Tag: Design for Cognitive Bias

Maurice Cherry:
All right, so tell us who you are and what you do.

David Dylan Thomas:
My name is David Dylan Thomas. I am an author and a speaker. My day job really is to just go around and get people excited about and give them better tools for more inclusive design, and I do that from talks and workshops that I give at conferences, organizations, what have you.

Maurice Cherry:
How’s the year been going for you?

David Dylan Thomas:
Busy. I’ve been doing a lot of traveling. It’s like I’m making up for years of growing up without travel, and then the most recent three years of no travel because of COVID. I’ve been to Stockholm, Denmark, Japan, and then last fall I was in Berlin and just Seattle and all these other places, so it’s been really fun but exhausting.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow, so you’ve been making up for lost time.

David Dylan Thomas:
Exactly, yeah, and it is this very much like growing up, I did not make a lot of money or my family didn’t have a lot of money, so the idea of travel was just totally out of reach, and now it’s the exact opposite end of the spectrum where I’m like world traveler and I love it, but yeah, it’s a lot.

Maurice Cherry:
Living the dream.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Speaking of all this travel, do you have anything that’s planned for the summer?

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, it’s not slowing down. Well, so I’m going to be at UX London in a few weeks. I’m going to visit some friends in San Francisco in a few weeks. I’m hitting up a gig in Tampa, family vacation to Montreal, so it’s staying pretty busy. I might get a break in August. I’m not sure yet, but it’s all good, but yeah, there’s still more to come.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. I mean, you’ve got a stacked year so far. That’s pretty good.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, it’s a lot of fun. I hate the act of travel, like air travel I despise. I…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… [inaudible 00:04:00] it, but I love being places. I just hate getting there, so that’s the other exhausting part is the actual act of air travel. I’m not a big fan.

Maurice Cherry:
I know the feeling all too well. I went to Toronto back in October last year, and it was my first time traveling since before the pandemic, at least air travel before the pandemic. I was like… I was kind of dreading it a little bit, to be honest. I was like I had been seeing stuff on the news about people fighting in air airports and on the plane and stuff, and I was like, and I’ve been Atlanta. I’m like, “I don’t want to do,” I mean, I wasn’t flying spirit or anything, but I was like, “I don’t want to go to the airport and it’s a whole thing.” You know?

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
I just want to get to where I have to go without incident, and it was fine, but I was kind of a bit worried leading up to it. I’m trying to get my sea legs back with travel because I used to travel a lot, like pre-pandemic for work and for the show, and I’m trying to like ease back into it now.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, I’m fully on board at this point. I’ve been… I think I’ve traveled more post-pandemic than I ever did pre-pandemic…

Maurice Cherry:
Wow-

David Dylan Thomas:
… at this point.

Maurice Cherry:
What lessons did you learn this past year? How would you say you’ve grown and improved?

David Dylan Thomas:
I’ve learned what my, or I’m starting to learn, I’m beginning to learn what my boundaries are because as much as I enjoy the travel, there’s a psychological hit, a social hit, there’s a family hit, there’s an economic hit, to be frank, but I’m learning. I won’t say I’ve learned it yet, but what I’m learning is balance and trying to figure out, “Okay, what am I comfortable saying no to?” I’m in the privileged position of having enough things going on and having enough financial stability to be able to say no, so where does it make sense to say no? Where does it make sense to say yes?

An example would be like Japan is a very expensive trip, and I was paid for my time there, but it’s always going to be more cost-effective to do something online. It’s sort of one of those I’ve never been, I love it so much, I’m willing to take a bit of a financial hit on that or whatever. It’s figuring out how much of that before it becomes a burden, that kind of thing. I would say balance, or that’s what I’m endeavoring to learn in this past year is, what does that look like?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm, and now I would say outside of the travel realm, is there anything in particular that you’re learning about now?

David Dylan Thomas:
My new hotness is really grappling with ownership. I mean, I’m finding that my talks, my work is drifting pretty rapidly into the political, so I talk about design, I talk about UX and content strategy, but increasingly the stakes, the things I’m talking about are things like Facebook’s impact in Myanmar. These are quickly becoming very political topics, and the stuff I’m reading, I’m reading currently Braiding Sweetgrass, and there’s a lot in there that’s really challenging me around ownership, like the idea of ownership and, where is it appropriate? Where is it problematic actually? Where is it actually doing more harm than good to have these strict notions of ownership?

A basic example would be if you think about colonial perspectives on Native Americans and taking the land from them. That presumes that Native Americans uniformly believed the land belonged to them, when in fact, many Native American cultures didn’t believe in ownership at all. It was sort of like, “Hey, those aren’t your strawberries or my strawberries. They belong to themselves and that’s it.” We don’t own things in that sense. Really, if you were going to do a reset, for example, to say, “Okay, what would reparations look like in the context of Native American land?” One version of that would actually be not giving the land back, but actually abolishing ownership of land, which is I think is a far more controversial, right…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… concept than just saying, “Oh, we’re just going to give all the land back.” That’s hard enough, but so we’re not giving the land back. We’re just saying no one’s going to own any land. I think that would freak people out way more, so that’s the kind of stuff that’s really got me excited and challenged in terms of what I’m learning about right now.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, especially in this country. I mean, manifest destiny and everything. You talk about ceding ownership and people get hot.

David Dylan Thomas:
Oh yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
That is a hot potato to deal with.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, that is the, “Y’all ready for this conversation” meme? That’s…

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Let’s talk, I guess, a little bit more about the work that you’re doing. I saw just recently that you spoke in Denmark at UX Copenhagen. How was that?

David Dylan Thomas:
Oh, it was fantastic. Copenhagen is nice, and it’s one of those conferences where the talks are great, but what’s really awesome is just the people, the conversations you have in between talks at dinner after. Copenhagen’s a great place to have those conversations. Helle Martens who runs it is so kind and so thoughtful and is a great host, not just hosting the conference, but hosting her guests, her speakers at the conference, everyone involved. What I remember most, though, about UX Copenhagen is really just the great conversations and the people I met there, which is to me like the highest value of any conference is not the talks, although I enjoy the talks, it’s the people. It’s getting to meet new people, getting to reestablish old relationships, and UX Copenhagen was great for that this year.

Maurice Cherry:
Had you done that conference before?

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, that talk is actually historic for me. The book Design for Cognitive Bias comes from a talk called Design for Cognitive Bias, and the first time I ever gave that talk was at UX Copenhagen in 2018, which was also my first international conference. She invited me based on a podcast I did with Saskia Videler. She was like, “Oh, it sounds like you’re doing really cool stuff. Can you come to my conference and talk about cognitive bias in the context of like UX and content strategy?” I’m like, “Yeah, I can.”

I put together that talk, and putting it together was really where I found what I believed to be the spine of the book, even before I knew it was going to be a book, which is really this notion of not just, “Hey, here are these biases that our users have,” but, “Hey, here are these biases that we as designers have.” Really, this isn’t a talk about bias, this is a talk about ethics. When I figured that out, I unlocked that, that became what the talk was, what the book was, but all that started at that first UX Copenhagen I went to in 2018.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice, so this was kind of a good return to form in a way.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, it was kind of a homecoming, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, and now speaking of talks, you have a new talk that you’re doing now. Can you tell me a little bit about it?

David Dylan Thomas:
Sure, so this is a massive talk that I’ve been working on for a while, and it all started once, I don’t know what it was, but some social media company did something terrible. There’s way too many examples of that for me to remember which one it was, but I got mad and I posted something like, “I swear to God, my next talk is going to be called. “No, Seriously, F Engagement,” except I didn’t say F, I said the actual word…

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
… and…

Maurice Cherry:
You can say fuck here, that’s fine.

David Dylan Thomas:
Oh, okay, so “No seriously, fuck engagement.” Of course, people were like, “Oh yeah, you should give that talk.” It was kind of a joke, but then I was supposed to give the closing keynote at An Event Aparts, which ends up being the final An Even Apart in San Francisco. I needed a new talk because I’d already given all of my other talks. We kind of went back and forth and I said, “Look, my new talk, it’s like super anti-capitalist. Are you sure you want me to do this?” They’re like, “As long as you have like actual positive advice and it’s not just a rant.” I’m like, “Yeah, I got great, great advice or challenges that I want to kind of put out there.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
The talk ends up being based on a quote from Martin Luther King which says, “We must rapidly move from a thing-based society to a person-based society or thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.” This is something he said like 50, 60 years ago, and I basically start off by saying, “Okay, if we agree that’s a good idea, what is our role as designers, makers of things, whatever, in that shift?” I start by saying basically, “This is what a thing-oriented web looks like,” and I talk about things like Facebook and engagement and how the obsession with engagement could lead to things like genocide in Myanmar where they let lots of hate speech just sit up there because, frankly, hate speech is good for their bottom line. It increases engagement.

