Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The Monolith is a podcast about navigating exponential change without losing your humanity. What began as an exploration of design thinking inside large organizations, has evolved into a broader inquiry: how people and institutions adapt when legacy systems fail, and new ones arrive faster than we can name them. Each episode explores the present through systems thinking, economics, hacking mindsets, and cycles of change. The Monolith isn’t futurism for spectacle. It’s pattern literacy for people who sense the shift and want agency to thrive inside it.
Cameron Craig (00:01.61)
Keith.
Keith (00:01.948)
Cameron, what's happening?
Keith (00:08.173)
It's gonna be a rant show today.
Cameron Craig (00:10.218)
Yeah, this is the WTF episode again. So before we jump into that, I'm wearing my space man hat to remind myself to be like Dave.
Keith (00:19.308)
Nice. Be like, that's, I dig it.
Cameron Craig (00:24.244)
be like Dave. If you can't be like Dave, you have no possibility of surviving. one other thing related. So you know how last week we were extolling the virtues of Arthur C. Clarke? I mean, talented human being, awesome futurist, thinks about things in a completely different way. So I am rereading all of the Odyssey series and I'm just finishing
Keith (00:25.9)
I love it. What's that?
Keith (00:40.93)
Yep, it's great.
Cameron Craig (00:55.192)
2061. Yeah, so, so Dave, Dave's essence comes back. And I think as I was texting you, you know, I'm near the end, and they're talking about the Trinity Trinity of Heywood Floyd, Dave Bowman, and how the computer. So how is not dead, he is dissected the monolith and is now figuring out, you know, the comms how the comms with the model.
Keith (00:56.418)
Okay, 2061.
Cameron Craig (01:23.904)
Anyway.
Keith (01:25.848)
So I haven't I didn't even know they did a two a part two and part three. So how does how does this essence.
Cameron Craig (01:30.496)
Well, there's 2010, you probably saw that movie with Roy Scheider. That was, that was shite, you should stream that. But it at least follows 2001 closely, right? Both in terms of years and the plot is directly related to the discovery, to how, et cetera. Yeah. And you kind of get a little bit of a payoff as to like, like Dave comes back, he goes to Earth, basically gives them a warning.
Keith (01:33.996)
Okay, no, I haven't seen that. Okay.
Keith (01:48.246)
Okay. cool.
Cameron Craig (02:00.0)
And then Dave comes back again in 2061 with another payoff, which is why the warning about not going to the particular satellite near Jupiter. Um, now I have to say, I read all of these in my teens and my twenties and 2001 is the one that I became enamored with both from the movie and the book.
Keith (02:13.034)
Interesting.
Cameron Craig (02:26.25)
and it's the one that I've reread multiple times. I don't know that I've reread the other ones until now.
Keith (02:26.357)
Yeah, sure.
Keith (02:32.609)
So does Dave's essence come back as like a radio signal or how does it how does it propagate?
Cameron Craig (02:36.702)
They don't really, which may lead us into some conversations for today. It's like he is present. I don't know how else to describe it. He's present, right? At the very end of 2001, he's described as a star child, right? He kind of, he merges with whatever the entity, first by going through a wormhole essentially, and then actually,
Keith (02:49.527)
So is there like...
Keith (03:03.18)
Yeah.
Cameron Craig (03:06.034)
landing wherever it is that he ends up merging with the other intelligence live and then ultimately dies and then I guess without getting into religion or spirituality, I guess is being waiting to be reborn.
Keith (03:19.404)
Yeah.
Keith (03:24.459)
I mean, I guess at that point, it's like if time, not that it doesn't exist, but it's kind of collapsed because if it's like a relative thing where it's moving faster or slower relative to us, it's just like, okay, I mean, we're waiting maybe. so if he's kind of like present, it like, how is he showing up in the world? in what ways is he present?
Cameron Craig (03:38.43)
Yeah, who knows.
Cameron Craig (03:50.196)
Very good question. He shows up to various people as himself, different ages. So in 2010, he shows up to his dying mother and he shows up to his past girlfriend and delivers a message basically like, hey, you know, I loved you, et cetera. Kind of like he's more of a psychological apparition, if you will, at least.
Keith (04:12.331)
Like a spirit.
Cameron Craig (04:18.9)
you know, again, not Clark's description, but as I've read these now and like I said, I'm nearing the end of 2061. He's having a conversation with Floyd and Floyd is sort of like, is this the same thing? Like when you came back, you know, right before I went on the, I can't remember the, I guess he's on a Russian ship in 2010.
Keith (04:48.609)
That's interesting.
Cameron Craig (04:50.59)
So anyway, and now the funny thing is in 2061, Floyd's over 100, right? Because he's been living on a space station in low Earth orbit for 60 years or 50 years. So by 2010, he was already in his 50s and now he's like over 100. But anyway, so Floyd,
Keith (05:08.681)
my god.
Cameron Craig (05:18.526)
Dave and Hal are now having a conversation and I'm just getting to the part where Dave is explaining how he and Hal are dissecting the inner workings of the monolith because it is part technology, part...
com, item, et cetera, et cetera, right?
Keith (05:38.005)
like spiritual very forward advanced technology thing crystal oscillator
Cameron Craig (05:43.664)
Something. Yeah, I mean, it's driving evolution basically, I think is the basics of it, right? It's intelligent experimentation and evolution, which is what, you know, the segments that we played last week are the quote Genesis of that. And now you're learning how that is done, but it is not. It is not spiritual. It is definitely technology. Some sort of intelligent technology that even how can't quite.
Keith (05:48.032)
Yeah.
Keith (06:08.408)
to the...
Cameron Craig (06:12.505)
figure out he's he's
packed the lower level functions of it basically. Yeah. But.
Keith (06:20.012)
That's crazy, huh? There's a lot of like different pieces of this because is it like, so if you take Clark's third law of like, you any technology that's super advanced is basically magic because we don't understand how it works. I wonder if there's like an equal opposite, like, I don't know, maybe spirituality is the way people make meaning of the thing of like a presence or something.
Because it may not if there's like a causal relationship or like a one to one like a plus B equals C kind of thing then okay, maybe I don't know. I'm wondering if there's there's gonna be both because like with the whole new Claude bot thing or whatever they call it, whatever that got released. Supposedly people, I don't know who it was, but someone let them kind of run amok. And there's a bunch of them just making their own religion. Now it's like Christopharianism or something.
So dude, it's like they're, yeah, well it's like, and it gets back to the Hans Moravac thing we talked about, like briefly, we'll have like, if there's enough processing power and memory, and then it's like, what, I don't know where this begins and where this ends. And I think that that's what we're about to get into. And this is why everyone's like, WTF is going on in the world right now. Cause it doesn't matter where you are or what's happening. Like everyone's not freaking out like,
Cameron Craig (07:17.876)
That is rad.
Keith (07:45.327)
COVID was different, COVID was kind of like a different kind of crisis, but this is just kind of like, we feel like we're accelerating over the roller coaster about to go over the top. And it's a, know we can't get off, we know it's gonna go fast, we know what to go drop through this kind of like portal wormhole, whatever. And no one really knows where we're gonna land. And the harder you try and control what that is, like the worse it's gonna be because you're...
trying to steer the future based on like a recency bias, like you're driving in the rear view mirror and that's not the way to go.
Cameron Craig (08:18.6)
Yeah. I mean, everybody, think you're hitting on a bunch of things. Everybody's. Waiting in some way, you know. And the dimensions of the waiting seem to be around a few things, you know. Depending on what where you're spending your time, maybe where you are geographically, but you know, there's the political waiting. People don't love friendly fascism.
Keith (08:29.101)
Yeah.
Keith (08:46.382)
Yeah.
Cameron Craig (08:48.816)
And I bet. So, so there you go. There's partially your dimension. I think where I sit geographically, everybody is, you know, I sit in the epicenter of AI development, right? Not, not at work, like, but geographically, right? Like where I, where I live is all about that.
Keith (08:49.346)
Totally don't see that in immigration law.
Keith (08:56.814)
So what are the different pillars? Yeah.
Keith (09:10.318)
Silicon Valley.
