Mike Monteiro
Burning Design Down
In this episode of Brave UX, Mike Monteiro sets fire to design orthodoxy 🔥, tech overlords 🤖, and his own Portuguese American history ⛓️ in what is a delightfully dark conversation.
Highlights include:
- Why is it important to re-examine your beliefs?
- Why do you have nothing further to tell people?
- What shocked you about your Portuguese heritage?
- How is unionisation a positive thing for tech workers?
- Why do you want some people who listen to you to get angry?
Who is Mike Monteiro?
Mike is the Design Director of Mule Design 🐴, the outspoken, outstanding, and slightly outrageous design consultancy that he co-founded with Erika Hall 21 years ago.
During that time, Mike has made an outsized contribution to the field of design. He is the Co-Host the Voice of Design podcast 🎙️ and has authored several books 📚, including “You’re My Favourite Client”, “Ruined By Design”, and “Design Is a Job” - which is now in its 2nd edition!
With a unmissable emphasis on ethics, Mike pulls-no-punches as he singles out the failings of design and the industries that employ it 🥊, while also illuminating the opportunities and challenges we face - as designers - to right the ship.
His talks, like “How Designers Destroyed the World”, “How to Fight Fascism”, “My People Were In Shipping” and “Let’s Destroy Silicon Valley” have raised more than a few eyebrows, heart rates and figurative pitch forks 🔥.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello, and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluative UX research practice and world class UX lab; enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. You can find out a little bit more about that at thespaceinbetween.co.nz.
- Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world-class UX, design and product management professionals.
- My guest today is Mike Monteiro. Mike is the design director of Mule Design, the outspoken, outstanding, and slightly outrageous design consultancy that he co-founded with Erica Hall 21 years ago. During that time, Mike has made an outsized contribution to the field of design.
- He's the co-host of the Voice of Design podcast and has authored several books, including You Are My Favorite Client, Ruined by Design and Design is a Job, now in its second edition.
- With an unmissable emphasis on ethics. Mike pulls no punches as he singles out the failings of design and the industries that employ it, while also illuminating the opportunities and challenges we face as designers to right the ship.
- His talks, like How Designers Destroyed the World, How to Fight Fascism, My People Were in Shipping and Let's Destroy Silicon Valley, have raised more than a few eyebrows, heart rates and figurative pitchforks. Something I suspect that Mike's totally okay with
- Described by the New Yorker as delightfully hostile. I'm hoping for a touch more delightful than hostile today, but we'll soon find out, won't we? Mike, welcome to the show.
- Mike Monteiro:
- Hello, Brendan. How are you?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'm doing well. I'm doing well. It's great to have you here. It's something that I've looked forward to for a long time, actually a very long time. And just to start with, I have a, well, I think it's an easy question, which is how many parts delightful to hostile are you currently running at?
- Mike Monteiro:
- Oh my Lord, I am mostly delightful. I am, I'm running at a hundred percent delightful.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Okay. Always. This next question might change that ratio. What is it like being married to someone who you've described as smarter than you?
- Mike Monteiro:
- It's amazing, honestly. Why would you want anything else? I get to hang out with the person who I think is the world smartest person. So anything that we're talking about or reading or that I have a question with you, she'll say something and hearing what she has to say makes me smarter.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So I was wondering about that, how the two of you have contributed so much to the field. How much of the perspective that you've been able to bring has been a result of the two of you just bouncing things off of each other and off the people that are in your circle?
- Mike Monteiro:
- I'd say fairly significant. I mean, we, I think at this point we've been running this place for 21 years together, and I think at this point we have understand each other. We have a secret language, we know how we work together. I kind of think my contribution to this company is being able to understand what Eric is saying and being able to dumb it down for people. Usually using sports metaphors in a way that they'll understand,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Do you actually like sports or is it just a vehicle that you've found that a lot of people can connect with?
- Mike Monteiro:
- Oh, I used to it a lot more than I do, but I grew up enjoying 'em. And then you find out that everybody involved in it is a racist piece of shit. And that's kind of turn off after a while.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I definitely want to get into your conversation that you've been provoking around the role of race as specifically as it relates to the field of design. But before we do that, I just wanted to address something with you because I understand that in your last book, the collected angers, which were essays about design for an unwilling audience, you vowed never to write another design book again, but then I discovered something that you'd done. You didn't specifically mention anything about children's books. So what is sofa stories and why did you write it with Betsy?
- Mike Monteiro:
- So I love that book. Yeah, I just wrote a children's book. I mean, depending on how much you trust your children, it's a children's book,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]. Tell me about that.
- Mike Monteiro:
- Betsy and I Betsy is a friend of mine. She's a delightful illustrator. She's like her, and we actually met Eric has known her for a while, but I met Betsy when at the start of the pandemic we were doing quarantine book club, and Betsy came to every one of 'em and she would just sit there drawing. And at one point I said, Hey, Betsy, what are you drawing there? And so that just became part of our routine. At the end of the episode, I turned to Betsy and I say, Betsy, what'd you draw today? And she would show everybody her drawing, and it was always this amazing anthropomorphic animal doing something silly. Then I ended up becoming friends with Betsy, and every once in a while she would send me a drawing or share a drawing with a group of friends. And at one point she shared a drawing, and to me, there was a story in the drawing that was so obvious to my weird broken mind, and it's it.
