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Episode #145: RJ Andrews
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RJ Andrews is a data storyteller. He is the author of the new book Info We Trust, a lavish adventure exploring how to inspire the world with data. RJ blends creative arts and data science to inform. As an independent creative...
The post Episode #145: RJ Andrews appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Podcast Delays and Book Launch
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Viz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabish. I hope everyone's well. I just returned from a long week in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, working with Stephanie Posovic and the folks at Graphic Hunters to put on a couple of workshops. So I am digging out. And so apologies for the day delay in getting this episode of the podcast out to you.
00:00:32
Speaker
But I think you're going to enjoy it. If you haven't heard, and hopefully you have, RJ Andrews from the website InfoWeTrust has just published his new book, InfoWeTrust, which is an extraordinary run through the history of data visualization. Both a look back and a look forward and what we can learn from these texts and how we can apply those teachings to the work we do today. The book was fully illustrated and written by RJ.
00:01:03
Speaker
design the papers, design the cover. It's really a fantastic book. I just got my copy. It just hit bookstores last Thursday on the 17th of January, so now it's out and you can get your hands on it.
00:01:17
Speaker
back in December RJ and I sat down at the tapestry conference in a little side room found a little spot and the two of us talked about his process for writing the book the content of the book and what he hopes folks will get out of it so I hope you'll enjoy this week's episode of the policy of his podcast and I'll be back again in a couple of weeks with a new guest in a new episode thanks a lot
Writing Journey and Data Storytelling
00:01:44
Speaker
My name is RJ Andrews. I am a data storyteller. I've spent the last few years publishing my experiments and explorations of data storytelling on a website called InfoWeTrust.com. About a year and a half ago, an editor from Wiley reached out to me and gave me a very generous offer to spend some time thinking about and writing about the craft of data storytelling. And now that's what I've done. And so I've written the book, Info We Trust,
00:02:14
Speaker
how to inspire the world with data. It's coming out January 17th in 2019. I'm really excited about it. I'm really excited to talk to you about today. It's great. So tell me about what does it mean to you, the craft of data visualization, especially as it's coming in through the book. Sure. So I use the word craft throughout the book and I talk about
00:02:37
Speaker
the craft of data storytelling. Now, whether you use data storytelling or use data visualization or dashboard design or any sort of number, like the craft waves many banners across many communities. It's been referred to by many different titles across time. But what I see is sort of a continuum and I like using the word craft
00:03:00
Speaker
you know, versus other words you might consider such as art because craft has some sort of suggestion of utility, practical usefulness, but also has some suggestion of skill, artistry, something you make with
Human Element in Data Visualization
00:03:15
Speaker
your own two hands.
00:03:15
Speaker
And guess what? Even if you're typing on a keyboard and on a mousepad, you're still using your two hands. It's still a very human activity and it's not only a human creation activity but it's for a human audience. And so I like using the word craft A because it puts the emphasis on how human
00:03:37
Speaker
the process of creating charts and maps and diagrams and depictions and sort of new ways of seeing the world. But then I also like it because you can think of the craft as this long 400 year old tradition.
00:03:50
Speaker
that wasn't born with big data, wasn't born with the internet, wasn't born with interactive computers. The craft stretches very, very far back and it has always been evolving, it has always been improving and it will continue to and it's really our duty to be good stewards of the craft and to keep pushing it forward and keep learning not only how to make better information but how to learn how to better inform people into the future.
00:04:18
Speaker
so tell me about a little bit about the history because I understand that's the book is going to touch on that and you were telling me earlier that you read
00:04:24
Speaker
a book a day for a while. For a while. Is your home just like stacks of books? Like is it crazy person stacks of books to the ceiling? Yeah. So every flat surface in my home at one point was definitely, and the physical, I love the physicality of books. And there's this sort of idea, you know, what do you do when you get, you know, stuck, you know, maybe not quite writer's block, but you get stuck like, well, one of the things you can do is you can rearrange your books.
00:04:55
Speaker
What does the word information mean? Information means putting something in formation.
Book Design and Creative Control
00:05:03
Speaker
The data doesn't change. You're just arranging where all the dots are. You can do that with books and you put them in different stacks.
00:05:14
Speaker
And then maybe you can get restarted because you notice new connections. And it's not as satisfying when you're moving the PDFs on your Kindle, but like to stack them up pretty high.