Cameron Craig (09:14.004)
The conversations in the cafe are about that. The conversations, if somebody figures out that you have something to do with it, turn to that. And, you know, it isn't, it isn't filled with the miracle that it potentially is. It's filled with the, so how long do I have before X, right? And most of it's negative.
So you got that going.
Keith (09:35.759)
Before I lose my job, yeah, how much more is this stuff gonna, how much more expensive a thing's gonna get? Like dude, are people, the irony that video gamers basically funded the GPU acceleration and now they're getting the rug pulled out from under them, GPU's almost doubled in price in the past six months. mean, anyway, this is, because the Uber driver, I basically bought a building machine.
He has like AWS certs and he was like, what the hell do I do? And he's laughing because I'm like, dude, eggs are going up chicken. Like everything's going up right now. Like it's not, it's not cheap. And he's, he's like, yeah, he doesn't know what to do because even though he has these certs, he didn't know if he should keep doing AI stuff or go into it more or kind of how to do it. So it gets back to like the whole curiosity thing from the last episode. I noticed two episodes ago, that was the end of season one about curiosity leading to faith. but it's.
It's the acceleration of this exponential level of change and we're just, we're linear humans and we just don't know how to, we don't have the tools to keep up with that anymore.
Cameron Craig (10:42.538)
Yeah, I mean.
Cameron Craig (10:47.199)
Again, kind of as we have talked, I remember sitting in a home improvement parking lot, talking to you, I'm gonna guess probably three and a half years ago about the impending shift in, you at this point in the world of design and in the world of how businesses need to evolve their thinking.
And we were still trying to figure out, know, do we write a book? Do we go and have, presentations or try and talk at different events? And you were submitting us for another event. And we were also just trying to figure out like, how do we encapsulate this? But nevertheless, the thing that I was, I think, impassionately talking to you about and saying,
Keith (11:18.126)
Mm-mm.
Keith (11:23.511)
Yeah.
Cameron Craig (11:46.272)
I'm part worried and I'm also part like thinking this is a thing. You know, it took us another two and a half years or maybe longer to come up with like, okay, it's a podcast and we should start doing this, right? And then last year we did it. But long winded way of saying what it sparked for me, which I ended up doing about eight, nine months after you and I were talking was to kind of pull out our old
decks and take into account some of the thinking that is now over 10 years old. And I abstracted that because it's a different business problem. But what I got down to was some of the basic pillars that we discussed last year that I'm not going to rehash. But I went and did this presentation to
Keith (12:38.766)
Yeah.
Cameron Craig (12:44.18)
people that I work with to say like, Hey, I see a big change coming. see impending shifts in the way in which we do things and based on the way in which we do things, you know, I am, I am biasing the future directions of my staffing and the future directions of my, org and the things that we value and the things that we're going to try and do, you know, towards
a bunch of different things that were not the things that we were doing today, which is a lot more of like you just said, getting curious and solving problems from the point of curiosity using the things around us, right? It's not just, we're going to go and invent these things over here because we're designers. was like, look at the things that you have, the parts bin, if you will, and start driving alternate value from the things that you have, right? Like we were talking about last week, it's like.
Keith (13:31.628)
Resources. Yeah.
Cameron Craig (13:40.798)
go broad to drive value as quickly as you possibly can. you know, whatever the cut on the events of this particular timeline, you know, what's going on in the world, whatever your take is, political, technological, like social fabric, invention, business, whatever, it's crazy that those things
were percolating for you and I three and a half years ago. And like you were talking about, like, you know, the economy is impending like shifts and you know, it's going to go even further away from the attention economy to, I mean, you were even talking about bits, bits and bytes back then. It's like, you know, this is what's going to be traded and these things will represent, you know,
whatever your comms, your value, the way in which things are perceived, right? Like the perception is gonna change because we will no longer physically see representations. We will only see the representations of these things as they're delivered to us through these various channels and like oddly kind of spot on.
Keith (14:36.268)
Yeah.
Keith (14:53.135)
Yeah war war being fought with bits instead of bombs. I mean they're still using bombs, but it's more about It's cheaper to manufacture a narrative and if ai can make video and you don't people don't We're like in a bubble like if we're on twitter and in tech at some point like it feels like we're behind But like you said the last podcast last episode. It's like we're still so early that it's almost like a future bias where we're like we you know, we're we're we're further along the acceleration curve than like
a normal person who has like two kids in Park Slope or whatever in Brooklyn and you know, whatever. So yeah, a lot of the themes from the original Defcon talk, they still hold true because no matter what you build, like anything that's like innovative is going to become a monolith or some legacy system over time. It's just the process of evolution given enough
innovation cycles, it's something new comes along and that cycle just collapses faster and faster. And even at a small firm like I'm working at now, people don't want to change. It's really hard. And this is like, the closer we get to the tip of the asymptote, like where it just goes up almost like vertical, like it's like a perpetual stubbornness. And it's a point where it's like,
You can't fight the current of the ocean. If a big wave is coming over, it doesn't matter how big, you're going to get hit. You're going to get knocked over. I don't know, man. We're almost at the point where the wave is going to crest. And that's going to be February. We've got eclipses. We've got that Saturn-Neptune conjunction at the beginning of Aries, which hasn't happened in like 6,400 years. I mean, there's other cycles within that. that's like the last time that happened was when religion started.
Cameron Craig (16:34.449)
Mm-hmm.
Keith (16:48.557)
So this you know, and then what are we seeing with like this little crucifixion ism that we're just talking about with a clawed by it's like they're making their own religion So you're see like AI religions. You're gonna see people I don't know man it It's hard because it's like you don't it's almost like The dominant or the best strategy right now is to do nothing and to like wait and to be patient as much as you want to like Move and lurch and run
Cameron Craig (17:10.943)
Mm. Mm-hmm.
Cameron Craig (17:17.641)
How long is that cycle?
Keith (17:22.671)
probably like a month because Mercury is gonna go retrograde. It's gonna go shadow in like two weeks and then it's gonna be retrograde through the middle of March. So not until like April, May is when you start moving, but you're gonna start getting information now until that point because when eclipses happen, like it's just crazy chaotic.
Cameron Craig (17:36.672)
Mm.
Keith (17:46.478)
Energy. I mean, this is when they took out kings and stuff or kings would die and they would even replace some kings with like fake people because they just knew, you know, they're looking at like conjunction, what's called conjunctional astrology is when planets come together and they basically just start the new, the cycle again, if you just time it. So February is going to be crazy. mean, January was nuts. When you think about like black bagging Maduro who may or may not have been CIA, like more people forget about Ukraine.
Cameron Craig (17:56.896)
Mm. Mm-hmm.
Keith (18:14.659)
People forget about all these Epstein files. know, people forget, you know, all this stuff going on in Minneapolis with like, you know, the murders, the shootings, like the, who knows, all this stuff going on. They're supposedly like, know, it's just like, at this point, you have to, I think you have to look at it like a movie and just be like, okay, we're living in a movie right now. And it's day by day to like, not lose your humanity. again, the whole algorithm thing for me,
is about finding what resonates and using that as the weapon against all this noise. Because if you're using AI to do anything, even if you're looking stuff up or having it help you write something or writing emails, if it's not a real reflection of who you are or what feels natural, and this is the Leo Full Moon because Leo's the heart, because that's the thing that beats your own pulse, then you're just...
You're not doing it right. think you're going to that that's what the corrections going to come. yeah, patience is hard, especially in Aries, because Aries wants to go and move and Saturn's like it wants to go slow. so you can't Saturn doesn't can't go slow because Aries is like, screw it. I'm just going to do it and start defining it. So it's like starting to kind of build the vector or the direction, but not being so attached to what that outcome is. So this gets back to like the suspend your ego thing.
Cameron Craig (19:25.183)
Right.
Keith (19:41.488)
And that's why it worked for us in the beginning because I was like, all right, screw it. Like, we'll see what happens. We're going to plant some seeds and it could be any vast array of outcomes on this continuum. And I think that's kind of more the quantum for lack of a better term way to think about things where it's like, it's both at the same time and it could be anything. And it's, you know, and then the hacker part of like, dude, if you can have some spare cash.
Cameron Craig (19:41.706)
Right.