- So I just typed out the story and she sent another one and I t I was like, well, okay, I see a story here. And I mean, it's a testament to what a wonderful illustrator she is that she, she'll give you this drawing of a character in a little setting and you see there's a past, there's a present, there's a future. It's all right there. So we decided, let's make a book of these, and there's 30 of them in the book. Betsy did the illustrations. And the illustrations always came first. And then I would come up with the story to go with the illustration. And it's kind of like a broken fairy tales thing where it's not really for children but it looks like it's for children.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Now, Mike, you appear to approach your public criticism of design with a lot of passion. And that's not a word that I typically like to use because it gets overused, but you do have this kind of energy, almost like a Billy Graham, the Baptist type energy with revolutionary undertones of Karl. This sort of combination of that passion with that kind of, I suppose, that intellect that you are trying to bring to this conversation. Yet you recently and I watched a talk that you've given earlier in the year to some design students, and in that talk you said to them, don't put your passion into shit that you sell to other people for money. You keep that shit at home, have something that you hold back from other people that you keep just for yourself, something that's yours. So if what we see from you in terms of your commentary on design isn't passion in the way that you deliver that, what is it that you're actually putting into what appears to be very passionate work for the field?
- Mike Monteiro:
- Well, I mean it's a, it's design. So here's the design problem. How do I talk to people about something that isn't fun, isn't promising them like a big old box of gold coins at the end and is difficult to hear? How do you talk to people about something like that and get them to listen? So there's your design problem, and the solution is to do it in a way that gets their attention. Do it in a way that is, I mean, I could talk to you about ethics using pie charts and graphs in a very academic voice, but who the fuck wants to listen to that? This is just how a designer should approach things. You got a problem, you got an audience. How do I, I figure out how do I communicate this to that audience? What's available to me, what's in my toolbox? And before, I didn't do my first public talk until I was very old because I was terrified of public speaking. I said, okay, this is something I have to get over. And so I went on YouTube and I'm like, well, who's good at public speaking?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Billy Graham
- Mike Monteiro:
- Baptist ministers and professional wrestlers?
- I even kidding. So I watched, I mean, I was already a wrestling fan from way back. So you know, watch a wrestler going off in the ring doing their thing and they're working the crowd and you watch a minister work. I mean, they're working the crowd. And I thought, if I'm going to get up in front of people and I'm going to speak, I'm going to work the crowd. So I watched a ton of those and I listened to how, and there's certain methods that people use. I'm going to repeat a thing 10 times until you hear it. I'm going to keep simplify, I'm going to keep repeating, I'm going to keep coming back to that thing. So there's a pattern when you're speaking that I got really used to, or that I got pretty fairly good at when I was doing my public speaking and it worked for me. I don't know if it worked for you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, it definitely holds your attention and I think you delivered, let's destroy Silicon Valley only once before the pandemic. And it's not even titled that in YouTube. So I will link to it in the show notes if people are interested in having having a watch of that talk. No,
- Mike Monteiro:
- The one I did just once, the pandemic was a small sliver of hope that I did kind of was February of 2020. I flew down to Miami to do it once and it was kind of like a practice round because it was a smaller crowd. And on the flight back I was going through all these notes, here's what I need to fix and your timing here is off and yada yada yada. And this part is weak and this part got a lot of laughs, so let's keep that. So I'm going through all of this and I had a bunch of other stuff already scheduled for March and April and thing and stuff. And then the pandemic hit
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Fucked up everything, didn't it?
- Mike Monteiro:
- Well, I mean I think it fucked up a little more than my talk schedule. But the thing was, I, the topic of the talk was pretty much the clocks at 1159. We've got one small little sliver, a guy, one minute if we want to fix anything. And the only way that it's even going to have a remote chance of working is if we can unify. If we can unify and just the debate for are things actually bad that debate's over, we need to decide, yes, this is broken, let's fix it and we need to get with the fixing. And then the pandemic hit and I watched I watched how the world was reacting to that and how human beings were reacting to that. And I just closed the book on the talk. It was like, Nope, I'll fuck this
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Up. Your bio that you use online on the mule site and also other places, I think on a book apart, for example, other places where you have your public profile, you have said in there, or at least it says in there that you've pretty much given up on tech. And this is partly evidenced by the fact that you haven't written as far as I know, another talk since a small sliver of hope. And just this year I
- Mike Monteiro:
- Wrote my people in a shipping.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Right, okay. After that, I'm staying corrected. You said earlier this year and something that I watched of yours, you said, I've stopped writing talks because I've decided I don't have anything to tell people yet. You still seem to have a lot to say. And so I was curious about this. Is it really that you don't have anything to tell people? Or is it more that you are tired of telling people what you already have told them?
- Mike Monteiro:
- Well, I think a little bit of both. And also a big old dollop of am I the right person to be telling people anything
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And what's that about?
- Mike Monteiro:
- Do we need another white man yelling at people about the state of things. I've been asked the last couple years or so to come and do to your talks, not necessarily at conferences, but at a lot of schools, universities, shit like that. And I tell people I want to do a talk, but I'm happy to come in and do a q and a because I want to hear what other folks have to say. I want to hear what questions are on students' minds. And right now that to me is so much more interesting hearing what people are worried about, what people are concerned about than any answers that I might have for them. Because I don't know that I have any, quite honestly, there's a point at which, you know, tap out again the things I've learned from wrestling, at some point you get tired and you tap out and somebody else C comes, goes into the ring and you have to give those other P and you have to give somebody else a chance.
- And when I said that, I very much meant it. And I'm still not quite ready to tap back in yet, quite honestly at least right now. I mean, I'm be very honest with you, where are we? December of 2022. The pandemic has fucked with me and fucked with everyone. Fucked with everyone. And when I say fucked with me, I appreciate how lucky I've been and I'm still here. Weird. I'm still here. I do this ridiculous job where I've been able to keep earning a living. Here I am on my little screen. And so I've been doing this, earning a living and other people haven't been able to do that. And within that realm of privilege, it is still fucked with me in a way that there's old enough that I've seen, there's parts of your life that close and you're like, okay, well that was interesting.