I sort of paint that portrait, and then I say, “Okay, what would a person-oriented web look like?” For that, I look to things like the Siksika and the Wyandot, who are Native American tribes that have different perspectives on just fundamental assumptions about humanity, basically that, “Hey, maybe you’re born having value and I don’t need you to have a lot of money for me to consider you having value.” You know what I mean? What happens if we take those assumptions and build the web based on that? I can point to a couple of different instances where people are kind of experimenting with that, but the whole point of the talk is we don’t have that web.

How do we build it? Really, it’s more of just like a challenge, almost like a design brief for the audience to say, “Okay, if we were to make these other assumptions about people and about how we should interact, what would we build? How would we build differently? Let’s go do that.” It’s the first time I’ve ever given a talk that’s more of just a challenge for something that doesn’t exist yet, as opposed to saying, “Hey, here’s all of this evidence from science about these methods you can use to make your stuff more inclusive.” I love that, but the thing that I’m really into now is this notion of, “Okay, what’s the next step?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I like that the talk is sort of putting the onus on the listener, the audience, whomever, to kind of come up with what the solution is. You’re pointing out the issue. You’re not giving necessarily a solution, but you’re saying, “These are the things that you need to think about so we can come to a solution.”

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah. It’s really challenging the audience to listen to themselves, frankly, because a big chunk of the talk I get very personal. I go into therapy that I’ve been through, I go into how I found value in literally writing down my values and trying to proceed from there. The only tangible advice I give the audience ends up really being around, “Hey, after this talk is over, I want you to go home and write down your values and ask yourself, ‘Is your work taking you closer to or further away from that?’ If it is getting you further away, well, what can you do to get closer?'” That to me is the beginning of that journey, so it gets very personal, too.

Maurice Cherry:
You know, I did a talk, it was 2020, maybe 2021, but I did a talk called Content is Subject to Change, and I had sort of come with… I guess I won’t say I came up with the idea on a whim, but I was talking about how content on the web is in this sort of state where nothing is really being sufficiently archived because the internet and the web itself was never meant to be a tool for archive. It was a tool for research. It came out of research institutions and how like the early web, the “Web 1.0” was really about research and discovery. Then, of course, Web 2.0 sort of ushered in user-generated content, and we’re sort of in the throes of, I don’t know, I guess we’re sort of limping into Web 3 with the way companies have been approaching the metaverse and such.

The reality is that users create and put so much content on the web. I mean, tweets, Instagram posts, photos, videos, et cetera, and none of that is really stored anywhere, not in a very active way. You can look at, or you can try to find articles from 10 years ago and all the links are broken. none of the images work if you can find the actual article at all. People point to the Internet Archive, but they’re just a small nonprofit. They can’t archive everything. They can’t even archive things in certain countries. They can’t archive Flash. I mean, Flash was everywhere. Now, Flash is a relic, and all of that stuff that was created with Flash is just like dust in the wind, essentially.

David Dylan Thomas:
I have an interview with Jack Dorsey that is-

Maurice Cherry:
Oh wow.

David Dylan Thomas:
… [inaudible 00:15:31] to Flash, and it’s such a tragedy because one of the questions I asked him is, “What makes you pessimistic about the web?” This is like 2008 or something. What makes you pessimistic about the web? What he said was, “I think it’s going to be hard to prove what is true.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
Like oh my God. Not being able to just post that online every single time something blows up, like, oh my God, but yeah, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, even to what you were mentioning there with what Jack said, look at now with deep fakes and AI and MidJourney and all sorts of stuff. Like what is real? I’ll see imagines on Twitter or whatever, and it’s like, “Wait, I think that’s real. That might be real.” It sort of is falling into that sort of uncanny valley, especially as the technology gets better. I say all of this to say I like the fact that you’re giving sort of a design talk that’s not specifically about, I guess, digital design, but more so the concept of design and how that relates to what we go through in society.

David Dylan Thomas:
Well, yeah, and truth be told, it’s a political talk. I don’t market it as such because I’m giving it at design conferences, although I did give it at a journalistic conference once, but it’s a political talk because the things I’m talking about, the things I’m recommending are for everyone. This is at the societal level, and it’s what King was talking about. King was talking about what he was talking, about not for designers, not for politicians, but for everyone.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
He wanted everyone to be involved i this shift, and he saw the need for it. I’m like I’m speaking to designers for the most part, just because of the milieu in which I work, but I’d be happy to give this in Congress, in civil activist organizations, in churches, in just stand on the street corner and yell it. This is something I believe in and that I think is applicable at a very, very universal level.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, and I think certainly as technology increases and as we start to… I mean, AI is pretty much already being used now by companies and a bunch of different things. Not to say that AI is like the scapegoat or the catalyst for the talk that you’re giving, but it’s important that more people outside of our profession know about this. They know that this is sort of, I have to say it, it’s sort of a condition of the world that we live in now. It’s like this is a thing that we have to contend with and it doesn’t just have to deal tech or just have to deal with design. This is a human problem.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, and the thing I try to get across in the talk and in my work in general is it’s just a tool, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
I mean, the same database that was used to hunt down people for their medical debt, it’s like, “Hey, you got cancer, but guess what? I don’t care. You have have to pay these bills.” That comes from a database and hospitals, people go and buy that debt. These two guys who were running one of those companies that had those databases sort of had a moment of truth when Occupy happened and they flipped it and said, “Okay, now we’re going to use the exact same database to find people who owe medical debt and then forgive it. We’re going to use the exact same financial mechanism of buying that debt from hospitals for pennies on the dollar and then forgive that debt.” They’ve forgiven something like $6 billion of medical debt that way.

Exact same tool, exact same database, exact same like… I don’t know if AI was in there or not, but let’s say, yeah, why not? AI’s in everything, but it’s like that’s a very, very old story. There were examples going back to indigenous Peruvians who were doing similar things with taking the same tool for different purposes, so this is… When I see AI, yes, it’s scary, and yes, it’s doing all sorts of mischievous stuff, but it is the exact same story. It depends what you want to do with it, and you can use it for great good, or you can use it for great harm.

Maurice Cherry:
The reason sort of like I said that it’s good that you’re giving this talk or you want to give this talk outside of our industry is that more people need to be aware of the consequences of these things or why it’s sort of something that we’re bringing up as a point. AI has really blown up to mainstream, at least to the point where the media is really talking about it outside of specialty outlets. It’s blown up over the past nine months where now the creators of this stuff are testifying before Congress about what are the best ways to curtail this or to use this or something like that. It’s important that these are issues that we talk about now before they sort of spin out of control.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, and I think that what I want people to do is not focus on the tool so much as the players behind the tool. There’s a great PBS Digital Studios channel that show, it’s not around anymore, but it was called Idea…

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, Idea Channel with..

David Dylan Thomas:
… Idea Channel…

Maurice Cherry:
… Mike Rugnetta. Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, fricking love that, and one of the episodes at some point they’re like, “Hey, we’re instituting this new policy on our show where when we talk about a new technology, we are not going to embody it, which is to say, we’re not going to say AI is doing this or AI is doing that. We’re going to say people are doing this with AI, people are doing this with ChatGPT, whatever that technology is because we don’t want to give the impression that technology is embodied, that it is its own thing. No, human beings are using a thing to do a thing. I feel like we need to keep our eye on that because if we point people and get hysteria around a particular technology, we sort of draw their attention away from the people because the people are the thing you need to be losing your mind about, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
You know, Elon Musk firing all the content moderators is the thing you need to be worried about, not Twitter per se, or I sat on a panel earlier about ChatGPT and content and people freaking out. “Oh, ChatGPT is going to take my job,” and I’m like, “Trust me, you do not need to be afraid of ChatGPT, you need to be afraid of shareholders. Shareholders are going to take your job hella faster than ChatGPT.” Shareholders have been taking people out a thousand employees at a time for the past two years. They’re the ones, but we’re not having this panic over shareholders, so yeah, I’m like, “AI, great.” It’s interesting, but the big story isn’t AI. The big story is who’s using it for what. The who is the big story.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now, I first heard about you from your book Design for Cognitive Bias, which you mentioned earlier. For those who might not have heard about it, one, will include a link to it in the show notes so you can pick it up, but can you tell us a bit about the book?

David Dylan Thomas:
Sure, so the basic premise is that we have biases, our users have biases, our stakeholders have biases, and when I say bias, I just mean your mind has to take shortcuts just to get through the day. You have to make something like a trillion decisions a day. Right now, I’m making decisions about how fast to talk, what to do with my hands. If I thought carefully about every single one of those decisions, I’d never get anything done, so it’s actually a good thing that a lot of our decisions are made on autopilot, but sometimes the autopilot gets it wrong, and so the book is really… We call those errors biases, so really the book is saying, “Okay, if we accept that bias is going to be with us, what do we do? At the user level, what are some biases we can design our products in a way to either mitigate or maybe even use for good? How does that also play with stakeholders? How do we sort of use persuasion techniques to leverage biases they may have to steer our organizations in maybe more inclusive directions?”