Keith (20:10.233)
take care of yourself. Like, I don't know, call your relatives, like people are getting older, you know, like I'm dealing with this shit with family stuff right now. So it's like, I don't know, it's hard because you don't want to like be preachy and spiritual and try and like, dictate to people how they should live their lives because everyone's got a different value system. So maybe this is like a long-winded way of saying like, it's going to help you figure out this next two months are going to help you figure out what really matters if you're like open to that, like what really matters in your own value system.
Cameron Craig (20:39.006)
Yeah, I mean that's huge. I think that's important. I think the other thing for me personally that complicates it, this guy is an Aries.
Keith (20:49.571)
Bro, dude, you're gonna have a huge new awakening. This is gonna be awesome. So actually, everybody, it's gonna be good because we talk outside of this too about things we can't talk about publicly on like podcasts with like work and stuff or whatever. like, you know, this is gonna be good for you because the way you're moving, the way you're thinking, the way that we're evolving as as men, as humans, you know, as like people or whatever.
It's going to be good. It's just, you know, I think it's, it's teaching you patience and persistence, which you've always kind of been in a way. You've kind of always been kind of strategic with things.
Cameron Craig (21:27.262)
Yeah, I mean, I'm not crazy rash, but like you're describing. And again, I believe that the time of the year that you are conceived drives some amount of personality traits, right? Like we're not all carbon copies, like not every person who's born near the end of March through April all has the same personality.
Keith (21:54.926)
Yeah.
Cameron Craig (21:55.498)
But there are some things that become these common traits that you do kind of rely on. And while I'm not an overly rash human being, the need to push things forward and the need to see change and sometimes the bashing into that, just, nope, like, change needs to happen, you know, becomes relentless at times.
Keith (22:18.938)
Dude, yeah.
it's hard because I grew up from like, you know, people who, know, ex military parent and like, you know, you're if you're not 15 minutes early, you're five minutes late kind of thing. So it's just like nuts, right. And for me, it's like, it's like, more like a jazz standard, where it's like, okay, you have this kind of like thing, this chord progression laid out, and it's kind of like how you move or kind of flow within it. And that's what's always worked. But if I tried to be like, okay,
Cameron Craig (22:35.529)
Right.
Keith (22:51.728)
I have this timeline, I got to knock these things out in this time. And the more I pushed, it blew up. And that's what kind of had me second guessing, do I build this computer or not? Because RAM prices kept going up, the GPUs went up, parts were out, you couldn't pre-order. I'm like, am I just not supposed to do this right now? And then I'm like, no, dude, this thing's going to be triple the cost by the middle of 2027 at this point, if this curves keep going. I think that's part of the constant.
Cameron Craig (23:09.088)
Mm.
Cameron Craig (23:16.723)
Yeah. Yeah.
Keith (23:21.242)
process of self-evaluation, where you kind of like, instead of judging, learning how to take it in as like new information, like, okay, this is, I got feedback, how am going to adjust? And this is like, the systems thinking part where it's like, you put something in, you get something out, how you can react. I mean, I don't know, I think at least for me, I don't know for you, but that's kind of how I've always been thinking about things like input, output and.
trying to evolve, but I guess sometimes the Aries part can just be like, I'm just gonna like, let foot this thing. He'll toe this and like, go into the corner a little bit hot instead of like, slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
Cameron Craig (23:56.798)
Yeah, for sure. For sure. mean, I think. Yeah, you nailed it. I fight those things personally, right? Not that this is a segment about me, but I feel that, you know, where I'm like the systems thinker in me knows better. The system thinks her in me knows that the inputs are coming in and I'm evaluating them and I never ignore them. I always pay attention to the inputs that are coming in. I can't help myself, I think, in some ways, but.
Keith (24:24.857)
Yeah, you're subconsciously aware for better or worse.
Cameron Craig (24:27.58)
Yeah. And mean, I can't not process them. I have to, like, there's just something, it's almost like a compulsion that says I have to process them. But yeah, I fight that on the other end of just like, we got to get to an answer, you know, like we need an answer to this problem. So.
Keith (24:45.764)
And it's hard when you're seeing a problem before other people see it, or they're just like, that's not a problem. And I'm like, dude, I'm like, I don't want to deal with this. Like, what? I'm like, you know, I can't give specific examples because of what's going on. like, know, you know, before we're saying with, yeah, I know, it's but like, it can drive you nuts, because you feel like you have like a Cassandra complex, where like, I can see what's happening. This is the truth. And then it's like, what, you know,
Cameron Craig (24:50.715)
God.
Cameron Craig (25:01.8)
Yep, I hear you. I'm in the same spot.
Keith (25:14.98)
Whether it's like interpersonal relationships or job kind of things, whether paying you for a vision or for knowledge or for foresight. you're like, and at some point you're like, all right, fine. You know, it's going to blow up. So here you go. You want to blow it up, then here you go. Yeah.
Cameron Craig (25:29.598)
Yeah, actually one process thing that is related to work that I can talk about, which you just touched on, which I've always struggled with, which I think you and I lovingly called melting. You're like, know, Cam, can't go in there and say all that. You're going to melt their brains. And I'm like, what, Keith? That concept for me was such a foreign concept, honestly. And you kept saying.
Keith (25:48.088)
Yeah
Cameron Craig (25:55.092)
That's a lot of information, Cam. Do you have any idea? If you start going and you're talking at the speed that you're going, you're going to literally melt their brains. And I'm like, yeah, OK. And it took me another 10 years to get to a place where I was like, all right, you can break these things down. You can start with an example. You can talk about what the example means. And you can stop. You don't need to be like, here's all of it. Just drop the seed.
Keith (26:03.824)
And I know
Keith (26:18.628)
That's... yeah.
Cameron Craig (26:21.758)
This is all you need to know for right now, you know, and be okay with that. And again, the areas of me is like, no, we're gonna force our way all the way through. Yeah, yeah.
Keith (26:24.004)
The... I'm st-
Keith (26:29.902)
Just do it. Just get it. What's the matter? It's so simple. Dude, this is the story of my life. This is why I was like, because I run into this even still all the time because someone's like, they'll ask me a question about something technical or like, I don't know, gold and Bitcoin or something. And I'm thinking through like, OK, there's like a security piece is the money piece, whatever. I'm like, they're like, I'm like, OK, never mind. I'm like, don't ask me. I'm like, you know how I'm thinking about this stuff.
It's like, if you're just going to buy something and it's never going to go up, it's like, sure, enjoy. But, know, and then it's like, what's your time horizon? What are you going to do? It's like, do you work for the city and you got a pension? I'm like, is it pension going to be there in two decades? He's like, what are you talking about? I'm like, dude, I'm not paying attention to what's going on. It's like they're not even thinking about that. So I'm like, all right, you know what? Screw it. Like it just it's hard because you're it's like there's like a little devil on your shoulder. Like, don't say it, don't say it, don't say it. And he says, like, do it.
Tell him! Yeah.
Cameron Craig (27:29.64)
Yeah, yeah. So that part, think, despite the, yeah, despite the need to get it out there, right? Like, this is what you need to know, and this is why, and this is why it's important, and here's what it's gonna drive, and like, you know, you need to commit to this, because otherwise lost opportunity, or like, we're all gonna die, you know? Reminding yourself that on the other side of the table is somebody who's like, wait, what?
Keith (27:34.328)
Melt their brain.
Keith (27:49.626)
Yeah.
Keith (27:57.585)
They're not even at like step one of that yet. They're like, how do I turn on the computer? Like, and you were thinking about like, you know, RAM, megahertz of RAM, speed of RAM and overclocking. you're like, okay, wait a second. We gotta come back.
Cameron Craig (27:59.37)
They're not. They're not.
Cameron Craig (28:11.23)
Yeah, mean, senior execs are not immune to this problem. Like, and that's the other thing that, you know, you and I were dealing with that at daily and it was like, why don't they get this? You know, and it's just like, well, you know, the 10 year post mortem on that is they didn't get it because they, they all were working in their specific areas of expertise.
Keith (28:17.37)
dude.
Cameron Craig (28:35.892)
They were not broad thinkers. They were not paid to be broad thinkers. They didn't see success being broad thinkers. They were like, I am optimizing the daylights out of this particular part of our supply chain. And you're like, and you are doing it really well. But what happens when we need to do this? And they're just like, can't do it. It's like, you might have to.
