Intro/Outro (00:00:02):

Welcome to Logistics with Purpose presented by Vector Global Logistics in partnership with Supply chain. Now we spotlight and celebrate organizations who are dedicated to creating a positive impact. Join us for this behind the scenes glimpse of the origin stories change, making progress and future plans of organizations who are actively making a difference. Our goal isn’t just to entertain you, but to inspire you to go out and change the world. And now here’s today’s episode of Logistics with Purpose.

Enrique Alvarez (00:00:35):

Good day, good evening. Good morning. Welcome to another exciting episode of Logistics with Purpose. My name’s Ri Res, co-founder and managing director of Vector Global Logistics, and I’m here with my fearless co-host, Christie. Christie, how are you doing today?

Kristi Porter (00:00:49):

I’m good. We’ve already had such a good pre-discussion. Sometimes people are in a hurry. We jump into these and we hit record, and sometimes we have more of an established relationship or less of an established relationship, but we are lucky enough to have all these behind the scenes conversations as well as what the listeners hear, and this is going to be a good one. I’ve been counting ground and looking for this, and I can’t wait for everybody to meet to be

Enrique Alvarez (00:01:13):

Very unique.

Kristi Porter (00:01:14):

Yes, very

Enrique Alvarez (00:01:15):

Unique, very unique interview that we have. I think that the audience going to be not only inspired, but surprised. And actually I’m excited too because we have the honor of having an amazing guest today, which comes from a very, very different background that most of us supply chain professionals out there.

Kristi Porter (00:01:32):

Yes, for sure. Well, without further ado, let me introduce everybody to Drew Kataoka globally, acclaimed artist technologist, CEO of Drew Kataoka Art Studios in Silicon Valley with clients across more than 30 countries. And even listened to this two artworks sent to space, which Enrique and I were talking on the phone earlier going, where do they put it? So I can’t wait to ask just some more questions about that. Her work is deeply influenced by Zen philosophy, bridges, art, science, technology, such a unique perspective from mirror polished steel sculptures, which are gorgeous. Please go look at them online to virtual reality e, EG, and NFT. And if you dunno what that is, we will unpack that as well. And today she is a recognized leader in the fast moving fields of AI and AI art, highly controversial space. So I’m excited to get into these conversations and as if there wasn’t enough, drew is the recipient of the 2025 Innovator Award from the National Council of Women in Generative ai. She’s collaborated with Disney Lucas Films, Israel Light and Magic Star Wars fan, that one’s for you, exhibited at the World Economic Forum in Davos and serves on the advisory board with me at Space for Humanities Universal Inclusion Podcast. And her innovative and humanitarian approach has been featured by outlets including CNN, wall Street Journal, routers, wired, and more. Drew, what an amazing background. Thank you so much for taking the time and having this conversation with us, and there’s just so many topics that we plan to uncover with you. So thanks so much for being here.

Drue Kataoka  (00:03:08):

Excited to jump in and leave people with actionable takeaways. Yes,

Enrique Alvarez (00:03:13):

Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to have you here. And again, amazing successful career full of innovation. And of course, ai, which is something that everyone’s talking about this days, and we’ll get into that. But before we do, let us start with what we’re calling this quick questions rapid firing. So please answer with whatever comes to your mind first. Ready?

Drue Kataoka  (00:03:36):

Okay. Rapid fire.

Enrique Alvarez (00:03:37):

All right, here we go. What’s one thing you cannot live without?

Drue Kataoka  (00:03:41):

My workstation computer, Nvidia, RTX 50 90 and 64 gigabytes of ram. It’s a beast of a machine that cranks through video generation, like video generated ai, local generations like butter. Wow.

Enrique Alvarez (00:03:56):

I mean, I understood probably 80, 60%. I’m not technologically advanced, but it sounds like you need as an artist, which is something that we’ll talk about, you need stronger computing power to perform. Right. So what’s your favorite way to spark creativity?

Drue Kataoka  (00:04:13):

Meditation. I would say it’s the ancient zen part of my family Samurai heritage. And it’s all about emptying your mind. Meditating recentering and amazing ideas will inherently spring from that. It’s just that in our everyday lives, there’s just so much pollution. We’re bombarded with so many voices and advertisements competing for our brain space, and so we have to reclaim that in order to allow our creativity to flourish, you need to reset to zoom out and to refocus on the signal and not the noise.

Enrique Alvarez (00:04:49):

I love it. Favorite famous piece of art.

Drue Kataoka  (00:04:51):

There’s so many, so it’s a very hard question, Enrique, but I’ll pick two. Maybe that’s cheating. Michelangelo’s last judgment. It really makes you put all things in perspective. And then given my Japanese and Samurai heritage, I would pick strike on a barren tree by Mia Moto Muhi. He was the greatest warrior philosopher of Japan. And the piece has this incredible economy of brush strokes. It really reduces the image to its essence and the sheer elegance of the way that the space is used is really unmatched.

Enrique Alvarez (00:05:29):

Well, thank you. And then we’ll actually go fish those paintings and put them on the link to the interview so that our listeners can better understand how well you describe those two paintings.

Drue Kataoka  (00:05:39):

And by the way, Enrique, I’ll say I’m a big fan of just taking paintings, artworks, but it could be even unattributable, things that you find off of the internet, images that you’ve taken, printing them out, nothing even super fancy. And having a wall where you put different things that find significant and then just covering this wall and continually replenishing it because your brain will make connections between those things as you juxtapose them in different ways. And so as you keep going by that space again and again, it’ll be an incredible source of ideas. You’re the best filter for what is going to be important for you. So if at one point you thought something was important, then it’s important.

Enrique Alvarez (00:06:19):

That’s a great tip, and I think we should put it in practice and have that kind of visual board, if you will. I know that you’re very visual when it comes to art, and we’ll talk a little bit more about that. But one last question for this rapid fire segment, one artist or creative that you admire.

Drue Kataoka  (00:06:35):

Okay, I’m going to give you two again and that’s going to be

Enrique Alvarez (00:06:38):

Perfect.

Drue Kataoka  (00:06:38):

Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, the scope of their work and the ambition is unmatched and their ability to elevate the human spirit, combining that vision and philosophy and science and hell logistics. They were logistics masters.