Then, really, I think the most important part is our biases. How do we keep our biases from causing our users harm? All of that is in 92 quick little pages you can read, but yeah, that’s the spine of the book is this journey from our user’s biases, our stakeholders’ biases, and then our biases, and all the way through these very concrete examples and concrete methods to try to work with that.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I love that the book really emphasizes the importance of recognizing and understanding them because that’s sort of the first step to fixing them or to create in spite of them, I suppose, to make more effective and inclusive work to strive for DEI. Oftentimes these things are brought up only in a sort of DEI context, which I think gives some people, some people, gives some people permission to not think about it at all because they’re like, “Well, I don’t fall within the, I don’t know, BIPOC spectrum or whatever. Why should I have to think about this?” You know?

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, which is actually the number one reason you should have to think about it.

Maurice Cherry:
Exactly.

David Dylan Thomas:
Right, right [inaudible 00:23:57] supposed to be, you know? No, and then the thing is like, yes, when people think of bias, one of the main things they think about is race or gender, which absolutely they should, like two of the most harmful biases out there, but it’s even things like, “Hey, stuff that rhymes is more believable.” If you’re making something rhyme, you better make sure it’s true. It’s things like that that are both within and without the realm of race or gender. Yeah, it is important at a global level to understand how these things work.

Maurice Cherry:
You know, that’s even something that I think about honestly with this show. I think about it in the context of podcasts in general. I remember I think I saw some study, it was either from Pew or from maybe Edison or something like that, but they were talking about how most people believe I think it was like 80-something percent of podcast listeners sort of get their news from podcasts. That’s what they believe over, say, mainstream media, which is really dangerous because anyone can put out a podcast. Just because you say some shit on a microphone does not necessarily make it true, and so I think about that even in the context of this show.

I’ve done over 500 episodes. I try to get as varied a swath of people as I can to talk about a universal experience, which is being a Black designer or a Black digital creator or whatever, and that is broken down across gender, sexual orientation, gender presentation. It’s broken down across so many different things, age, geography, industry, and I try to do that to not sort of introduce what I think people may already look at. They may look at all of the people that I’ve interviewed and say like, “Oh, you just talked to a bunch of Black people. It’s all the same.” It’s not the same. It has changed drastically over the years. We talk about a lot of different topics. It varies. Every person’s conversation is different because every person is different so…

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
… I understand kind of that need to recognize the bias so you can work against it.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, and by the way, if people out there are like, “Oh, you just talk to a bunch of Black people,” I’d be like, “Have you met Black people? We don’t all agree. When was the last time you hung out with more than five black people and they all agree?” Are you kidding with this? When’s the last time you sat in a barbershop for more than five minutes?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
Right? We agree? What?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Have you met black people? That’s funny. That’s a t-shirt right there. That’s funny. I like that. With everything that you’re doing, what does a typical day look like for David Dylan Thomas?

David Dylan Thomas:
No such thing. Well, okay, two such things, so one is the travel Dave where I am on a plane and I’m getting up in some new city and doing this weird mix of touristy stuff and my job. Those days look like this weird mix of I’m going to go check out this castle or this museum, and then I’m going to go rehearse. It’s very much like touring a comedian or a band. You go and you do the thing, but you also try to have a good life at the same time, or you meet people in town that live in that town that from the web or something. That’s travel Dave, and then there’s home Dave, which is I don’t do a schedule in the sense of at 9:00 AM I do this, at 10:00 AM I do that, but I do have a Trello where I just have my priorities.

It’s like the first few things I’m going to do is try to have… I like to wake up slowly, so I have a nice breakfast, watch some TV, maybe play some video games, maybe do some reading. Then, I’ll get into things like household chores like laundry or trash, or maybe help with the dishes and cleaning. Then, I might get more into things like, “Okay, let’s check some emails. Let’s go through all of that stuff.” That’s more of like depending on how the day comes out because I might have a meeting, I might have this, that that’s sort of fixed. Everything else that’s kind of liquid time that I can kind of play with is sort of like, “Okay, this is the next thing on the Trello that I want to get to.” Some days I’ll get through maybe laundry and the day’s over because there’s just too much other stuff going on.

Other days, I’ll be like, “I actually got through all 500 emails. My God, how did that happen?” That’s a little more fluid and it’s what I’ve learned over time works bests for me, both from an anxiety perspective, but also from just a functional perspective because I have the luxury of having a job where, with very few exceptions, my time is my own. I can choose how to spend my… I’m not required to be in a certain place at a certain time with very few exceptions like, “I have to be in that place giving that talk at that time, so that’s one hour that is a hundred percent accounted for.” For the rest of it it’s like, “You could be doing dishes. You could be meditating. You could be playing with your son. Any of those are options that are just as equally valid. I don’t have a boss saying, “Hey, why aren’t you doing this right now?”

Maurice Cherry:
Hmm. Yeah. I think with any sort of entrepreneur, that’s the challenging thing is balancing it, managing your time, and still getting stuff done within the midst of all of that.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, and I’d say that’s my biggest challenge over the past year is really now that it really is much more fluid, making sure that I’m not over-optimizing for gigs, that I’m really making time to be there for my wife, to be there for my son, to be there for my family, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
Excuse me, and kind of give that its due weight and its due context because it’s really easy to fall into the trap of, I’ve found it, to fall into the trap of like making everything like a checklist…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… of like duties rather than look at the team effort of we’re a family and we have these shared goals and we’re each chipping in to work on those goals. Yes, an easy way to get closer to that is to have the sort of list of to-dos, but there’s also times to be flexible. THere’s also times to like see a need and just work on it. That’s hard for me because I am a very list-oriented person, so that’s sort of what I’ve been working on is how to be more present, frankly, for my family. That’s the new hotness.

Maurice Cherry:
Same, same. Right now, I was just talking to my Mom recently because Mother’s Day just passed. Her and I were talking and she’s telling me like, “Oh, I’m finally thinking about moving.” She lives in Alabama. We’re from Selma, Alabama, and I grew up there, moved out when I was 18. I’ve been here in Atlanta ever since. She’s lived there her whole life. Now she’s talking about moving to Dallas, and the first thing in my mind was like, “I’m about to project manage the shit out of this move because, one, I’m like, “I have been waiting for you to leave this town forever, and you are finally going to do it. We are making this happen.”

It’s also about being in the moment of like why she wants to do it now. She’s been retired for, let’s see, she retired at 62, she’s been retired for eight years now. She just turned 70. I’m like, “Now you want to move? Sure, yeah, let’s talk about it. Let’s do it. Let’s try to make it happen.” I have to resist my urge to try to really plan this and make sure this goes off without a hitch, but also make sure that I’m present for her feeling behind moving because, I mean, she grew up there just like I did, but she’s just lived there now her whole life and now she’s like, “It’s time to get out of here.” I’m like, “Okay, let’s make it happen.”

David Dylan Thomas:
Just for a second, can we just talk about the South? Because…

Maurice Cherry:
Sure.

David Dylan Thomas:
… being born “in the North,” I was born in Maryland, which is technically the South…

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

David Dylan Thomas:
… and is the South in a lot of ways. I grew up with this fear of the South, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
I see like… When I think of the South, I think of Mississippi Burning, right? Like that’s…

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

David Dylan Thomas:
… at the same time, I’ve been to the south a lot of times. I never really had any problems, and that’s where 80% of us are. Black folk live in the South. That’s where we are.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
I talk to people who have lived there their whole lives, or who lived in the North and are anxious to move to the South and I’m just like trying to get my head… I don’t even know what my question is, but it’s just sort of like when I hear, “Oh, she’s moving from Alabama,” I get that, to Dallas. Oh, that’s…

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
… Texas isn’t awesome right now, but okay, you know?

Maurice Cherry:
Well look, her other choice was Florida, and I was like, “Well, that’s definitely…

David Dylan Thomas:
Ooh…

Maurice Cherry:
… not happening…

David Dylan Thomas:
… ooh.

Maurice Cherry:
… so…

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah. No, Dallas is better.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
Well, I’ve been to Dallas. It’s better than all of Florida.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
The entire state.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh my God. Yeah, it was either Florida or Texas and I’m like, and even talking to her about it, I think honestly the main reason she wants to move is because her brother lives there, so her older brother-

David Dylan Thomas:
Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
… lives there with his family and he is extremely well-off. It’s like…

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
… “Okay, well, if you move there, if you move in with him or even in the vicinity of where he is, at least you’re together, it’s family. The main thing I’m excited about is that she’ll be in a city that is served by a major airport because I don’t drive and I don’t have a car, so me trying to get from Atlanta to Selma takes like a bus, a pack mule. I probably have to hitchhike part of the way. It’s not easy to get back home and I was like, “Heaven forbid there’s an emergency and I can’t get to you quickly.” If you’re at least in a city served by an airport, I can hope on a plane and take an Uber or a Lyft to get to where you are. That’s not a problem, you know?

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, it was either Texas or Florida and I was like, “Well, it’s not Florida, so Texas it is.”

