Episode 1: John Delacruz

The Accidental Geographer’s Vincent del Casino speaks with Associate Professor John Delacruz, one of the most creative people on campus, whose research focuses on teaching, learning, and creativity, principally how experiential learning spaces impact the creative disciplines, as well as mentorship and peer learning in creative teams.

Episode Transcript

[Music]

Vincent Del Casino: I want to welcome you to The Accidental Geographer. My name is Vincent Doug Casino, and I am the accidental Geographer. I'm here today with John Delacruz, associate professor and associate chair in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. John is one of the most creative people we have on this campus, innovating pedagogy, thinking about the future of teaching and learning, as well as bringing a sense of expectation to the world that we need to challenge ourselves as we move forward post-pandemic. So I'm really excited for this conversation today.

[Music]

Vincent Del Casino: So John, thanks so much for being here, I really appreciate it.

John Delacruz: Thanks for having me.

Vincent Del Casino: You know, you and I have had a lot of opportunity to kind of intersect and talk on and off, but, you know one of the exciting things about having this conversation is you get to dive in a little bit. And what I'm always curious about is, you know, to get started is how you get to this moment, being a faculty member, your work. You have this really interesting trajectory of experiences that led you into this school, doing this kind of work, working with students on creativity and creative literacy, as well as advertising and so forth. So how do you get here? I guess is my first question.

John Delacruz: Okay, so that's an entire series, right?

Vincent Del Casino: *Laughs* Of course.

John Delacruz: Yeah. And, you know, it's really a coincidence that its the Accidental geographer and the accidental, I don't know, creative, I guess I'm not sure, but, it was a series of events, you know, took turns here and there. That led me to this place. So the first thing that I've got to point out is that school for me was horrible. I didn't enjoy school. I like to be with my friends and hanging out and things. And, I never really even wanted to go to college. I was the first one in my family to attend college. But not only am I the first generation to go to college, I also go to art school. Okay, so it's like, well, what are you going to do after this? The whole idea was to go there and get a job. And, just to top it all up, I did fine art. I was a graphic artist and a frame maker, and I did my own work, you know, and that's what I wanted to do, really. I wanted to to practice as an artist. But, I was always fascinated with advertising. And since I was a young kid and, I really wanted to go into that. But one thing that always kind of, held me back, I guess, was the discipline, you know, the discipline of graphic design. So I'm not a graphic designer, I'm. I'm an artist, I'm a creative person, and I stumbled into the whole world of branding and advertising, kind of accidentally, but on purpose. And then moved around a little bit and, ended up teaching.

Vincent Del Casino: No, it's so it just so many layers to pull apart there. The first one, you know, because my background's geography, right. And I do think that cartography and mapmaking and the entire print industry, which you start in as a printmaker and thinking about the evolution of that, I'd love to unpack that a little bit, because I think it's really interesting and important because it ties directly into the curricular innovation work you've been doing here, as well as where you were previously, because the evolution now of the creative industries, for lack of a better word, is so fast. It's moving so quickly. So how as someone who with the passion for print, I imagine you still have that passion, how do you balance all that and think about how to intersect that with the kind of curriculum work you're doing now?