Enrique Alvarez (00:06:57):

Absolutely. They were both of them

Drue Kataoka  (00:06:59):

Just, I mean, it’s absolutely incredible when you think about Michelangelo. He was such a perfectionist. He didn’t just say, go buy his materials at the store and start working on them. He went to Carrara, he went to the marble quarries, he selected the stones himself. He had teams moving marble that was heavier than anything that had been moved since Roman times. And he was so detailed that he even gave instructions about how the roads should be designed so that the marble that he would eventually work with would be transported in the proper way so that when it got to the studio that he would be able to work on it in the way that he wanted to work on it. Those two are just unmatched. When I’m working on a complex project and I facing obstacles and I, I’m trying to figure out how can I do this more creatively, I’ll often say, what would Leonardo DaVinci do? What would,

Enrique Alvarez (00:07:52):

Oh, that’s a great person.

Drue Kataoka  (00:07:55):

Sometimes that gives me ideas, and sometimes that also pushes me to aim higher and think higher.

Kristi Porter (00:08:00):

Very cool. That is amazing. Thank you for that. I love walking with artists and hearing their perspective, such a special and unique perspective. Thank you. And now I want to just go to the museum and look at art, but okay, so it’s November 19th. Just this morning you were quoted in a Forbes interview talking about how we’re entering and a visual AI revolution. I don’t know that we’re entering it. We already feel squarely in it. It’s moving so quickly, so delighted to talk about the more, I guess, traditional sense of art, which is what we were just covering. And I remember being in the Louvre last year and just overwhelmed by all the beauty around me and taking it in from that. And then now we’re looking at it from a completely new perspective through this visual AI revolution. So I feel like also have such a unique perspective because so many artists are fighting it for good reason, right? There’s attribution concerns, all of these types of things, but you’ve really embraced it. You have all these amazing videos on Instagram that people should go check out. So I’m curious, what do you feel like this means for artists and business leaders?

Drue Kataoka  (00:09:06):

Yeah, Christie, we are squarely in it. It’s just an unprecedented visual revolution that’s being driven by ai. And I think mastering the visual part of things is something that so many businesses and businesses of different sizes too, like small and large ones, they unfortunately overlook. And so much of the public’s attention is focused on chatbots and the textual side of things. But I believe that visual will be the predominant modality of ai, not text. And what’s really fascinating is just remind the clock. Imagine, remember the internet when it first came out? It’s really hard to go back in time. But remember, the early internet was all dial up and it rapidly became visual. And today over 85% of internet is visual, over 85% image video, Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram. And after all, we’re visual creatures. Most of the information that we acquire comes through our eyes.

(00:10:02):

And so if you have a blind spot on the visual side, this creates an enormous advantage for your competitors or vice versa. It could be enormous advantage for you, however you work with it. So the most powerful visual tools, they do have a steeper learning curve. And sometimes you need to download and run locally rather than relying on these polished, tightly controlled apps from the Frontier labs. But when you do the creative and strategic payoff can be really big. So one of the things that I like to constantly remind business leaders is that AI now gives you the opportunity to create high quality visual assets at just a crazy speed, unprecedented speed. So it’s like having several movie studios just in your pocket, but the catch is you need to hone your artistic and directorial skills. And that’s something that I call the vision muscle,

Kristi Porter (00:10:58):

Given the fact that you were talking about this big creative wall printing things out, putting them up. I’m curious what you also advice you would give for helping people navigate this new area, whether it’s tools or workflows or just a new way of thinking.

Drue Kataoka  (00:11:13):

So I’ll give some tools and I’ll talk about the vision muscle. The vision muscle for me is about getting really clear on where you want to go and then moving towards that with purpose, but then also iterating and fine tuning because it’s definitely not a one and done like Michelangelo, you need to get the angel out of the rock. And so it’s an easy thing that you can do is just jump in and start. Just say, I’m going to try in the next two weeks, I’m going to try 10 tools. I’m going to try 20 tools, I’m going to try 50 tools. I don’t even know what they, or I’ve never even touched them. I give you some quick ones off the top of my head. But it’s important also that for business leaders to do it directly themselves, not just delegate to your IT team and say, okay, they can do it. They can do it. But really to have a first person visceral connection to the technology to roll your sleeves up, get dirty, get messy, break some stuff, and then you’ll get invaluable insights as you go back to applying that to your industry. So do you want me to share some tool ideas?

Kristi Porter (00:12:15):

Please, yes.

Drue Kataoka  (00:12:16):

Yeah. So you really have to spend a lot of time with Nano banana and also Nano Banana, which is also Gemini 2.5, flash nano Banana two is coming out very soon. It’s amazing for character consistency. It’s amazing for so many other things. You can plug it into Google AI Studio, you can plug it into Lovable. Really sky’s the limit with that tool. Poel is a new tool that Google announced that allows you to explore your business. DNA, I wouldn’t say it’s a serious tool right now for creating actual assets, but it’s more of a brainstorming tool.

(00:12:48):

Mix board is another interesting one that came out of Google Labs. It’s like an AI concepting board image. And on Vertex ai, it’s an enterprise grade platform for generating and editing studio quality images at scale. You’ve got to play with vo, the video model. Most advanced text to video generation model script is a great one, a great one for podcasts. You guys probably already use script, but you could go on and on and on and on. But just pick some things and also pick some things outside your comfort zone and definitely go on the visual side. Don’t just stick on the text side.

Enrique Alvarez (00:13:22):

I love the fact that you’re telling everyone in our audience and everyone that’s listening that you just have to go outside your comfort zone, right? This is not a tool for the IT team. Sure enough, they’ll probably do it at faster and better, but it’s something that every single one of us needs to go and experience themselves.

Drue Kataoka  (00:13:40):

And at the end of the day, I’ll say that, and they might not even do it better. You might end up doing it better because, right, maybe not canoe. Because whereas some of these, to build certain web applications, you had to have such deep coding expertise. It was easy to really get completely stuck. But now the reason I say you might end up doing something better is because whatever you’re building is going to be transected with you’re deep expertise in logistics, your deep expertise in shipping or in art, whatever. It’s, and then you’ll build things that only you could imagine.

Enrique Alvarez (00:14:14):

Absolutely. And well, is it fair to say you’re an artist yourself and you see, you hear a lot of artists out there that are actually somewhat threatened by ai, but just listening to you how you describe everything, you’re excited, you sound excited. Is it fair to assume that you are actually excited about AI and as an artist yourself, you don’t feel like it’s a threat to you?