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, and I’ve been to… I actually like Dallas a lot, but it’s just this… I don’t know how many Black people hold this special relationship with the South or hold… I feel like Black people just have a feeling, it may not be the same feeling, but have a feeling about the South, and it’s just endlessly fascinating to me.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m curious, what’s the fascinating part?

David Dylan Thomas:
Well, it’s just like I think I grew up with this myth in my heard that once you hit the South, it’s all Klan. You know what I mean? Like… How can you live there? I do. I get genuinely surprised. I have a brother who was living in Maryland and was like, “Oh yeah, I want to move further south.” Or I’ll meet someone else who’s sort of like, “Yeah, I was living in San Francisco, but I want to move back to North Carolina.” I’m like on the one hand, I kind of get it. Again, it’s one of those things I’m learning more about now, but on the other hand I’m like, “Yeah, but you know about the South, right?” You know?

Maurice Cherry:
Right, right.

David Dylan Thomas:
I think the part that’s fascinating to me is that as I interrogate that, there’s no real evidence that the South is any safer or more dangerous. If I think about all the shootings that have happened with Black people, they’re all over. They’re not just in the South. There’s plenty in the North, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
I do think… I don’t know. It’s me dealing with my own fear of white supremacy, and when I think of white supremacy I associate it far more at the South than I do with the North, even though there’s plenty of it in the North.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I mean, I can only speak on the South because I grew up here. I’ve lived here all my life. I do know that there is that perception, certainly because I have cousins that live in the North. Most of my Mom’s side of the family is in Detroit. My Dad’s side of the family is in Cleveland, and they’ve always kind of treated us as like the country cousins, you know?

David Dylan Thomas:
Mm-hmm.

Maurice Cherry:
Like for whatever that means, but i think there is that perception. Granted, I mean, I grew up in Selma, which, I mean, I think now certainly within the past maybe like 10 to 15 years has started to become something that’s in the regular zeitgeist because presidential candidates go there and there was a movie about it and all this stuff. I can tell you, when I first came to Atlanta in ’99 from Selma, people thought that I meant Salem, Oregon, because they had never heard of it.

David Dylan Thomas:
Wow.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, yeah, which is weird…

David Dylan Thomas:
Wow.

Maurice Cherry:
… because like when you grow up in Selma, you are not divorced from the history of the Civil Rights Movement at all.

David Dylan Thomas:
Right.

Maurice Cherry:
It is present. It is not just something that you learn about. It is everywhere. You are a byproduct of it. I’m the first generation outside of Bloody Sunday. Like it’s everywhere, I remember, oh God, was this fourth grade, fifth grade? When did I have my social study teacher? I think this was fourth grade, my social study teacher Mrs. Manz had shown me… Well, it was like a field trip. She had shown us a spot downtown where her blood was spilled because she got hit by a police officer 20-something years ago. You’ve never divorced from it.

It’s always around you, and even growing up in Selma, I mean, I’m using Selma as kind of a bit of an outlier here, but you are fully aware of the gravity of racism and the Civil Rights Movement and all that sort of stuff because you’re in it. You know, “Don’t go to this part of town after a certain time, don’t go to this grocery store.” You just know that, and even as politics change and you see how people change because of politics, and Selma’s another good example of this, we had a racist white mayor from Martin Luther King, Jr. Times like the ’60s up until he died right around 2000, Joe Smitherman. He famously called Martin Luther King Martin Luther Coon, like…

David Dylan Thomas:
Hmm.

Maurice Cherry:
… and like the fact that he still got elected year after year after year is strange in a city like Selma, particularly when Black people are the majority, but he died, and so the city got its first Black mayor. Many of the white citizens were so incensed by that that they closed businesses, moved roughly about five miles up Highway 22 and started their own city called Valley Grande.

David Dylan Thomas:
What?

Maurice Cherry:
It sounds like something out of The Simpsons, you know? Like…

David Dylan Thomas:
This is why I’m afraid of the South.

Maurice Cherry:
… but I mean, it’s one of those things where you are cognizant of it and aware of it and you kind of just… I don’t say you kind of just deal with it, but it’s because you are aware of it and it’s such an ever-present thing that you know how to navigate within it.

When I left Selma and came to Atlanta, I mean, came to Atlanta, went to Morehouse, the school that King graduated from, and being in and around all of that history and everything, it’s like you’re just aware. You just know this is the world you live in. I think sometimes when people think of HBCUs, there’s this perception that you’re in a bubble in some ways, and in ways you kind of are. You’re in a bubble of being around only Black people and certain aspects of the diasporic African experience because it’s not just African-Americans that go to Morehouse.

Then, you get out in the real world and you meet other people and you know that it’s different. It’s just hard for me to describe it, I think, in a way because it’s just something that’s been ever-present. You just know how to deal with it because you see it in so many different ways. I mean, just racism in general, sometimes it’s super overt, sometimes it’s covert. It’s just all this kind of a thing that you recognize. It’s a cognitive bias to put it… to kind of like, I guess, bring it back to your book and everything.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s just something that you know about, you’re aware about, and because you know about it and you’re aware about it, you know how to effectively work through it, work around it, or work to include it in some way. I mean, even what I do with this show and in the design industry is very interesting, we’ll just put it that way.

David Dylan Thomas:
Hmm.

Maurice Cherry:
I would say my time growing up in the South and in Selma and everything has taught me to deal with a lot of the stuff that I deal with in terms of just discrimination from this show that it’s just like, “Okay, I know that’s going to be a thing. I can work around that.”

David Dylan Thomas:
Right.

Maurice Cherry:
I can deal with that. I’m not going to let it stop me or bog me down or get me down in some way. It’s just a general awareness of it to the point that I know this is a thing. I’m just going to have to kind of work through it, work around it to try to make it better or to try to circumvent it or something. You just… It’s just always a thing that’s present. You just know that it’s always there. Even your mentioning about like the Klan, I mean, Selma has a Klan hall. One of our housing projects is named after the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Nathan…

David Dylan Thomas:
What?

Maurice Cherry:
… Bedford Forest. One of the… It’s not an all-white school, but it’s pretty much an all-white school. One of the schools there is John T. Morgan, which is also named after a Klansman. It’s a thing that you know about. Even one of the cemeteries has a Klan monument in it. You know that it’s there so you don’t fuck with it. You don’t deal with it. You know like this is a thing not to deal with, so you just work around it or don’t deal with it. It’s kind of hard to describe, but

David Dylan Thomas:
No…

Maurice Cherry:
… but yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
… no, I think I see, and what it reminds me of is I talked to a guy from Singapore…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… and Singapore does not have free speech.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
You talk shit about the president, you are not necessarily going to go to jail, but you’re going to get sued into oblivion. I was asking him about it and it was this thing where it was difficult for him to answer because it was sort of like asking a fish about water. It was just sort of like, “Of course they are.” You don’t fuck with it, but you also don’t necessarily… It wasn’t really affecting his day-to-day. It wasn’t like every morning he wakes up and thinks, “Oh God, I wish I could say shit about the president.” That’s just not a thing, and I don’t know, it’s interesting, but what you said makes perfect sense.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Even that sort of description you mentioned about asking a fish about water, that’s just how it is. Sometimes things happen and you’re like, “Well, that’s just how it is.” Some of it is unfair. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that you just deal with everything and just sort of shrug your shoulders about it, but at least you are cognizant and aware of the fact that it is happening. You know why it’s happening, you know the cause from which it stems. It’s not just like out of the blue. You know this is how people are like. I mean, I can give you another example. Now, we’ll bring the interview back to you, but I know you asked about me, but…

David Dylan Thomas:
No, that’s cool.

Maurice Cherry:
… but I mean, when I was graduating high school, my guidance counselor was doing everything in her power to not want me to go to college. She wanted… The one white guy that was in our class, all-Black class and one white guy who happened to end up becoming valedictorian, but that’s a whole other story, but was doing everything to get him into college, giving his applications and all this sort of stuff.

Then, she’ll turn to me and be like, “Well, why don’t you think about learning a trade? You could go to the community college. I know your mother works there. My husband works there. You could go there and learn a trade. People always need air conditioning. We live in the South. What about HVAC?” I’m like, “Ma’am, I have a 4.5 GPA. What are you talking about? Are you daft?” I mean, this is also at the time when computers really started to be put into libraries and stuff like that, so I just did a lot of research on my own, but she was actively not wanting me to go to college like…

David Dylan Thomas:
Hmm.

Maurice Cherry:
… not helping with applications. She would give… The guy’s name was Gary. She would give him application vouchers for application fees and stuff and…

David Dylan Thomas:
Wow.

Maurice Cherry:
… then she would tell me about, “Have you thought about welding? Welding could be a good trade for you.” “Ma’am, I’m taking AP Calculus, what are you talking about?” Welding, so it’s just stuff that you deal with and you’re like-

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
… “Whatever.” Yeah, that’s a tough nut to crack, but let’s bring it back to you since we’re talking about beat. Let’s talk about your upbringing and your backstory.

David Dylan Thomas:
Uh-huh.