Keith (28:58.48)
And what's happening now is that this is pervasive across all companies and all industries all at the same time right now. So it's not just AI accelerating this, it's the inverse relationship of the legacy system seizing up. An engine running with no oil, it gets so hot that it basically becomes a molten piece of metal because it just can't move.
Cameron Craig (29:24.786)
Well, I mean, I think you're on to something with that. the fast, I mean, again, Macy's is like the gift that keeps giving in this particular area. And because it's like 15 years on, we can talk about it because who knows what they're doing. And we haven't been associated with them for at least 12.
Keith (29:30.852)
Dude, it was...
Keith (29:39.694)
I can make some more predictions, but I gotta watch my tongue.
Cameron Craig (29:42.324)
Hahahaha
Keith (29:44.944)
I mean, they could have been.
Cameron Craig (29:47.06)
I it's a giant reet basically. They don't care about any of the other things. don't. but, but, I'm gonna fortify the point that you just made about the engine running with no oil. Like remember when we were there and everything was, we can't do anything because we're stuck on this monolithic system from the 60s?
Keith (29:53.874)
Dude, I know. It's... Okay, sorry, go ahead. I don't want to derail you.
Keith (30:12.037)
The AS 400 or whatever. Yeah.
Cameron Craig (30:13.918)
Yep. And there was never any economical way to get out of that death spiral, endless loop of pain that that thing gave us, right? Now everybody's in the, I'll just, like, it's literally like the table flip. I'll just not worry about upgrading or, you know, making these things compatible or trying to find things. I'll just throw it away and start over, right? Because
Keith (30:24.731)
Yeah.
Cameron Craig (30:42.4)
everybody's bought this hype that the intelligent underpinnings of an AI system can solve any of these problems. And it's like free from these conventions that we like, I'll just talk to the AI and the AI program itself. It's like, well, no. So, but, people's risk tolerance has gone through the roof with that. They're just like, ah, fuck it. Like,
Keith (31:02.267)
Dude, god.
Keith (31:10.801)
It's the worst thing to do too. Yeah. But it's like the, and that's the end of Pisces is set. Cause Saturn should be the structure and Pisces is like the dissolution of all this stuff with no net. When Neptune was there, but it just went in the Aries, like, or I think it's about to, I have to look at it. It's almost crazy to someone going on, but it, yeah, they don't, there's no boundary and it's almost like they don't care anymore. And it's like almost like the worst thing to do because then you're giving away like complete autonomy to this like.
Cameron Craig (31:10.994)
All in on AI.
Keith (31:39.441)
And they could have fixed it like they had decades and dude every company is gonna like is going through this kind of thing right now or it's I Don't know man it
Cameron Craig (31:50.77)
It's madness. mean, honestly, again, I can't... No.
Keith (31:54.066)
That's why I don't worry about the warfare part either, because I'm like, they're going to try to go to war, but they're going to fucking botch the job because like, let's just AI it and we're going to quantum AI it now because the guys at Palantir said we could do it when they're just like a giant consulting firm. And it's like, okay, it's not going to work. It's like going to shut it all shut itself. It's almost like, I don't know if it was this podcast or if it was some random rant I was talking about, but I wonder if
Cameron Craig (32:11.2)
Yeah.
Keith (32:19.141)
the AI becomes sentient enough that it actually saves the humans from themselves being like, now they're going to kill themselves. They're like,
Cameron Craig (32:25.192)
Well, I mean, there's a bunch of science fiction about that, the unintended consequences of that are never good.
Keith (32:31.068)
I mean...
Who knows at this point? I don't know, man. It's craziness. I think about...
Yeah, I don't know where we go or what we do or what you recommend at this point because it's just everyone's in the exact same boat. So it's almost like everyone's getting re-equalized in some way, no matter where you are.
Cameron Craig (32:59.624)
Yeah, I mean, again, I think you and I were trying to stay as far away from work things as possible. Not for I mean, there's some things, as you just said, that we can't talk about. there's other things like just like, I don't know about you, but I'm exhausted thinking about work. And and there's part of me that just can't even bear to be thinking about being on a podcast talking about work. But but from a systems perspective, right, take take the work out of it for a minute.
Keith (33:16.891)
Dude, yeah.
Cameron Craig (33:28.48)
I think one of the things that I'm realizing is to maybe come down one level from the wait things out, be patient, and also don't get locked into one thing.
My learning from this week specifically about the AI stuff, right? And I'm not gonna talk about the application of it to particular part of the business or anything like that, but the strategy, the mental model strategy that I am now deploying, I'll keep it very simple. There is AI for repetitive tasks, autonomous AI doing repetitive tasks that you're like,
You're doing this on behalf of humans, the users, whatever, however you want to, you know, term them.
Keith (34:24.207)
Scan my receipts, put it in a tax folder for the year.
Cameron Craig (34:26.78)
Yeah, like right now, very low level tasks and you can trust AI as long as it is in a framework and frameworks are important. again, not to be harping on the design end of this, but designers are really good with building frameworks and frameworks are the things that protect you from hallucinations and unknown consequences and systems gone awry. Like frameworks matter in that.
Keith (34:50.745)
leaking data that's sensitive.
Cameron Craig (34:54.716)
And information architecture, again, to the design side of things, like information architects should not just be thinking about the information architecture for humans anymore. They should be thinking about it for the machines and the agents, because that is how you get to stable systems that don't randomly decide to go do something because you're like, Hey, the most efficient way of doing this machine is the following things.
and by the way, if your entire reason for being is these tasks, these lower level tasks that are repetitive and time consuming, there are ways that work efficiently for you machine and for me human. And by defining those things and like putting a design to them and an architecture to them, both things win.
You win because you're like, hey, I'm now not dealing with cleaning up the random response from the machine. And the machine wins because it's like, hey, I can get done with this in a much more efficient way. And businesses win, I mean, to bring business in just for a second, businesses win because that more efficient way of doing things is a time saving for the human, but it is a time saver for the machine as well. And like, think we, the odd thing again that Clark, because Clark's computing.
Keith (35:57.659)
consistent.
Cameron Craig (36:15.744)
architecture or model is timeshare based compute, right? And he, like, he keeps bringing this up in various books, because that's the world of compute that he's most familiar with is like, hey, compute resources are scarce, and they're very expensive. Well, guess what? It's 2025 and compute resources on AI are scarce, and they're expensive.
Keith (36:39.513)
We're right back. Dude, I was gonna say we're right back at square one again.
Cameron Craig (36:43.412)
So, and then the other side of it, the other mental model is augmentation of a human being, right? You brought up jazz, that's a great analogy. Like the other side of AI that you can embrace and go after, and it's less risky is like the composition of things that are unknown. And in that regard, you're sort of like, hey, AI.
Go bring me a bunch of knowledge about X, Y, and Z. Go structure that knowledge in a certain way so that I can understand it. Check the knowledge with reference, give me references so that I can go research it, right? It's not just like, here it is. And I'm going to go do what this thing says. Cause like that level of creation is like, again, another totally smart way of human and AI working together. It's like,
I don't know what I don't know. Present me with a bunch of things and reference them so that I can go deep on things or maybe you and I go deep on these things together, right? And I don't know what I'm trying to invent yet or I don't know what I'm trying to create, but I need a bunch of like points of data or points of knowledge or points of inspiration or points of ideation that I can then go after. Like AI is great at that, but you're not.
Keith (37:44.571)
Ahem.
Cameron Craig (38:06.964)
Like again, this fear of, these higher level functions and white collar work across the board like is dead. It's like, if you're in white collar work where you're doing a repetitive task that honestly a business probably didn't want to pay you for 10 years ago, yeah, might be kind of dead, right? And then one last thing, and then I'm going to completely leave design systems and AI aside, at least in terms of business.
Keith (38:29.33)
Mm.
Cameron Craig (38:36.992)
On the design end, like if you're a designer and you think, this goes all the way back to the beginnings of last year, if you're a designer and you think that creating interfaces is actual creation, you've totally missed, you've missed the last three years. Like absolutely missed it.
Keith (38:56.498)
But that's what, that was the information that got passed around and that's what got rewarded because if, know, it goes back to like the art and copy from like advertising and then the tech came with like UX and it kind of made it digital. yeah, it's.