Drue Kataoka  (00:14:35):

No, I don’t feel like it’s a threat. I feel to tremendously excited time. We’re living through a new renaissance. And so as such, we really need to think Renaissance people. There are of course a lot of concerns. There are so many things that are not fairly worked out with respect to copyright right now. That’s a very thorny and complex issue. There’s a lot of safety and ethical issues to look out for. But you look at some of these incredible tools around digital twins, tars, all this stuff, instead of just saying, oh my gosh, deep fakes and oh my, this is going to cause this X, y, or Z nefarious problem, we need to spend an equal amount of time on the positive side, which is what could we build? What could we create? What could we do? Because if we spend a hundred percent of our time only obsessing on the negative outcomes, we won’t be able to tap into our full collective creative potential. Absolutely.

Enrique Alvarez (00:15:32):

Well, it’s a little bit like what you said, right? You have to have the vision clear and then the vision will follow the reality. And if your vision is negative, then well guess what? That’s what’s really all that’s come out. But by now, probably our listeners are thinking, well, and what does art have to do with logistics? This is a supply chain podcast. So Drew, what is your perspective on this? What does art have to do with logistics?

Drue Kataoka  (00:15:56):

Well, we teased a little anecdote at the beginning with Michelangelo, and I think any great artistic masterpiece was underpinned by incredible logistics. And that’s very fascinating to look at in the history of art, but people say that strategy wins the battles, but logistics wins the war. So in military context, logistics is everything behind the scenes. It’s getting the food, it’s getting the medical supplies, it’s getting the ammunition, the right people in the right places at the right time. And those are kind of like an unglamorous backbone that decide who at the end of the day can actually move and fight. And so with art, I think that art and logistics are really deeply intertwined because they’re both about orchestrating complexity. And so in art, you take a lot of different elements seeming color, composition, emotion, narrative, history, ecology, mathematics. I mean, you have to weave all these things together.

(00:16:51):

And that requires creativity and kind of a constraints driven problem solving approach. And you have to be able to see the patterns before other people see them. And then when we add AI on top of all of that, AI is actually turning logistics into a highly visual discipline. So digital twins, all sorts of different visual simulations, all sorts of different predictive dashboards. Artists have been prototyping visual worlds forever. That’s their specialty. And so the same kind of visual imagination that led an artist direct a complex film or envision an incredible masterpiece is the exact same kind of imagination that will shape the next generation of AI powered logistics systems.

Kristi Porter (00:17:36):

Amazing. Thank you for such a thoughtful answer. I can tell you put a lot of effort into that, and I appreciate it. And it is so true, and it is, I know we think of traditional creative, I’m putting that in air quotes for our people who aren’t watching this on YouTube, but we think of creativity and art as what you do and painting and sculpture and ceramics and all of these amazing things. But I tell people continually like my coworkers are such creative, amazing people because they have to figure out these really difficult solutions, this port closed, or this is not a normal place to ship to, or how do we get this into this complex region? And it takes such creativity. So I think it’s a completely different way to look at it. So thank you so much for that thoughtful answer. And we’ve talked a lot about your present, which is fascinating. Let’s talk about another important, fascinating aspect of you on this Drew show. Let’s talk about your past. So tell us a little bit about where you grew up, your childhood, your experiences.

Drue Kataoka  (00:18:35):

Well, I was born in Tokyo, Japan to a Japanese father, American mother, and would fly back and forth in the summers between Tokyo and Arizona, actually. So on the one hand, futuristic Tokyo. And then on the other hand, this minimalist, beautiful, serene landscape of the Sonoran Desert, both places, I would say shaped, we’re talking about really early childhood, really shaped my vision on art and life profoundly. So as a kid, maybe just walking around akihabara, seeing the latest gaming gadgets, or one of the things that my dad used to do is take me around the Imperial Gardens. Walking, jogging, running as a kid is just incredibly breathtaking. Architecture and flowers and nature, and just feeling all the history of just layers and layers of history there. Or then just playing in the Sonoran Desert and sometimes not even knowing what side of the US Mexico border I was on, because my family’s hometown from my mother’s side was there in Arizona. I feel grateful for all of those different contrasts and really rich visual experiences that I got to have as a kid.

Enrique Alvarez (00:19:47):

Drew, looking back, do you remember maybe one story that can share with us about those kind of early years that shaped who you are and kind of what you do now? I mean, what was kind of a calling of what you ended up being years afterwards?

Drue Kataoka  (00:20:02):

Well, I just talked about the Imperial Palace. Anyone can walk around those gardens, and I recommend it for people who are visiting Tokyo. My dad used to jog around there, and my mom and dad would take me, and around the time of my birthday, they would say to me, oh, if you can listen really carefully, and this is when I was really little, really tiny, the flowers are actually talking. They’re saying, happy birthday. And then I would say flowers cannot talk. And they would say, no, they actually can. You are not listening carefully enough. So then I would kind of lean into these beautiful flowers, I’d look at ’em, and I try really hard to listen, and it sounds like kind of a crazy childhood story, but many years later, I thought about it. I was thinking that’s actually what the role of an artist is. It was actually good exercise, good training, because the role of the artist is to listen to all of the voices of objects, sometimes inanimate objects, plants, nature, people, buildings, things, cities. To hear those voices kind of internalize them and kind of re-articulate them in other forms. I

Kristi Porter (00:21:09):

Love

Enrique Alvarez (00:21:09):

That. Wow. I love that story. And you’re absolutely right. I mean, do you think that has to do also with your Samurai hair touch, I mean, which is very intriguing for me. How was this Samurai hair touch influenced your philosophy and your approach not only to art and leadership, but just as a human?