00:05:28
Speaker
books on your hard drive, but the problem is that they're not accessible. Like you can't see them. There's not this physical reminder. You mentioned kind of the deep history of the craft. And so I was very intentional, maybe even strategic in how I wrote my first draft. And what I did when I started researching the book, I read what I consider to be all the modern classics. So Bertine, Tooki, Cuffee, Holmes, and Cleveland all wrote
00:05:55
Speaker
really important books between like 1960 I think 67 or 69 for Bertin and then all the way up to Cleveland's first big book which came out I think in 1985 and like so why that time frame well two reasons one is that this is before interactive computer like really made a big splash like books after 1985 talked about like how to click right and like spoiler alert I
00:06:23
Speaker
Books are not a great medium for talking about how to click. Go on the web and learn how to do that. And so looking at pre-1985, what I was really interested in seeing is what
00:06:36
Speaker
principles, what lessons, what were they describing from back then that still resonate with what I know as a practitioner today. So you can think of like two inputs went into the first draft. Like one input was all of these enduring principles that still work and then my own craft. And I figured if, you know, the fireworks between those two streams,
00:06:55
Speaker
you know, was something that had a chance at not being fashionable, not something that's going to kind of like not make sense in a year from now, like something that would be a little bit longer lasting, have a little bit longer shelf life. And so that was one reason to do it. The other reason was I wanted the narrative of the book and the book does have a narrative, it sucks you right through.
00:07:16
Speaker
to be written in my own voice and to have a unique sort of skeleton. And I knew if I read or reread in many cases a lot of the sort of post-1985 work, which are honestly a lot of it written by my colleagues, written by my friends, that their voice, their perspective would influence me so too much. So
00:07:37
Speaker
Pre-1985, I read these modern classics, I write the first draft, a couple months later I have a first draft, then I can go back, revisit post-1985 and polish and refine and in many cases talk to these people and say, hey, what do you think of this? Is this how I'm thinking of framing this thing or that thing?
00:07:57
Speaker
But there's an additional part to the book that I think is important for people to know. So you laid the whole thing out. And everything's like hand drawn. Yeah. There's sort of the content of the book, which is sort of what you might walk away learning and also the sort of enjoyable experience you might remember. But then there's also the form of the book.
00:08:15
Speaker
And so when I mentioned this great opportunity that the publisher gave me, it was complete creative control. And so when I say complete creative control, I did the layout. I obviously wrote it and I did these 300 or so hand-drawn illustrations.
00:08:31
Speaker
But it went a lot further. It was the quality of the hardcover. It was the quality of the paper. It was proofing the color printouts to make sure things are registered correctly. And so I'm a designer, right? And so a designer can become a micromanaging perfectionist. Lovely. They didn't only kick off the project giving me this control, but they stepped
00:08:56
Speaker
You know, took every step with me and engaged with me and did the eight iterations with me that I demanded and they never fledged. You know, they were patient and they said, you know, we're giving you the ball and we want you to score and we're going to support you. And to have the opportunity to have that sort of support and engagement is just phenomenal, right?
00:09:17
Speaker
So were any of the books that you read, did any of those books inspire the form at which the book ultimately took? Yes. So two books in particular inspired the form from the get-go. And so one is a book by Robert Greene called The 48 Laws of Power.
00:09:36
Speaker
And this book is very interesting. It's a very interesting read. The content of the book is entertaining. The idea is that it's sort of a late 20th century Machiavelli. These are the laws of power. Do with them what you will. This is how power works.
00:09:56
Speaker
has a sort of Talmudic or biblical form design kind of inspiration in that it's packed with marginalia. So the central narrative is black, the marginalia is red, very much like a Bible, right? And so it has this
00:10:13
Speaker
parallel or multiple narrative form to it. So I love that book because what marginalia does is it lets you squeeze in all these little points of inspiration that if you had to put them in the main narrative, it would slow down the narrative and it would distract you from the flow of the narrative. And so if I have a great
00:10:31
Speaker
quote from Levasseur from the 1880s when he's talking at the statistical conference, and it's something that somebody in the 1880s is saying, and I'm bringing it forward not because I want you to peer at something that's dusty, but I wanted to show you that somebody who was informing people in the 1880s is saying something that's as relevant today as it was back then.
00:10:51
Speaker
I don't have a spot in my narrative to put that. To frame it, the book would go from 208 pages to 400 pages and that's a drag. So I can put it in the margin and
Narrative Flexibility and Inspiration
00:11:02
Speaker
it's there if you want to dance between the black narrative text or the blue marginalia, you can do that or forget the marginalia. Come back to it some other time.
