. They're certainly boring to me because what I enjoyed was the, hey, let's go figure out this new thing.
Lisa Welchman:
Oh, I see, yeah.
Mike Monteiro:
You see what I'm saying?
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah.
Mike Monteiro:
I enjoyed going into that crazy frontier space at the time and figuring out this new wacky thing that had no rules to it. I mean, it's the difference between starting a company and running a company. There are people who are really good at one, people who are really good at the other, and they're very rarely interchangeable. And I think a lot of people in my generation of web building were people who were really excited about the whole Wild West, new frontier, let's try anything kind of stuff, and enjoyed the lack of framework and things like that. And a lot of us right now are writing 10,000 word hot takes about the death of the web.
Lisa Welchman:
But it's just getting started.
Mike Monteiro:
I know it's just getting started, but at the same time, the stuff that excited us about is kind of gone, as what happen in any industry that starts maturing. I'm not saying it's a fully grown adult, I'm just saying it talks back now and it can walk and it's learned a few words and we're older.
Andy Vitale:
That's interesting because we're making the same mistakes, not mistakes, but there's that play feel to all of these new emerging technologies that we're figuring out as we're building it. We see what we've done to the web and the mistakes that have been made, yet we're not taking them into consideration as we start to build these new technologies. We're still playing.
Mike Monteiro:
If we learned from the mistakes of our ancestors, we would be amazing, but we don't. We generally don't. We all make the same... we're forced to repeat those mistakes over and over and over, the small ones and the big ones.
Lisa Welchman:
What are happening in these 10,000 word treatises that people are writing about the death... because everyone's always writing the death of the web every 10 years, right, the web has died repeatedly, the web is dead, long live the web is the article that's been written how many times, right?
Mike Monteiro:
Well, I mean, when you're a self-centered individual, the fact that you're now tired of something means you get to write an article about how that thing is now dead. I remember when all of my friends left the agency space, they all wrote articles about how agencies were dead. Obviously, they're dead, I'm leaving. And if somebody leaves the product space, well, they have to write an article about how the product space is now dead. We think a lot of ourselves.
Andy Vitale:
Have you thought much about the drummer?
Mike Monteiro:
No, but I got a bass player.
Lisa Welchman:
Okay.
Andy Vitale:
Perfect.
Mike Monteiro:
Mike Watt on bass.
Andy Vitale:
Okay.
Lisa Welchman:
Mike Watt is famous, right? He's...
Mike Monteiro:
He's famous among dozens of 50-year-old White men.
Lisa Welchman:
Well, here's the thing. I never remember people's names, even artists that I love a lot. I'm like looking up their name. I don't store that type of information, so he could be the bass player for The Rolling Stones or the bass player for whatever, and I wouldn't know who they... it can be a band that I liked or something, not that.....
Mike Monteiro:
He was a bass player for the Minutemen, which was one of my favorite bands of all time, and then he went on to form Firehose, and lately, he played with Iggy Pop for a while on tour and I think was in a couple of... he's a fantastic bass player.
Andy Vitale:
You said Firehose before and my head went right to Firehouse...
Mike Monteiro:
See, that's what's wrong with you, Andy.
Andy Vitale:
That was my wedding song, Love of a Life... no, yeah, it was either Love of a Lifetime or another Firehouse song that I can't remember.
Mike Monteiro:
See, that's not something you admit.
Lisa Welchman:
I don't even know what any of this is, but I'm not saying anything. I listen to R&B music, R&B '70s soul growing up, because that's what you did, right, '70s soul growing up, was in love with Michael Jackson, was going to marry him because he was about the same age as me, so that was my thing all growing up. And then in middle school, I fell in with some White girls who all loved metal. And so I listened to metal most of the time, all the way to maybe second year of high school, and then I got shit from the other Black girls about listening to metal music and generally not doing all the right things. So then I just slid sideways into jazz and classical and stayed there.
Mike Monteiro:
So you two...
Lisa Welchman:
... jazz and classical is an untouchable zone, right?
Mike Monteiro:
What do you mean untouchable?
Lisa Welchman:
Well, when you listen to those types of music, enough people don't really know enough that they can't...
Mike Monteiro:
Oh yeah.
Lisa Welchman:
You know what I mean? You're just like, oh yeah, I listen to jazz, fearfully nodding their head a little bit. Classical music or whatever is just a whole another thing.
Mike Monteiro:
No, you never want to get into an argument with anybody about either of those.