Drue Kataoka  (00:21:27):

There’s so many aspects of Boto, which influence me and inspire me, and also many ways in which I often reflect on the parallels between the sword and the brush. There’s just so many beautiful things written about this. And Mia Moto Mushi whose artwork I referenced in the beginning, he was Japan’s one of Japan’s greatest philosopher warriors, and he was wielding the sword and the brush, if you will. And that is what the Samurai would do as a way of meditating and emptying their mind, getting prepared for battle also to be ever aware of the transience and impermanent nature of life. And the thing about Sumer, a Japanese brush painting is that every brushstroke is indelible. So it’s different entirely than western oil painting where you have thousands of brushstrokes. If you don’t like what you did in this part, you just turn the whole canvas over. You can paint over it and keep going, and there’s a beauty in that, but it’s just something entirely opposite than Sumer, which is you have this huge scroll in front of you and whatever you commit to with the brushstroke, you can’t change it. And so there’s a certain amount of pressure, but you have to be kind of relaxed and composed and have an empty mind. And so with sword strokes, those are final two. There’s no undo on the sword or the brush. So I think about that a lot.

Kristi Porter (00:22:53):

I love that. What a great comparison. Thank you for sharing that. It also, just talking about your background, I want to talk about your educational career as well, and it’s sort of those juxtapositions also, I feel like show up in your educational background too. So American school in Japan graduating with distinction from Stanford and multidisciplinary curriculum, you were focused on all kinds of, you sound like a sponge, a life sponge, and I love it. And then you completed executive programs at Harvard and Yale focused on global leadership and values. So again, you’ve got kind of art culture, technology, leadership, global values. How did, I guess, with so many interests, how did you decide which path to take? What did you learn from those experiences?

Drue Kataoka  (00:23:40):

Well, at Stanford particularly, I wanted to create my own multidisciplinary curriculum. And Stanford is fantastic for that. If you have a vision for something unusual that you want to do, they will embrace you and support you. So yes, I took art history and amazing humanities and professors that they have in those areas, but also I took computer science and multi-variable calculus and just a range in a psychology and just so many different things. And we live in a multidisciplinary world. Logistics is multidisciplinary, art is multidisciplinary, AI is inherently multidisciplinary, and all the old silos are breaking down. So for me, having a background in art, but also science and technology, leadership, social impact, it’s incredibly helpful. And I always wanted to take an active role in shaping my own path. And I think for young people today, that’s more than ever important. You have the ability to shape your own education in a way that you never could.

(00:24:38):

And even as adults of any age, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, a hundred, we should be all continual students that are learning new things every single day. So I’m super excited by the new era of AI and all that it offers because we are kind of in this moment where we can build whole world, Adam by Adam, pixel by pixel. And so to do it, we need to thread the needle and make sure we’re considering all these different components and not just really being siloed and compartmentalized. And it’s easier. It’s easier to just kind of stick in your own discipline with your own tribe and speak your own lingo. And sometimes you have to go outside of your comfort zone. I mean, I think Richard Feynman, who’s one of the greatest physicists to ever have lived in his book, he writes about how he decided he wanted to understand art.

(00:25:30):

And so he decided one day he was going to take a painting class, and then he went in and there was this naked lady there. Everyone was drawing better than him, and he just started. But the long story short, he got really good and he ended up creating this incredible body of paintings that only he could have created that because it’s refracted through the prism of his incredible brain. But the point is that he reached across the aisle and he went outside his comfort zone, someone who was advising presidents, advising NASA doing all this stuff. Really, he did something where he didn’t know what he was doing. So I think if you’re in a place and you put yourself more and more in places where you have no idea what’s going on, then that’s a good means. You’re going in the right direction.

Enrique Alvarez (00:26:14):

Wow, that’s very powerful. And I think a very good piece of advice for all the younger listeners out there, because technology helps us accomplish this more easily these days. I mean, you can learn a lot about everything or everything that you’re interested in, a lot faster, a lot easier. And we talked about AI a little bit, and it seems to me that it’s a really, really good advice just to be interested to learn new things, things that you may not even be good at, just for the sake of learning and growing and developing as an individual. Thank you for sharing that. You founded the Drew Katao card studio over two decades ago, and actually before we started recording, I mentioned something. I complimented your background because it looks fantastic, and I think that is your art studio, isn’t it?

Drue Kataoka  (00:27:02):

Yes, yes.

Enrique Alvarez (00:27:03):

It looks amazing, and it’s this very global fine art studio serving collectors in more than 30 countries. Could you take us a little bit through that journey? How did it all began? How did your career evolved in those early years to becoming the artist that you’re now? And then how do you mix the technology and you have become a global voice for creativity and AI as well. Tell us a little bit more about the journey from your amazing art studio.

Drue Kataoka  (00:27:32):

Thank you, Enrique. Well, I built Duke Taco Studios from scratch around a little over 20 years ago as a startup coming out of Stanford, frankly, at a time when the world didn’t really think of this San Francisco Bay area as being a place that was going to sustaining a world-class fine arts, independent fine arts studio. And at the time, a lot of my classmates, they were starting Google, they were starting Yahoo, they were starting LinkedIn. Just these little crazy ideas that they had. Everybody had this kind of reality. Well, I dunno everybody, but it was just a lot of reality distortion bubbles around in the force fields. And I was thinking, why can we not apply that to art in a similar way? The old model of the art galleries is so obsolete, so outdated, dying in every way. The question I was asking myself and I always ask myself is like, how do you embrace the future, embrace technology and just relentlessly innovative and push? So it’s been incredible. My very earliest art form that I started in was Japanese ink painting, and it’s informed so much of my philosophy and a lot of concepts that I have still thread through many of the other forms, but quickly moves to different technological and scientific conceptual art. And today we are deeply steeped in ai.

Kristi Porter (00:28:51):

Absolutely, yes. Quite a career and quite just a depth and breadth to your artwork as well, which people can, again, I’m going to plug your Instagram, go look at all the cool things she’s doing, and your website has just these gorgeous mirrored pieces, which we’ll talk about in a minute. But I just love your versatility and that’s so reflected as you’ve discussed in your academic background. You’re growing up and you just have kind of this unique blend and mix that is all your own and it’s beautiful the way you’ve lived it out. Well, I want to talk a little bit about space. That’s how we met. So we met through Space for Humanity, amazing mission to make space accessible for people from all backgrounds. I’ve applied several times to be an astronaut and they still haven’t picked me. I’m going to keep applying, but

Drue Kataoka  (00:29:36):

It’s going to happen.