00:11:10
Speaker
And so it's this opportunity to really almost choose your own adventure in terms of how you read the book. That was one important book. The second important book that inspired the form was Oliver Burns' 1843, The Elements of Euclid. And so this is a very famous book in the book design community, tough to even pay homage to it in one of his books. But the idea is that
00:11:36
Speaker
I don't know, maybe 60, 70 years before people like Mondrian were using primary colors to do sort of like very abstract diagramming. He was explaining Euclidean geometry using geometric shapes right in line with the text. And so instead of saying the words red circle, he would just illustrate a red circle. And so his primary color palette of dark blue, burnt orange, golden yellow,
00:12:02
Speaker
is what I riffed on to get my primary color palette. I tried to adopt his illustrations in line and what I found is that very small illustrations are too close to emoji and they just don't work. And in a similar way that a marginalia quote would interrupt the narrative flow, I find that the in line illustrations also interrupt the narrative flow. And what you want to do when you're reading a book is that you want to sort of
00:12:27
Speaker
use a sense of self and you want to co-create the narrative with the author, right? So the author is giving you an input and the author is exciting this story that you're creating in your brain, co-creating with the author and like little diagram illustrations, you know, right in line I found were disruptive. Okay, so as an aside then, I have to ask, are you an infinite jest?
00:12:54
Speaker
David Foster Wallace fan? So people asked me about that and I actually only looked at that
Prescriptive Styles in Data Visualization
00:13:02
Speaker
once I started showing people my prototype chapters. Oh, you have to check this out. The multiple narratives.
00:13:12
Speaker
Okay, so you've gone through the modern text and the book, as I get a sense of it, you're talking about which aspects of those works still ring true today. But I'm also curious, are there aspects that no longer hold true?
00:13:28
Speaker
Sure. So when you open up some of these older books, especially Bertine, they're quite large, like four or five hundred pagers. They're honestly sort of textbooks. And I've already written and published some design essays on what I think is so great from all of them. And so without retreading that space, there's
00:13:50
Speaker
a portion of each of these books which is essentially a product of their time so instructions for how to use a graph paper or you know basically how to do things that just we don't have to worry about anymore and you know because of textbooks you know some of these books have pages of
00:14:10
Speaker
you know, data tables, they have examples or case studies, which you don't really have to read every word of. So you can really skim a lot of these books and get to the good news. Okay, beyond these anachronisms, what I found is, you know, in Bertine is that, you know, style-wise, Bertine sort of over-frameworks everything. And everything fits into a two-by-two hierarchy.
00:14:37
Speaker
It was very, very important for him to do this because what he was doing was really building a structural sort of academic bridge between cartography and data visualization in a way that created such a strong foundation that decades and decades of authors have been able to react to it. But that doesn't mean that what he put forward is like state-of-the-art anymore, right? So maybe that's per team. For Tufti, and maybe I'll say a little bit more
00:15:07
Speaker
something a little bit more critical Tufti and so in that sense what I'll say is you know positive for Tufti is that he still is one of the best Describers of what's so magical about the craft in terms of being able to capture like why this is so wonderful He was able to do it
00:15:24
Speaker
You know, you read his contemporaries and nobody seemed to get that. Nobody seemed to get sort of this like, just human magic that was happening with this craft. Like the beauty of grass and charms, as opposed to like, well, it's just a way to get numbers. Yeah, and not a superficial beauty, but the beauty of informing a mind and exciting a mind to like a new way of seeing the world. Very poetic language describing what's happening. That's what I love most about him.
00:15:53
Speaker
But he has a very prescriptive style. Do this. Don't do that. And honestly, the craft evolved. The craft is very complex. And so that very hard prescriptive style, I don't think has aged well at all. And so the other thing about a lot of these authors, but particularly Tufti, I think, is that he's a critic. He's an analyst. Academics are sort of analysts. That's their job. Their job is to say, that's not working.