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah, so people just stop talking and you don't have to talk anymore. So.
Mike Monteiro:
Yeah. I listen with a ton of jazz, I know absolutely nothing about it. I'm blissfully...
Lisa Welchman:
I don't think there's anything to know, I'm just trying to avoid difficult conversations.
Mike Monteiro:
Yeah. I mean, I play stuff, I enjoy hearing it, I get a kick out of it, I absolutely never want to have a conversation with anybody about it.
Lisa Welchman:
Well, I think that's what music's for. I mean, we're making fun of Andy but you like your tunes, right?
Andy Vitale:
Yeah. I mean, I was thinking bass player before and I immediately went Fieldy from Korn.
Mike Monteiro:
Jesus Christ.
Lisa Welchman:
Is that Korn with a K?
Andy Vitale:
Yes.
Mike Monteiro:
It's like he's doing it on purpose now.
Lisa Welchman:
See, I know that. I know that one.
Andy Vitale:
I'm not, but I change my mind and I went Les Claypool.
Mike Monteiro:
No, you're saying that for us.
Andy Vitale:
No. It's true, I wasn't saying that for you guys. But then, yeah. I think that makes sense, because I thought about who's the bass player for... I've been into Metallica lately because I want to get pumped up and literally, I watch garbage on YouTube, so it's either someone eating pizza, someone eating fast food or these concerts, because concerts, I miss those things.
Lisa Welchman:
Everybody does.
Mike Monteiro:
Yeah.
Andy Vitale:
I know. So...
Lisa Welchman:
No matter what kind of music you want, everybody wants to go see it live, right?
Andy Vitale:
Yeah.
Mike Monteiro:
See, here's a tell, here's a tell. People who say concerts and people who say shows, that's a very important distinction
Lisa Welchman:
How so?
Mike Monteiro:
Concerts are big. They happen at big places. They pre-print tickets for that shit. Shows happen in weird ass little venues that might not be around in six months. I grew up going to shows.
Andy Vitale:
Yeah, me too. I grew up in New York, so going to a place like Coney Island High that probably lasted two months. I saw They Might Be Giants at Irving Plaza, that was my first concert. [inaudible 00:23:58] Frank Black opened for them. And then I happened to see them in the next two places I moved, just randomly, I walked into a place in Charlotte, I bought tickets but I didn't know they were playing and played there. And then when I went to Minnesota, they were playing record store day at Electric Fetus, and I just happened to weasel my way in and jumped in the front.
Mike Monteiro:
Nice.
Lisa Welchman:
I'm trying to think about this. You've got my mind rolling on this whole concert versus show thing. And I'm thinking, if I go to a big symphony or an opera, that's a concert. If I go to something in a jazz club, that's a show.
Mike Monteiro:
Yeah.
Lisa Welchman:
But then there are small ensemble classical music things which I don't know what I call those. I don't think I would say... I think I might still say concert even though it was small and in a small venue, I wouldn't call that a show. So I think anything classical, I call it concert.
Mike Monteiro:
Interesting.
Andy Vitale:
Because it's formal.
Lisa Welchman:
Right. Concerts, to me, maybe that's because concerto, concert, maybe that's just some bias I have, but I don't think I would ever call... I think it's style. I think it's the style of music that I think I'm going to hear. If I think it's "classical", then I think I would call it a concert, but then if it started to slide over experimental, like when I lived in New York, I listened to John Zorn and stuff like that, that was a show.
Mike Monteiro:
Yeah.
Lisa Welchman:
Right? So, anyhow. But it wasn't small and it wasn't in... that was Knitting Factory, this wasn't a venue that's going to go away.
Mike Monteiro:
Oh, God, the Knitting Factory.
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah, remember that?
Mike Monteiro:
Yeah.
Andy Vitale:
So, when there's an orchestra that plays along with, I don't know, like the Home Alone soundtrack or they do that tour where you watch the movie and the orchestra plays live with the score, is that a show?
Lisa Welchman:
Do you go to that?
Andy Vitale:
I went to one where it was Empire Records and they had a band playing the music of a movie, but ultimately, to me, that's a show even though it's in a 1,500 or 800-person facility because the entertainment, it's not just a single performance, it's multiple performances. So that makes me immediately think show because I'm being visually stimulated from different ways. I don't know. That's just, I think show big there because it's more than one thing happening at once.
Mike Monteiro:
All right. You remember how the last tour that he did, Prince did a bunch of little pop-up...