Kristi Porter (00:29:37):

I know it’s going to happen. I’m putting it out there darling. Friend Aisha said, who has been on this podcast as well. Please go listen to her episode and her talk about Space for Humanity, the founder, Dylan Taylor, they’re doing such cool things. And your current advisory board member shaping the vision of an inclusive and purpose driven future beyond Earth. We’ve been advising on the Universal Inclusion Podcast, which is sponsored by space from humanity, whole different sector of space than I had ever considered before in my life, before becoming a part of that. So I guess first, I don’t think we’ve discussed this, but I want to know kind of how you got involved in the space sector and just kind of got the bug for that. And then again, this is adding a whole other layer to art and technology and what cosmic means and global sense of purpose. So I want you to just sort of

Drue Kataoka  (00:30:29):

Tease all of those out. So how I got involved in space, well, I loved space from the time that I was really little kid got wind of something called Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. Got myself out there from California to Alabama to do that. I did. We did that. Oh my, as a little kid, loved it was always following astronauts in the news and that kind of thing. One time when I was in the eighth grade, I was visiting my grandmother in Arizona and I was listening to the radio. I heard that STS 44, I believe it was, I dunno if it’s exactly the right mission, was visiting Fort Chuca. And I just called them up on the phone and I said, I was doing a book report and this is a military fort. And so basically they invited me to come. It was a private press conference, and as an eighth grader for my report, I got to interview the entire crew and hear about this special reconnaissance mission.

(00:31:29):

And from then on, I was just completely hooked and met a lot of different people in the space industry from a very young age. There’s a lot more I can say about it. It’s always piqued my imagination. And I had the opportunity to create an artwork for the first serial gravity art exhibit in space at the International Space Station. I called the piece up. It is, you know how when you have artworks, you say, what are the materials? It’s tempura paint and wood and metal, or it’s this, this and this. In a museum, you list the materials. I say this work of art and the materials are ink and time dilation. And the reason is, so I was invited to create this piece, but there were all these constraints. It can’t be this size, it can’t be over this size, it can’t be any of these materials.

(00:32:12):

You can’t do this, can’t do that. And I was thinking, well, space exploration is about seeing what boundaries we have and then just blasting through those boundaries, surpassing and exceeding whatever boundaries that are externally or internally imposed. And so I created a piece that was bigger than what they said we could take on board. But then I invited the astronaut was flying to make the decision. I surrendered that decision to him to cut out a piece of the artwork that he would to take into space. So it was kind of an act of creative destruction. And then he took that piece and the work of our first time in the history of art, that a work of art has been separated from itself at those distances and speeds. So this piece went up and that was the celestial piece. And the piece that remained on earth was the terrestrial earth bound piece.

(00:32:59):

I call it the mission control of the art. And then that piece went up to the international space and it came back, the celestial pieces hovering over to the terrestrial piece in this glass box that’s in a private collection. But the piece that went into space is slightly younger now than the piece that remained on earth due to the effects as described by Einstein in his special theory of relativity. So there you have the time dilation. That’s a real thing. That’s not just a theoretical thing. And so it’s one piece of art. I mean, it’s a very small difference, but it’s one younger piece, one older piece. And all of that also is not just an abstraction. It really is about being human-centered. I was trying to create a conceptual portrait of father and son astronauts because his personal story, and there’s just so many layers to this, was that his father was an astronaut on Skylab, and then he wanted to be an astronaut.

(00:33:51):

So he always looked up to his dad, and I’m a parent, and now I wasn’t when I did this piece, but I thought about a lot how when you take a smaller piece from the original whole and it goes on this breaks off, goes on this odyssey and then returns back to the same place, it’s in the same place, but it’s not in the same place. That’s so much the story of humanity and just every one of us as that parent child relationship. So yeah, a lot of people in the space world, like that piece, there was a lot of conversation about it and it really sparked conversations with Nobel Prize winning physicists, Martin Pearl, Douglas Ooff, students, kids, teachers, parents, academic community. And it was a really interesting piece because it’s an artwork where you can say not only what is it or what does it look like, but you can say, when is it?

(00:34:40):

And so there’s so many layers to it, and you can just kind of keep unpacking and unpacking and discussing what it means. And so with Space for Humanity, I was one of the very earliest advisors for that organization. I think it’s a fantastic organization. I think that Dylan Taylor was so prescient, he was just thinking so far ahead when he started it. I remember the very early days and I was like, yep, I totally support. And Rachel Lyon did a lot of great work too in the early days, and now Aisha with the Inclusion Council that we work on with Christie. So there’s just been really brilliant people that have been part of that organization working with Blue Origin and NASA and just supporting all sorts of people, allowing them. We have enabled people to go to space that would’ve never had a chance to go to space. So it’s just an honor.

Kristi Porter (00:35:30):

We’re so deserving and so incredible at what they do and amazing human beings. So yeah, it has been remarkable to see that. And I’m curious about the, let’s talk about the gravity of that situation, no pun intended. So how did that change your perspective on art or change how you’ve worked since?

Drue Kataoka  (00:35:48):

You mean just creating that piece up

Kristi Porter (00:35:50):

In space and working around the space community outside of your eighth grade report more currently? Yes,

Drue Kataoka  (00:35:56):

And I mentioned that I think that childlike wonder is important to always keep and always capture. It’s not a trivial thing. It’s like the zen mind beginner’s mind idea of a mind of beginner. The possibilities are many, but in the mind of the expert, they are few. So it’s always good to have that kind of beginner’s mind with anything that we approach. It gave me a lot of ideas. And then subsequently, I did another artwork for another space mission for

(00:36:27):

Katya’s mission that she was the first Mexican-American woman to go into space. She was the first citizen that we sent up as space for humanity that we worked on her mission really hard, and I created the artwork, which was a mission patch for her that she held up and she took when her Blue Origin mission went up, and it’s a very interesting piece that involves the nopa, which is like a cactus and this kind of dove cutout where in the space of the dove, in the negative space of the dove, you can see all of the stars. And so I integrated a lot of her personal story. Amazing.

Enrique Alvarez (00:37:06):

It’s incredible how you can actually, through the art and the way that you live and experience art, you can fuse all these different things together to the point that it just becomes so incredibly multidimensional and complex, but at the same time, so primal and natural and just the love between the father and the son, or what you just described about the astronaut, it’s just amazing. It’s really incredible and very, very powerful. Speaking about another of your very powerful pieces, the Vitruvian Woman, which of course is Reimagines, the DaVinci iconic painting, tell me a little bit more about why you actually came up with that. Why did you felt the need and felt compelled to paint that particular piece, and what’s the meaning for you and what’s the meaning for everyone else?

