The Tech Margin: Sonia Cook-Broen

And today we have with us a really multi-talented individual, Sonia Cook-Broen, who is not only an artist, but also has done a lot with tech and creativity, and she's the founder of TheTechMargin. Sonia, it's really great to have you in today. Sonia Cook-Thank you, Lisa. It's wonderful to be here, and thank you for having me. So I think it's very interesting that you are here kind of working with us as we're doing our content, but you have this whole world of your own content and you talk about intersectionality as being a big thing for you. And this is essentially what we are all about all the time is intersectionality. So when you and I talk to each other at the Portland Art Gallery because your husband, Chris O'Connor, Christopher O'Connor, who is represented there, it was like a mind meld. I was like, oh my gosh. So many things that we're on the same page about, even though one might look at our, I don't know, our educational backgrounds, our career paths, and not think that, I don't know, how is it that we have so much in common that ends from such different fields? Sonia Cook-I wonder if it's the internal processes that are so important more than the external processes that we connected on. Because I think when you're curious about things like intersectionality and juxtaposing ideas and the excitement in finding new realms, that's a very internal world and maybe that's where we connected and why we connect. Well, I love that you were able to kind of pick up that thread and answer it so effectively. It was kind of a complicated question, but yeah, I mean, I think that even the idea of creativity coming from different sources and being creative in different ways and having been on your website and reading some of the work that you've done through LinkedIn and seeing some of the things that you've produced, I mean, it's so interesting because creativity, you're exploring it from this really very artistic but different perspective than maybe what the visual artists at the Portland Art Gallery are doing. Sonia Cook-Yeah, definitely. I don't know if it's because I went into tech as a software engineer or because maybe I was always this way inclined, but I did have a boss once at a company that I worked for who said that I wanted different things than most people wanted out of their jobs. Because I think even as a software engineer, I was always trying to bring art into it or creativity into it because I think it's actually extremely creative to make anything, whether you're coding an application or you're creating a painting or a film or a podcast, it's making something from your own intuition in your own ideas. And I am really curious about pushing those boundaries. And especially with technology today and with AI today, I think artists have always been the trailblazers in this area, but for some reason with technology in particular, there's a bit of a disconnect because tech and art have really been just separate disciplines. So I'm really trying to lead the ideas about as an artist, go play, go explore. You can't really be afraid of what you don't understand or you can, but perhaps maybe you won't be. If you do understand it. You're describing something that I think we've continued to see multiple times in the last few decades as tech has really kind of sped up. And I know I've spoken to photographers for example, who really initially did or didn't embrace digital photography, and at the time it seemed like they couldn't co-exist, but of course they can and one can really compliment the other. And just because you have something new brought in, it doesn't mean that you push out the old. Sonia Cook-Absolutely. Actually, that reminds me of why I got into tech because I love the idea of exploring and being curious, and I knew that tech was well besides that it's a really high paying industry, which as a single mom at the time, that was helpful too. But also I just really wanted to be in a field where I was always having to evolve by the nature of that field. And I understand the fear of technology and change, especially when you've built a career around doing a process a certain way. But I think it behooves us as artists and creators and technicians to innovate, to embrace even a little bit of that. And I think to your point about photography, the photographers who did embrace that realm found great success and new ways of expressing themselves. I think we need to be encouraged sometimes to be trailblazers. Well, I mean, I think that's true, and I think that when you create new neuron pathways and the brain, it can feel really challenging as those neurons are stretching into new spaces and making new connections. Sonia Cook-Oh, yes. So I mean, sometimes it's easier to just be like, oh, I'm so tired. I just want to keep doing things the way I have. But even if it's not very efficient and I feel like I've kind of stalled out creatively, but at least it's a path I know. Sonia Cook-It's so true. And I mean aren't we pattern seeking machines in a way as human beings to begin with? Our minds want that comfort of the known. So it really requires an embrace of