Maurice Cherry:
You’re right outside of Philly right now in Media. Is that where you’re originally from?

David Dylan Thomas:
No, so I was born in Columbia, Maryland. It’s the city that’s basically right in between D.C. and Baltimore, and I grew up… My mother and father split when I was very young. I didn’t really get to meet him, get to know him until I was like 25 years old.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
That’s very formative, and my mother was amazing. She really always made sure that we knew, like me and my sister, we knew we were loved and we knew that we could be whatever we wanted to be. Nothing could stop us, and she also really, really went to great pains to make sure we were educated, so for all of those things and much more, I’m always eternally grateful to her. She passed in 2011. From a very young age, I was writing, I was reading at a young age. Very smart, doing al of the smart Black kid things, and having to sort of like… It’s interesting. My earliest experiences of racism were actually coming from Black kids who didn’t-

Maurice Cherry:
Hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… understand why I talked the way I do, why I didn’t talk Black and that was… I think every Black person has the story of when they realized they were Black. That was it for me. It’s like the way I was talking was different from the way the other Black kids were talking. Weirdly, that’s how I found out I was Black because I wasn’t talking the way I was supposed to with this flat, not African-American vernacular we would call it now, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
That was also sort of an interesting wrinkle for me growing up, but I was always interested in filmmaking. I still do it today and I did it ever since high school, and that’s the sort of content in my content strategy trajectory really comes from that storytelling aspect. I went to Friends School of Baltimore, very prestigious school. Again, my mother went to-

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
… great pains to make sure I was able to get in there, went into debt for that, and then ditto for Johns Hopkins University, which I originally went for electrical engineering, and then found out I was bad at that and switched to writing seminars and kind of got a concentration in theater and film.

I’m there, this is like the mid-’90s, and I’m armed with this like really solid… Basically I know how to think now that I’ve been through college. I know how to think and I know how to write, and for four years I’m just working in a record store because if you remember in the mid-’90s, there was like yet another recession slump. Nobody had any jobs-

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
… so for four years I worked in a record store, which was actually kind of fun, and I just worked on whatever independent movies came to town. Then, after that, I finally got a job that more or less had to do with my major, which was being a online writing tutor for a CTY, Center for Talented Youth’s online writing courses, basically giving junior high and high school students these college-level narrative nonfiction courses on CD-ROM. That’s how long ago we’re talking.

Then, they go into an online forum to submit their work and to their workshopping, workshop those things. That’s when I really kind of fell in love with the web because what I was seeing the web do was take people, students who lived all over the world and might never meet each other in person, and they get to talk about sports and homeschooling and all these other things. That was amazing to me. That was just… The potential for the web to bring people together was where I really fell in love with it, and I’ve worked in tech in one form or another ever since.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, just to kind of give an idea, I’m trying to sort of place this within the context of history, I’m guessing this is roughly around like early 2000s?

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, so I worked at CTY from 2000 to around 2004.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Yeah. The web was really, I mean, it’s hard, I think, probably for people now to really know about this or think about it because, I mean, it’s been 20 years, but the web back then was just exploding in terms of new experiences, new things to discover. The technology itself with browsers and such were growing at such a rapid pace. I think about that time so fondly. I mean, I was in college right around the time I graduated in ’03, but that was such a magical time to be into the internet and the web because the big agents that are around now did not exist. It’s hard to think of an internet without social media, without Facebook, without Twitter, but I don’t know, maybe it’s rose-colored glasses. I don’t know. I think about that time so fondly with just the web being a fairly idyllic place. I might be romanticizing-

David Dylan Thomas:
No, I think-

Maurice Cherry:
… it a bit.

David Dylan Thomas:
… I don’t think you are. Actually, my new talk, I start out talking about personalization and how today it is almost impossible to find a website that doesn’t have a login, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
You go back to the early web, zero websites had a login. It was just this big art gallery-

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… and you’d have things like Homestar Runner, which to this day has no login option. The Homestar Runner you see is the Homestar Runner I see-

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
… but every other website, you see a different version that’s personalized to you, and there are real psychological stakes for that because it basically makes it seem like the entire world revolves around us.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
You could be forgiven for believing that because on the web it does. Literally, every website you go to is custom-made for you, so that was not always thus. The early web was just a place where a lot of weirdos were just putting up like, “Here are my opinions about Star Trek. Here is this weird animation. Here is a bunch of things about badgers that’s like saying, ‘badger, badger, badger over [inaudible 00:48:23].'” It was sort of like if you think about the creativity you see in a place like TikTok where people… Some people are there being very money-minded and trying to do a business, but some people are just putting up weird, fun shit, you know?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
That’s the early web, it’s just here is… Yeah, there’s a definite difference there, and there was a gold rush that came where people started realizing, okay, they can make a lot of money off of this by taking what was like the open web, something like an mp3, which is a format for music that isn’t owned. It’s free. Anyone can use it and changing that into a format that’s proprietary so, “Oh, if you want to play that movie, you have to do it on this browser, in this website, using our technology, and if you try to copy it, God help you.”

That was how we moved into the web we have now, which is much more capitalistic, much more predatory, and it’s basically, “Every way we can possibly make a buck off of you we will.” The early web was more like, “Hey, look at this new toy. What can we do with it?”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. The early web was also just a place where you could play, I guess play… I mean, I’m using play in sort of a broad sense, but you’re playing without consequence. Like you said, there’s no… Aside from there also not being any logins back then, there was no tracking really. Google Analytics wasn’t a thing. The way that you found other people were visiting is if you had a hit counter on your website, or if you had a…

David Dylan Thomas:
[inaudible 00:49:46]-

Maurice Cherry:
… guestbook-

David Dylan Thomas:
… web counters. I’m like-

Maurice Cherry:
… and someone signed it, you know? You didn’t know.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
There wasn’t all this sort of stuff to sort of track your movements across the web and like, “Oh, you went here? Where did you go next? Where did you go after that? What purchases did you make?” None of that existed, and you could really… The thing that I… It’s funny. I tell this to my… I have two goddaughters, they’re nine and twelve, and I tell them that back when there was Windows 95, how when you logged off there would be this message that would pop up that would say, “It is now safe to turn off your computer.” There was a time when you could turn things off.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
TV had a stop time.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yes.

Maurice Cherry:
At 12:30, those test bars came on and you went to bed. There was nothing else to sort of keep you up. You know what I mean? It’s so different now with everything being so tracked and analyzed and stored and sold to other companies. It’s just the web now is so different, and I think about that a lot in the context of “creating content.”

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
You’ve been writing, you’ve been making podcasts, you’ve done web series, et cetera, and I do want to talk about your podcast work, but you’ve been creating content online for over 20 years. How have you seen content online change during that time?

David Dylan Thomas:
There’s a dichotomy there because the original sin of the OpenWeb, and Anil Dash talks about this in a talk called The Web We Lost.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
The original sin of the OpenWeb was that it was very, very privileged. If you did not know how to code at some level, it was very difficult to create content on the web. What Facebook did, what Twitter did, what all these walled gardens did was make it easy to create content, make it easy to put it on the web.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
In exchange for that ease, we gave up data. The plus side of that was a lot of poor people got to make content. I don’t know another way to say it. If you look at Vine, back in the day before it collapsed, there was some amazing BIPOC content going up there, especially BIPOC humor. There was so much like I would say sort of innovative work being done, and some of that has bled over into TikTok as well. There are people who are creating content today who could not have made it otherwise because of Facebook, because of Vine, because of Twitter, because of TikTok. The trade-off was, “Oh, now we have your data. Now we can track you everywhere.”

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
I don’t think it had to be that way. I think that governments could have stepped up to say, “We think it’s important that people who aren’t privileged are able to make content. I think that different business models could have arrived that were better than that, but I don’t think any of that was likely because we live in America. We live in capitalist country in a largely capitalist world where people are incentivized, are told from a very early age your highest value, the best thing you can do is make money, so the likelihood of having a web that is sort of built on the idea of lest as many people responsibly make content as possible is not likely. This is not going to happen. The way I’ve seen content change over time since I started doing it is it is way easier than it ever, ever, ever, ever was-

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… but it has come at the cost of data. It has come at the cost of misinformation. I will always, if I have to choose between a privileged few being able to create content and a whole lot of people being able to create content, I’m always going to choose a whole lot of people, even if it means the odds of disinformation going up. The fact of the matter is, the odds of disinformation don’t go away if it’s only a privileged few. In fact, depending on who those privileged few are, the odds of disinformation skyrocket.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
You know what I mean? So-

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, I think we’re definitely seeing that now with Twitter’s recent change in ownership.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, so that’s a lot of why I talk about what I talk about now is this idea of I want people to understand what that balance is like and that it is good for lots of people to be able to create content. We don’t know how to deal with that yet. Somebody was pointing out so people talk about these unprecedented times, and I always get kind of like, “Really?”, when people say something like, “Yo, we’ve had.” There’s a lot of people who’ve been living in precarity for a long time now. It’s just more middle class people. More white people are having to deal with black people shit than ever before and they’re calling that unprecedented. I’m just…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… [inaudible 00:54:26] that, like poverty and health problems and all these other things. Other people have had to deal with that before, but what I do think is unprecedented is two things.