Lisa Welchman:
I was at the one in Baltimore, that he did---
Mike Monteiro:
Okay. So...
Lisa Welchman:
... it was a George Floyd stuff, was I not?
Mike Monteiro:
So tiny-
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah. No, no-
Mike Monteiro:
... tiny, little...
Lisa Welchman:
... no, it wasn't the small thing, this one, I went to the big stadium one. I know what you're talking about. It wasn't one of those in Baltimore that he did. He did a big concert in Baltimore to raise money over the whole George Floyd, but go ahead what you're saying.
Mike Monteiro:
Wait a minute, Prince?
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah.
Mike Monteiro:
The timeline doesn't work.
Lisa Welchman:
Okay, then it wasn't George Floyd. It was... what? Are you sure? What year did Prince die? Is that five years ago, I think?
Mike Monteiro:
Yeah, it was a while.
Andy Vitale:
Yeah.
Lisa Welchman:
And the George Floyd thing was...
Mike Monteiro:
Just last year.
Lisa Welchman:
Oh, George Floyd. I'm sorry, I'm totally getting names mixed up. That's wrong. It was the gentleman in Baltimore. I'm going to look it up while we're talking. The gentleman in Baltimore who was put in the back of the van by the Baltimore police, and-
Mike Monteiro:
Oh, yeah.
Lisa Welchman:
... there's so many, you can't even keep them.
Mike Monteiro:
It's so many-
Lisa Welchman:
It's ridiculous. That's just-
Mike Monteiro:
... but anyway-
Lisa Welchman:
... I'm going to look it up because I actually do want to say his name.
Mike Monteiro:
... so Prince would tune up for his big shows by showing up at little bars, almost 24 hours notice or less, what would you call those?
Lisa Welchman:
Freddie Gray.
Mike Monteiro:
Freddie Gray? Freddie...
Lisa Welchman:
Freddie Gray.
Mike Monteiro:
Freddie Gray.
Lisa Welchman:
Freddie Gray.
Andy Vitale:
Yup, Freddie Gray.
Mike Monteiro:
Thank you for looking that up.
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah. No, I mean, I'm embarrassed that I forgot his name, but it's just also like, oh my God.
Mike Monteiro:
There's so many.
Lisa Welchman:
It's just ridiculous. Anyhow, not this episode, we're not going to go down that road, but what a shame, and shame on us, America.
Mike Monteiro:
Yup. I mean, we can go down that road.
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah, we can go down that road. I mean, if we want to go down that road and talk about it is, is it relates to technology and how that stuff goes together, I don't even know if there's a connection between those things, but just how people use that technology to organize for protests and to organize for evil, right? And so, it's just sad.
Mike Monteiro:
Well, so, here, let me be really self-serving about it.
Lisa Welchman:
All right.
Mike Monteiro:
Because I got a new talk, I got a new talk that I'm doing, and things being what they are and we being where we are, I decided, the hell with waiting for conferences, doesn't really matter. So I just set up my own events. The talk is called My People Were in Shipping, and it's about the African slave trade as invented by my ancestors, hurray me, and about finding this out and dealing with that, and that's a journey and how oftentimes, we build up these walls against admitting some of this shameful shit. And it's intergenerational that you have to deal with and how carrying this around, you have to just say yes, yes, we did this. This is something that we did. This is something that we should deal with and we can't really move forward cleanly until we've done something about it.
Mike Monteiro:
And there's the whole tie in to what's going on in America right now, obviously. I mean, we keep trying to sweep this shit under the rug, and there's a tie in to tech too. All of this shit happened on our platforms. And we're seeing tech leaders out there, still, saying not us, not us. They just happened to do this on our platform but we can't really be blamed for it. So the talk is about how you have to just own it. You have to just own that, yes, this is the thing that happened, yes, we're responsible for it, yes, we need to clean it up. And how once we get past that, rather than trying to run from the shame, just walking towards it and through it and seeing what's on the other side of that, then, we can actually start cleaning up some of the messes that we've made.
Mike Monteiro:
So I use my own story of my own ancestry as a device to talk about what's happening now in tech and how they need to own some of this shameful shit that they've done and the repercussions that have come out of that. And they're still not doing it, and they're not doing it because to admit that you're responsible for something like this is scary and it's easier not to and...