discomfort, which is its own hope, journey and process. I've started doing a lot with AI and incorporating it more in content creation, but also in a lot of curricular work and a lot of actually coaching and leadership development work. And it's so rich in the possibilities. And I think I'm entering myself at a time where there's been a lot that's been done to it to make it more accessible for people. And it's actually hard for me now to not use AI in some of these ways. And I just want to say to people, don't be afraid. There's so much out there. And what do you have to lose if you go to chat GPT or you go to, I mean, I've been a little obsessed with Claude lately and copilot, and they all have their own little different ways, but it's so much fun. Sonia Cook-I think there's some interesting, I'm not sure what it is, but because AI produces human-like content seemingly on its own, it's very black boxy to us. What is an LLM? A large language model. But don't ask a large language model to do math, by the way, because it's really bad at math, but it won't admit it. Interesting. Okay. Sonia Cook-Language models are not so good about math, but they're always trying to deduce the next right answer. So it will try. But aside, I think that human-like quality of the content that AI can create sort of freaks us out a little bit, sort of puts us in that uncanny valley place of "are we going to be replaced?" And I think the fear of that should not prevent us from playing with these tools, from realizing that these tools can be an amazing ally, especially as a solo founder or as a business who's just an individual, which all artists I think are individual businesses and benefits them to think of themselves this way. But AI can be wonderful for rephrasing an email if you know that you use a lot of passive voice or things like that that you want to kind of clean out of your professional writing and gives you great confidence, especially when you might not have teammates to bounce things back on forth with. And that's just like the administrative side. We haven't even touched on the world of the creative side of AI, but I'll wait until you want to talk about that or we can Go there, please. No, I mean open up this door because I think there's so many directions you and I could take with this. Sonia Cook-Absolutely. So just from an apps side, and as you said Lisa, they have done so much work to improve the accessibility and how you can interact with AI beyond just a chat window in chat, GBT for example. But visual tools and apps that have been built on top of visual AI models can be great idea generators for painters or for photographers or for, even if you're doing an animation, sometimes I'll use material that I've recorded and I'll put it into a tool called Runway ml, and I'll generate snippets of AI clips that are based on the filming that I took, some interesting film that I made, and then I'll put pieces of it into AI and slice it back into the original film. So it's sort of seamless, but it's this new entity that's been woven in. And I mean, there's a magic in that, but it's still very much my own creation. So when we started using Photoshop, it opened up a whole new creative lexicon for us. And as you said, people were scared of that too, but play with it. There's free apps, but the paid ones let you do a lot more for sure, and a lot more professional quality type of collaboration. That's the way I like to think about. It's like a collaboration. I think that's a great way to look at it because, you can put stuff into, I don't know, I put a logo request in for, I think it was through Dolly, and I'm going to make this explicit for people who are eliciting and they're like, what is Dolly and what does this mean? So that is kind of attached right now to copilot, but also to chat GPT. And it gave me this great logo, and most of the wording was wrong because it doesn't really understand how to put text in correctly so it wouldn't be used right out of the box. But it was so interesting, I said, oh, that's so interesting that those are the elements that this assistive model decided were important to this logo. And I wouldn't have thought of it that way myself because I'm coming at it from my own frame, but here's this external frame that's making these suggestions. That kind of prompted my brain a little bit. Sonia Cook-Yes, a hundred percent, Lisa, that's exactly how I use it too. Kind of give me new ideas, but also the ideas you get back are as important as the questions that you ask. And of course as a whole, that's really prompting when we talk about AI prompts. That's what kinds of questions are you asking the AI? And you're totally right. AI cannot make an image with good text in it yet. So if you do get that back, you can take the image and you can bring it into Canva or Photoshop or wherever and start working with that image that it gives you. It's just a seed is kind of the way you can think about it. And also as far as giving you novel ideas and new insights, I have a little bit of an antidote. When I was getting started with TheTechMargin, I was doing a lot of pitches, and when you do startup pitches, you