One, we have never, ever, ever, ever had 8 billion people on the same planet at the same time. Just hasn’t happened, and two, they have never all been able to talk to each other at exactly the same time. We’ve never had many too many communications at scale instantly ever, like ever, ever, ever. That’s never happened, so why should we be good at it? Why would we expect we’d be even remotely good at it? Especially if it’s all being done through a capitalist lens. It makes sense that we’re fucking this up, but I think we need to focus up on, how do we do this? I think it’s important to preserve our access to each other. I think it’s critical, but I don’t think we know how to do it yet.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, you mentioned something here just about the fact that we’re dealing… I mean, I think the unprecedented part of what you’re saying is just that, yeah, we don’t really have those mechanisms available, even though communication now is easier than it has ever been just because of the technology. You can text, you can FaceTime, you’ve got WhatsApp and Instagram and all these sorts of things, but I don’t know if the tools are necessarily facilitating the conversations in that way.

David Dylan Thomas:
Well, and I think it’s really, really important to understand that the societal work has to come first.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
There’s a great Twitter thread where someone talks about how this comes from actually an episode of The Orville, I guess, but there’s a character… The Orville is kind of like a Star Trek kind of show. There’s this character from an impoverished planet that asks the Federation, basically the spaceship, “Hey, why don’t you give us all replicators?” A replicator, for those who aren’t geeks like me, basically just a device that can just make anything you want. It just out of thin air it just makes it, so food, clothing, whatever. It just makes it. “Why don’t you give us all replicators and then we can be as peaceful as you are?” The guy from The Orville explains, “That you got it backwards. The only reason we were able to develop the replicator technology in the first place was because we got over our shit.

We were able to actually support each other to the point where we could coordinate to make something like that. The guy goes on, the Twitter thread goes on to say, “Look if we had replicator technology, if Twitter developed replicator technology, they would license it. They would make it so that if you don’t keep paying your subscription fee, or give us data for advertisers, it would stop working. Different companies and then different countries would be like, or different political groups would be like, “Oh, replicated meat is ruining the meat industry, so we’re going to say that replicated meat is bad and evil and I’m going to run on that platform so I can get votes.”

He basically breaks down all the ways that the greatest technology in the world can be ruined by people. People have to get their shit together first. Then, you can do good things with the technology. Yeah, we’re going to keep using social media for shit because we the people have shit that we need to work out. We have trauma that we need to get over. We have all these sort of agreements we need to actually make with each other before we can even have a hope of actually using the technology in a positive way.

Maurice Cherry:
Amen to that, amen to all of that. Society has to work through their own biases and other shit before we can really start to have the technology serve us, hopefully in a positive and constructive way. Just to kind of bring it back to the earlier conversation we had around content, to you, what does content strategy mean now? I mean, you’ve been a content strategist since before the title really came to be in this industry, and like I said, you’ve been creating content online in many different media for over 20 years and across several different fields, I should mention. To you, what does content strategy mean now?

David Dylan Thomas:
Organizational change. I was talking to a friend of mine who’s doing some work with the G20, and long story short, she was talking to someone about trying to get more buy-in around content strategy with her stakeholders and the person was like, “Don’t call it content strategy. Call it what it is. It’s organizational change.” Even from day one, so like 10 years ago I get my first official job. I’d been doing content strategy before, but I get my first official job where it says, “Content Strategy” on my business card. Within a week, I turned to one of the strategists at the organization and I ask then, “How much of our job is just doing interventions?” Hey says, “90%.” I’m like, “Oh, okay, I get it now.”

Yeah, I do content audits and I do this and that, and I built content models and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I make these artifacts, but at the end of the day, none of that means anything if I can’t work out your political problems, your organizational problems, your biases, all of the stuff, half of the examples in my book come from real-world experience I had working with clients, which is why I think it’s valid, frankly.

I’m glad I went through those experiences because I don’t think my book would make any sense otherwise, but yeah, it is people stuff. It’s messy people stuff, and content strategists are at a great position to witness and document the outcomes of the messy people stuff. If you have no taxonomy, if you have paths that don’t make any sense, if your language only makes sense to certain people in the organization with certain seats of power, all of that is just the outcome of people stuff, messy people stuff.

When you’re really… I’ve never seen a content strategy work lest there be organizational change that preceded it. If you did not fix the organizational problem, the best content model in the world isn’t going to help. I mean, the same thing with UX, same thing with dev. I think content strategists in particular get exposed to that first if they are kind of looking because they’re kind of the first ones under the hood looking at, “Okay, let’s take a look at your content inventory. Let’s take a look at your… Let’s do an audit.” You get to see those outcomes firsthand…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… but yeah, so I think call it what it is, organizational change. I spent 10% of my time as a content strategist creating these like artifacts like from an effort perspective. I spent 90% of that effort trying to convince you that it works.

Maurice Cherry:
Right.

David Dylan Thomas:
That’s what I’ve seen is a shift toward understanding that, or at least personally what I see, and that’s the other thing. I don’t feel comfortable commenting on content strategy like per se because I haven’t worked with a client in three years. It’s like, “Don’t ask me, ask the people on the ground what content strategy is.” My observation is that it is becoming clearer and clearer that content strategy is, in fact, organizational change, and to varying degrees, absolutely UX, absolutely design, absolute… There is no service industry in terms of like, “I am building you a website,” or, “I’m helping the organization do X, Y, or Z.” That is not on some fundamental level organizational change. That’s the shift I’ve seen.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, as I mentioned, you’ve done a lot in your career, events, web series, talked about podcasting. I have to ask about the podcast because you’ve done several. You’ve been host, you’ve had your own podcast. When did you really start getting into doing that?

David Dylan Thomas:
I was in podcasts before it was cool. Do you remember Odeo?

Maurice Cherry:
I remember I was on Odeo.

David Dylan Thomas:
Do you know what Jack Dorsey was up to before Twitter?

Maurice Cherry:
I remember. I do, I do. I remember Odeo in like 2004-2005. Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
My friend, Kevin Smokler, wonderful author and filmmaker in his own right, convinced me or we partnered up. Basically he’s my best friend, so we partnered up and said, “Hey, let’s do a podcast about movies.” We’re just going to talk about it because we’re both huge movie buffs. We called it Talking Pictures, and our first episodes, I believe, were posted on Odeo. Then, we moved on to other things later. That’s back in 2006 or so I started doing podcasting. I’ve never done it with any sense of like, and again, this is that arc. The early days of the web, you just did stuff because it was fun. You weren’t trying to get followers. You weren’t trying to make a fortune. You were just, “Hey, I can post something, and like hundreds, hundreds, hundreds of people could potentially see it.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
Wow. You have to understand, that was new. The only way to hear your voice on the air was to go on the actual radio. There was no like… The idea of just putting something online and having other people witness it that you will never meet was just a totally new thing. It didn’t matter if it was five people or 5,000 people. There just wasn’t as much a thing as it is now where it’s like, “Well, if I don’t get a million followers, what’s the point?” Yeah, and then many years later, I did The Cognitive Bias Podcast because basically I had been reading up on cognitive biases ever since I saw a talk by Iris Bohnet called “Gender Equality by Design.” It blew my mind, and she was the first one to start connecting the dots for me around here is this bias and here’s this impact, and here’s how design influences that.

It lit a fire under me to learn about cognitive bias, so I literally went to the The Rational Wiki Page of Cognitive Biases and just looked at one bias a day. I would pick a bias and I’d learn about it. Next day, go on to the next one. This turned me into the guy who wouldn’t shut up about cognitive bias, so my friends, and I remember one friend in particular who worked for Ted at the time was like, “You should do a podcast.” When someone who works for Ted is like, “You should do a podcast,” you listen. I’m like… Okay, at the time, I had a job that I only worked four days a week, so I had Fridays off, and so I was like, “I’ve already studied all these biases. What if I just do a podcast where I talk about one bias? Then I just would kind of reacquaint myself with a bias, make some show notes, and then just turn on the mike and talk.

I could wrap that up within an hour, and one hour every Friday was super manageable, so yeah, I just started posting it. Again, I wasn’t with the intent of like, “Oh, I’m going to grow this big audience.” It was more like, “Hey, this would be a fun thing to do,” and people tell me that they’re interested. Yeah, and it just grew and grew and grew and grew. It was never like… I never got to the point where I was like, oh, getting advertisers, or anything like that because frankly I’m too lazy. I just don’t have the energy to… I don’t care about that enough to build a whole business around it, but I care enough to do this thing, and it led to all these other things like giving the talk in Copenhagen, like writing the book. My experience from career perspective is that that’s how it works.