John Delacruz: Yeah. And it's nice. You mentioned layers because it is. Printmaking is built on layers. And that's where the connection comes to the work that I do now, working with all of the Adobe products, you know, that are there. It's my toolbox, you know. But I actually started off using as one of the early versions of Photoshop when I was still a student. Even though I kind of grew up doing doing print by hand, linocut and woodcuts, intaglio, I very quickly was always had a passion for photography as well as and darkroom photography. My practice moved into that intersection between photographic practice and printmaking. So I started to create less on a large scale, photographic screen, screens for screen printing, photographic and, intaglio plates as well. And I was doing a lot of like, so kind of, I guess postmodern stuff, you know, I mean, it really is my era, right. So I was cutting up comic books and sticking them together. And you talk about maps, maps formed a big part of, of my practice at the time because, see I'm from Gibraltar, which is a colony, and I was starting to unpack that and really kind of look into at my background, what it meant, what colonialism meant. And so I was looking at colonialism in a physical sense and also like, in a cultural sense. And so a lot of the work that I was doing was influenced by American art and American design, and yet I was living in the UK who had colonized my, my land, you know, and, I found a lot of, I don't know, I it got me thinking, right. So I began to look at cultural imperialism. And, long story short, I printed like a whole series of, like, global maps where Captain America was always of jumping in. He diving in, you know, and, there was wreckage that ensued. So I was kind of lots of, photocopying old masters and, kind of letters and so on, and marrying those with the technology. So when I was in that phase where I was literally cutting things up and using photocopiers and, you know, xeroxes and so on before taking them to screen, we got a computer and this funny hand-held scanner. And the technician said to me, "hey, you'd be interested in using this." And that was my first taste of like, creating digital art, you know, scanning things in instead of photocopying. And it was kind of, oh, I've always cut and pasted, that's what I do, you know, I cut and stick things together. And so, that led so fast forward that to when I was practicing as a freelancer, and I moved away from the handmade to the more digital forms of expression. I still consider myself a printmaker because the way I approach digital art and design is still with that whole idea of layers in mind, including when I do photography. So now I use Adobe Fresco on my tablet, but my approach is not like a painter, its like a printer, you know? So, looking at the different layers also enables me to be able to break curriculum down and to really look at what a problem is and how to solve it. So it's kind of instinctive now. Could I go back and kind of analyze that? Yeah, maybe, you know, because when I get that woodblock or that lino block, I cut away, and you cut the positive away in order to create a negative, that then becomes a positive again, it's kind of it's a mix of way of thinking, ou're thinking in, in mirror images. And so you cut, you print, you cut more to, to retain a color, and you print different colors. And so all of this kind of approach connects really with my Adobe skills, but also connects to with the way that I design curricula and syllabi.

Vincent Del Casino: You know, it's so interesting, my father worked in the graphic design industry, but he was a project manager. He was a guy who came up, but he could read print backwards because he used to get plates, there back in the day when you were still printing, And I remember him talking about the moment at which Quark, which I think Quark was the design programThe first one that really did desktop in a big way. And how that put out just eliminated the topography industry in New York, like overnight. And he had friends with millions of dollars worth of equipment that became art pieces and no longer had practical use. But what's interesting about that evolution, and what I want to pull the thread on with you a bit, is the skillset that you learned in that print experience. The ways in which you think about negative and positive space and so forth. Do those still, are you still teaching those skills when you're working with students, thinking about these sorts of things, because you don't necessarily have to produce the backward version when you're working in a digital space, but negative space is a very important part of how we create emotion and feeling and other things like that. So how does some of the things you've done stuck with you in the educational experience? Has anything kind of been put on the wayside, or do you see it as an opportunity to get back with students, because you clearly have an interest in the history of the ideas that have gotten us to this point. 

John Delacruz: Yeah, totally. And, even though the tools have changed, creativity still exists in the same way it always has done. You know, the way that we think, the way that we problem solve is still the same, you know, that that doesn't doesn't really change. But I guess even though I said before that I didn't like the discipline that you have to have when you're a graphic designer, as a printmaker, you do have to be disciplined. But I didn't mind it, you know, because, I felt more in control. And so that discipline has stayed with me. The whole idea of lots of trying things out, of going over the edge and not knowing whether you're going to walk into a void or whether you're going to have come up with something beautiful. I don't know, that mystery. Right? That mystery that you have when you, when you're in a dark room or when you're cutting lights of a block of wood up, all of that is still there with me, you know? So, yeah, I encourage my students to think, obviously there's a whole principles of design. I apply those very much in the work that I do, but I always have to remember and remind others I'm coming at it not from a strict designer perspective, but from an art perspective or an artist who designs or who is involved within creative practices and creative production. So I encourage my students experiment, I really do. I mean, in the ad program, like currently this semester, one of the courses I'm teaching is, ADV 95, which is, working with type. The way I teach is very much hands on and messy, and it's not how you would teach, typography necessarily within a graphic design curriculum. I'm not looking at the formal build up of type, but I'm looking at playing with materials and found objects and ways to kind of express letter shapes and letter forms and the meaning behind words through creation and through making stuff. So I'll have students, for example, casting things in concrete, right? Using food, using found objects, and then using lots of, taking that whole idea of 3D, but using it within a digital space. So you learn to build using actual physical objects, but then we'll move into Adobe Substance and actually create the 3D in a digital space. But of course, you're having to think of that digital space in the same way as you do the physical. So you move around your letters, you light in different ways as you would do within, within an actual studio. So I introduce them to do the hands on and then we'll move into into digital later on.

