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Explore the evolving world of design with Cameron Craig and Keith as they tackle the challenges of complex, monolithic products and the critical role of human-centered design. Each episode dives into topics like organizational change, the future of design in tech, and the emerging influence of agents on user experience. Perfect for designers, strategists, and leaders, this podcast offers insights on adaptability, communication, and the strategic thinking needed to thrive in a rapidly changing landscape.
Cameron Craig (00:00.783)
in. Hey Keith.
Keith (00:02.71)
Hey, what's up, Cameron?
Cameron Craig (00:04.307)
Hey, we just, okay. So I like giving context, like taking down the third wall as if there's somebody actually listening to this, which, know, maybe there are, maybe there aren't, who knows. Keith and I just decided we're to push the record button because oftentimes we talk about a bunch of stuff for like 20 minutes and we don't record any of it. That's fair. It's been a lot, but you know, that's content that can be used and you know,
Keith (00:12.034)
I love it. Yeah.
Keith (00:23.246)
It's like 45 minutes to the past couple episodes. It's been a lie.
Cameron Craig (00:34.259)
We can do like 90 minutes and, and be in a place where we've got it for the day versus, you know, 45 minutes of good stuff. And then we're like, what did we say? And then like half the time, you and I are like, so right before this, we were talking anyway.
Keith (00:48.542)
It's not the same. I don't want to be like, you had to be there. It's worse when it's inside joke style.
Cameron Craig (00:51.367)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there you go. Fourth wall taken down. I could not get my brain out of my back phasing again. No.
Keith (00:59.768)
Pazer.
Keith (01:03.47)
I don't know, I was going to say I thought we talking about the microphone that was just busted and we had to reboot. Okay, nevermind. I'm like, I'm still behind. Okay, go, don't let me stop you. Yeah.
Cameron Craig (01:08.895)
Well, that, took like 10 minutes. That's like 10 minutes of, know, that was fun content. Like you said, if we were doing an audio engineering podcast, it'd be brilliant. It's like, okay, here's what not to do.
Keith (01:17.324)
It sounded like a Star Wars episode. it was, was it some Riverside feature that they put on Riverside in case you're in the same room? But I think it was a delay thing. So your microphone was kind of like,
Cameron Craig (01:23.549)
Yeah. Yep.
Cameron Craig (01:29.607)
Yeah. So it's a, it's a software feature that allows you to record somebody else in the same room with you. But Keith and I were just saying we would never do that through software. We would just plug in with the hardware and I've got multiple inputs. So could run two different mics and you could sit across from one another and not have that happening. Cause the mics are very like directional and off you go. It's a problem that nobody needed a solution to.
Keith (01:54.987)
It happens to the business people that want to like we got to push more features. The engineers got a good idea and just didn't put real people in front of it. you know, that's monolith.
Cameron Craig (02:05.949)
I mean, I'm going to start printing shirts and just like engineer first, think about everything else second, right? Like that always works. Like engineer some stuff. We'll find somebody to buy it. You know, like why not? Features.
Keith (02:12.93)
Eheh
Keith (02:18.318)
That's a very it's a it's it's a tech corporate thing that I think people would get if if they were like bigger tech companies but like I don't know if the normies would catch it yet. It's almost You have to it's like why isn't this thing working the way don't know it's like trying to think of how you simplify the boomer mentality because they like talking about parents doing tech support and like just unplug the freaking kill modem dad's like I'm like dad unplug it. It's not gonna work. I'm like, okay
Cameron Craig (02:38.697)
God, yeah.
Keith (02:48.578)
He unplugs it. I'm like, how's mom? She's fine. minute later, plugs it back in. Okay, cool. works. I can get my big account now. Thanks, Keith. Click.
Cameron Craig (02:55.507)
Yeah. Well, I mean, like, so back to the Riverside problem, what did we do, Keith? I'm just like, all right, I'll be right back. And I come back and you're like, come back. Like Keith's like, what'd do? I'm like, nah, just turned Riverside off and I rebooted it, which is like, it could have been hardware. like, I'm fully, fully capable of like not plugging the same thing in twice. Like I don't really unplug my stuff that much. I just shut things off as I don't need them. Cause I'm not going to leave like my audio interface up for a whole week, but I rarely unplug anything. So I was like,
Keith (02:58.923)
Yeah.
Turn it off and on again.
Keith (03:09.506)
Dude, it...
Keith (03:22.689)
Yeah.
Cameron Craig (03:24.959)
It's not really the hardware and I can quickly get to a place where I know that like all the hardware connected to my Mac is working. So it has to be Riverside. It took me like less than 15 seconds. I'm like, yep, got to be Riverside. Click out in everything works.