put together your pitch deck. Sonia Cook-And in the pitch deck there's like three year projections. And I am just getting started. I've been working as a software engineer for the prior decade, and this whole realm is brand new to me. So I'm working with Chat GPT back and forth asking questions. It has the whole internet up to at that point, up to 2020 I think. And it was able to give me templates for different ways I could approach my pitch decks, but it would also say things to me like, you are doing great, combining creativity and technology at TheTechMargin. Your focus on empowering diversity in tech is a wonderful mission. And it was making me feel so empowered as a person who had just been laid off from a big tech firm trying to start a startup and pretty scared to be honest. So to feel like I have somebody kind of giving me a little boost was kind of cool. I'm not going to lie. There's a bit of personality in it sometimes if you put a heart emoji, thank you, it gives you one back. So there's reasons to play with it beyond even just creativity sometimes if you're working on your own, getting new ideas is really hard, so you can use it that way. Or just as a little bit of a pep talk, if you're about to do a pitch, for example. I mean, I love that and I think about how often are we interacting with website bots? Some of them are perfectly pleasant, and you're like, oh, okay, well, I just accomplished this, that I would've stayed on hold for three hours just to get a human voice and we're all done. And it was a very nice chat bot. Sonia Cook-That's true. I mean, I feel like the way that, I mean, sometimes technology can be nicer than humans actually. Sonia Cook-Well, that's actually a really good point. Mean, especially with tone, we don't always realize that our tone might come across one way to a person that we didn't intend. And again, with writing emails or letters, AI can really help smooth those things out if you want. It's not disingenuous, I don't think, if it's still using your wording and the intention is still behind the wording. Yeah, it's a whole new world for sure. And I think it's important that more of us be interacting with these tools so we can define what the best and most positive ways to use them are. I could not agree with you more. I mean on so many different levels. One of the things that I have brought up multiple times, I was at the American Association for Physician Leaders and we were doing this Vanguard group, and I was one of the speakers, and people are still very concerned about generative AI, and it was generative ai. A year later, I'm like, we need to interact with these tools as doctors because it happened to be doctors in the room. Because when we didn't interact with electronic health record creation whenever that was 30 years ago, 20 years ago, we got the output that other people created for us. And I have a lot of, I'm very grateful to the engineers who did put those things together, but now we need to step into that space and we can't wait for other people to do these things for us. We need to be doing it ourselves. And I would say that's probably true of most professions. I think Sonia Cook-I think so. I think it's also encouraging more cross-disciplinary interaction too, because if doctors are demanding that there be tools built for this purpose, then they're going to be working with engineers. And engineers want that too. I mean, when you're building tools for people as your profession, you want to know that they're useful and that they're helping people. That's kind of the best part of the job when you get to actually hear that feedback. But I do think in all disciplines too, as you say, Lisa, we're going to see a lot more merging of the minds just through the sheer fact that now information is so accessible. I mean, how could that not change everything? You and I were talking before I came on air, and I was very excited because I had had been using AI throughout this process to generate questions for our questionnaire, which we sent out for the first time this time to our guests. You're the very first guest that we put together. I think it was Claude and I, we worked together up that way. Came up with some great questions, really great, rich kind of source of information and some of the things that actually came up in the questions you answered in addition to this idea of intersectionality, but also this idea of transience, which I know you have some very personal experiences with in your background, but you've also, in addition to this transience, you've also kind of recreated yourself multiple times for multiple different reasons. And I wonder if that has contributed to your willingness to kind of be open to the possibility of space and creativity. Sonia Cook-That's a beautiful way of seeing me. Thank you for painting that picture back to me that way, Lisa. It's a gift. Yes, I did move around an awful lot when I was a small child and through adolescence. And then I guess my whole life really, actually I've been in Maine longer than I've been anywhere else, and that's been lovely. But I think moving around, especially as a small child made me