Vincent Del Casino: I think that that flow is and that comparison is really important because you're right when you get that the tactile kind of haptic work of, you know, wood and then being in a three dimensional space, I think that would evolve the way they think about that digital and probably ask different questions about it, I imagine.

John Delacruz: Yeah, totally. And it's really hard to break through. This has been happening for a while actually, you know, but even more so now that we have such versatile technology. Right. Lot's of so, you know, you have an iPad, iPad Pro or an Apple Pencil, it's like having a sketchbook, but it's not, you know, because you can still delete, with a sketchbook you couldn't, right. But again using a sketchbook, is really hard. But you have to adapt, you know, and you have to understand that their tools have changed. You know, they shouldn't be the same tools that you had. As long as you're ideating and breaking ideas first before committing to doing less of a final piece of production, then it doesn't really matter what they're doing. You know? It took me a long time to actually break through that thinking and not necessarily insist on pen and paper just because I think, well, you know, my tools were different to my predecessors, do these guys tools are they're much more comfortable thinking in this way, you know. 

Vincent Del Casino: Well, to that point, like it creates a new way of knowing and interacting. a question I have which comes out of this is how much of that self reflexivity do you build into the curriculum to get students to think about their relationship to the objects and everything? Before you even get into the conversation of, let's say, advertising itself or something like that.

John Delacruz: Yeah. So, like for every assignment I set, every brief I set, and most of them to do tend to be live briefs. Actually, I work a lot with NGOs and nonprofits and organizations within the community. But every single assignment that they do, they don't just present the final piece of work or the final campaign post, I don't know, social media, imagery or whatever. They do actually have to define their journey through. So they begin at the beginning and they tell me what the initial research was and then their ideation, their thumbnails, their inspiration. I'm big on inspiration and and really looking around and looking broadly, not just that, our industry, our discipline and what's come before, but looking generally around, culture and so on. The reason for this is because, you see, ultimately it all comes back to advertising, right? So it doesn't matter if you sell, if you're selling deodorant or whether you're selling an idea or whether you're getting people to vote. Through the the creative work you do, you're connecting with a group of people. You're connecting with humans, and you need to understand how humans think and feel and what triggers them. So engaging within culture and and understanding and actually empathizing with your audience, getting into their heads, walking a mile in their shoes, you know, whatever, and seeing what they see, reading what they read and listening to what they listen to is vitally important for that creative process to kind of evolve with meaning. Right? So, so all of that's got to be recorded in their Be Hands project, if they don't have that in their grade goes down because I need to see the progress, I need to see the process. And I always tell them at the very beginning, you know, for me, process is sometimes more important than the final product because, I want to see them evolve, you know?

Vincent Del Casino: Right. Well, it must make for interesting conversations with the clients. So, I love that you bring that hands on work in real life projects to the table for the students, because it has, at some level, you have to also generate an empathy and a conversation with your folks. I guess one of the things that's interesting about all of this as well, though, is you are, at the end of the day, also responding to their needs. So how do you start to teach students and integrate into the curriculum that you could be as creative as you want, but if it doesn't link to what the client is thinking, you know all you have is a beautiful portfolio, right? Not something that's actually responding to their needs. So how does that get integrated into this creative process for them? And I imagine that sometimes causes quite a bit of struggle for some folks.