Keith (03:39.406)
But it was pretty seamless. I would say that I could stay on and it didn't drop the call or the initial connection. Yeah, which is cool. Props for it's due.
Cameron Craig (03:44.957)
Which is great. Yeah. And you know, I didn't have to send you another link to be like, Hey, can you come join? Like you changed the link to the studio. It's the same studio. You know, that's good.
Keith (03:54.383)
Yeah, that so yeah, there's a lot of good things that get right. It's not a total criticism. It's just you know, but dude, also this is like, this is to be a really weird Mercury retrograde that we're coming into like people. We'll get into that in a second. I want to ask, the thing I wanted to drop into that you me think about was, what is the analog or the equal opposite of turning off and on the company?
Like how do you reboot the, you can't just like turn it off and on without breaking it. Like how do you, so is it almost like it's a server rack and you just got to do like each piece of gear and it's like a different piece of the company or something like, cause don't know. like, what would that be? That would be a really good way to breach, you know, the suits in a way to get them to think about this.
Cameron Craig (04:25.639)
You can't. You can't. I mean...
Cameron Craig (04:42.397)
I mean, maybe, maybe you're onto something, right? It's like, as opposed to trying to tackle the entire problem, you maybe start removing the top level processes that are less core to the basic runnings of the company and you swap those things out first. mean,
Keith (05:04.526)
I think it's got to be simpler. It's got to be like, you don't get to use your fucking BlackBerry today. You can't use your corporate email for like a week. No slack. Figure it out like adults and get in the same damn room. Like no technology. Like that level of simplicity where it's like, grog half pen must write code. Do it the old fashioned way.
Cameron Craig (05:14.35)
god.
Cameron Craig (05:23.985)
Well, I mean, there's so many, there's so many like analogs to that, like the from this week, right? It's like, I mean, not to dive deep into my personal life, but you know, my son's 13, he's having some issues. He's 13, right? They're all having issues. Like how he grew up and like what he's grown up with very different than the rest of us. Like, and I understand that and accept that. On the other end, it's like, broke, like,
Keith (05:35.128)
Go for it.
Keith (05:40.717)
Yeah.
Cameron Craig (05:51.839)
Technology is like not making your life better. It's actually making your life worse. And we see it. So we're going to put some like boundaries in place and figure some things out. We're to put some systems in to prevent you from doing things that as a 13 year old, you're not going to have the wherewithal that even me as a 54 year old, I'm struggling with. Right. Like these are these are net cumulative effects on humans, not just him, but he's got no way of
Keith (06:15.383)
human problems.
Cameron Craig (06:22.143)
monitoring that and yet, you know, like, here we are. it was like.
Keith (06:25.378)
Always a walking hormone dude like he's he's learning how to regulate his internal nervous system at this point.
Cameron Craig (06:33.469)
Well, and I watched him detox from the phone for two days. And it was like, I mean, it was like watching somebody who is addicted to a substance detox every 30 minutes. I need to check it. No, you don't. No, no, I do. It's like, Nope, you don't. Nothing's going to change. Nothing's going to shift. It's all going to be fine. And you know what? Like after a couple of days, you're going to be in a much better mood and you know, sure enough, like three days later, way better mood. And then like the minute it's like,
Keith (06:48.387)
Wow.
Keith (06:59.139)
Wow.
Cameron Craig (07:00.873)
technology needed to be introduced for practical reasons. It was like, okay, limits. The limits are coming in hard right now. Like you can have the device, but the limits are coming with it. And it was like, this thing's useless. okay. Like, thrown on the dash, about to exit, no phone. I'm like, no, no, no. Take the phone with you. Because the only purpose of the phone service tonight is if I need to call you.
I know that I can get through it. Like I don't have to call on your friends. I don't have to call their parents. This is Halloween by the way, Keith. So, you know, two days ago. So like he gets home, he's like, here's my phone. I'm like, great. Thanks. You know? And he's like, you're taking it back. I'm like, taking it back. Like we're taking it back. You're checking it in. Have a good night. And it's like these things, you know, like we're, back at this this morning. Cause like the phone went away and like this morning, like we had this.
Keith (07:36.29)
EHEH!
Keith (07:50.35)
Amazing.
Cameron Craig (07:56.383)
agreement that Sunday we were going to sit down and have a conversation about the rule set. Like what governs this system? And we're all going to agree to what governs the system because no one wants to have the repeat conversation. He doesn't want to have it. My wife doesn't want to have it. I don't want to have it. Like we just like we're all agreeing. We're locking in the rules. The rules become immutable. The device will be the thing that like delivers the rule set to the humans. No one needs to have it. It needs to have.