Drue Kataoka  (00:37:55):

Well, Leonardo da Vinci is one of the people I admire most in the history of humanity. He was an artist, he was an engineer, he was a botanist. He was pushing the boundaries of anatomy, he was pushing medical science forward. He was doing all those things and was doing all those things well, so he managed to do those things all at the highest level of accomplishment, which is really something to meditate on in this world that we live in of hyper specialization in that world. Giants like him really stand out because guess what? When you master all those fields and you’ve thought about all those things really deeply, then you are in a position to make connections and leaps between them that no one else could see. And so you can come up with all sorts of incredible insights, and that’s what he did. His creativity just fed off of itself.

(00:38:43):

But he’s someone that you just dip into any of his work, you just take a peek into some of his prolific notes and you feel your own creativity getting supercharged. One of the things that I like to share with people is that he took all these notes. He was always writing, but he liked to do, to-do lists like us. He had these amazing to-do lists, but the thing is that his to-do lists were a little bit different than ours. So he was just super ambitious. One thing I like to say to people, what’s on your to-do list? Just take five minutes to write down. Now listen to, he would have things like, today, I want to, and this was written in the style of the, to do this just very list. I want to measure the sun. I want to go find the lung of a pig, and I want to inflate the lung of a pig, and I just want to see what happens.

(00:39:28):

I want to draw the city of Milan. And so I always say to people and to myself, what’s on my to-do list? Is it like go to Whole Foods, drop off the laundry? What’s really on that list? And then my challenge to the audience, because I always like to make everything interactive, look at your to-do list and then put something really big and really like 30,000, 90,000, a hundred thousand feet, whatever big, big thing to put on your to-do list that will inspire you and maybe orient some of the other points. Vitruvian man is one of his most iconic pieces, and he was really thinking in that piece, literally about putting the human at the center of the universe, which was incredibly prescient because now with ai, we’re kind of getting edged out of that position, but at the end of the day, he put a man there. And so the challenge was to follow in his footsteps, but also to reinvent it for the new era. And I actually put myself in the center as it’s a self portrait. So it’s a Vitruvian woman. And it’s because deep inside I feel like really I’m a student of everything that Leonardo and Michelangelo are doing. So they’re very much a north star for me.

Enrique Alvarez (00:40:36):

Well, and it’s also, in my opinion, a very good image, a very powerful one of the future that we’re going to one where women are present, the future is female, as some might say. And I think that this is a very powerful image that actually compels everyone to make sure that we continue not only sharing and creating and innovating, but also making sure that we’re considered equal. And of course, women still have a lot of roles to play. And of course you saw that maybe you had it on your to-do list, and of course you came up with that very powerful piece. So thank you.

Drue Kataoka  (00:41:12):

Well, and I’ll just say this, that future is female. I totally agree, but I’m a mom of two. I have one son, one daughter, very young children close in age. And so I believe the future is female and the future is male, like both and have this very inclusive view. So I did this piece because I was for a long time in all of the discourse, a lot of these things are very much centered only around thinking of man is the word used and not human. And that’s how we thought about it. So

Enrique Alvarez (00:41:43):

I am excited about this and I totally understand and agree with what you’re saying. I think we have to start rethinking the way we have been addressing some of these things or labeling some of these things to make sure that it’s a lot more inclusive, basically what human beings are. And we just need to reflect that not only in the art, which is something you do very well, but then also in technology and innovation and our business,

Drue Kataoka  (00:42:10):

All of our systems, all of our algorithms, all our logistics.

Enrique Alvarez (00:42:13):

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Kristi Porter (00:42:16):

Yes. Well, and speaking of sort of again, back to future thinking, which you spend a lot of time doing and sort of re-imagining and imagining, you also recognized as a young global leader by the World Economic Forum, what an incredible honor that must have been. And so shaping global future through creative innovation purpose, which is just showing up time and time again. What is it about that network that makes you excited and how are you seeing through that lens that they’re solving complex challenges, and how have you been able to be a part of that and looking at these really big things that are ahead of us, but being able to break it down and looking at it through an artistic lens and innovation and tech and just all of your beautiful intersection of experiences.

Drue Kataoka  (00:43:02):

Thank you, Christie. And you say it’s an incredible honor and it has been an honor. And one thing I’ll say about it is it’s not real. It’s static. It hasn’t been a static honor. It’s been a very dynamic, active position over a period of years being very involved with that organization, which is beautiful, and that’s what makes it meaningful, I think. So what is the form of the young global leaders? It’s incredibly diverse organization that is part of the World Economic Forum. It’s like their flagship organization. One of the things that they’re most proud of building, and it’s 1400 members and alumni from 120 countries, including ministers, heads of state, government representatives, CEOs, business leaders, artists, technology pioneers from all over the world. And I’ve had the pleasure of participating in so many and leading and creating also my own initiatives for that organization. And speaking in the incredible summits that they’ve had, which have been in Yangon, Myanmar, bueno, Aires, Argentina, Tokyo, Japan, Puerto Vata, Mexico, Beijing, gin, Dion, Geneva, and just having just incredibly diverse group of people that are really almost like a second family. We’ve come to know each other over a period of years, and it’s incredibly enriching to meet fellow leaders who are across so many different sectors, so diverse intellectually, geographically, and culturally and professionally. Beautiful. What an amazing place to be.

Enrique Alvarez (00:44:34):

Absolutely. Must be incredibly interesting and inspiring. And of course it sounds like a lot of fun as well. Very diverse.

Drue Kataoka  (00:44:41):

Yes, we have fun. That’s the most important thing if you’re not having fun,

Enrique Alvarez (00:44:44):

Right? I mean, fun has to come hand in hand with living and art and technology. And so it sounds amazing. Recently you spoke about a concept or a term on social media that caught our attention, the visual diet. And we talked a little bit before we started recording about the media these days and how much information, visual, most of it is being fed through all different channels. I mean, you can’t really go without a second looking at our phone or looking at our screen or something popping up. So what is this visual diet concept that you talked about? So explain it for our audience and then how can you use that to spark more meaningful conversations around the world? How can you use it to elevate our consciousness? How can you use this visual diet concept our lives?