John Delacruz: Yeah, it can, especially because the, I guess lots of, as you travel through life, I do want to say, as you get older, as you travel through life, you become more confident in the communications that you have, you know, with the client, for example. Right. But what I remind students is that the client is coming to you because they don't know how to solve that problem. So even though they may have an idea, it may not be right, because otherwise they wouldn't be coming to you. Right? So ultimately they're paying you or, you know, they're asking you to undertake this work for them because they need that direction. They need that help and guidance. So, it may be, it may be something dull. Usually when it's something dull is when it becomes really difficult. But we have to do dull work, we have to make it interesting. Right. So, I always encourage students really at the very, very beginning to, to really dig around, the, the brand, the organization, the client themselves. It depends on how you know, what kind of a scale we're looking at, you know, dig around, find something that's interesting and that interests you, maintain your interest through it. And I use examples, you know, from, like, from my experiences, but also from, current industry practitioners. Right. So whenever we visit agencies and so on, we always get talking to young creative teams or, you know, even creative directors. But mainly it's the young creative teams that really kind of inspire them because they're kind of close in age. And the,y that's a question that always gets put to them. You know, how do you deal with like working for and, you know, creating work for an insurance company? Yeah. And so the explanation always is the same, its like "so dig around." Where's your jumping in point? How can you get excited about this? And it may take some time, but you will always find it. As soon as you get excited about it, that unique insight that you're bringing to the table, you can convince a client that that's the direction they need to take, you know? So it often leads to left field thinking and to creating a pointed difference between that client and their competitors. And it doesn't matter if it's a mom and pop florist just down the road here in San Jose, or whether we're looking at, you know, a big global company like, say, Apple, for instance, you know.

Vincent Del Casino: Yeah, that's interesting. And and for our students, you know, we have an an incredibly diverse student body. They're coming into these classes. You know, there is a way in which sometimes advertising forecloses access to certain communities and populations. But the idea that they get to think about and bring themselves, I bet that produces some challenges for some of the live clients you bring in, in a positive way, in the sense of like, well, I don't think you're connecting, for example, to the experiences that I've had or other things. So how does that balance out for students? You know, because it sounds to me like you're trying to also help them build their own voice into this work so that down the road they can see themselves back, you know, through that process, right?

John Delacruz: So one thing that I remind them, or I remind myself actually, is that the big creative revolution in advertising happened around about, it was like the mid-60s. And it happened across both sides of the Atlantic. It happened in the UK, and it happened in the U.S., almost kind of parallel to each other. And it was known as, like I said, the golden age of creativity. What happened at that point was that working class kids were graduating from art school and entering the industry that had been closed to them before, maybe it was because the rules were kind of breaking down a bit in society, you know, with the emergence of the hippie revolution, and you know, the, I guess the whole swinging 60s kind of idea, right? So rules began to break down, and working class kids began to infiltrate this industry that had been, had always been closed to them. It was, it was an all boys' network, literally, an all white boys' network up until that point. And so you get, not just working class kids, but people of color, women as well, entering the industry of those, like so top, top level creative positions. And it kind of changes the way that advertising manifests itself because they were giving authentic voices to the messaging that brands were communicating. And that's kind of what we've inherited. So it's interesting then to see that there is research going on at the moment that is highlighting a return to the pre-60s days where working class kids from less disenfranchised communities, or underserved communities are finding that they feel that the doors are closed for them in advertising. If they're not living within the metro areas. So if you're living in New York, in any of the five boroughs, or if you're living in London, and you're working class,
those barriers aren't really there, or aren't seen to be there. But if you're from outside, if you're from any of the flyover states, or if you're from any of the,
the old industrial towns in England, then as a working class student, or a working class individual, you are finding that advertising does not seem to be there for you. And this is research that's been conducted by in particular one agency called VCCP, they have their academy is now in my old university. And that was done through that connection that I made at the time when we were there, when I was there. And VCCP just loved the energy that the student, these students who are like so fresh, you know, we're bringing to the table. So they've established an academy there where they're conducting all of this research into what barriers are there to underserved communities entering the industry. How can we improve diversity within the industry and so on, because it is kind of going back to where it was before, and that's not a good place to be. So it's good to see that the industry itself is kind of less
of paying attention to this.