You may have a plan, you may not have a plan, but if you are diligent and lucky, and I stress the lucky because I don’t want people to think, “Oh, some people are just better than others and the ones who have all the hustle get the good shit.” No, the ones who have the hustle are persistent and that helps if the lucky thing happens, but there’s also luck. There is privilege, like I was born lower middle class to a mother who really cared about education, which put me in a better position to be able to get education and so on and so forth. There are people in my life who have cared about me and supported me…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… so that wasn’t something I planned and then happened because I’m so fricking awesome. No, it happened because of just all of the chaos theory things that happen in life-

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
… but when those things happened. I was prepared to say, “Yeah, I will do a hundred episodes of this podcast. I will go out and give all these talks.” I’ll… I think it’s a mix of those two things.

I always stress that because I won’t want people to forget about privilege. I don’t want people to forget about privilege. I don’t want people to forget about the social structures that limit our opportunities, and I really, really, really don’t want people to fall into the trap of thinking some people are just better than others. That’s one of the most horrific doctrines…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… in the history of the world. I’m not even a little bit overstating it. I always stress that, “Hey, I’m not here because I’m so fucking awesome, I’m here because I tried really hard. I care about these things. I was passionate about these things. I did it in a context where very fortunately these other people were in my life and I was born in this particular place at this particular time.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
There are a lot of things that I didn’t have control over that played in my favor, as well as some that played against me, but it isn’t just don’t think that some people are better than others. That’s the thing I really try to avoid when I’m telling my story.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I’m so glad that you mentioned that just kind of in the context of the work that you do and how that places you with where you are now. It’s a combination of things. This wasn’t something that was just handed to you. I mean, we’re talking about privilege, too, but also it’s kind of by privilege, I don’t want to say by privilege, but it’s also by fact of just being early, being around at the time that this technology started to pop off in a way where people could really take advantage of it and make livelihoods out of it. I think about some of the early projects that I’ve done, the Black Weblog Awards, and in 2015 I did a whole podcast about tea for a year. I just did like…

David Dylan Thomas:
Oh wow.

Maurice Cherry:
… short bursts, less than five-minute episodes about tea, one episode a day. I called it The Year of Tea…

David Dylan Thomas:
Oh.

Maurice Cherry:
… because I only did it for a year, and I could do that now. Maybe people would pay attention to it, maybe they wouldn’t. I hate the fact that content creation is now under not just the filter of algorithms, but also the lens of like how many likes or shares or whatever it gets.

The early web was just so much about doing things because you could do them and no one else was doing them, so you’re like, “Well, I’ll just do it and maybe it becomes something, maybe it doesn’t, but I’ll also not doing it for it to try to become something. Like…

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
… it’s… I don’t know, it’s hard, I think, to explain in the current context because so much of what’s done now is just filtered through engagement.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s as you kind of said earlier about fuck engagement, but everything is like, “Well, are people paying attention to it?” Who cares? Are you doing it because you like it? You know? Like… oh yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
Who is being helped? I think that’s the other sad truth about the early web is it wasn’t particularly, I won’t say exclusively, but it wasn’t necessarily… It wasn’t helping people, I think, necessarily in the way that there’s the potential for it to help people now. Some of the early shit like Ushahidi was awesome where it was like this tool for helping people know where to avoid violence during the Kenya elections of 2007. It became this disaster relief tool. I think people… I wanted to see more of that out of the early web. I was perfectly happy to see us just kind of fuck around and do cool shit, but I also wanted to see us, and I think some of us were, and I think it got harder in some ways after the web got commoditized. I want a web that where the metric isn’t how many people are looking at my shit, but how many people am I helping?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
That’s the web I want to see. That’s the metric I want to see.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, that’s something with Revision Path, I’ve certainly… I don’t want to say I’ve come to terms with it over the years because when I started this, it really was just honestly as a continuation of a project that I did back in 2005. I started the Black Weblog Awards in ’05. In ’06, we had a category that was Best Blog Design. I was a blog designer at the time, designing movable type and WordPress sites. I was also working at AT&T at the time. I had other friends who were designers that were Black designers, and I just thought we weren’t getting any recognition in the industry. The magazines at the time, the conferences, we were not there, period. I wanted to do something about it, but couldn’t do it then.

It took me seven years until I started Revision Path, and now I’ve done that for 10 years as of this year. I’ll still run across people that think like, “Oh, this was just a fluke.” Like, “Oh yeah, you know, you’re just an overnight success.” Yeah, overnight since 2005. Come on, you know? I think about it in that context of like, “Is Revision Path ever going to be as poplar as, say, like Design Matters or 99% Invisible?” I don’t even look at the success of the show through that lens.

David Dylan Thomas:
Mm-hmm.

Maurice Cherry:
I don’t. I mean, I could and then I would be like, “Oh, the show is failing.” I don’t think about it that way because we haven’t reached that level of, say, audience or general I would say design community knowhow or knowledge or penetration, largely because people, honestly, they see the word Black and they’re like, “It’s not for me. I’m not interested. Whatever.” Which I’m fine with, but the impact that the show is having on the design industry, I know that there are teachers that teach the class in their schools, so there’s a new generation of designers learning about current Black designers, that those current Black designers that I talk to never encountered other Black designers.

I’m helping to change the conversation around who can be a designer, the visibility of what a designer looks like, where a designer can be, what a designer can do, et cetera. I have to look at it in that sort of lens of this is the impact that it’s having and less about whether or not it’s getting a hundred thousand downloads or something like that.

David Dylan Thomas:
We never know truly the impact we have, and you’re reminding me of this little Twitter contest that happened at least a decade ago where Ashton Kutcher and Wil Wheaton basically said, “Okay, we’re each going to ask our followers to do some kind of charitable thing.”

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
I think the way it broke down was… I don’t know, Kutcher had a much, much bigger reach than Wheaton, but Wheaton, a higher percentage of his followers actually did the thing, so it may have been technically more of Kutcher, a larger number of people did the thing from Kutcher’s clan, but if you did it by percentages, maybe 50% of Ashton’s people did something. Whereas, like 90% of Wheaton’s people did something. It’s sort of like if I had to pick, right?’

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
I’m not sure. I feel like maybe I’d rather be Wil Wheaton in that scenario because the people who are following you mean it. You know what I mean?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
It’s this tighter relationship, and increasingly I find myself defining success through relationship rather than through numbers. I’m working on this movie right now and I’ve decided the number one metric for success for the film isn’t going to be how much money it makes, it’s going to be, what are the relationships like during and after? Do I get to meet more people and form these new relationships? Do I get to strengthen existing ones? Because, A, that’s people I can work with again, and most of the experience making the movie is going to be working with people, so why would I not want that to be pleasant? B, I would much rather have that than have the movie just kind of fizzle versus have the movie be a huge success and we all hate each other when it’s over. That is not interesting to me.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
Where I’m at now, that’s just not interesting to me. Yeah, I feel you in terms of trying to not fall into the trap of it just being about the numbers and comparing yourself to other podcasts. I mean, my latest podcast, I’ve done two seasons of my new podcast called Lately I’ve Been Thinking About, and it’s nobody. There’s like… it’s like five people have heard it. The people who have heard it love it, but it’s sort of like compared to… Even compared to myself, it’s a failure in the sense of I don’t think it has nearly as much, as many plays as my Cognitive Bias Podcast, but I don’t care.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
I actually am in some ways more proud of it because it’s the first podcast I’ve done that’s actually accessible. I’ve got a transcript now and I paid for the transcripts and I’ve got good… There’s certain things that I’m doing as a podcaster that I think is better podcasting than what I did with the first one, so…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… to me, it’s not as cut and dry as like, “Am I getting more likes than Joe Rogan?”

Maurice Cherry:
Right. I’m hoping to get to that. I mean, I don’t want to say I’m hoping to get to that. I still am in the mind of creating things just to make them, and if it does, well, it does well. If it flops, it flops. It doesn’t necessarily mean it was a bad idea. Maybe it’s bad timing, you know?

David Dylan Thomas:
Mm-hmm.

Maurice Cherry:
We did a design literary anthology we started in 2019 called Recognize, where we wanted to sort of cultivate like BIPOC design voices, et cetera. We did that in 2019. I think it went pretty well. The pandemic happened in 2020. That pretty much killed it, so we did one more year in 2020. I think I tried to do it in 2021 and it wasn’t working. It did not have the impact that I wanted it to have. I’m going to bring it back one day. I’m going to find a way to do it again because I still feel that it’s super important, especially as I start seeing more Black designers and Black creatives like writing books and stuff. I still want to do that because there was a time, and not too long ago, I’d say maybe roughly, I don’t know, maybe five, six years, maybe a little bit longer than that, but I feel like there were prominent design voices online. Not necessarily authors, but like you have venues like A List Apart. I remember when Designer News used to be a thing before it turned into a graveyard, but there used to be places where you could read writing about design.

David Dylan Thomas:
Mm-hmm.