- It was interesting doing that. Now let's see what's next. The pandemic felt like. And sometimes those things happen because you decide you're ready for them to happen. And sometimes the world just decides for you. And this feel feels very much like the world deciding what great job with the whole international traveler, public speaking phase of your life, you did really well, but now that's over and let's see what else you got. And it felt, the pandemic felt very much like that. I, I saw people who were like, okay, when are we going back? When are we going back to the way things? And those folks seemed kind of miserable to me. Mm-hmm.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Planning for a pass that's not going to
- Mike Monteiro:
- Return and maybe shouldn't. And then there were folks who were like, well, okay, again, this is a design problem. Here's available to me right now. Here are the possibilities. So I can either wake up tomorrow looking at these, figuring out a way to form these possibilities into something that helps me make it through the day and helps me go to sleep at night hoping for another tomorrow. Or I can spend the day regretting that it wasn't what I was hoping it would be.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's a source of a lot of anguish for a lot of people. How much of your listening tour that you've been doing around campuses with students, how much of returning to the grassroots of design is about you trying to find your way through this transition that you've just described that you're undergoing?
- Mike Monteiro:
- I'd say, I mean, that's a great question. I haven't thought about it in those terms, but hearing the question, I think that's it. That's that I would say a significant amount. Just figuring out what the fuck are we doing? Why are we doing it? To whose benefit are we doing it? Fuck UX, fuck design. I have no intention of trying to, I don't care about those industries. I care about the people affected by those industries. Whether it's the people who are practicing, the designers who are being employed to practice their craft or the folks on the other side of the glass, the people who are affected by that work. I care about them. I care about both of those groups of people. The industry itself, I do not care about.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So what have students told you? What is the most burning question that they've asked you or the issue that you've seen them wrestling with?
- Mike Monteiro:
- Why didn't you do anything seriously? Why didn't you do anything
- Brendan Jarvis:
- About
- Mike Monteiro:
- [laugh], about all this shit that we're going through? So when I started as a designer, it was, I mean I started my career as a print designer because it was the only game in town. And then along comes the web and it looked very exciting. It was like, Ooh, this is new, this is nuts. This is kind of everything that we ever wanted. All of a sudden don't, like I can just put my things out there and people can see it. I don't need a publisher. I don't need to run to Kinkos and make a thousand copies of something. I just put it and it's easy to put, oh, this is so easy to learn. And that was so all so exciting. Then we met other people in the industry at the time who were talking about like, oh wow, the web is great equalizer. Everyone's going to have a voice. It's amazing. It's beautiful. Come join. I was like, oh yeah unicorns and double rainbows. Fuck yeah, I want that. And then 30 years later, Nazis, I hope you like Nazis because [laugh] what we've made for you. And you're talking to kids, they're like, what the fuck happened there?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You grew up in Philadelphia and you went to a university called Temple University, which you referred to in the past as an inverted, as a bad school, a state school. And you said also about it that it gave you a really great education when you graduated. Just how large was your student loan?
- Mike Monteiro:
- My student loan fir, wait a minute, did I ever call Temple University a bad school?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You did. I jest.
- Mike Monteiro:
- Oh, okay. Because I actually, I love that I went to a state school. I love that I went to Temple. It's like, it's an amazing place and it's a real place in, so in Philadelphia, I'll tell you a little aside here, you can decide to cut it or not. In Philadelphia, there are two main universities. There's temple and that's the state school. That's the one where the kids in the city go to. And then there's the University of Pennsylvania, which is super fucking expensive. It's the one that kids come from out of state to go to. It's part of the Ivy League. It's like the nose in the air school. And if you tell people that you went to college in Philadelphia the joke is that I went to Temple O because if you tell people that you went to college in Philadelphia, they'll say, oh, Penn did you go to Penn? No Temple. Oh yes, temp o I went to temp O You sn [laugh].
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well that look, that was a good aside. And I don't think we'll cut that, but I am curious, your student loan, how large was it when you finished?
- Mike Monteiro:
- Well, here's the thing. Here's that's funny because I can remember the day that I got the envelope that said here's how much you owe us. I sat on my front stoops and I opened the envelope I saw the number and I cried because I thought there is absolutely no way I will be able to ever pay this off. That number was $7,000,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Which is about a 10th, right? About a 10th of what it currently stands out for a
- Mike Monteiro:
- Graduate. I'd say. I mean, everybody who just graduated from school who is sitting on a ti amount of student loans just told me to go fuck myself as they should have. But at the time, that felt like such a huge amount. So I can't imagine what it's like to graduate now and get that letter and that letter is like six digits. That's nuts. And it's criminal. I think it's actually criminal that we're saddling young people with that amount of debt early in life. And it's totally fucking us up as a society, by the way, because I got an art degree for my 7,000 thousand dollars. And as enormous an amount as that felt like, I felt like, well, I'm going to get an art degree. This is what I want to do and that'll be fun. And now you do the math of like, well I'm, when I graduate from here, I'm going to be like a hundred grand in debt. And you have to think about what kind of degree should I shoot for that helps me pay off that debt. Cause it's not a fucking English degree with a minor in Russian literature that helps me to pay down a hundred grand, I'm, it's going to be like some bullshit business degree or a medical degree, which means more debt down the road. The humanities are, we just took a giant shit on the humanities with what we did to college tuition. And so there's a whole skillset that you lose generationally when
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Technically you lose your humanity. Is that where this leads us? No.
- Mike Monteiro:
- Yeah, because we're gradu. We've got a whole generation of kids who are going to be saddled with that debt. So they're making choices to help pay down that debt. And those choices are the much more analytical side of education and which is necessary. It's necessary. I'm not shitting on that. But you also need the kids who are willing to take the English classes and the arts classes and the poetry classes and all of that shit to have a functioning society. And that's really fucked us over. And now you've got the Biden administration, they just attempted to help out with student debt a little bit, in my opinion, not enough, but hey, a little bit is better than nothing. And there's people my age who were screaming, well wait a minute, I had to pay my student loans. How come they don't have to pay theirs? And I wish all of those people had one neck so that I strangle 'em all at once because what a fucking selfish, self-righteous stupid way to live that you want to make sure that the generation after you is suffering along the same way that you are or with the same thing that you did. It just speaks to a very brokenness in people.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That rabid individualism though is really at the core from an outsider's perspective, looking in what America has tried to foster in its people over successive decades.