Vincent Del Casino: Well, it is interesting, especially in the context of the wake of some of the challenges we've seen as a society in the last couple of years, I would imagine it's getting kind of, you know, opened up, forced open, you know, to some of that work. But so I wanna shift gears just a little bit to discuss the way in which you think about curricular innovation, because it seems to be at the heart of sort of your, intellectual project, you know, your larger, scholarly creative activity sort of, is how we think about teaching and learning, the ways in which you bring digital and creative literacy to the table.
And I sense you're always iterating on how to teach different ways to connect to students. Obviously the pandemic changed a lot of how we were interacting with each other, but how do you, first off, how do you think about curricular innovation and how it is informed by a larger kind of scholarly body
of work, you know, like, oh, there's these things changing in the research, in the industry, how people, and then secondary, how do you implement that when, you know, curricular change is not always easy in universities, right?
We're not as nimble as people think sometimes institutionally.

John Delacruz: No, it can be frustrating, and it can be frustrating for new entrants into our profession as well, you know, 'cause they come in with loads of ideas and, yeah, okay, it's not gonna start happening tomorrow. We've gotta go through these different layers, right? As it is, I mean, I chair the school curriculum committee, and I'm also on the college curriculum committee. So, you know, once you're aware of how these things work,
it can be painful, but it can be doable, right? So you, I guess for me, innovation comes within the classroom, I think there are things you can do
that don't need to be going through a complete changeover, right? So how you teach, for example, how you bring tools into an existing curriculum, that's where the difference can be made in the short term, before we implement
the big, the bigger, you know, changes. So when you like, so redesign a degree program, for example, that's gonna take you two to three years easy, right? Before it even becomes a reality. What I found that the pandemic did was that we actually had to take a complete stop, which we did, we literally did stop for two weeks or a week, and we had to rethink what we were already kind of like, very, very used to doing. We had to unlearn and then relearn new ways of doing things. If you're handy with technology, it kind of, it feels a bit easier. But if you're not, and if technology scares you, or if you don't have an interest in trying out new things, then the pandemic must have been horrible, you know?

Vincent Del Casino: Yeah.

John Delacruz: But we did, you know, we had that great scheme where some of us helped to mentor other faculty and maybe impart some of our hacks, our tips, our tricks, you know? Innovating, I said, within the curriculum is something that is informing, has always been informing my practice, from my initial interest in experiential learning spaces that has led to the redesign of teaching spaces in my previous university and here as well. Our advertising creative space is, you know, it's kind of, it's a beacon really, you know, to other people around campus, and in fact, it often gets used as a showcase to host an event or whatever, right? 'Cause it's kind of cool, it's funky, it's, it's based on an agency model, it's like a boutique agency. My whole idea within curriculum is to, and experiential learning, is to teach within a space that echoes where they're gonna be, not in a classroom. We have to move, for me, I feel that we have to move students out of a tiered classroom,
because that's where we were for the first 18 years of our lives, you know?
And it kind of, it restricts creativity and thinking. I've got to actually be very candid, and when I first started here, I was used to teaching in these kinds of spaces. I'm studio-born and studio-bred, and I found myself having to teach copy and teach art direction in a tiered classroom. I was like, "Oh my God, I think we made the wrong choice here." But, very fortunately, a grant came in,
and we were able to, we had some existing space that was boarded out in our building, and so we were able to redesign it, and the culture within our student body has began to change. It enables them to think in a particular way. The courses were not drastically changed, it didn't go through curricular changes, but the way that they were taught did, right? So we can implement within the classroom itself