00:16:21
Speaker
And so the critic analyst doesn't bring the same thing to the table as a maker, as a creator, such as one of his contemporaries and sort of one of his, you know, they kind of went back and forth a little bit, but Nigel Holmes, you know, who was a maker and was able to say, this is why you do it and see here all the examples that I've done and have done successfully in that space. You know, it's, I want to listen to Nigel, not to Tufti because Tufti's like, well, this is how I think, you know, from my,
Creators vs Critics in Data Advancement
00:16:48
Speaker
you know,
00:16:48
Speaker
ivory tower. Right. With no real like the quantitative support or no evidence. No, no evidence. Right. Where's your, and maybe he has done a lot, but that's not what the book's full of. The book is full of other people's work and his thoughts on it. And the thoughts are often really interesting and really inspiring, but that's sort of like a gap there. Yeah. And I mean, maybe the only other thing is that
00:17:15
Speaker
He anchored very hard on efficient encoding. That's sort of graphic efficiency, right? But really, if you're going to design for efficiency, you want efficient decoding, efficient informing. And so a great example of that is if you're going to use multiple graphic visual channels to communicate the same thing. So we're going to use both size and color
00:17:42
Speaker
to encode this particular data dimension. Graphically, is that efficient or maybe not as efficient as only using one?
00:17:52
Speaker
decoding informing perspective it's much more efficient because it's much more easy for somebody to kind of like hook into what's going on. Right. Interesting. So let me put it this way. What modern books are you like these are the these are the ones that you put up on the on the pedestal like the top part of the bookshelf, right? Sure.
00:18:14
Speaker
So there's sort of like three categories and I actually think there are some emerging categories which is very exciting but you know there's sort of one category of books which is how to use a particular technology, how to pull the letters. That's one category. Another category are
00:18:32
Speaker
coffee table books and so big beautiful full color photo kind of you know photo vases like maybe you know one of the great example of this but there's sort of a subcategory emerging of historic vase which is being published in you know so you have Santa Rengren's Minard book you have the Du Bois book that just came out so it's been like kind of like
00:18:56
Speaker
A really exciting year for historic data is coffee table. That's the second. The third category is kind of like approaches to the craft and like kind of like no matter what technology lovers you're pulling here are some principles that you want to be aware of. And so personally Alberto Cairo's book the functional art.
00:19:16
Speaker
Which I think came out in 2013 that was the book for me So that was a book that I read when I was just starting out and that's the one that really turned my mind on it It wasn't the first book I read but it was the one that like made things start to click and really sent me down Really sent me down this path. So personally that book is still very important to me, right? Um in terms of citations like what modern book did I cite the most in my own book?
00:19:40
Speaker
It's probably Tamara Munzer's book. And what's great about what she does is that the date of his academic literature is not the most accessible corpus of work. And so what you rely on, me not being an academic, is what you rely on is people like Kennedy Elliott did a really great round up of some of the literature at, I think it was Kennedy.
00:20:04
Speaker
Yeah, at OpenViz. At OpenViz maybe three years ago or so. And then I think Lisa Charlotte-Rose has done a bunch of also kind of like summary kind of work and that editorial work is so valuable to practitioners because it's hard to wade through the papers but you know that summary work
00:20:26
Speaker
is, you know, Kennedy's and Lisa's work, those are sort of medium length articles and we go read them. But then if you want to go kind of like a little bit deeper, then and then go go pick up the month or book because she is able to explain it all in a way that, you know, it's not a narrative that pulls you through like a like a story. But it is a book that has a lot of punch per pound, right?
00:20:53
Speaker
There's an incredible amount of value throughout it and there's other ways to hack learning the research. You can look at citations and there's ways to read research in an efficient way that doesn't take over your life. But read Tamara first. Do you view her book as the natural evolution of
00:21:18
Speaker
Cleveland's book and then even Bertine before that where it's a little more academic, a little more rooted in the research as opposed to sort of a prescriptive or critical or a beautiful coffee table book. Yeah. I mean, they're so far apart in time that you'd have to
00:21:37
Speaker
like fill in the second book and then Wilkinson. There are other kind of dots along the way, but it's certainly in that blow. One thing that's interesting, and this is another early design decision I made with my book, is one thing that really impresses me about Cleveland is that
00:21:57
Speaker
The book is almost entirely black and white, very sterile, very surgically precise charts, and they're fantastic. If you want to take information to ink ratio or something, it's
00:22:15
Speaker
really outstanding and really impressive to have a visual consistency without the whole work and demonstrate all the principles he's talking about with all these data sets that he has selected in order to demo these principles. And as an author you know that
00:22:33
Speaker
choosing the example data set to show a principle is not always an easy thing to do. And one of the things I leaned on Cleveland for is in some of my examples, I looked at what data set he used and then I went back to that data set and refreshed it with the last 30 years worth of data. And so there's a lot of tributes and homages throughout my book and that's one of them is that I'm actually using some of the same data but updated with filling in the last 30 years.