- Mike Monteiro:
- Yes, I have absolutely nothing to say to defend America. It is the richest country in the world. It cannot offer its people. It will not offer its people healthcare, which is a human, it should be offering its people a free education because I believe in education is human. The amount of people in this country who are unhoused is an international disgrace. And the amount of people in this country who need mental care and cannot get it is disgraceful. And we keep making decisions, we keep making decisions to hurt people. And so I don't think this is a country of any dignity or grace.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And given what you've just shared and also the things that you've said previously about, I think anger hopefully is not a misplaced word here, definitely frustration that you feel with the state of things. When do you first recall becoming conscious of just how frustrated you were or with the status quo
- Mike Monteiro:
- Growing up in Philadelphia in the 1970s in an immigrant community? Just kind of set the table for that because I grew up surrounded by all of these people who had immigrated to the United States because it was supposed to be better. And the lesson that they were receiving was that C, because all of these folks, they want to be, they want to be super American, they want to be super American when they get here. We belong, belong. Please be nice to us. We're going to start businesses, we're going to help the economy be cool that we're here. We are just like, we're more than just like you. We're super versions of you. And what I saw was, and these folks looked around and they were like, what makes Americans American racism? So watching an immigrant community become super fucking racist because to them that to them was the thing that made them more American was a hell of a tell.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What was the nature of that racism that you observed in those immigrant communities that you were growing up in? I understand that your family is from Portugal. Yeah. So what was it that you observed in the Portuguese immigrants about the way in which they tried to assimilate into American culture?
- Mike Monteiro:
- I mean, this is the American cast system. This is a wonderful book called Cast by Isabel Wilkerson, which everyone should read twice that talks about the caste system in America and how it was developed and how every group that comes into America has an opportunity to climb up that caste system except one which has been firm and which is black people who have been firmly placed at the bottom of that caste system. And the way that you rise up through the caste system is by showing disregard for black people and whiteness being the construct that it is. Anytime the white's in charge need to, anytime they feel like there's too many of the people at the bottom rising up, they just invite the next group in. So if you look at the history of Americans, it's like, well, the Irish became white and the Italians became white. And eventually we pull the closest group in and say, okay, well you're white now, so okay, there's more of us now. And it's all a history of hitting on black people.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And that history goes quite back as far as I understand. In Portugal's history. I understand
- Mike Monteiro:
- The Portuguese invented the North Atlantics slave trade,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I understand that while you're at Temple, you had an uncomfortable conversation about your Portuguese heritage with a young black man. What was said and what do you remember thinking about that at the time?
- Mike Monteiro:
- I remember feeling a tremendous amount of shame because we didn't have the internet back then. We didn't have Google. We couldn't look this shit up. I'm that old. My upbringing, as far as I understood, was all told to me by community elders. And it was the great story of the discoveries and Magellan and great sailors who it mostly discovered lands that where other people were already living. And so this was the way that we were taught to think about ourselves. And I hadn't heard the other part, I hadn't heard, actually you stole people. You stole people [laugh], because my grandfather wasn't going to tell me that shit. He was all bought in on the myth. And so the leaving the confines of that community and going out into the world and meeting other folks who weren't raised in that kind of like when an Amish person decides to leave the farm, you discover like, oh, there's electricity and cars and zippers.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's by the Truman show.
- Mike Monteiro:
- So you know, meet other folks. And I also went to Catholic school for eight years, which was 50% pulled out of that from that Portuguese community. So it was very insular. And the story that they were telling was a very similar story. It's like, Hey, know the crusades. We're about getting the holy lands back and Jesus rah rah, and let's convert some savages. So this is what I grew up with and it was all very normal. This was the story, this was the truth. And then you go out and into the world and you discover, eh, there's actually more to that. You know, see folks dealing with this on daily, you still see folks dealing with things like this on a daily basis. Hey, there's more to this or a thing you haven't thought about. And the, there's like a fork in the road in people's lives where you can either double down and keep thinking that you've always known everything and that you've always been super smart and that you've always been told the truth.
- Or you can open yourself up and you can say, tell me more more about this. And you know, see it. You see it with old folks and you with gender now old people or I can't deal with all these pronouns like fuck off dude. And it's basically people saying, I don't want to think I was wrong for so long. No, but the amazing thing is you are now given a chance in this life to be a little bit smarter than you were by listening to people who you didn't think of listening to earlier, or maybe you didn't even know they were here, or maybe, well it's new, or maybe they're making you a little bit uncomfortable, but that discomfort comes from, oh wow, I've been kind of tricked, or Oh, I didn't really know the whole story. And if you just embrace that and decide, fuck it, I'm going to feel uncomfortable for a little while I learned something new mean, there's your pot at the end of the rainbow. It's like every day that you're alive, you have an opportunity to go to sleep smarter than you woke up. And there's always going to be some discomfort involved in learning. And it's such a reward when you accept it and you decide, I'm willing to go through that discomfort. Or you can put on a red cap and storm the capitol and claim you were always right about everything.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This lack of intellectual curiosity is led to a few dark places over the course of human history. And it seems to be one of the things that we are inherently capable of as humans, but quite fearful of to embrace. And in terms of the way that we try and open people's eyes and minds to the possibility that they might not be right about something, my observation has been that often coming at them too forcefully and too directly can encourage them to continue to grasp onto the limiting beliefs that they currently hold. And you are someone who's come at certain topics like racism in America very forcefully. And I'm not suggesting that that's the wrong way to go about it, but I am curious based on the way that you've approached this to the specific audience of designers that you mostly speak to, what has surprised you about the response or reaction that you've gotten that you didn't necessarily expect that you might when you first started off down this path?