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah. I think the intent there is, I mean, it's hard for me. I'm a Black woman in tech and I'm a Black woman in her 50s in tech, so I was in Silicon Valley, in particular, in the '90s, so the first wave of commercial web, that's when I was physically located in that. And so I had my issues in my first job at Cisco Systems, the typical bias that Black women receive in any type of work environment, plus a little bit of tech put on top of it. And part of the reason why I've just sort of floated around the system and not inside of organizations, it's kind of intolerable.
Lisa Welchman:
And so for me, at this point, it's very good, objectively, I'm putting on my consultant hat, as a consultant, it's very good to see people realizing and waking up to a dynamic that I've been swimming in my entire life, right, and at the same time, there's a huge part of me that's like, I would just like to go over here and knit while you all work that out because honestly, this ain't my gig, right? Somebody else needs to work this shit out because while we're in this problem with you, it's just not my problem to solve, not my problem to solve at all. So to the extent that your work is going to help that out, know that I'm on the sidelines with a box of popcorn, occasionally glancing your way and cheering you on, if that doesn't sound too cynical.
Mike Monteiro:
Well, I may join you sooner rather than later because, I mean, honestly, this is exhausting. I'm going to self-shilling here. I just put out a new book, The Collected Angers, ta-da.
Lisa Welchman:
How did I miss that? I've been googling all around you.
Mike Monteiro:
There's a lot going on.
Lisa Welchman:
Yes, a lot going on. Okay, cool.
Mike Monteiro:
So, The Collected Angers, it's all the essays, or the best of the essays that I've written in the last six, seven, eight years about design shit. And when I was putting that together, part of me was like, this is the last thing I do. This is the last thing I do for the design community. Screw it. And after this, I'm going to go write fan fiction for Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, or something because for eight years, I've been trying to get people to understand that they're responsible for their work. And to me, that felt like, okay, well, spend a month here, we'll spend a month talking about how you're responsible for your work and then we'll move on to the next phase.
Mike Monteiro:
And I feel like I've been fighting step one for eight years, which maybe I'm not very good at getting the point across, that's one possibility, or two, people don't want to get that, or maybe it's a combination of the two things, but it kind of feels exhausting at times.
Andy Vitale:
It's interesting because your name comes up with my team a lot, started with me, how do I turn people on this message, especially wanting them to feel empowered, right? I'm working with a team of varying maturity and sometimes, I need them to really take the initiative and take the step and be confident in their ability, whether it's right or wrong, be accountable for a decision that you make and you'll have support around that. And now I'm starting to see that message kind of carry on, and it's been good. And I feel like it's probably been a really hard fight for you and it's been what a lot of designers that I've had coached or mentored or worked with needed to hear at times. But still, the industry itself, it's a lot of the same things over and over, at the next place, at the next place. So I can see where you get frustrated with it.
Mike Monteiro:
Well, I mean, thank you, and thank your team for me. Ah, man, I cringe when you say hard fight because I wrote a thing, I mean, I don't really feel like I'm going to training camp and waking up at 5:00 AM and chasing chickens around the backyard. I wrote a thing and people had issues with it, or it didn't have an effect or whatever, it's really great to be able to earn a living that way. I mean, that's a pretty privileged life right there, but I do believe I've had some effect on people. And I think it's worth it, it's been worth it. I wish it was a bigger effect, but I think we all wish that from our work. I wish my work had a bigger impact on things. I don't know anybody who's worth their salt who doesn't think that about their work.
Mike Monteiro:
We're never satisfied, we're never satisfied with the impact that our work had on people. And if 5,000 people tell me this was great and two people tell me, this was lacking, ah, God, boy, those two people are in my head and I'm just churning over what they say over and over and over because that's just how people work.
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah. I mean, it sounds like, for folks who are designing things, I mean, I design people systems, but who are designing in the more traditional sense, as an outsider looking into that world and seeing people like both of you all work in it, the thing that really sticks out to me is you don't have a lot to work with, right? So there are plenty of talented people and good ideas, so it's not a diss on the skillset of the people there, and this harks back to what you were talking about just as far as, or what I was thinking about as far as the racism and the sexism and the exclusion, the homogenous nature of the tech world, right?
Lisa Welchman:
You're only going to get so much result out of that. I mean, people think that they're doing folks who are excluded a favor, right, by allowing them to be a part of this environment, and it's actually the inverse is true, right?
Mike Monteiro:
I'll let you, I'll let you.