Maurice Cherry:
There was AIGA, had Eye on Design. I think there might have been a couple of others. Now you see things and they’re mostly just glorified tutorials, which is not to say that’s a bad thing, but who’s the next generation of design writers? The current generation is either, I mean, not to be morbid, but they’re either dying or nobody’s paying attention to them anymore. Who’s going to be the next generation that are going to be talking about the things that are important? I feel like it’s going to be us and our generation, like you, of course, with your book and the works that you’re doing, hopefully me with this podcast, but there are more design voices out there that need to be cultivated. I feel like it’s going to mostly be designers of color that are the ones that do that.

David Dylan Thomas:
Mm-hmm.

Maurice Cherry:
How do we bring back Recognizing the Future? I don’t know. I’ll have to noodle on it some more, but I still think it’s important because it’s just important. I still think it’s something that needs to be out there. You know, did it do well the first time we did it? No. It’s just a timing thing. I’ll find a way to bring it back.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, and I hope you do, and frankly, I think that the… I’ll say women and people of color are going to be like the new design voices, and I think they’re Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Eva Penzey Moog, Sheryl Cababa…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… all these folks are doing great work, but I think that the new design voices are also going to be political. I think that’s the difference. I think that’s…I think it’s going to be increasingly difficult to tell the difference between good design voices and political activists. I think…

Maurice Cherry:
Oh yeah. Hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… that is… and frankly, there are periods in design history, like look at Bauhaus, there are periods in design history where that has been the norm where… I mean, design has always been political and sometimes it’s more pronounced than others. I think, I hope, we’re entering into a time where it is this thin, thin line between kind of activist voices and design voices, especially as we come into this period where we’re really realizing racism is designed, sexism is designed, transphobia is designed. All this injustice is designed-

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… and can be undesigned. Social equality can be designed. People treating each other humanely can be designed as well, but that there’s this, I don’t know, increasingly, and maybe this is just the voices I’m listening to, but increasingly I’m seeing design and discourse becoming more human and less technical.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I’m definitely starting to see that as well. I mean, I look at what I did for… I mean, I’m trying not to keep bringing it back to me, but I’m seeing it with things like, where are the Black designers? Which was kind of an offshoot of a talk I did in 2015. Mitzi Okou ended up doing a conference around it for two years starting in 2020. Now, it’s sort of grown out to be its own thing. They’re partnering with agencies and stuff, so I’m starting to see the byproducts and the effects of the work, and that to me is how I measure the success of what I’m doing or the impact that I’m having is that it’s reverberating out into the industry in other ways.

If I do something and it doesn’t go well, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the idea was bad. Maybe it was just the execution or the format or the timing, like those… Again, with the way that the modern web is and everything being geared around algorithms and numbers and such, just because something isn’t seen doesn’t mean that it’s not in some ways a success.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. What keeps you motivated and inspired to keep going?

David Dylan Thomas:
A couple things. I mean, people mostly. I have a wonderful wife, a wonderful son, I have wonderful friends, and just seeing them thrive or meet challenges helps. I think what also helps, frankly, is once you study things like cognitive bias in the human mind, you start to get a really great respect for uncertainty. Uncertainty can be scary, but it can also be invigorating, and so one thing that makes me hopeful about the future is that I am terrible at predicting the future and that, in fact, everyone is terrible at predicting the future. That’s just something we know. We’ve looked. People suck at it. I used to fancy myself a futurist until 2020, and then it was like, “Oh, it was adorable how much I think I could predict about the future.”

Now, I’m like, “Oh, something happens, Ron DeSantis will do some ignorant shit in Florida,” and I’ll be like, “Oh my God, we’re all doomed.” I’ll feel my feelings, but then I’ll remember, “Oh, right, I have no fucking clue what’s going to happen.” I don’t. I really don’t, for better or worse. I cannot accurately predict the dystopia and I cannot accurately predict a utopia. All I can do is what I can do, and what I can do is I can go around and get people fired up about inclusive design, get people fired up about treating each other like humans. That’s something I can do. I can go make my art, make my movies that I feel are going to have an impact and express these things and that might even bring me some healing. I can treat my family well. I can support my friends. Those are the things I can do. What I can’t do is predict the future, and that means I have just as much right to hope as I do to despair. I have equal access to both of those things because neither of them are accurate.

Maurice Cherry:
What advice would you give to someone out there that they’re hearing your story, they’re hearing about your work, and they sort of want to try to go into that direction? Not necessarily following your footsteps, but they want to be a more active designer as it relates to the issues and the things that you’re talking about. What advice would you give them?

David Dylan Thomas:
I would give them the advice that I give at the end of my newest talk, which is say sit down with a piece of paper and write down what you believe in at the level of like for me, it’s compassion, creativity, curiosity, connection, open-mindedness, spirituality. I just write these things down. Literally, I have them in a Trello, like straight up they’re in a Trello. Then, I look at them from time to time pretty regularly, actually, and I remind myself what I believe in. When I have to make a decision, like a hard decision, I look at that and I say, “Well, which course of action is more compassionate? Which course of action favors creativity?”

It’s not always an even mix. Sometimes it’ll be like, “Okay, well, this decision would be more compassionate, but less creative or whatever.” I have to… It gives me a framework for approaching the world and it reminds me that it isn’t all chaos, that there are things I can control because when you sit down to write those values, that’s you. You get to decide what you believe in. You may not get to decide how much you get paid, you may not get to decide how other people treat you, but you get to decide what you believe in and that the degree to which you want to strive for those things. Honestly, everything else I’ve done aside from the just chaos of it all that I couldn’t control began from those things. I would say that’s the best first step.

Then, after that, I mean, if you want to know what I did, what I did was I doubled down as much as I could on the things I was passionate about to the degree that I could and I chipped away. I basically reached a point where rather than think about my day as, “Here’s my day job and here’s the time I spent doing what I love, and here’s my hobby or whatever, or my passion.” Instead, I broke it down into, “How much of my time am I spending doing what I love?” There were times during my work day I could, in fact, do 5% of that work day was doing something I love. Okay, maybe next year it’s 10%. Maybe next year it’s 15%. I chipped away, chipped away, chipped away until now, I’m at the point where I’d say 90% of my day is spent doing things I love, and then there’s laundry. That’s a 20-year journey, by the way, at minimum, so don’t be disappointed if it doesn’t happen in a week.

That, I’m speaking about that abstractly because I don’t have a path. There is no like, “Oh yeah, Dave, that’s who you follow if you want to become a podcaster/speaker/filmmaker/workshop-giver, I guess author.” That’s the thing, right? No, it’s just a bunch of shit I do and I love it and I’ve worked very hard at it, but it’s like no, there’s no… I didn’t sit down one day and say, “Oh, well, first I’m going to do a podcast, and then that’s going to get me some talks, and then that’s going to get me a book deal.” No, I didn’t know any of that was going to happen. I seized the opportunity when it did happen, but I didn’t know it was going to happen. I just knew I really care a lot about this, so I’m going to start talking about it.

Maurice Cherry:
Where do you see yourself in the next five years? What do you want the next chapter of your story to be?

David Dylan Thomas:
I mean, in terms of impact, it’s like I said, I want people to treat each other better and anything I can do to make that happen, but concretely, I’ve got this movie I’m making. It’s based on a true fact, which is that beneath Washington Square Park in Philadelphia and Urban Park in Philly there are buried the bodies of hundreds of enslaved people. What if they came back one night as zombies, but they only ate white people? Movie is called White Meat. I have finished the screenplay. I did a table read-

Maurice Cherry:
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to… I want you to keep going. You completely have gagged me by talking about the zombies and called it White Meat. Oh my God. Continue, continue. Please continue.

David Dylan Thomas:
Oh no, no, so I did a table read in December with professional actors and an audience. It killed, and I’m now putting together a budget, maybe a pitch deck, so I’m moving forward with that. That is one of those if it takes me until my dying day, I’m working on it kind of thing, but I’m hoping it’ll only be like five years, so that’s one piece. When I’m done that, I kind of maybe have another book in me because this new talk, it keeps getting longer. It’s like this actually might be a book or one-man show, so I’m going to keep doing that, and I’m going to keep doing what I do. I’m going to keep going out and giving these talks and these workshops, but yeah, that’s where I see my energies focused over the next few years is really do what I do on the daily, but I really want to make this movie. That’s the number one creative priority for me right now.

Maurice Cherry:
A zombie flick that kills. I like that. Well, just to wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you, about your work and everything? Where can they find that online?

David Dylan Thomas:
The one-stop shopping for me is daviddylanthomas.com. You can buy my book there. You can sign up for my mailing list. You can hire me to speak. All the good stuff is there.

Maurice Cherry:
All right, sounds good. David Dylan Thomas, it has been an honor and a pleasure to have you on the show. I had a feeling that we were going to have a great conversation. We had, I think, a tremendous conversation. I just want to thank you for the work that you’ve done, the work that you’re continuing to do around not just helping us designers, people, et cetera, to uncover our biases, but also find ways to take that knowledge and then put it into action and to service to help make the world a better place. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

David Dylan Thomas:
Thank you so much for having me, and thank you for all the hard work you do with this podcast. Appreciate it.