very adaptable, which can be a troublesome thing sometimes in one's internal spaces, but also has given me the gift of not feeling particularly attached to one approach. So I'm very open to the idea of trying new approaches with most anything. And I guess most people aren't like that, I realize. So I think that is sort of my special skill that I can give back to the world. And so in that regard, I'm extremely grateful for all of the different things I've experienced in my life. You were apparently unhoused for some period of time when you were younger and having to create a home in the space where there's no physical home. So you actually are having to surround yourself with something that feels like it's going to enable you to develop that doesn't really exist, not like walls, but you have to make that happen. And that's such a powerful idea for me. Sonia Cook-Wow. Yeah, that is so true. I mean, it is true what you're saying that I did have a period of my childhood where my mom and I, we were living in England and we lived in a lodger they call it in England. And then we lived with my godparents, and it was a pretty unsettled time of my life. And yes, I always created a nest around me, Lisa, everywhere, and I still do. It's like no matter if I go to a hotel room or an Airbnb, I have to sort of set everything up. But I think that is an external way that I can be myself and how I am wherever I am, and it's a lifelong process to find true comfort in that. But I'm certainly working on it. And I think this year of being outside of the corporate world and really digging deep into who I am and how I can give my gifts back in a authentic way that is most valuable to the world, has forced me to really dig deep into what that is, what are my roots? Because your roots almost for all of us, we are just our individual selves, and we really only have ourselves at the end of the day that we might have strong family connections. We have to understand who we are first. And I think that gives us a great power to be able to express ourselves when we get really in touch with that. I dunno if that answered your question, But that question, I mean, I just love this conversation. Sonia Cook-Okay, perfect. Me too. I think this leads to my next comment, which is that you and I share that we've both been unstructured or restructured out of corporate type positions. And I've had the interesting fortune of having had this to me happen to me multiple times, which it doesn't really change my identity, but it does kind of unleash the sense of like, oh, I had all this structure around me and all of these obligations, and now I do not. And so what you're describing, this ability to reroute without the walls, I mean, it's such an important thing to do, otherwise you could feel a little bit like a jellyfish in the ocean, Sonia Cook-And that's overwhelming, and it's hard to do anything when you feel overwhelmed. And I do think when we do have a big external change, it does in a way change our identity, at least externally for a period, almost forces us to reevaluate what our identity even is. I guess that's the opportunity in it, that it's consistent no matter what is happening outside of us. And somehow you found a way to, I mean, I think you hit a new high of subscribers recently that you were telling me about and was so impressed because this is you putting yourself out there in the world as this new identity that you have is coming from you fully. And other people are saying, yes, I would like to embrace that identity, and I'm finding value in that. So talk to me about that. Sonia Cook-Sure, thank you. Yes, so recently I have a YouTube channel, all of TheTechMargin is just called TheTechMargin for my own simplicity's sake. But one of the things that I do is a YouTube channel and I am at 112,000 subscribers. So thank you. It is very exciting and I'm very appreciative for everyone who's tuned in. But it's really an interesting thing to realize that you can put yourself out there and actually connect with people just by doing what feels true to you. It's certainly an evolution. I'm evolving rapidly with everything that I do, and I feel like probably for the first eight months of my content creation, it was really just throwing things at the wall and embracing messiness and chaos to a degree, because I think that's where you sometimes have to go to find what you're looking for. But I also have a newsletter that has 3000 plus email subscribers each week, and that one is another way that I can get kind of inside of my own head and express ideas, but more in a tactical way, I think, because it's kind of geared towards what sort of steps can you do to empower yourself through mindfulness in your day to day, not from a coaching or therapeutic perspective, just from my own synthesis of things I'm learning and reading as I go on this journey. I think that's really so wonderful because in a sense, you're building a virtual community. I mean, you are sort of like the baby bird. The corporate world kind of pushed you out of their nest and now you're like, okay, I'm going to make these connections with other birdies in the trees as they're