Lisa Welchman:
I'll let you be in here and it's like, no, actually, you really need this because this is kind of fucked up and it's only going to get better if you just open this up and allow all the what you call otherness to come in here and be part of the formation process. You're not going to get better solutions out of things when the people who are making the decisions have already made the decision in their head before they sat down at the table and have a very, very limited and narrow worldview. I don't have the broadest worldview myself, but I know it. I know that the world that goes on in my head is not the whole world, whereas there are a lot of people in tech who don't know that.
Lisa Welchman:
They're making up stuff and they're like, if it works for me, it must be right. And I can't even conceive of what that seems like, and it's a shame because there's so much capacity. We have the solutions to many things if we would just allow everyone in the room to participate.
Mike Monteiro:
And you're absolutely right. And I feel like people like me and people like you and people like 100 other people out there have been trying to sound this alarm for years. There's cracks in the foundation, something's going to go wrong. It's common. There's a rip in the fence, you all ain't ready for this. And it was in the land of chicken little theory, like, oh, God, always screaming about bad things about to happen, well, they happened, they happened. We plotted a coup, we plotted a coup on social media.
Lisa Welchman:
It works, social media works.
Mike Monteiro:
Yeah. Americans plotted a coup in plain sight on social media. They told you they were going to do it, they did it. We saw the results of what they did, it's not theory anymore. We don't have to go up there and talk about how this is common. Now we get to talk about, whoa, so that happened. That happened. This thing that we told you was going to happen. That's in the past. We get to have conversations about that happened. And now, we can start asking questions that instead of what will you do if, now, we can ask questions like how are you going to keep this from happening again.
Mike Monteiro:
And when Mark and Sheryl say, well, it didn't happen here, we get to say, receipts, we have receipts. They talked about it Congress. It was on the front page of every paper. It happened. How are you fixing it? And I think that's the shift, that's where we can all shift now, because now we're not sounding alarms anymore. Now, we're like, how do we fix the mess you made? It's not the mess that you're about to make, it's the mess you made. And you knew, you knew it was coming because we told you it was coming. And people smarter than me told you it was coming and you told them that they were nuts, and then it came. And I don't see any apologies from those people and I don't see any signs to fix shit either.
Mike Monteiro:
What I still see from people like Jack and Mark and Sheryl and those goobers is still, it's still that shame covered, oh, that wasn't us. That wasn't us. They're like those little ghost characters in Family Circus, remember them? Like, not me.
Lisa Welchman:
Is that still out, Family Circus?
Mike Monteiro:
Like, Billy, who's been taking mom's birth control like Pez? Not me.
Andy Vitale:
[crosstalk 00:43:09]...
Mike Monteiro:
I think you got to have Prince on guitar.
Andy Vitale:
Perfect.
Lisa Welchman:
You know what? That's exactly right because you want to know what? At that Baltimore concert, he had this guitar solo, and I know music fans know Prince was an amazing guitarist, but my mind was blown. I was weeping, I was crying, I was just like, oh my God, this is just... that's not bad.
Mike Monteiro:
I mean, there's some Prince albums that I absolutely love, probably the very basic set. I'm not a Prince completist. My wife, Erika Hall, she adores Prince, so we do get our fair share of Prince in the house and she has educated me very well about Prince. But the thing that most astonished me the more I learned about him was, holy shit, he can really play a guitar. I think that's how she hooked me.
Lisa Welchman:
I had a client in Minneapolis once and we did the tour. This was after he died, right, we did the tour of, what is it, Paisley Park?
Andy Vitale:
Paisley Park, yup.
Lisa Welchman:
Paisley Park, we did the cheap tour so we didn't get to go into every super duper room, but we did the Paisley Park tour, and it was kind of amazing just how weird and odd and intimate it was. I mean, it was just like a dude who'd build a big house that he could fun in, right?
Mike Monteiro:
Yeah.
Lisa Welchman:
... so it was kind of amazing. I didn't know that much about him, but that was amazing. So that's a good pick. So we got Aretha on vocals, Mike Watt on bass, and Prince on guitar.
Andy Vitale:
Yup. I was in Minnesota, I lived in Minneapolis when Prince died, and I remember, I was at 3M and there was the... TMZ posted it or someone, and maybe I was not paying attention to the meeting and just saw it on Twitter and then it kind of spread. And it was crazy. Everything stopped that day. And I remember that night, we went to eat somewhere, and literally, the sky, it was purple rain that night. And I couldn't believe it, the sky was purple and it was raining, it was drizzling, but crazy. And then the next day, we went past Paisley Park, we drove past it on the way to arboretum there, and just news people and tons of fans leaving wreaths and notes, and it was crazy. First Ave opened up that night and had an all night long dance party. I've never seen anything like that. The last person I remember, famous, famous musician that died when I was younger was Kurt Cobain.