- Mike Monteiro:
- Anytime that there was was a moment in every talk that I thought of as here's the line that makes the white dudes leave. And I wasn't always sure which one it was going to be, so I was always super curious and yeah, I think it was different depending on where I was giving a talk, especially in the us, there was always going to be a line that made the old white dudes leave and I got kind of annoyed if it didn't work, to be honest with you,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Not pressing hard enough
- Mike Monteiro:
- Like, God damn, that didn't go far enough. Fuck. So I expected that I wanted it. I wanted those fuckers to go home angry.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's interesting though, Mike, let's, let's just touch on that a little bit because what was it that you wanted them to change, if at all, as a result of going home angry? Or was it just that you just wanted a certain bunch of people to be mad about this?
- Mike Monteiro:
- If I'm being honest, I don't know that everyone has within them still the capacity to change. I believe that we're all born with the capacity to change. I believe that there are things that happen to us in our lives that fuck with that. And I believe that there are some people who will if I'm arguing with you, it's because I believe that you still have within you the capacity to change. If I walk away from you, it's because I decided you don't. I am not going to waste my time arguing with somebody who doesn't have it within them, the capacity to change anymore. So the way I saw it, the people who were walking out of those talks didn't have that anymore. They didn't, didn't want to change. Was I a hundred percent? Probably not, probably not. It could just be that I'm saying things in a way that wasn't working for them.
- That's fine. There's no right way to deliver. I do my thing way in the way that works towards my strengths and while I try to a adapt and change and learn, tractor's always going to be a tractor or maybe a better metaphor, the bulldozer can go fast, the bulldozer can go slow, but at the end of the day, it's a fucking bulldozer. And the bulldozer might work for some people, it won't work for other people, which is why I am super happy that there's other people having these conversations and delivering it in different ways than I am playing to their strengths.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- One of the lines that I wondered might have led to some, as you've described them, I think old white dudes walking out is, and I'll quote you now, to grow up white and male within a system that's designed specifically for you to succeed and yet not succeed. That's embarrassing. So there you were making comment just to set this in context for people on the rise of, I suppose the MAGA movement within the states. And you seem to be suggesting to me that the only thing in America holding white males back from success is themselves.
- Mike Monteiro:
- When I wrote that line, I was specifically thinking about my brothers who I don't talk to anymore, but my brothers were raised in the same situation that I was by the same people in the same house, in the same neighborhood. They had all the same possibilities available to them that I did. It's not like I took all the college money and ran off. And right now they are both, they're MAGA heads, they wear their red hats, they vote for Trump, they're members of the nra, they're racist as hell. And I think back to the three of us sitting on the couch watching Saturday morning cartoons together. We were three kids. We were three kids nine months or 18 months apart. Each of us in the same household. They're the last before I just stopped talking to 'em completely. There was just so much hate coming out of them, so much hate because though their lives didn't end up the way that they felt they should have ended up despite the fact that they did very fucking little to get their lives to go how they wanted them to, they're upset that their minimal effort didn't result in maximum results.
- If you look around at American workplaces, and my God, especially in tech, you see people of color, not many of them, you see women of and you see women, you see women of color, and you see how much harder folks who don't look like me and you Brendan, how much harder they have to work to achieve a fraction of the success that we do. I can walk into, there's a thing that I call the hotel bathroom test. Can you walk into any hotel downtown and use the bathroom?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Probably. Yeah.
- Mike Monteiro:
- Yeah. That'll tell you everything about a place that you need to know. I mean I can do it. I can walk into any hotel downtown, I don't have to dress up. I can come in shitty as I might look any particular day, walk in, use the bathroom. I might get a look or two, but no one's going to stop me because part of them's going to be are they a guest? They might be a guest, there's a chance that they're a guest, let 'em go. Mm-hmm.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- The benefit of the doubt.
- Mike Monteiro:
- Yeah. I will always get the benefit of the doubt and I've walked into every job interview that I've ever had with the benefit of the doubt. Is this dude a good designer? Hey, he looks it. He looks it is this dude somebody I can work with? Sure, I get that for free. I get the benefit of the doubt for free
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Seems to be a slight hint of remorse in your voice as you described the situation with your two brothers and where you currently sit in that relationship having been kids watching TV together and now to realize as adults, I think you're in your fifties now, that things aren't okay between you clearly not okay because you're not talking. You also, earlier you touched on your feeling that people, some people reach a point where they no longer have the capacity to adopt a different position to the one they currently hold. What hope, if any, do you hold that you might be able to mend the relationship with your brothers?
- Mike Monteiro:
- Zero. Zero. There comes a point when you have to decide where you're going to spend your energy, the shit that my brothers do and the shit and people like my brothers, the shit that they do hurts people and it puts people in jeopardy. It puts people in danger. Whatever energy that I have left, whatever love I have left, whatever hope I have left, I want to deliver it to those people, not to the ones who are hurting them. I have very little compassion left at this point for people who are out there hurting others because they feel slighted or because they feel like the world, the the white supremacist world didn't deliver on its promise that they didn't really have to try.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You said something, I think it was in Let's Destroy Silicon Valley that feels like a reflection of the point that you're at regarding compassion for people like that. And in many ways watching this talk and watching other things that you've said, in talking to you today, you struck me as a little bit of an enigma. And I mean that insofar as on one hand you lament the impact that big tech has had on democracy, the observations of your brothers and the political affiliations they've adopted, having lived under the same household, these different stories around the state of the nation, so to speak. And on the other hand, you seem to advocate a very hard line approach to the way we could address these problems in terms of some, sometimes you use, and I dunno if it's off the cuff, but violent language to describe that approach.