Vincent Del Casino: So the skills that you're gonna teach are there, but the ways in which you deliver that, the way in which you bring clients in, experiential. What's interesting about what you're saying is, and again, you know, the geeky geographer in me, is the spatial organization of the room itself is a critical component to the learning, because they have to, you know,
a classroom that you're talking about, the tiered classroom, generates a particular set of social relationships. I'm gonna profess, you're gonna learn,
you sit at your desk. So tell me a little bit more about this space, what it kind of looks like, and what the intentional feel is there. When you say it's like, you know, being in an agency, flesh that out for me a little bit, because it's really interesting and important, I think.

John Delacruz: Yeah, it all goes back to my time at school, which was a jungle, and then into literally, it was horrible, to not responding well to that kind of learning and teaching practices, to when I went to art school, and there was the stage and the stage approach for our art history, and I switched off, but then we were given these open spaces to explore. And that's where I came alive. So that's why I then tried to bring in, and throughout my practice,
that's the kind of space I inhabited, right? It's messy, like my mind, it's where things happen. Myself and my creative partner also came from a fine art background. We designed spaces which were a typical learning studio, but mimicking the agency spaces. Why we did that, I don't know.It was, we just did. You know, we thought, we wanna like, so create something that's different and unique. That's where my advertising and brand management degree came from. We wanna bring interdisciplinary students in. It was important, because prior to that point, you were either creative and you did design, or you were management, and you did marketing, right? We wanted all those kids together in a space that echoed the place that we're gonna work in, because we'd been existing in those spaces, and we were taking students into those spaces. So when we brought them back to campus,
suddenly they were in a different space, right? So you start to find a division. When I was taking students into ad agencies and having them do an ideathon there for a day, where they were able to roam around the building, it was amazing, because it really super came alive, right? And so that's where that sparked the whole idea of, what does an experiential learning space mean?
And that kind of led into my own research and my scholarly activity, which is not just the thinking and designing of the spaces, but to actually write about them and find similar-minded people who, educators, who, again, sort of experience, or practice experiential learning in that way. It does create sort of a cultural shift, and sometimes that's hard to achieve, but you get to a point where it becomes kind of natural for the students who are coming in. Once you've gone through the first three years, maybe, and you get new students coming through, that it's brand new to them, so they become immersed in it
from the off. I think that we were getting to that point of cultural change
when the pandemic hit, and this is where, and now I'm noticing something else, which is kind of also impacting the research I'm doing right now, which is about pedagogies post-pandemic, and it's also, I'm recording those in a podcast, as well, actually. Not as fancy as this podcast. I'm literally like sitting in a tiny little booth, like a cupboard, recording this. But no, it's brought me into conversation with similar-minded creative educators who have experienced exactly the same thing. We have a culture of social interaction
within our studio spaces, and then suddenly, we're going onto Zoom, and we recreate to a point. But very quickly, those cameras get switched off, and I understand, we all understand why, you know? It can be awkward for people to have their cameras on. But as soon as the camera goes off, a switch goes off in your mind, as well. Even though you can try out different tools, you can do some asynchronous work, as well as light-synchronic work, you can use Zoom rooms, and so on, that whole, the whole social interaction that occurs within the physical space is hard to kind of bring back. Once we move back onto campus, what I've seen is that we've now taken three steps backwards,
and we're having to rebuild those relationships again, because students are in the space, and they're enacting out their Zoom years. So they're sitting there, you'll have 25 of them in the room before you come in. I always come in late, purposefully, you know? A few minutes later, or I try to make sure
that they're all in there, to allow a conversation to develop, a hubbub to start going, yeah? Just so that you're not going in totally fresh. And they're all on their screens, not just in the first week, which you get, but beyond that, yeah.
And so the big battle right now is, well, okay, how do we kind of break that down again? How do we kind of like, break that down? So I've started to do icebreakers, which we used to do before, right? I've started doing icebreakers. Talk to each other, turn to the person to your left, who are they, have a conversation. And we kind of, I do lots of random groups, and just get them all moving around and walking around, and talking to each other, because that's a big part of what we do. And it started to work again. We started to see those digital, those screen barriers breaking down a little bit now. But that's been the problem coming back in.