Mike Monteiro:
All right, are we doing horns too?
Lisa Welchman:
Well, you could do horns if you want to do horns. I mean, we're missing-
Mike Monteiro:
and horns...
Lisa Welchman:
... a drummer or some level of percussion other than...
Mike Monteiro:
Yeah, here's the question, why are we going by standard rock band?
Lisa Welchman:
That's what I asked at the front. I was like, I got Alice Coltrane on harp, so horns would be great.
Mike Monteiro:
Well, then, I'm throwing in both Coltrane's.
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah. I was thinking, I wanted to have Alice and John in the same band but I thought that sounded a little too...
Mike Monteiro:
Because if you're going to have a horn section, you're going to have Coltrane and, I mean, if you're throwing in a harp, I mean, what are our choices?
Lisa Welchman:
Not a lot.
Mike Monteiro:
Exactly. And I think it's fair that Alice comes out at the top of that heap.
Lisa Welchman:
She was amazing. She's also amazing pianist-
Mike Monteiro:
She was amazing
Lisa Welchman:
... she can double. So we've got somebody on keys and we've got her playing the harp as well.
Mike Monteiro:
All right. We just need to figure out our drummer situation.
Andy Vitale:
So, what does the future hold for Mike Monteiro?
Lisa Welchman:
You said you were ready to leave and eat popcorn with me and watch the world go by.
Mike Monteiro:
The future, hopefully, I kind of want to go outside. I want to go outside, I want to go see a show, I want to go to the movies, I want to do all this safely. I want to visit a place where I haven't been in a year. I used to spend 50% of my time traveling to the point where this may all be my fault because I was the one who's like, I never want to travel again.
Lisa Welchman:
Oh.
Mike Monteiro:
Sorry about that.
Lisa Welchman:
No, I don't think you got that much drive, Mike. It wasn't you.
Mike Monteiro:
God didn't listen to you, Mike. As soon as we can safely travel somewhere, we're going on a vacation. We are going somewhere that has a hut or a cabin, a zero goddamn internet, and I'll take a big stack of books, do a lot of nothing, do a lot of nothing and walk around safely without a mask on and say hello to people and walk in to weird little bars and have weird little drinks and-
Lisa Welchman:
Eat street food.
Mike Monteiro:
... eat street food and, hey, you want to be my friend for the next 10 minutes while we have this drink together and tell me something interesting about yourself? That was fun, bye. Best friendships.
Lisa Welchman:
I used to have those on Greyhound buses when I was in college. The Greyhound bus length friendship, right?
Mike Monteiro:
Yeah.
Lisa Welchman:
Tell them your deepest, darkest secrets, get off the bus, and it's over. It's like free therapy.
Mike Monteiro:
Single serving friends. Apart from that, what I still really, really, really enjoy doing is teaching young designers, talking to young designers about stuff, doing my workshops. I've been doing one-on-one's with people where just work through whatever issues they might be having, stuff like that, I love doing stuff like that. I have zero desire to work for anybody. I have zero desire to help... right now, I have zero desire to help a company figure out how to make money, how to collect data, how to take things from people that people need more than they do. But I love working with designers and helping them figure their stuff out, and hopefully, doing a little bit to make sure that young kids entering the field know exactly how much power they have in these situations because we've been stripped of that.
Mike Monteiro:
We have been taught to believe that we are powerless, and we accept that. And I think the young kids that I talk to now, the ones that are in school or just came out of school, they're not buying it anymore. They're not buying that nonsense. They're unionizing. I mean, we are the generation who gave that up. And do you see that medium unionized yesterday?
Lisa Welchman:
I didn't see that. I missed that one.
Mike Monteiro:
Yeah. Yeah, the writers and engineers and designers, they all unionized. They're like, fuck it. No, we don't believe that we're a family anymore. No, we don't believe that you have our best interest at heart. We have our own best interest at heart, thank you, and we can do this ourselves. And we're seeing this happen more and more across the industry, and we got these amazing little socialists coming up everywhere and God bless them. And...
Lisa Welchman:
More power to the family.
Mike Monteiro:
Huh?
Lisa Welchman:
Pass the torch.