- And by that I'll just quote you now from that talk. You've said, there comes a time when despite our best efforts, despite the persuasion, the fighting and the best of all possible efforts of good people, things cannot be saved. The foundation is broken, those in charge are rotten. The effort to fix it, even if everyone could decide how to fix it, wouldn't be worth the time and investment. Not everything can be fixed. There is a time to burn things down. It's on us to dismantle it. It was built on our watch and it needs to burn on our watch. What did you mean by that?
- Mike Monteiro:
- That sounded pretty good. Did I say that?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You did. This is the best. Oh,
- Mike Monteiro:
- Everyone has left the podcast but nobody's listening anymore. They were like, this is the most depressing shit I've ever heard. I'm going to go listen to something else now
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I told you we were going to, were get deep and dark.
- Mike Monteiro:
- No, I mean I stand by that quote. I heard
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What needs to burn? What do we need to burn down? And do you literally mean burn down? What do you mean?
- Mike Monteiro:
- Jesus, you're going to get me in trouble. I heard I [laugh]. I'm for flipping cars and burn and setting them on fire. To be honest with you.
- Here's, here's the deal, here's how I'm going to answer this because you want to talk about violence. The richest country and the world does not house is ci, it's citizens that is violence. I forget what the actual numbers are here. The percentage of black men that lived into their thirties versus the percentage of white men that live into their thirties is ridiculous. That's violence. That is state sanctioned violence. The way the police treat minorities in this country is violence. The fact that two soldiers fought in World War II both got a GI bill out of it. The white soldier could get a mortgage with that GI bill, the black soldier could not as fucking violence. The fact that a woman in tech has to be twice as smart to earn half as much as a white counterpart violence if we want to talk violence. Let's talk about who actually started it.
- It's one of the things that's been giving me hope, a little bit of hope lately is to see the resurgence of the labor movement in the US to see workers organizing. And I think that was one of the big problems with tech is that everybody in tech saw themselves as a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. To quote John Feinberg, I'm only working here until I make my first million, which I'll then roll over into my first 10 million, yada, yada, yada. But so everybody saw being a worker as a very temporary, embarrassing entry level job, which is not uncommon in a new industry where mountains of gold are still being made, but this industry is not new anymore. It's not a startup industry, it's it's woven into the fabric of every fucking thing we do. And we're still behaving.
- We're only one lucky roll of the dinosaur way from being a tech billionaire. But lately we've seen workers actually embracing the fact that they're workers unionizing. We've got workers actually unionizing. And that's the one thing that started to give me hope. Sadly, one of the things that I've also seen is some people who I know, some of people who I came up with in this industry who now run companies turning into union breakers and shit like that despicable form of life. But watching workers realize that the labor they're putting into something is something that they should have a stake in. And I think that's going to end up strengthening our industry ethically. Because I mean, right now, I mean take a look at what's happening at Twitter. You decide you don't want to work for a Nazi overlord you get shit canned and your healthcare gets shit canned along with it.
- And your ability to pay your mortgage, get shit canned. And if you have kids and let's say that they had paying large educational bills, all that stuff is in jeopardy. So we're asking the American worker to put up with a lot, put up with a lot. And we're tying all of these, the, we're tying the social network of healthcare and education and all of that. We're tying all of that into the job market form. So you know, either work for these assholes or you don't get that, don't get to go to the doctor. And what we're seeing now is workers who are like, okay, well if though we organized so that we could fight the shithead in charge a little bit better as a group rather than a bunch of individuals. And I think we're going to see more of that. I hope we see more of that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You have spoken about the conflict, whether it's acknowledged or ignored that workers, tech workers and designers face when working in big tech between the paychecks that they receive and the undesirable outcomes of some of our work. And you touched on it just there. You sort of suggested that if you get shit canned, you then have to pay for your health insurance or find another employer. You've still got to pay your mortgage. So there are these very real threats to people's existence, or at least the level of existence they've become accustomed to that come into play here. And you've said, and I'll quote you again now this is speaking about big tech's less than glamorous moments which was in destroy Silicon Valley that talk again, you said we can accuse these assholes of self-serving inaction and that's fair, but what's not fair is to call them self-serving assholes while cashing their checks.
- What's not fair is to rail against the horrors of Silicon Valley while implementing these horrors. What's not fair is to believe that we are innocent bystanders to the damage our work has done. So there seems to be a conflict here that I want to tease out with you. Sure. Between what you said then, and it seemed like to me at least you were telling people, Hey, you're responsible for the work that you're doing for these people no matter what the personal cost might be to you to stand against it. And yet, on the other hand, just earlier on this conversation, you acknowledge that the very real financial implications that come into play for people and their family if they choose to take a stand, right? So is it that you've changed your position over time on this and become more sympathetic to workers in tech? Or is there something else that I'm not seeing that's going on here between what seems to be a conflict?
- Mike Monteiro:
- Oh, I was always sympathetic to workers in tech. My heart is with workers in all industries. The fact that you have so much to lose when you lose your job is not an excuse for you to do it badly. That's the truth. You will always be responsible for the work that your labor makes. You'll always be responsible if you're spending your days making databases to round up immigrants for Palantir, by the way, and that database is actually used to round up immigrants, you are responsible for that. The fact that I understand that if you didn't do that, you would lose your job. Doesn't make you less responsible for it. What I want to do is help you get out of a situation where you can't stand up to that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hence unions, this is why you're excited about it. I understand in the first edition of designers a job, you had a chapter on unionization that got pulled. So you must be quite pleased that now makes it into the second edition.