Drue Kataoka  (00:45:35):

I think it’s also just like how does it make one more productive and more creative? It’s really practical at the end of the day. I mean, so vision, it’s our main sense, and we get a huge amount of information through our eyes. It’s like the equivalent of gigabytes of information

Enrique Alvarez (00:45:51):

They hurt

Drue Kataoka  (00:45:52):

At the end of a couple hours, they do. It’s like gigabytes of information per hour. It’s like books. It’s like piles of books equivalent going shooting through the optic nerve. And so what that means is that the eyes can be a kind of Trojan horse. So what you are taking in visually, it can either be creatively charging you or it can be creatively handicapping you. It’s the same way that you feel like after you go somewhere with incredibly enriching, nutritious visual diet content, like you’re at the Louvre and you spend the time with these artworks, you feel so enriched. You have all sorts of ideas for days versus if you’re just kind of stuck scrolling and you get stuck scrolling on your phone a little longer than you would like to, it’s kind of like that feeling that you have after you eat a lot of junk food and you’re like, why did I let myself go past that third bag of Cheetos?

(00:46:46):

It’s that regretful feeling that we all have. So I like to say to people, be as mindful with your visual diet as you would be with your regular diet of how you’re curating the nutrition and the protein and the fiber and the vitamins and all that stuff because it will profoundly impact your creativity. And I would say even your sanity. And this is a big war with the algorithms, with all their tentacles, just kind of wrapping their tentacles around our consciousness and knowing our own habits, waking and all of our habits are even better than we do. So it’s kind of really hard to battle those. But I would say think about how you curate what you do online and then also how you curate what you see online and how you curate what you see offline. And I think that’s a big lever too, that many people don’t even take advantage of.

(00:47:34):

Just do an audit of your office today, what the space that you’re working in, ask yourself, number one, is there anything in here that’s just like, I don’t need? Can I just subtract and move? Is it clutter? Is it just a reminder of something that’s not necessarily negative, but it’s just not? It’s like a dead weight. Take all that stuff out. Think very carefully of what imagery, what visual presence that you want to have around you because that is the thing that you’re just marinating in mentally all day long. Absolutely. It’s really important to be thoughtful. And then also that idea that I said about kind of curating a wall for yourself where you very are, select mindfully, selecting images that are multilayered, that speak to you, that are important to you, that remind you of things, and have that in a space that you have the opportunity to visit and revisit it.

Enrique Alvarez (00:48:23):

To your point, it is very hard. I mean, you’re just looking at that random soccer play on Instagram and 30 minutes afterwards you’re like, what happened? I just

Kristi Porter (00:48:32):

Wanted to

Enrique Alvarez (00:48:33):

See how Ireland did or how Mexican did on the game. And then all of a sudden I’m constantly scrolling, mess’, best moves, fab.

Kristi Porter (00:48:41):

Real life examples there.

Enrique Alvarez (00:48:43):

Very, very real happened today. But no. So is there an app merging this with technology and ai and you’re an expert in both, including the art side of things? Is there an app, is there a practical tip? Because I understand what you’re saying, but at the same time it’s hard and harder every day and I see it in my children and it’s hard. It’s hard to put the phone down.

Drue Kataoka  (00:49:07):

Okay, well, I’ll say two things that are coming to mind. Number one, it’s a super practical thing on Instagram, there is a new feature where you can actually speak directly to the algorithm. And this has never before been the case up to this point. The algorithm kind of decides what it thinks you like and then it kind of pushes you more of that content and you kind of get dug deeper in that hole. And sometimes it gets it right, and a lot of times it doesn’t. Now you actually in Instagram in settings, it’s a great feature and encourage everyone to do this. You can go in and in natural language you can say, I just don’t want to see any more stuff about gardening. That was one thing I looked up last year or whatever. It is integrated, you can tune it yourself. So that’s one really just practical easy tip.

(00:49:53):

That’s a rather new feature and people don’t know about it. So I would share that. Another thing I would take more comment, it’s more at a high level, but to think about creating versus consuming, taking the creative stance versus the consumptive stance. And so many of these technologies deliberately, they’re designed to deliberately push us into a passive role where we are just consuming. And the visual image that I think about when I talk about this are those people from Wally, like the round people that are on those little scooters and everything physically, mentally has kind of atrophied away because they’re just swiping. They’re just kind of drinking this digital sugar, water and real sugar water. So that’s the end result of being on that consuming end of the spectrum too much. On the other end is the creative side, the creative path. It’s harder, it’s rockier, it’s filled with more obstacles, but ultimately it’s more rewarding. So with everything that you do, audit everything you do and say, is there a way that I can make this a little bit more creative? It’s a little bit more of an active creative role that I’m taking and shaping versus just being kind of a passive participant with respect to the technology. And I think with that lens, I mean that’s the lens I like to apply to all that stuff.

Kristi Porter (00:51:06):

Great advice. Thank you for all the inspiration and the practical tips that you’ve given us here today. And as we start to kind of wrap up, I want to ask you something that you’ve talked about a little bit more, but let’s put a fine point on it. So in your website artist statement, you mentioned technology is artist technology. To say otherwise is to do a tremendous disservice to both, which is a very powerful statement. So as we were talking to logistics professionals who are heavily involved in either technology, working with their hands, getting cargo to where it needs to go, whether they’re pushing buttons or physically moving it themselves, again, that’s not something we generally tie to art. So I think they understand maybe the technology piece, but talk a little bit more about that disservice and what that can do and how to reapply that in their lives.

Drue Kataoka  (00:51:55):

I have a mantra that I’ve been talking about for many years. Art is technology and technology is art. One of the ways I think about that is when you have any technology and whenever it reaches, it gets better and better and more and more sophisticated and it reaches a really mature form, we step back and we say, oh my gosh, that’s an art form. Look at some of the things that Steve Jobs did and it was just became so magical and beautiful that the technology people said, oh my gosh, that’s like art. Then you have on the other side, the more sophisticated and mature and complex it becomes. People say that’s a technology right there. And so it’s like there are two parts of one continuum and it’s only us that are limiting them or breaking them apart in our own imaginations. I think we really need to think about things like renaissance people because we are living in this new renaissance.