Mike Monteiro:
Yeah. And if there's anything I can do to help them out, I'm happy to do it, but I do not need to be on stage when they come to do their thing.
Andy Vitale:
I have another question, only because of looking at your record collection and we talked about technology and digital, so your setup is very much vinyl analog, I've got vinyl downstairs, on top of that is my home pod.
Mike Monteiro:
mumbling./
Andy Vitale:
... that I stream my Spotify to from time to time, how have you embraced digitalization in music in the way you listen to it? And what made you kind of... I imagine you started with vinyl and then adopted some digital and then went back, or have you been vinyl the whole time?
Mike Monteiro:
Oh, no. I mean, I started with vinyl because I'm old, and vinyl was what you got and a record costs $7.98 at Sam Goody, and you had to shovel a lot of snow to get $7.98. And then, when I was in college, it was like, oh, let's trade all these vinyl and get CDs because they're so great. And then digital came along and it's like, well, this is... I mean, I'm a nerd, so yeah, all of a sudden, we're like MP3 this, MP3 that, and I love that shit. I've got subscription to some, you know, shall remain nameless streaming service, and I leave the house, I put my headphones on, not the AirPods because I've got the weird ears where the AirPods fall out.
Lisa Welchman:
I don't believe in AirPods.
Mike Monteiro:
I don't like them. And people keep them in all the time and just talk with the AirPods in their ears, which, I'm old and cranky and I think that's rude because I can't tell if you're talking to me or not, but whatever. I like a cord, I like a visible cord, but I do the digital thing if I'm walking around. And then if I'm home, I put on the records, because I like putting on records, but I'm not interested in having a conversation about what sounds best or what's more pure or what's got the low, lows and the high, highs. Love music, man. The thing about music is that there's something for everybody out there, and however you listen to it is the right way to listen to it.
Mike Monteiro:
Personally, I get a kick out of... I mean, I was a poor kid in Philly who had to shovel a lot of snow to make $7.98 to get a record. So the fact that I can walk in to them, even now, I just buy a bunch of records, like, yeah. It's like candy for dinner almost. It's like that adultery. It's like when you're a kid and you're like, yeah, when I'm grown up, I'm going to have candy for dinner every night. It's like the same thing with records. I'm like, oh, you know what? I'm getting all of these.
Lisa Welchman:
That's cool.
Mike Monteiro:
Of course, they're $25 now.
Lisa Welchman:
Are they really? I mean, I feel-
Mike Monteiro:
Yeah.
Lisa Welchman:
... my son's always telling me how crazy I am, I had this amazing record collection, right, growing up that was mostly '70s and '80s R&B and heavy metal. That was Lisa's record collection. And at some point along the way, I think I gave it all the way. It's worth a bundle. My dad has this amazing set of records from... he's old '50s jazz bebop guy, that's where I get my jazz taste from, just the collection or whatever, which actually got saved, right, that got saved because my dad wasn't going to get rid of everything, anything. So we have that as well. But...
Mike Monteiro:
So you still have it?
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah. Actually, my son has it. He's got it. He's like, these are good, and he's pulling some out for me. I don't have a way to play vinyl in my house. Now the problem is this, I see it, I see behind you, you have a turntable, I want one, but then, I mean, I used to have the whole... I saw on Twitter today, somebody had a picture of the '80s console system in the cabinet with the glass front, right, and saying I had one of these. It's like...
Mike Monteiro:
Oh, yeah. I remember those.
Lisa Welchman:
... yeah, yeah, I had seven or eight different ones of those, my dad was a big audiophile. He did tours in Vietnam and all those dudes came back with electronics equipment from Asia, right? So I grew up with that stuff, quadraphonic sound, speakers just so, and I used to be into that, but somehow, that's kind of fallen away from me. It's tough though. I mean, that's a whole another conversation, streaming, and how they can't get certain sorts of music right. That's another inclusiveness thing. it's really engineered around a pop album. And when I say pop, I mean, any genre that could become popular, right? So, I don't know what all the ones are that I'm... but it's around that. It's not around classical music that has movements, right-
Mike Monteiro:
Right, right.
Lisa Welchman:
... that has to go in a certain order, it's not. The whole taxonomy of streaming music is so unbelievably limited, and just the categorization shows a definite narrowness of mind. So you see all of these things, is it call Primephonic-
Mike Monteiro:
Yeah.