all nesting in their own places. And that's okay. And in fact may be preferable in some ways. I don't want to speak for you, but Sonia Cook-I think it might be part of how I'm making my roots system as well, because I realize how we do need community. We do need roots, we need to connect with each other. Sometimes it's really hard to do that for multiple reasons in today's technological world. We all hear of the reasons why that's a problem, but I think we are looking to connect in a way that feels very like a soul connection, not just we do the same job and that's why we're friends kind of connection. And so that's really exciting to me as well, Lisa, is the idea that if someone resonates with the content I'm creating, well, I feel like they might resonate with each other too. And that is one of my goals on my kind of near six month to year roadmap is to actually have an online community where there can be interactions and ideas, sharing between people, creators and innovators, technicians. I think that's a cool place to bring people together. Why is it called TheTechMargin Sonia Cook-As a female software engineer, we're still really, really in the minority as women engineers, less than 20%. The numbers had actually gone up just a little bit in the early eighties and then went swiftly down again to about 17%. So there's not many females coding. And so just about every job I had, I was the only female software engineer and have amazing colleagues, lots of allies, really great guys who I was like a brothers. A sister, brother relationship because people look out for each other when you're part of a team. But in the world and in maybe the less technical roles where you weren't valued on just whether or not you knew how to code well or put together an application, sometimes I would encounter some bias and some stigma and some not so friendly parts of that's how that goes sometimes. Sonia Cook-So I started a blog called TheTechMargin because being in a minority, you're in the margin. So that was many years ago. And when I started my startup, I have many domain names as most nerdy people like to collect domain names. It's sort of a weird habit. And that's one I still had. I hadn't really been active with the blog, but I asked my husband and my daughter, what name out of all these domain names sounded like a potential startup. And they were like that one because it's interesting, but I'm not sure what it is. And I think things like that can be like, why is Apple, Apple or Microsoft? Microsoft? Not that I'm comparing TheTechMargin to those, but it can be nice to spark a little bit of curiosity with the name. So that's the backstory. And then I like smushing words together because that's another techie thing to do the camel casing. So it's all one word, TheTechMargin just with capital I actually like both of those things even though I'm not in any way a software engineer or engineer of any sort. Sonia Cook-You are an innovator. I mean, okay, there you go. So I think my husband and I as kind of surreal entrepreneurs have collected a lot of domain names and it's kind of fun. It's like, what could I do with this one? Oh, well, maybe we should pare it down for a little while and just focus in, but I don't want to give up this last one. It might go somewhere. Sonia Cook-You never know exactly. They're like projects in your back pocket. So when I was kind of mucking around looking for things and kind of trying to figure out who is Sonia Cook-Broen, I found some interesting examples of art that it seems like you and Christopher have some collaborative work that you've done together. I think maybe it was one was a headscarf or some sort of fabric, and I was like, wow, she really does do the intersectionality thing. She's actually doing it with physical pieces. So talk to me about that. Sonia Cook-Yes. So TheTechMargin, also a shop where I have been taking art and creating attire and accessories. I think the piece you're speaking of is a silk scarf made from Christopher, my husband, Christopher O'Connor's Blossom series paintings, which I mean, they're just beautiful paintings of pink cherry blossoms against a blue sky. And I've always thought they'd make gorgeous fabrics. And so as one of the initiatives that I took on as part of TheTechMargin when I was getting started throwing things against the wall, I knew as a person who sows and creates clothing myself that I wanted to weave that in, pun intended. So I found a vendor in Canada who actually, it's integrated into my website. So when if somebody orders an item, they create it there and ship it directly, but I don't have to maintain an inventory. Sonia Cook-And Christopher's cherry blossoms are featured in, I have a jacket with a zip and a silk scarf and a cool dress that can be also like a shirt, but they're all made from the same print, but they all have a different feel and quality to them. And that's been a lot of fun just to bring art that is usually seen on walls into a wearable or into a digital realm. And part of my process here is also pushing the envelope of how artists can establish multiple revenue streams for themselves as businesses, so that