- Mike Monteiro:
- It wasn't a whole chapter was, I mean there were a comments about it there. There's a few parts but yeah, it does. It did touch upon it. And when was that? Like 2012? The industry wasn't there yet.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Do you see any, see any irony insofar as that you are a designer who employs other designers yet your advocating, so therefore puts you on the capital side of the ledger if you want to look at it that way. Sure. Yet you are advocating for unionization. That almost sounds to me as if it's not in your best interests.
- Mike Monteiro:
- Not really. It's only ironic if you see the boss's job as exploiting workers. I have no desire to exploit the people who are working for me. And if this is something that they want wanted to do, fantastic do. It doesn't have to be an antagonistic relationship. If I own a company, what I want is I want that company to be successful. I want to make sure that we're doing good work. I want to make sure that every couple of weeks paychecks land on everybody's desk. I want to make sure that people are talking about it in a way that people who need work say, Hey, let's go with them. That's all I want. None of that by definition means I have to exploit my workers to do it. In fact, treating my workers well helps with all of those things. Treating my workers well and making sure that they're well rested helps me to do better work. Making sure that they don't have to worry about where they're, if they can pay their rent or their mortgage, helps to focus at work. Making sure that they're not worried about being asked to work the weekend helps to keep all of that stuff helps you to do better work. Now, if the only way I can make a profit is by paying my workers as little as possible and working them as hard as possible, I would say that's a shitty business model. And that business model does not deserve to survive.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- A lot of people looking at tech and the up until recently, maybe the large compensation packages that have been on offer to designers and engineers and people and product would find it difficult to believe that workers in tech are being exploited by their employers.
- Mike Monteiro:
- That is fair. That is fair. Because at the higher levels of the design realm engineers, they get paid very well. But you know what? I don't want to shit on how much a worker's getting paid because take a look at what the level above them is getting paid and take a look at the level of effort that the amount of labor that those is. People who complain about ball players getting paid too much. I can't believe that so-and-so just signed a 200 million contract. It's like, do you know how much money the person who's signing that million dollar contract has? Do you know how much money they're making off of that player's labor? The part of the American story is pitting workers against each other, pitting the factory workers against the office workers. And really what we need to do, the factory workers and the office workers need to realize, hey, we're both workers, we're all workers.
- We have more in common than we do with the management folks. We can band together and we can help each other rise up. So yeah, maybe as an office, maybe as an engineer, my pays grade, but I'm being asked to let Kanye West back on Twitter. I have to pull that switch. And right now, imagine if I was being asked to do something like that and I got to say, you know what? I need to talk to my union steward before I do that because that doesn't sit right by me. Because right now your options are pulling the switch or getting shit canned
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Seems that you are suggesting it would change the way in which companies make decisions.
- Mike Monteiro:
- I think, yeah, I think it would think by definition it would have to. Because right now, if you take a look at the biggest companies and where they're getting their employees from, you've got meta is just pulling up super deluxe school buses to college graduation ceremonies and loading them up and saying, y'all work for us now come work for us. And same time, this is all metaphorical at the same time. They're saying, we're going to give you a gigantic salary. How much student debt are you carrying? And boy, that gigantic salary sheriff sounds good. It sounds good if you're walking out of there with a hundred grand in debt and we're going to give you healthcare and we've got this great campus, by the way, it looks a lot like the campus that you're graduating from. We've got froyo, we've got a gym, we've got all that stuff that makes this place feel like a community.
- We got that and we're just going to ask you to do stuff and you're going to do it. And some of that stuff, it's maybe a little shady, but you know what, we got froyo. All of that is incredibly enticing, especially the part about helping you to pay down that debt. If I was a hundred grand in debt and a company like Meta came to me and said, we will pay you an enormous amount of money and you can help pay down that debt. If I was like 19 and just graduating from college, I would take that offer every time.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, it wouldn't be Mike Monteiro sitting on the steps crying. It'd be crying, maybe tears of joy instead.
- Mike Monteiro:
- Yeah. I cannot blame folks for taking that offer. What I would like to also let folks know is when you're in that situation, there is a way to there, unions are available to you and unionizing. When you unionize, you get the experience of everybody on the floor together as a 19 year old. Picture this as a 19 year old who just graduated from school, here comes Mark Zuckerberg. And he's telling me like, Hey, do this thing. And you're like, oh boy. We talked about that sort of thing in my ethics class back at Carnegie Mellon. That's not a thing I'm supposed to do, but it's like, fuck it's fucking Mark Zuckerberg and he's helping me to pay down my loans. What are you going to do? You're 19. You don't have any experience working, you don't have any experience dealing with shit like that. Now you put like 55 year old me in that situation who's been working for 40 years, has been fired from countless tasks. And I got no problem turning to him and saying, fuck off, I'm not doing this because I've worked forever. I know how to have these, or I might even be smart enough to say, Hey Mark, let's walk through this together. Let's walk through some of the possible things that I can have the educated conversation before I get to fuck off. I'm not doing this because I'm, I've been managing clients for 30 years now. I know how to have those conversations with them. I did not know how to have those conversations at 19.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You've said before, and I'll quote, you said, this is not natural. It took time to develop this kind of callous and you were speaking about confidence, which is what you're touching on here. Yeah.