00:23:03
Speaker
And so Tamara's a little bit different that it's a much graphically richer book in that she's calling on a lot of different examples from a lot of different sources, right? And so in that sense, it's broader, it's more expansive, but then it doesn't have the same kind of personality punch that Cleveland's book does. And so it's not a one's better than the other approach. It's just a slightly different animal.
Drawing for Discovery in Visualization
00:23:29
Speaker
So let's get back to the design of the book because one of the things that I've seen of the book and your sort of last few weeks of priming the book on Twitter is all these drawings and illustrations that you're doing. And one of the things that I find and I've talked with lots of people on the podcast is about drawing and a lot of people who are
00:23:50
Speaker
data scientists or analysts who are more sort of identified with the statistics or data side, they don't want to draw. They're like, I'm not an artist, I'm not a designer, I can't do any of that. So do you have a prescription for people who say, I can't draw and so I'm not going to draw? Sure. So let's make sure that just like when you're visualizing data, you can cleave drawing into two categories. One is I'm drawing for my own personal discovery and insight and then I'm drawing to inform.
00:24:16
Speaker
others, you know, it's a communication tool. So as a communication tool, and this isn't strict either, but as a communication tool, you might think, well, this should look nice, right? But let's put that aside for now. Let's talk more about drawing for yourself. So drawing for yourself, even if you didn't know how to draw well, you're not going to draw well when you're drawing for yourself.
00:24:41
Speaker
Because, and so what do you need to know? You need to know how to draw a square, how to draw a line, how to draw a circle. That's like pretty much it. And so the visual thinking author, Dan Rome, like this is his banner, right? And he extends it not only drawing for yourself, but drawing even collaboratively with others.
00:25:00
Speaker
Okay, so you can draw, anybody can draw a square, a circle, a line. Alright, so why is it so important to go off the screen and draw? Okay, one is that there's nothing faster, there's no tighter link between the brain
00:25:16
Speaker
and externalizing an idea from the brain to the outside world, then drawing. It happens very, very fast. It happens so fast you don't have to think about it. And so why that's important is that as soon as you externalize and get it out of your brain, it's less wrapped up in your own identity and who you are. It's less fragile because you're not going to forget it. But even more important than that is that you can look at it, you can say, aha, there it is, and you can react to it.
00:25:45
Speaker
And you can make another drawing, and you can have another thought and another idea, and you can keep thinking, and you can keep drawing, and you can have a dialogue with yourself by drawing. And so this is something that I learned even more about from Nick Sousanis, the author of Unflattening, the comics professor, the power of drawing as a thinking tool.
00:26:06
Speaker
Now, power of drawing is a thinking tool. That's sort of like, you know, there's a whole body of work and, you know, kind of idea about that. But there's also an idea of using drawing and data visualization data, storytelling, to explore form.
00:26:20
Speaker
Personally, I'm maybe not the most talented developer coder. And so I'm not always going to prototype everything in code. Maybe sometimes we do, but often we don't. And that's because I'm very fast with just sketching. I bring out my arts and crafts supplies and I go wild. But even if you were the best coder in the world, well, coding is a certain angle on the
00:26:45
Speaker
You should be taking advantage of every angle you can on the problem, right? So why not try something new, even if it looks bad, especially if it looks bad. If you're a good coder, it's going to look great. So why not try something that doesn't look great and see what you learn from it? So I think this split is great because I think when you say to people who are data people,
00:27:09
Speaker
And you ask them to draw. I think their first instinct is, oh, this is something that we're going to show, or it's not. I want to understand your thoughts about how you want to present this. So when you work with partners and clients and collaborators, do you have to have these hard conversations with them? Like, are you trying to convince them to draw?
00:27:29
Speaker
I'm trying to convince them to draw, I'm trying to convince them to write, to describe. So when you're working with a partner or collaborator, most of the value that always materializes,
00:27:47
Speaker
for whatever reason, a lot of people don't expect is that there's an enormous value to getting everybody around the same table and actually having a conversation on what's actually there. Like when we use these words, what do we need? And so one of the values I bring is playing the fool and saying, but I don't, what do you mean by that word? Like what are you referring to? Like explain, no, no, no, no, no, no. But what exactly is that thing?