(00:52:47):

And also to look back in history at people who did this really well. Feynman, I was talking about Feynman, he was an artist. He also was passionate bongo drummer, you can look this up on YouTube. There’s videos of him playing the bongo drums. Einstein was a violinist. These are the best physicists of our time. Newton going further back, he was even more interdisciplinary. He had all these interests ranging from alchemy and philosophy to the deepest questions of math and physics, and that’s where he was pushing the frontier aggressively. But that’s the type of person that we need and that we need to think in young people. That’s the type of young people we need to cultivate to solve. We have really big intractable problems on our horizon. Those are the type of people that we need to be producing. And there was a study done by Robert Root Bernstein from the University, university of Michigan, it a study about a survey of scientists who asked three different types of scientists, do you have a deep art avocation?

(00:53:48):

So the first was just ordinary scientists in the population. The second group was National Academy of Scientists scientists. So there’s a little bit of a higher cut, and the third group was the most high caliber, and that was scientists who had won a Nobel Prize in science. The first group when he said, how many of you have a deep arts avocation? And that means not just a passing thing, you drew something once in a while, but you really had a drawing practice, a sculpting practice of photography practice. You played in musical instrument over the period of a decade. The first group, that was one and three, the second group, national Academy of Science Scientists, it was one and two, but scientists who had won a Nobel Prize in science, it was nine out of 10 of them had had a deep arts vocation and some of them more than won. And so it was like if you were a Nobel Prize winning scientists, the numbers break down something like you’re 17 times more likely to be doing visual art 25 times more likely to. I have all these numbers on a chart, but I can share it with you if you want to drop it in the podcast. But I think it means that people who think in an interdisciplinary fashion and open themselves up to going really deep in multiple areas will be positioned to make these important leaps.

Enrique Alvarez (00:55:01):

Wow, absolutely. It seems like some part of our population is rushing to specialize in things, but of course it makes sense that doing different things gives you better perspective and connects maybe both sides of the brain more efficiently and more effectively. And so to your point, this is great. So if you guys are listening out there, just start painting, drawing, singing, dancing. It’s never too late either, right? I mean, at the end of the day you can learn

Drue Kataoka  (00:55:29):

And it goes both ways too. So for the art world side, I like to say, or my message to that group of people is embrace technology more. We’re really at an extension moment. So people who are not embracing technology are sadly the dinosaurs of today. It’s going to be a loss for humanity if we don’t really capture all the incredible voices and talent that we have in the artistic community. There’s so much creativity there, but there’s some bridge building that we need to do. And then for the technology people, I want them to even more tightly embrace kind of this interdisciplinary kind of creative spirit of our age because it’s so critical. Some of the best AI scientists really embody this. Like yesterday I was talking with my friend Sharon, who is the VP of ai, a MD, and she’s like a really interdisciplinary human being with wide ranging interests, fascinating brain, but these are the of people that are leading in this new era, kind of the dry scientists of yesteryear are a thing of the past. Right.

Enrique Alvarez (00:56:30):

Well, I love the way you put it, like the renaissance. We’ve got to be renaissance women and just go forward. Speaking of the art and technology, drew, as we kind of close our show for today, what are one or two of the things that you wish that you could change or they can see some changes across the board into the future? And another question after that, what are some of your future plans and what can we expect from you and your endless amount of creativity, art, and technology?

Drue Kataoka  (00:56:59):

Thank you Enrique, and thank you Christie for having me today and Louisa and the whole incredible, amazing team, which of course it had fantastic logistics because that’s very on brand. In terms of what I’d like to see, I kind of just mentioned it a couple minutes ago. I want people on both sides of the aisle, the science and technology and even some parts of the AI community to reach across the aisle and expose themselves and their thinking more to the artistic mindset. And then the people in the art and humanities world to do the same on the other side and reach out and expose their thinking and their thought processes. And that requires a certain amount of human vulnerability, but that’s going to take us to the best place. So what’s next for me? Always building evermore ambitious artworks, leveraging so many of the new tools and technologies that are out there.

(00:57:53):

I’m very excited about all of that. And then because I’m such an active practitioner in the space, there’s so many insights that I had about AI in particular. And so there’s been a lot of invitations to do podcasts and speaking. And so I do a lot of speaking globally. I did the keynote at the MasterCard Summit in Washington dc. I’ve done a lot of things for Milk and Global Institute, a lot of private bespoke things for different organizations and commissions for both corporate and private family and family office type of things. So I’m also a mom of two. And then all my social impact work. It’s never a dull moment,

Enrique Alvarez (00:58:36):

Right? Not at all. Yes.

Drue Kataoka  (00:58:38):

No. Yeah, so I mean, I’m represented by Washington Speakers Bureau. I just started to work with them and I really like the team over there. And so integrating into the business and social fabric of our time is kind of a personal mission for me. And I think about things not just from a single perspective, but I think about things kind of in a multidimensional way. So yeah, it’s going to be an exciting year. I’m looking forward to 2026.

Kristi Porter (00:59:06):

Yeah, I think multidimensional is an amazing way to describe you as well. Thank you so much for being here. So we’ve talked about so many of your beautiful artworks, your videos, all the amazing things you’re doing. So where can people go to find out more about you and see these things for themselves?

Drue Kataoka  (00:59:22):

Thank you, Christie. So on my LinkedIn, which is just, you can look me up, D-R-U-E-K-A-T-A-O-K-A, just unique name. I’m on LinkedIn posting frequently, also on Instagram posting frequently. And my posts center around this visual AI revolution, tools, insights, tips, ideas on how to strengthen one’s, vision, muscle, all those types of things. My website is drew.net and I also put a lot of very interactive posts out there. What do you guys think about this? Or have you tried this tool? Or does anyone have questions or things like this. And one of the things I’m going to start doing more and more too is having different kind of behind the scenes tips on deep dives on certain tools, but in really concise PDFs because people have been asking for that. So literally giving people a takeaways that they can download as well. Very cool.

Enrique Alvarez (01:00:15):

Drew, thank you so much again, it’s been a pleasure. It was an honor getting to know you better. Thanks for sharing some of your life with us and our audience. Christie, always a pleasure being with you. And of course, if you like conversations like the one we just had today, please don’t forget to subscribe again, logistics with Purpose, the only podcast focused on the supply chain’s positive impact. Thank you so much and I’ll see you in two weeks.

Kristi Porter (01:00:41):

Thanks everyone.