Cameron Craig (39:10.912)
Those things aren't creative though. They're not, it's not invention anymore. It's rinse and repeat. It's refine a concept. And like, again, AI probably with all of its data points is increasingly getting better at that.
Keith (39:25.658)
yeah. yeah. mean, it there's a part of my subconscious that has to break because when I was doing like wireframes and flows, they were like, these look too designy. And I'm like, dude, like you got to think because it was like responsive at that point. So you had to do three interfaces at the same time, which now it's just like, it just should make things just make it. It's just, know.
Cameron Craig (39:46.858)
I mean, my tooling, the tooling that I'm working on does all of that. It keeps track of all of it. You don't need to think about the like, on this page, it's like the response is X and you know, the response is X plus one through six, right? Like it's all in there. You don't need to document that. You don't even need to think it through. It's like, I get what you're trying to do. You're moving from this space to this space. All right, here are all the states and here's an error state too. And you're like, wow, amazing.
Keith (39:51.122)
Yeah.
Keith (39:59.537)
Yeah.
Keith (40:12.698)
Yeah, I mean, but you should be able to program it or context engineer it, which for lack of a better term, whatever you to call it, what you're kind of explaining the last two minutes to do all this stuff for you to kind of shape the flow of where you're trying to go.
Cameron Craig (40:27.156)
Well, I mean it does. It's a better pattern recognizer than we are.
Keith (40:31.504)
Yeah, I mean, plus it's like you can tune it to be like it's a bank. So you can't give a positive, you know, hit for there's a like an email address, because then you can just brute force to turn it off and they can't pay their bill, you know, because then things like that. But that's like you wouldn't do that on Facebook or a social networking app or whatever, which. Yeah.
Cameron Craig (40:43.21)
Yeah.
Cameron Craig (40:49.768)
Well, again, that's like frameworks, right?
Keith (40:54.194)
So I wonder if a new breed of information architect is going to evolve that is not just going to be like, because at some point, how do you make the maps to understand kind of what's going on? Because at some point, it's like there's going to be this delta of like not knowing what the AI knows. And it's just kind of like a total black box. And if you're designing, I mean, I don't know, I'm a visual person. I have to have some kind of like map to things to understand.
What the hell's going on? You know?
Cameron Craig (41:25.298)
I mean, I think it works the same. the, the information architecture mental model is not any different, right? Like back in the day when I was doing, when my main gig was information architecture and IDG in Natick, Massachusetts handed me 40 years of topical, you know, PC world, Mac world, you know, information world, like all the world magazines, right?
The first thing that they did was they gave me a bunch of requirements. Hey, what we're trying to do is this. And they were like, we want to know when we talked about hard drives at PC world, Mac world, information week, blah, blah, blah, that there's a way from our system that we can pull all of that up. Right? Like we don't, and, and then we want to filter.
So that was the next thing is like, want to filter to basically be like, what was happening in the world of PCs? What was happening in the world of Macs? What was happening in servers? What was happening, you know, in, and so, you know, you develop some tags in the world of, like being an information architect for AI and potentially like, like one practical problem space right now is how many agents do I need? Right?
Keith (42:29.926)
Signal.
Keith (42:47.319)
Mmm, because then it's a compute question at the end of the day and token question.
Cameron Craig (42:51.87)
And so like if I were IDG and I were talking to Cameron, I'd say, Hey, the first thing that I'm really concerned about is speed and latency. don't want Keith to wait five minutes for a response to come back. And the next thing that I might say is like efficacy matters to me as well. Like I want whatever comes back to Keith to be, you know, and then, you know, take your, your five nines here, like accuracy, right? Like
If I can't rely on the efficacy of what's being delivered to this level of fidelity and accuracy, then it's a fail. And expense. There are knowns and there are known knowns, there are unknown knowns, and there are known knowns. Like, break the knowns into all the things that we should develop knowledge bases for, keep those out of a large language model, keep those out of a fully agentic framework, and let an agent spin through that data.
some period, almost like a cron job, some period of time, you know, and as Keith keeps pummeling the system with his requests, refine that, right? Like maybe all of the knowledge that we think an agent needs to know to answer Keith's questions about hard drive storage space really isn't that important. Like maybe all the things that we were talking about, like Winchester disks, which basically
don't exist unless you're in a data center at this point, we don't really need to spin the agent through that data anymore. So you can subdivide that as like hard drives pre 2010, right? Like it's the same problem. You just need to know like what the asks are from the organization or the group of humans or the users that you are now serving. And instead of going and thinking about it like human to human, like, hey,
Keith (44:29.361)
Right.
Cameron Craig (44:47.134)
Humans don't do well when the navigation gets below more than 25 items. Break the navigation into subsections. It's kind of the same thing, but for machines, like, hey, maybe an agent, it's too expensive to have it, be able to understand what Keith's asking for, go find the thing that Keith needs, reconstitute it in a form that Keith understands.
put it into a visual framework and an auditory framework. Maybe all of those steps get broken down and you're sort of like, need an agent to figure out how to present this to Keith. And I might need an agent that understands the brand of IDG so that when it's presented to Keith, it's in a form that feels good and engenders trust, right? All those things I think are the things that people in a design world will need to think through in the future.
Keith (45:16.727)
Ahem.
Keith (45:42.896)
Man, this is so different because then the next logical step is like exposing an API to your data set in a secure way and then having your agent basically look at understanding the best way for you to ingest it.
Cameron Craig (45:55.392)
Well, I mean, like we talked about that last week, eBay is going in the wrong direction with that nonsense, but the entire world is going that way. Again, I can't talk about strategies, but I think...
What I said last week, I'm getting signal, not just at work, but talking to other people who are designing and thinking through these things, that that is right. The branded design form that we expect things to show up in, that's not what needs to be designed. What needs to be designed is the response, right? Whatever that response is, whether that is like,
Siri reading me something from whatever marketplace I'm on to the way in which Siri responds with the data, right? Like that means I could tag certain things in the data that I hand to Siri to make it sound more like eBay and less like Amazon, right? Or more like the real real and less like Macy's. And maybe also my helpfulness
with the agent goes broader. Like, hey Keith, I totally see that you're in the car right now. Hang on, by the time you get home, I'm gonna have this sitting queued up and ready to go in a browser interface for you. All you need to do is when you get home, tell Siri to load the result. Maybe that's Macy's technique. We're gonna sell you right now. We need to close this deal with, or maybe if you're not Macy's, you're Nordstrom's.
hey, we got a bunch of other things that we're thinking about for you as well. In addition to the hats that you asked for, we've curated the t-shirts and the sweaters as well, right? That level of experience design is, think, where all of the interface designer should be going next. Design the experience based on the brand, deliver the experience in whatever medium, on whatever device, in whatever context.
Cameron Craig (48:07.208)
and be very deliberate about the context, right? Like that's where good non-browser delivered interface design goes next. It's like, I'm be super not verbose when you're in the car and I know that you're traveling at 90 miles an hour and you're also using CarPlay versus you're...
You're traveling at 90 miles an hour, but you're not plugged into CarPlay and there's another phone next to you that's actually, I think you might be the passenger. I have a little bit more room to be a little bit more verbose or ask you if you want to see something on screen. If I know that you're on CarPlay, I'm absolutely not giving you the option for screen, right?
Keith (48:49.235)
And what you're talking about is the evisceration of like a lot of privacy. I don't know if most people understand. Yeah, well, I mean,
Cameron Craig (48:59.242)
potentially.
I mean, and you were calling it out like, don't hit your identity or any of your pay information to a mullt bot.
Keith (49:10.547)
Dude, the thing is, I really want to experiment with these things to figure out like, well, I mean, that'll come naturally because of my brain thinks, but how can I use it to make my life easier? So, okay, so back to the repeatable, easy thing. You gotta pay for YouTube Plus, it's like 16, it's stupid amount of money to basically get ad free and be able to download.
Cameron Craig (49:18.356)
what the exploitation is and the hack.
Keith (49:40.124)
your freaking app. And I'm like, dude, no, this is not worth it for like paying more money to Google to do this. So it's like, you know, if there's a way to download, like a video and have it put it on like a little, you know, your shared folder, whatever, whether it's like Dropbox or whatever, just be like, hey, download this thing, put it on there and shoot me a text message when you know, when it's uploaded, so can just go watch it or like listen to it in the background, because I don't watch a lot of this stuff, but I'm listening to things like a lot.