00:28:17
Speaker
And then when you do that and when you push people and you don't worry about annoying them, is that you realize that often that a lot of people talk about, use the same word to talk about, have different understandings. Every word comes with a whole sort of network of concepts that are all related to one another. And so when anybody uses one word,
00:28:40
Speaker
they're sort of highlighting a portion of those concepts and that's sort of what they're leaning into. So when you use certain words, you can sort of have different understandings on what's really going on. I think we're talking about drawing.
00:28:56
Speaker
With partners, drawing together is great. I've done this activity one-on-one with people where I'll cover a kitchen table with a butcher board paper, and we'll each take a different color, never red, like maybe black and blue, right? And then we'll just talk, and we'll both be just doodling while we talk with one another.
00:29:23
Speaker
a very loosey-goosey kind of frame form fuzzy way of approaching it. You know, Dan Rome will show you much more, I think, sort of constructive and like precision ways of working with other people. So, and this broaches the kind of the topic of criticism too a little bit, but like there's, I think, I don't know if it's a design thing or an art thing, but it's like, don't show unfinished work to idiots.
Challenges of Unfinished Work and Feedback
00:29:50
Speaker
Because they don't have the context to understand that this is unfinished work and nothing's polished. These are the things that aren't polished because they're not supposed to be polished. These are the things that aren't polished because we don't know what we're doing yet. We need to work on this.
00:30:08
Speaker
When you're showing somebody sketches, it's very useful to sketch and fly in front of them and talk them through and sort of explain the thinking of what, and then like maybe better than that is you already have the sketches and you're showing and you're introducing them, sending them the sketches and asking them to react to them. The risk increases that like what's important and what we need to focus on right now is going to get lost in all the other things because they can say, that's ugly.
00:30:34
Speaker
Right. It's like, who cares? That's not what's important right now. Right. Right. So let me ask a last
Data Visualization's Societal Role
00:30:40
Speaker
question. So because I want to get back, make sure we get back on the book. So you had mentioned earlier that, you know, hopefully people
00:30:49
Speaker
They're going to buy it, but hopefully they enjoy it and they take some away from it. I want to give you a chance to just say or talk about what is the thing that you hope people take away from the book when they turn that last page. What are they going to get out of this book that is not yet in the library of this field?
00:31:10
Speaker
I'm visualizing in my head and it's important that when we use the word visualize we remember that visualize didn't always make a scatter plot. Visualize
00:31:23
Speaker
used to mean when you close your eyes, what do you see? What do you see with your mind's eye when I ask you, what's your favorite color? What is that thing that happens when you can see it? Right now, I'm closing my eyes and I'm visualizing the last page of my book.
00:31:41
Speaker
When you're a storyteller, people remember two things. They remember the emotional peak of your story and they remember whatever happens at the end. So the last part of the book is that I am hoping to fill you with enthusiasm and
00:31:59
Speaker
enthusiasm, a little bit of pride in the craft, and sort of also like a sense of duty that this craft is important. It's important not only to data science or business or academia, but it's actually important to everyone, to all of civilization, all of society, and that's a real tool that you can actively take and use to do really, really
00:32:26
Speaker
fantastic things in the world. It's been used over and over across the last 400 years to push civilization forward and create a better world. And what I want you to do is that if you're a practitioner, you know, to feel empowered and emboldened to go do that.
00:32:43
Speaker
And that if you're not a practitioner or if you're maybe adjacent to the craft somehow is that you recognize the creators, the makers, the data storytellers out there who are doing that, you know, sort of the people in the arena sort of thing and that you support them.
00:32:59
Speaker
and that you become fans of the craft as well, even if you're not practicing it. And that's sort of, I mean, it's a very, not utopian, but optimistic sort of cheerleading, rah, rah, rah, let's go do the thing. It's a book that's very much focused on championing the maker. Not the critic, not the analyst, but the maker, the person in the arena. And that's what I hope people,
00:33:25
Speaker
turn that last page and feel. Sounds great. I'm looking forward to reading it. Thanks so much. Thanks so much for coming on. Appreciate it. A lot of fun.
Episode Conclusion and Resources
00:33:36
Speaker
So again, thanks for tuning into this week's episode of the Policy Vis podcast. I put links to a lot of the books that RJ mentioned in our discussion on the show notes page. There's also an Amazon collection that I've pulled together from a blog post that RJ wrote. So you can go in and explore any of those books. And of course, if you haven't picked up your purchase of his new book, be sure to do so. So until next time, this has been the Policy Vis podcast. Thanks so much for listening.