- Mike Monteiro:
- Yeah. So what those 19 year olds who find themselves in that situation, one great way to get some of that experience in a big quick shot is unionized with the folks around you. So maybe you don't have 30 years of experience, but there's going to be somebody in that union who does.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You've talked about acknowledging the difficulties that exist in enterprise in terms of being able to apply ethics. You've talked there just before about the fact that you know can get shit candle, you can flip the switch. There's not a lot of options available currently, which is, I get the sense why you are so keen to see tech workers unionize. You've also talked about what might be the status quo in terms of the incentives that are at play. You've said you simply cannot correct a problem that management doesn't see as a problem. So that comes into play quite obviously with management wanting to make a certain decision and then labor needing to enact that or they can leave. And you've also previously quoted someone called Upton Sinclair who was an American writer and activist. And he said that it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
- Mike Monteiro:
- Yes.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So with the incentives at play, we currently have the status quo. It seems like this is an unsolvable problem,
- Mike Monteiro:
- Not if you're willing to light shit on fire, not an unsolvable problem because other societies have solved it and other industries have solved it. This is part of the American exceptionalism brain. How do we treat workers fairly while also producing quality work, while also benefiting financially to shareholders and shit like that. And if you take a look at other countries in the world, other countries actually do a better job of this.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Who stands out to you? Who, who's the poster child? What country's the poster child for the right calibration between labor and capital?
- Mike Monteiro:
- Well, you've got those lovely countries in Scandinavia who practice their level of capitalism and show socialism, which is a nice blend. You've got New Zealand is a very nice place to work. Is it not
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Full Wake's holiday?
- Mike Monteiro:
- There's other, and there's other industries that have unionized, not just in America, but all over the world. And we tend, we're, we're tech in the US is like a double shit Sunday of exceptionalism because one, we think we're exceptional because we're Americans, so we can't look around to see how other people have solved a problem. And also we're in tech, we're disruptors. Things that other industries have done, things that other workers have done, they don't work for us. But neither of those things are true.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Mike, I'm mindful of time. So as we bring the show down to a close now, I'm going to quote you one last time, and this is something that you've said that echoes many other leaders in the design field. And it is, as long as you are a designer, you have a responsibility to make the world better for the rest of humanity. But why should designers be the adjudicators for the rest of us within organizations for ethical behavior, what qualifies or compels us to move beyond Figma, beyond design sprints, and as you've said before, beyond aesthetics and into ramifications?
- Mike Monteiro:
- Because that's a fantastic question. And I'll tell you the secret because that quote is actually wrong. And I believe in further along in the talk, I expand on it. Say it again.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- The quote was, as long as you are a designer, you have a responsibility to make the world better for the rest of humanity.
- Mike Monteiro:
- Yeah. Stop there please. The real quote as it should be is, as long as you're a human being, as long as you're a human being, you have a responsibility to make the world better for other human beings. We just get to do it in design because we're designers. But really it's, I mean, if you're on this fucking planet right now, you have an opportunity that people who were on this planet earlier do not have you have an opportunity to fix what's going on right now and you will have that opportunity until the day they put you on the ground or however else you choose to go. And designers do not get to opt out of that. I think that's where the talk went. You can do it in the design field, you can get out the design field. You'll still have that responsibility, but everyone's job on this planet is to help make the planet a more manageable place if you can do it as a designer in the design field.
- Fantastic. Because I will say this, at this point in time, we seem to have an oversized amount of influence on what's going on with shit. I say this about tech in general. We didn't bring Nazis back, but we certainly built some amazing bullhorns for them to use in the last few years. I think I would say that they're a bigger problem, like they're fucking huge problem and we built the roads that they're walking in a town on and we had a chance over and over. We had a chance to not do that and we turned a BLI blind eye to it and people were telling us, people were telling us, you are going to bring Nazis back with this shit and people, nah, you're crazy. You're crazy. Ain't no Nazis anymore. Watch. And here they are, and now one of them's in charge of the fucking biggest bullhorn in the
- Brendan Jarvis:
- World, but the froyo is good,
- Mike Monteiro:
- But the froyo is
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Good. Mike, that's a really strong and important message to finish on. This has certainly been a provocative and challenging conversation. Thank you for bringing your fire and enthusiasm to design to tech and for designers. All of the things that you've provoked in them to think about and through your contributions in the field, it's been greatly appreciated.
- Mike Monteiro:
- Brendan, thank you so much for having me on. I guarantee we're the only two people left. Everybody else has left at this point. [laugh]
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're welcome Mike. And if anyone is actually listening, then just listen to this last 30 seconds of the show. I'm just going to close it out now Mike, if people want to connect with you to keep up with what it is that you are putting out there in the world, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Mike Monteiro:
- Well, you can send he all your hate mail to what's your email address? Brenda
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]. Let's not go there.
- Mike Monteiro:
- Well you can find me at [email protected]. You can. What? Can't. Not going to say, you can find me on Twitter because who the hell knows, but I got a newsletter somewhere. MuleDesign.com. There's a newsletter on it. I think newsletters are going to be the way we're going to be communicating, but that's a whole nother conversation
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And people can pick up a copy of Design Is a Job. The second edition from ABookApart.com, I believe.
- Mike Monteiro:
- Yes, right. It looks exactly like the first edition, if you can see this. Except it says second edition up there and it has Sam Cabrera's name down here. She was nice enough to write my forward
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I believe it's titled or subtitled the necessary second edition. So not one that you can miss people. Alright, that's
- Mike Monteiro:
- Because the, they wouldn't let me do the fucking second edition,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh] You know, Mike, I'm not surprised, but I think it's great that you tried to get that across the line.
- Mike Monteiro:
- [laugh].
- Brendan Jarvis:
- All right, thanks Mike. And do everyone that is still listening to us, it's been great having you here as well. Definitely plenty of things to think about in there. In this episode, everything we've covered will be in the show notes and on YouTube you can actually find detailed chap notes so you can hop around to the different areas of our conversation that interests you the most or you might want to come back to. You can also find links through to Mike there and Mule Design as well as where you can pick up a copy of Design as a Job, the necessary second edition.
- And if you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class experts in UX, design and product management, don't forget to leave a review. They're really helpful on the podcast. Subscribe so it turns up to your podcast app on the regular and tell someone else about the show, even if it's just one person you feel needs to hear the message that we've been putting out there through this podcast, then please pass it along to them.
- If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Brendan Jarvis, or there's a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes or head on over to thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.