So something simple like that to just be like, and then have it archive it to like your own knowledge base. So I think there's like a handful of things, people who start experimenting with all this AI stuff, for lack of a better term, is like they're gonna run into a lot of the there's like food groups.
Like you're probably going to start building your own knowledge base of stuff. You're going to, you know, whether it's books or movies or things because you know, these things you're going to want to like eventually someone's going to make it easy enough to just spin up your own external memory system that's going to be secure enough or whatever. And then these security things will get taken care of eventually. It's the early adopters versus like, you know, the innovators or whatever.
Cameron Craig (50:53.77)
Yeah, yeah. mean, again, wade into all those things cautiously, but wade into them, right? Like that, you know, that's a fascinating thing. think if you don't do that, to your point, you miss the opportunity to get curious about what, where the vulnerabilities are in the example that you're talking about and how you could solve them, right? Like be the first person to solve them.
Keith (51:22.705)
Yeah. And that, that's how I think the designers make the best move in the next wave. Cause what you're talking about with conversational and all this stuff, it's basically pulling context from all the sensors at the same time, and then making a decision based on what it's assuming you're doing and then changing the data that way. that's
Cameron Craig (51:43.904)
I mean, that's just one very specific use case, right?
Keith (51:48.786)
Yeah, but as a designer, that totally implodes their map of the world. You're talking about the world that the universe revolves around the Earth versus the universe revolves around the sun or the solar system revolves around the sun. It's a total change of model of perception and wayfinding.
Cameron Craig (52:03.103)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, and you have to change your entire model of perception, right? this, what we're talking about is an actual conversation that I had with a designer this week where I'm like, you know, kind of like, you need to not be thinking about the human, the human consumption of your information architecture, you need to be thinking about the agentic.
consumption of your information architecture. this is not the same, like in some ways, your thought process is the same, right? It's like, hey, agents are gonna have a hard time spinning through that much data efficiently, like humans spinning through 25 lines deep of navigation, right? It's the same.
Keith (52:56.371)
It's expensive.
Cameron Craig (53:01.788)
Same problem, like the, how you think about it on the backend as a designer, you're going to use a lot of the same techniques. Like, okay, I could break this this way. I could break this this way. I could categorize these things and sub categorize these things. Right. Same problem space that we're naturally really good at. just, you got to remember that you're now not doing this for the same use case. It's totally different use case, but the, the mental model that a designer is going to go through or an information architects is going to go through is exactly the same.
You don't need to relearn those things. You just need to apply it to a different problem space. And like you said, in a world where the sun is now going around the moon and you you have to reorient quickly and just basically be like, okay, got it. I can, same Swiss army knife is going to come out. It's not like you're like, like when the sun's going around the moon, I now need like a scepter, you know, it's like, nope, same Swiss army knife can work. Just figure out like how to use it as.
Keith (53:56.338)
Cameron Craig (54:01.314)
the gravity shifting a little bit, right?
Keith (54:04.148)
All right, okay, a couple things. One, this is gonna be not just designers, but everybody. Because the technologists are like, no, it's Python code and I know how to do it this way. it's it's the same as a manager who's been in a managing position going from VP to SVP for the past 15 years. Like they're so stuck in that way of thinking that it's gonna be harder for them even though they have more time in that one position. So no one's immune. What I'm thinking now is,
Cameron Craig (54:10.462)
It's everybody.
Cameron Craig (54:29.353)
Yes.
Keith (54:34.13)
as a kind of side tangent, it's like the agents need love too, and they're going to get rewarded based on efficiency. So if we go from, I don't think it's going to be universal basic income. I think it's going to be universal basic data where you're going to get credits or tokens or whatever from the government to share your data, or you're going to have to at some point. And then the more efficient your agent is, or your set of agents is, the more tokens you're going to get, the more income you're going to get.
in reverse because as you said, it's still a metabolism to be more efficient. don't know. But then it's like, what does the digital bill of rights 2.0 look like? Because now you're effectively giving away all your privacy rights at that point. And it's not just you as an individual, it's you pulled with 20 million other people in the city of New York or whatever, or in the state of New York.
you can just pull more time you have the more inference and the more knowledge you can pull out of like what you know like said okay do you want to buy this now you want to do this how do they social engineer you through like you know nudging or whatever the hell they're calling it it's this is crazy this is where we're going now this is the pluto you know this is the querying world
Cameron Craig (55:46.88)
Well, yeah. mean, maybe in our off hours or in your off hours since you came up with this the first time, right? Like this was a you melting my brain 12-ish, well, 10, 12 years ago when you're like, you know what, Cam? It's a culture of attention and it's an economy of, you know,
Keith (56:00.659)
Yeah
Cameron Craig (56:12.552)
It's economy of attention, right? And I was like, okay. And you're like, influencers are gonna become these like mega stars. You know, we're not gonna have like, you're not gonna just have movie stars anymore. You're gonna have these people that become cultural icons, like just because they've said stupid shit online. And I'm like, okay, really? Like, you're like, this is what's happening. I'm wondering, as you were just saying that I'm wondering if that type of a
Keith (56:14.141)
Yeah.
Cameron Craig (56:42.544)
mental model and business model in the world of AI only knows what it knows from the humans that have expressed something in this case right now online or into some sort of a knowledge base that AI has control of. For AI to continue to evolve in ways wholly unknown to itself, right? Like it can evolve.
based on the knowledge that it knows, but it needs to take in, constantly take in new knowledge to continue to evolve beyond the patterns that it can bring together, right? Like it can come up with its own sphere of things that are gonna be brand new, but it's all based on our old knowledge, right? The truly like, yes, yes. And it can create its own future based on combining things from the past, it can't like net new things that a human perceives. It can't.
Keith (57:25.224)
Data only exists about the past, basically.
Cameron Craig (57:38.526)
it's gonna have no way of doing that, Like even back to the sun going around the moon versus the moon going around the earth and the earth going around the sun.
Keith (57:43.475)
Like that.
Keith (57:53.266)
the change of the heliocentric to the geocentric model, yeah.
Cameron Craig (57:55.944)
Yeah, like it's not going to know that unless a human tells it that that's happening. Right? And a human's got to perceive that.
Keith (58:03.261)
But can you create agents to have it do that? then is it limited by the amount of tokens that you pay or feed it?
Cameron Craig (58:09.864)
Well, all that, yeah. Of course it's gonna be limited.
Keith (58:13.244)
So then all the more reason to, mean, I guess this is more geared to like if you're actually curious or not and wanting to kind of see what you can do because well, let me finish what you're getting at. So I don't want to derail you because you were like talking about off hours.
Cameron Craig (58:27.784)
What's so where so where I'm getting that is like, I'll be honest, when you brought up the economy of attention. I was like. I believed it. It wasn't like, nah, it's not going to happen. I'm like, yep. I was like, but man, what a stupid job that is, right? Like that that was like the thing. And now I'm sitting here. 12 years on, it was like those people are the only people that got paid.
for their last 10 years of work, they're the only ones that manage to monetize what has become this hugely paid for bank of information that now everybody's clamoring to get. And it's like now, it's like if you jumped into that space, you have to learn all of that monetization and all of the technique that those guys have used for the last 10 years to make cash.
Keith (59:11.708)
Yeah. Zero marginal cost, dude. Yeah.
Keith (59:27.892)
I think, yeah, cause that, that, model is collapsing to an extent because one, have super saturation of people who are trying to do it because they want to be popular. And two, because it's like the AI sloppification of everything. So it's almost like, again, what really resonates? What is the.
Cameron Craig (59:36.416)
Sure. Sure.