Vincent Del Casino: No, it's so interesting, the lack of social connection that emerged during the pandemic, and what it meant, and how we're having to rebuild that, and how the value of coming back face to face is there, but that there's real work to be done. As a last question, though, maybe to just kind of
get at some of this that I'm interested in, at the same time when they graduate, they may go into remote jobs now. Like the entire workforce, we have that deep partnership with a lot of different industries, and San Jose, I don't know if you know this, it's the lowest return to work rate in the United States, 31% of the jobs. Are those conversations also coming up for students? How are they gonna navigate that world? How do you think about it as you educate them on the reality that the agency that you've been building,
that vision of that place and connection, may not be the place they end up in next?

John Delacruz: Yeah, although, saying that though, the ad industry, parts of it are going back, but yeah, no. We have retained, so the whole work-life balance is an issue that comes up. So part of my pedagogical research is also drawing from industry practice, because I wanna see where the Venn diagram crosses over. So this is where we get back to digital literacy. So a lot of the new tools I was introducing, and that my colleagues have been introducing over the pandemic, rather than losing them completely, we retain them. So when we go back into the classroom, we're not going back in and forgetting everything that we've learned. I'm in favor of a form of high-flex approach, where we meet in the studio sometimes, but not always, right?
Because there's a need to meet on Slack. There's a need to meet asynchronously, perhaps, right?

Vincent Del Casino: And Slack is a tool that you use for managing projects collectively.

John Delacruz: Exactly, the reason I use Slack is because it's one of the most common industry tools for communication, for networking, workshopping, sharing documents, and so on. It can work asynchronously,
and it works beautifully synchronously as well. And I use that as opposed to, say, Discord, because when we break down the identities of these different tools, Discord is a party, it's social.

Vincent Del Casino: That's what my kids are using.

John Delacruz: Yeah, and it does exactly the same job, but it's noisy, it's loud, it's the playground. Whereas Slack, again, has the same functions, functionality, but it's serious, it's work time now. So I find that students actually interact differently on Discord than they do on Slack.

Vincent Del Casino: Yeah, interesting.

John Delacruz: We build community on Slack. This generation, going through the post-pandemic generation, is perfectly equipped to deal with the workplace of the future, they're gonna like to redefine it, I believe. Maybe the way that we think about social interactions is gonna change. I still find myself, sometimes, my son works like 90% virtually, he works for a marketing agency,
but he only has to go up to the office once or twice a month. The rest of the time, they're dealing with their clients, with their teams, beautifully, there's no need for it. But they're interacting all the time, they're interacting live. And then they've got their quiet time when they go off, and they do work on their own, and they're super productive in that respect. But maintaining that level of sociability when we are high-flex in our working approaches is what's gonna define this generation movinj into the workplace, I believe.

Vincent Del Casino: Yeah, no, I appreciate that. What I get from this, too, though, is at the same time, creativity is not an individual project. It's a thing that people do when they get together. My writing has always been the best
when I've had a co-author, where I'm learning from other people. John, I think I could talk to you for three hours, and probably would, but I don't think, I don't know how many people will listen to a three-and-a-half-hour podcast, so I'm gonna stop here, but I want to thank you so much for this really engaging conversation and sharing some of your own experiences. It's really valuable,
and I really appreciate learning from you. So thank you so much.

John Delacruz: No, thank you for having me, Vin. It's been awesome. I really enjoyed it.

Vincent Del Casino: All right.

John Delacruz: Thank you.

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