becoming an artist can be a lot more sustainable for people as a choice, as opposed to something where they feel maybe financially vulnerable a lot of the time. Because that is the reality for a lot of artists. And I think with technology, we have this amazing opportunity, so let's use it if we can. That makes a lot of sense because what you're describing is, again, making things more accessible and people who not everybody is going to have big walls that they could put big art on. And Christopher, some of his work, for example, is very large, beautiful, absolutely beautiful. And you need wall space and certain amount of funds, right? Yes. And I think if you're saying, but you can have beauty, we're just going to wrap it around your neck. Sonia Cook-Gently, not in a way that's in any way going to make you feel vulnerable. Sonia Cook-Exactly. And also know that you're supporting an artist in doing so. And again, I think that builds community. So I'd love to create pathways for artists to build more community for themselves. I think social media is obviously one avenue, but creating that connection with people who might not have the wall space or the finances at the time to be able to purchase original paintings, they can still support that artist. Or maybe they already own the painting and they love it so much that they also would like to wear that artist on their body. I just think that's a cool new way. Or I know that this is happening already, but it's another way we can interact with art and artists. And I think empowering artists to be able to do this themselves is a really cool idea. Like creating a platform so artists can set up their own passive revenue streams through their own art making, not changing their art at all, doing what they're already doing, but leveraging it in a multiplying kind of manner. And then if they still want Christopher's beautiful piece, they can go to the Portland Art Gallery and they can also have that. Sonia Cook-Please go to the Portland Art Gallery and admire the art in person. All of the above can be true. Sonia Cook-Yes. They're not mutually exclusive. That again, goes back to this fear pattern I think we have as humans of if something new comes along and we don't understand it, it's scary. Or if you're offered in another path, you have to choose one or the other. But I think we live in a time where we maybe need to start embracing the uncertainty of multitudes and multiple truths, even wait, not multiple truths in the sense of some things are true and some things there is reality here, but that you can have multiple revenue streams, you can have passive income. It is viable for anyone who wants to pursue that. Now with technology where it wasn't before, it wasn't even 10 years ago, you would've had to rely on someone to do that for you. Well, and by the way, I actually already agreed with the first point you made the idea of multiple truths. I do think that there's many a time that many things are true at the same time, and you have to kind of hold them in your hand as uncomfortable as it feels, hold them in your heart and your consciousness. And as humans, I think we maybe have gotten more comfortable with, oh, this is the pattern and this is who I am, and this is what I look like, and my life is going to look like this. That's just not the way life really works though. Sonia Cook-You're so right. And it's one of the most insightful things that my very insightful teenage daughter Matilda said to me once. She said, mom, it's just so confusing how two things can be true in your head at the same time. They're both true, and you just have to accept that. I guess that is, I think it's just where I was going with the multiple truths thing is just how in the political and social realm that can be problematic when people can't even agree on the basic fundamentals, but we won't go there. So it can be true that things simultaneously can have multiple truths and only one truth. I mean, now we're getting very mad. Sonia Cook-Might need more coffee for that. Exactly right. Sonia Cook-Aside. Yes. But I would like to do that one too sometime. Alright. The next gallery opening, you and I can find a quiet corner and we can continue to cogitate on that particular topic. One of the things that you wanted to make sure that we talked about was the idea that tech needs more diversity. And I know you kind of talked about that as far as being a woman in tech. Are there other ways in which you think tech could be more Sonia Cook-Diverse? Yes. Yes, definitely. I mean, it's not, the reality of the situation is that most software engineers remain male on the younger side. Typically white men or Asian men are often as well, but it's very limited in the diversity realm. Let's see, as far as disability, gender, people who are openly sharing their sexual orientation or their gender orientation, it's still a place where it feels very one dimensional. And honestly, having worked with, like I said, my good friends and colleagues in tech, me being a diversity in this group was always appreciated by my colleagues because you bring new ways of thinking. And when you're solving difficult prob