Keith (59:49.661)
What is the core harmonic of the light and the lighthouse that you're propagating to show the way back for people? And that, you know, I think the key is consistency without burnout. Because I still think, you know, there's a lot of companies now looking for founding creators, which is I'm thinking about as kind of like a next foray, because, you know, the chief of staff thing, like, I love being a chief of staff. But, you know, that's what these, you know, Claude bot or whatever.
or mold bot is gonna basically become once it becomes trusted enough, like everyone's gonna have one. And then, know, a chief of staff, when I look at it, it's just to make things happen. Like, so it's like, whatever the, you how do you make, how do you find solutions in anything? And I don't know. It's a crazy time. I mean, I don't know where this is heading. Cause you know, part of me is wondering, like, that's why we're doing this now too, is to put our ideas out there. And it's not like, we're gonna make a bunch of money doing this. But it's like, we're seeing things.
that are happening again and again. And their dilemmas that haven't changed that are just cyclical, know, vis-a-vis the AS 400 and you know, like it doesn't matter. Apple's having issues. Google's having issues. Amazon, all these companies are, they're not, they're not immutable from change or from evolution. Like even the U S and China, like the strengths and there's weaknesses and there's like other outside influences. And I don't know. It's, um,
I don't know where I'm going with this now. I'm kind of just like, I melted my own brain in this process. look at that! That's so freaking funny. Dude, but it went out when I said I just melted my own brain. That, dude, see?
Cameron Craig (01:01:26.59)
Your camera got again.
Cameron Craig (01:01:31.026)
Yes, at that exact minute. Is this your Sony whatever it is, ZX10 or?
Keith (01:01:40.276)
CVE 10 mark 2, yeah.
Cameron Craig (01:01:43.976)
It's kind of funny, well, I mean, my own experience, you're gonna need to go in and like up the temperature protection.
Keith (01:01:54.122)
Dude, it's on max and I think it's because there's a cloth behind this thing. Also, what?
Cameron Craig (01:01:59.872)
Yeah, you can't do that. that. I've learned that. my I hated this thing so much because it would it would always I mean, you remember it was shutting down like all kinds of time, like crazy times, right? It would get super hot. And now I spin this thing up like 30 minutes before you and iPod. We do the whole thing. And sometimes I like I forget to turn it off and then I'll come back. I'm like, damn, the stupid.
Keith (01:02:13.226)
Yeah.
Keith (01:02:25.811)
The fan's still on, yeah.
Cameron Craig (01:02:26.922)
Well, the fan's on and the camera's on and the prompter's on, because it's sending signal down to my desktop. And without the cloth, you touch the camera back and the camera's not hot at all. It needs a lot of space behind it to make. It's crazy.
Keith (01:02:44.349)
Yeah, it's-
I gotta get a little remote so I can zoom in and out too, because this is too...
Cameron Craig (01:02:51.274)
if you find that, can you send me that too? Because like I need that as well. Like every time I touch the thing, it moves like everything. So.
Keith (01:02:57.981)
Yeah, and this is like a little bit like jittery. If you're building this stuff, it's a lot of work. I like doing it to make it consistent, to make it fast, and to be able to just... You can't just turn one switch and everything goes on because it's got a sensor and it's...
Cameron Craig (01:03:06.76)
It's a lot of work.
Cameron Craig (01:03:16.466)
No, over the holidays, like, you know, I didn't tangent, but hey, for all of you that are trying to get your ideas out and something like a podcast, it can be done. It can be done by non-technical people. Keith is way more technical, at least with the gear, like, right? He's got the film degree. I'm not the guy with the film degree.
Keith (01:03:33.459)
Yeah, no, but you're a car guy. can frickin', you can make things happen.
Cameron Craig (01:03:36.894)
I mean, I've hacked things together, but like, you know, I'm pretty reliant on you to basically be like, Hey, your AV setup should look something like this. And then I go do research. But like once you even get the gear, it's so much to get it integrated and to get it to work right. Like, and I, had my system up and going for like six months, but it wasn't great. It had a lot of issues. And. You know, over the holidays, it was like, my kid needed he's.
building a gaming PC. So thankfully he got a GPU and a few other things before they went crazy expensive. you he, he needed a monitor. I'm like, I'm not going to buy this guy a monitor. I didn't like upgrade my monitor and give him my perfectly good and totally reasonable for gaming monitor. Right. And I want to dual monitors anyway, so I could split things. And if I were using two different computers, I could have one on one and you know, the other on the other. but
Keith (01:04:14.41)
Nice.
Keith (01:04:25.63)
Yeah.
Cameron Craig (01:04:35.582)
Just changing the monitors ended up being this colossal shift in my setup where I was like, everything is on the floor in a heap right now and I have to rebuild it from the ground up.
Keith (01:04:47.871)
Dude, especially if it's like a...
A Mac from a few years ago where it's like all USB C and there's like sub rules about like what you can plug in what you can't because then it goes to like display port I know there's a ton of like little things that You know working for like a non-technical person. It's like why does it just work? I'm like because that's not how it works But when there someone's hyper literal, I'm like just turn it off and on again She's like I did and I'm like and it went to sleep. It didn't fully reboot to like purge the memory and I'm like
it's funny because I'll call the IT guys that we pay and like you turn it off and on again I'm like dude I'm like thank you for the reminder yeah like this is another level I think
Cameron Craig (01:05:30.112)
You're like, we're well beyond this. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, you're right. Like, I mean, my desktop is, you know, I got it late last year, mid to late last year. So, you know, it was a current Mac mini for this particular application.
Keith (01:05:48.608)
Well, that's a whole new architecture with sharing the RAM with the GPU and the CPU too. So it's not just like, you know, dedicated VRAM. So it's like that has its own bus issues too. I mean, it's not bad, but yeah.
Cameron Craig (01:05:56.895)
Yeah.
It's fine. mean, like for what I'm doing, it's totally fine. you know, and I, as I was telling you yesterday, it's like 48 gigs of RAM seemed excessive and crazy when I bought it. was like, I can't believe I'm specifying a Mac mini that's costing me like 1600 bucks. Like what am I doing at this minute? Right? Yeah.
Keith (01:06:10.409)
Yeah.
Keith (01:06:19.687)
Now let's take a great deal the RAM price is going up and I 48 to 64 I think is I got 64 of my studio just because I wanted to like Experiment a little bit of like, you running local LLMs But I think 48 gigs if I get a Mac mini is what I'm gonna do next for like a pseudo gapped like cloudbot kind of guy But yeah
Cameron Craig (01:06:41.802)
Yeah.
I was thinking about getting the truly recommended spec, which is like the cheapest one that you can get. It's like 16 and 256. And you know, like you said, it's not connected to a monitor unless you need to do something. And most of the time you're like remoting in from your other system. But yeah, I won't use it for anything other than.
Keith (01:06:54.367)
Yeah.
Keith (01:07:05.909)
I think that's a really good design constraint to kind of see what you can kind of do. It's like you have this like little lightweight guy that's like entry-level pricing and you you can always hack it to put a SSD into it. I mean you void the warranty obviously but like
Cameron Craig (01:07:21.844)
But for 540 bucks, like, what do I care? Yeah. It's not cheap, but I mean, you're that off anyway, so.
Keith (01:07:24.373)
Who cares? Yeah. mean, it was not cheap, relative to like, yeah, and relative to like a $1,600, $1,800 Mac mini that you would spec. Because I'm like, I want 10 gig, I want a terabyte drive, because it's like, if I'm going to use it, I want like an external node that I can send it to render while I'm doing something else. I don't know. So I'm on the fence right now, because I'm wondering if like a $600 or if you get it on sale, like a $550.
Cameron Craig (01:07:45.502)
Yeah. Yeah.
Keith (01:07:53.417)
or like local assistant guy is kind of the way to do it.
Cameron Craig (01:07:56.34)
Yeah, I mean, it depends on what you're trying to do. Like I don't, I don't need another machine to render. And if I were going to do that, I'd probably go mobile for whatever work stuff I'm doing to the laptop that I have, and then just send a task to this thing to do at my desktop, right? Like reverse it versus, you know, cause I have like all this, if I wanted to render or something, I could start that happening on the mini.
Keith (01:08:15.401)
Yeah, that's
Cameron Craig (01:08:25.62)
you know, and then just leave it and switch to my MacBook to do anything that I would need to do during the day and just not disturb the mini.
Keith (01:08:28.681)
Yeah.
Keith (01:08:32.917)
They got a lot of power, mean, even though the minimum spec Mac mini's got lot of oomph to it, it's just not a lot of space.
Cameron Craig (01:08:41.396)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I have a bunch of external SSDs, so like that space I'm not worried about, but the RAM thing is always the one that I'm like, what do you do with that? Right? Like, you know, I don't know. Can you, can you hack that too?