Lisa Welchman:
... I can't remember, these classically oriented streaming where there's lossless audio, because you've got these really low, low quiet points in a piece of music and these really loud points that you don't have in a pop song, right? This generally just come in at you on an even keel. So, I've got troubles with that, but you know what? It's a luscious world we live in. It's a luscious musical world we live in. I mean, I do miss hanging out at the Harmony Hut with my buds looking at albums and checking out the guys, basically, that was a whole thing, that was a whole thing. That doesn't happen, can't happen the same online. Although maybe it does for a different demographic, maybe that's what they're doing, talking to each other and chatting about things and liking things. And so.
Mike Monteiro:
I mean, it tells you something about the people who design these services when they're like, okay, it's $.099 a song. I mean, this is a value of bringing people in from all over the place. What's the word? Diversity?
Lisa Welchman:
Yeah. If I'm in a room and everybody in the room either looks like me, is wearing the same clothes as me and is completely nodding their head all the time and agreeing with me, something's wrong, right?
Mike Monteiro:
Or we're about to build something that's really awesome for us-
Lisa Welchman:
Right.
Mike Monteiro:
... and that's fine, that's fine, go ahead, build something really awesome for you, but don't put it out in the world-
Lisa Welchman:
Right.
Mike Monteiro:
... because that's not for the world. If the five of you want to decide, all right, we're watching Weekend at Bernie's tonight, great. Great. But don't make us all watch it because we don't want to. I don't know why I came up with Weekend at Bernie's there.
Andy Vitale:
I do have vinyl. Here's my floating turntable.
Mike Monteiro:
What is that?
Lisa Welchman:
What is that?
Mike Monteiro:
It's a gimmick turntable. Oh my Lord, you got a gimmick turntable and he's showing it to us with a picture disc.
Lisa Welchman:
What even is that?
Andy Vitale:
Yeah. It's, sadly, it's a Justin Bieber picture disc.
Lisa Welchman:
Oh my God. We thought it couldn't sink any lower. He said Taylor Swift and my head split open, and then he said Justin Bieber and my brains fell out on the ground.
Mike Monteiro:
Questlove is playing drums for us.
Andy Vitale:
Nice.
Mike Monteiro:
I mean, of course, he is. The man is an encyclopedia of drumming and music, in general. So there's our drummer.
Lisa Welchman:
Well, I think that's a fine conclusion to the band and a fine conclusion to our podcast. What do you think?
Andy Vitale:
If people want to find out, get in touch with you or whatever, what's the best way for them to do that?
Mike Monteiro:
I just don't. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Look, God, I crave attention. I crave your attention. You can reach me on Twitter at @monteiro, if I haven't been banned on any particular day. They do enjoy doing that to me. You can also just email me, mike@muledesign.com. And you can buy my book, my new book, The Collected Angers. I'm putting it up on screen here for an audio podcast, which shows how smart I am.
Lisa Welchman:
It's a beautiful cover. It's beautiful.
Mike Monteiro:
Ain't it great? It's handsome, isn't it?
Lisa Welchman:
It is. It's a windmill.
Mike Monteiro:
And you see the subtitle there?
Lisa Welchman:
Essays about design for an unwilling audience. Okay.
Mike Monteiro:
And then there's the subtitle on the inside right there.
Lisa Welchman:
It's different?
Mike Monteiro:
It is different.
Andy Vitale:
An obvious grift to shake down my most loyal readers.
Mike Monteiro:
There it is. And on the back, I mean, buy it just for this, because on the back, you get a picture of my dog.
Lisa Welchman:
Oh, hi, doggie doo.
Mike Monteiro:
Yup. You can get that on Bookstop. Is it Bookstop or Bookshop? I always get it confused.
Lisa Welchman:
We'll figure it out and we'll put all that information along with the episode, along with the I think maybe the big band, the big band and some links.
Mike Monteiro:
So who's going to get this band together, Lisa?
Lisa Welchman:
Well, most of this band is dead.
Mike Monteiro:
Yeah, well, yeah.
Lisa Welchman:
Half, 50/50
Mike Monteiro:
Well, that wasn't a requirement. You should've made that maybe a requirement.
Lisa Welchman:
Well, I'm a big meditator, maybe I can meditate and reach some connections and I'll get back to you on that. How's that?
Mike Monteiro:
All right. All right.
Lisa Welchman:
Thank you so much, Mike. I appreciate it. It was great catching up with you and it was fun way to spend a Friday night.
Andy Vitale:
Yup.
Mike Monteiro:
It's always good to see the both of you.
Announcer:
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