Keith (01:08:48.106)
Yeah.
Keith (01:08:56.401)
No, they they started that shit. I think the way that the SSD I mean At some point it's like You know, it's like your your you your old beamer or whatever It's like how how much time do you want to spend on doing this when you just be like, know I'm gonna pay 200 bucks and just get more RAM and say screw it It's like what's your time worth because you could do it I'm sure but you know, do you want to make an eight-hour tutorial on YouTube about? You know reflowing your ram or whatever
Cameron Craig (01:08:58.248)
Yeah, that, that, yeah.
Cameron Craig (01:09:15.102)
Yeah.
Cameron Craig (01:09:22.111)
now.
No, I want to do as little as possible at this moment and blow up as few things as possible. So again, maybe that's part of the waiting, right?
Keith (01:09:35.391)
I just gonna say that that's like the great way to like, end cap this whole episode, like do as little as possible and blow up as little as possible. Just yeah, for right now, yeah.
Cameron Craig (01:09:40.447)
Yeah.
Cameron Craig (01:09:43.86)
Yeah, for right now, for right now. But like also, you know, I think maybe one other wrap up thing is you gotta think differently about this stuff. Like that's the thing that I'm really realizing, right? And maybe one other little anecdote from my week, cause it was a, you know, to end on a happy note as well. Like the same designer that I was talking about, the information architecture for the bots or the agents.
You know, we having a conversation kind of about technical architecture and we both have have thoughts about this related to multi because, know, we're solving some problems that are not the exact problems that you and I are talking about, but the solutioning involves the same set of thought processes. Right. So the cool thing was, you know, and like you and I were talking about, like you're either
Keith (01:10:33.012)
Yeah, it's tangential. Sure.
Cameron Craig (01:10:42.9)
designing a building, repetitive systems and a framework that keeps things tight so that the output is controlled. And then, you know, there's the jazz player side of it where you're like, Hey, I'm trying to figure things out. like I sent him to think about a bunch of different things around technical architecture. And he is not a technologist, right? Like he's not, he's not a coder. He is not a developer. He is not a infrastructure person. He's a designer like me.
And he did the thing that we were just talking about. He paired himself up with an agent that he said, he, he designed and tailored the agent like, Hey, you're going to act as a smart developer with the skills and knowledge of the following things. And you're going to help me solve problems. And you're going to help me write a document that I can take to technologists that explains why we need to shift.
our technical architecture to match this information architecture. So he ended up writing a doc and you know, the two developers that he's meeting with are like, they're reading the synopsis and they're like, this won't work. And he's like, just read the doc. Like don't tell me it won't work until you've read through what I'm trying to do. Like the synopsis tells you the problem space and some very high level thinking around what a potential solution is, but it's not the only solution, read the doc.
So he sits down with them for an hour and by the end, the three of them are like, no, this is actually doable. actually makes like the developers like actually it, it makes a lot of sense because what he did was he laid out the framing and the requirements and like, this is why it's important. And this is what we're trying to enable. And this is what it does for the human beings. Like he gave all of that story upfront. And then he's like,
Keith (01:12:30.794)
Right.
Cameron Craig (01:12:40.766)
here's what I think the architecture needs to be technologically. you know, developers do not want anybody that is not a developer stepping into their world, right? Like this is like walled garden stuff.
Keith (01:12:50.024)
Nope. Yeah, 100 % and that wall's coming crashing down really fast.
Cameron Craig (01:12:56.476)
It, it a hundred percent. And you know, from a fungible resource, and this has been my, the chip on my shoulder for the last nine months for a bunch of different reasons, he just proved that like, with a little bit of thinking, like a business person and a designer and pairing himself with a smart, technologically advanced agent, he could speak the language and come coherently with a solution.
Keith (01:13:25.312)
Yeah, he hacked the system in like not in like a negative way, but he found the back door to actually, you at some point you have to be like, look, we have to read docs. I'm here to work with you guys. You have to give me the time because this was the task I was given. You know, I set it up to the best of my ability to structure it in a way that you guys think. And it's like, yeah, actually it worked.
Cameron Craig (01:13:46.152)
Yep. Now.
Keith (01:13:49.259)
dangerous.
Cameron Craig (01:13:50.772)
dangerous outside of that work paradigm. He and I already know that it works because he's already built it. He's built it without the constraints of, you know, our day jobs, which I'm not saying that it would work if he brought it into our day job. I'm just saying he went a step further and proved conceptually that it works, right?
Keith (01:13:59.145)
Yeah, we've built it already.
Cameron Craig (01:14:17.738)
Like that's amazing for a designer to basically be like, I built the architecture. I built the technical architecture in a way that we could describe, right? Like, and then I went and actually coded the technical architecture to a point that I could, I could run a test and get an app. Like it doesn't, it's not fully functioning. It doesn't have the interface attached, but he ran a unit test where he's like, can I get the data out of this in a way that like is faster, more like reliable?
has a higher level of efficacy with less token burning. And he did it.
Keith (01:14:54.518)
Dude, really, really good, like measurable goals. Yeah, dude. And he didn't melt their brain in the process and he knew it would work. So it's like he took a step back to be like, instead of saying, I know it works and act in like, you know, a jerk.
Cameron Craig (01:14:58.356)
Be like Dave.
Cameron Craig (01:15:11.742)
And here's the code, cause like you're going to get into a firefight with that, right? Like if he handed over code, they're going to be like, nah, this won't work in our environment. There's a million reasons why it won't work. But instead he went for the concept. He's like, the concept is this.
Keith (01:15:25.078)
Yeah, again, a little bit of curiosity in a long way, but it means like curiosity and persistence, right? And a little bit of structure. So I don't know. mean, I think that's the title of this episode. Don't melt my brain. Don't melt my brain, You're the one who's melting the boss's brain usually if you're like thinking about it. yeah, dude, know you got to like, you got a hard stop in a few minutes, but
Cameron Craig (01:15:34.28)
and don't melt people's brains.
Cameron Craig (01:15:39.53)
Don't mow my brain.
Cameron Craig (01:15:53.055)
I do.
Keith (01:15:53.815)
I think this is good. I'm glad we got this to work and got going amidst the synchronistic camera turning off again, because I don't think these things are accidental. I think everything happens for a reason. that's just not going to melt people's brain with that crazy existentialism.
Cameron Craig (01:16:07.742)
Yeah. Well, thanks for reaffirming that I need to just wait because I'm having a hard time sitting here just waiting.
Keith (01:16:16.01)
Yeah, dude, we're good. Like, trust me, I'm the same like chomping on the bit to move ahead and fire like the best analogy is like the software is installed, the new PC is built. We're doing the updates right now. We're have to, you know, based on what those updates do when you reboot the machine again, you have to tweak the BIOS a little bit just like we're almost there. And it's going to be
You know, all systems go really soon, but it's like, trust me, people who are trying to push and go crazy, like they're going to run into their own swords right now. And I'm like, okay, look, you want to do this? It's all you like, you know, but you got to, you know, don't try not lose your humanity in the process. And, know, same to myself, trying to find the empathy to like, everyone's going through something right now. So to be open to that.
Cameron Craig (01:16:52.574)
Yeah, I agree with that.
Cameron Craig (01:17:07.722)
Yeah, yeah, well said. And thank you for saying that, because I think that is, it's back here in the back of my head, but I think that's important, what you just said, is, you know.
Keith (01:17:21.802)
You're doing it. I've known you long enough. Like, give yourself credit to like, we're all fine in our way, But don't be too hard on yourself either.
Cameron Craig (01:17:27.966)
Yeah. Well, I appreciate that. Thanks. Like the heaviness is real. And I think, like I said, I'm not unique in that way. think everybody, like you said it really well. Everybody's feeling that and that's okay. It's okay.
Keith (01:17:38.72)
Don't melt your own brain, dude. Don't melt your own brain.
Cameron Craig (01:17:42.836)
I'm trying not to.
All right, Keith. Thanks, man.
Keith (01:17:48.961)
Another one. Yeah, man. Thank you. Well, I don't know reconvene in next week or two Our men until then you too, man later
Cameron Craig (01:17:53.3)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. All right. Appreciate you. Thanks. Later.