Keith (08:22.54)
Here's the social contract.
Cameron Craig (08:26.001)
Another conversation about this. And in the moment it was like, man, that's like hardcore, like, you know, dehumanizing in some way. But on the other end, was like, this is how, like, if we are having some sort of a symbiotic relationship with our technology, you're have to use the technology to like, like serve us, not the other way around. And the rule set can get entombed in the technology and then the technology can like deliver the rule set.
Keith (08:29.336)
Hard conversations.
Ahem.
Cameron Craig (08:53.017)
No questions, no negotiating, none of that, right? That's good for humans. So I don't know, man. It's just like.
Keith (08:59.958)
ticket notes. Yeah, tech needs to serve us.
Cameron Craig (09:03.807)
It does. Like, and as we get further and further into AI, it's like, these, these are the problems that I'm having at work as well. It's like, Oh, we could just replace all this with AI. I was like, but to what end? Like you're kicking that can down the road. It's like, you're just handing off a, like a human work effort problem from like one tribe to another. And like in the instance, I can't get into a ton of the details, which always sucks. It's like, when I finally quit my job, it's going to be so fun to talk about all the crap I've seen.
Keith (09:05.806)
Ahem.
Keith (09:14.531)
Let them.
Cameron Craig (09:33.697)
But like, here's the Patreon link, go fund us. It's like the logic with this one, just there's absolutely zero logic with this one. It's like you're gonna actually hand off, you're gonna hand off work effort to a higher paid, higher like busier group of human beings and you're gonna take work effort away from a lesser paid.
Keith (09:34.124)
That'd another like sub-s- a paid series.
Keith (09:52.34)
of course.
Cameron Craig (10:03.582)
I mean, it makes no sense.
Keith (10:05.836)
Because monolith, that's why.
Cameron Craig (10:08.648)
It's like, I must protect this one class of workers, right? Like I need to keep saying that this one class of workers is like the, you know, unarguable most like the jackknife or Swiss army knife of all things corporate. And you're like, bro, no, they're terrible at everything except one thing.
Keith (10:29.24)
So I don't know what, yeah. No, no, no, it's not killing me. I'm like, okay, maybe it's killing you. I'm like, it's getting my brain thinking about this. Yeah. Well, because everybody knows it too, but it's a legacy of the culture that built Amazon that made Amazon successful. But I don't know this, but as a systems person, I would postulate is that what got you to where you are today is not going to get you to where you want to go tomorrow.
Cameron Craig (10:30.482)
It's killing me Keith. It's absolutely killing me.
It's killing me. Yeah.
Keith (10:58.466)
The economy has changed, things have slowed down, technology's caught up, inflation's hit, there's all these different things that, the company's bigger, it doesn't work that way. And the joke that they're going to realize is that, dude, when you start building more agents, like complex agents, you have an orchestrator that has to communicate with the other agent. It's like managing people, but they're virtual. It's like a virtualized container, but it's like a virtualized worker at this point. if they don't have social skills,
The developers or people don't want to talk to anybody because they rather work by themselves in like a dark room like You don't want dark agents running around touching all the IT of your company Like what if they go rogue? What are you gonna? You know? What if they just decide that when they want to go to work one day this one to turn themselves off and on I need a break to
Cameron Craig (11:44.576)
Well, again, I have no material knowledge of the events of the past few weeks, like none. But what I've read in the news, which is commonly so I can talk about this, like the common analysis seems to be on one end or the other. You AI'd your infrastructure ops, right?
Keith (12:07.269)
the U S East. Okay.
Cameron Craig (12:14.24)
CEO is bragging about it like, hey, know, like 40 % or some crazy number of like all of our infrastructure ops are done by AI and what happens like two days later outage could be, could be nefarious, right? Could be hacking, could be like, I'm not happy about this. It could be, I don't know. Like nobody seems to have come to any conclusions there. haven't, you know, again, like I'm saying this truthfully as a human being, I have not heard anything inside the four walls. Um, I,
Keith (12:14.521)
Yeah.
Cameron Craig (12:43.88)
I doubt I would anyway, but like everybody seems to be operating under the premise that it was not a hack.
Keith (12:52.975)
No, yeah, mean, even if it was like inside, like, you know, who knows, it could have just been DNS and some weird config thing, like all these IT hacks. What I wanted to actually bring up, though, there was an article in AP about how Walmart plans to prepare America's largest private workforce for an AI driven future. And I talked about, I think Macmillan is the guy who runs it. He said, we have north of something north of 200,000 people doing that job. And we have about the same total number of people working in Walmart in the US.
blah, blah. So I hope what happens as we lead through this is that there will be pluses and minuses, but the net ends end up being more people, even more people have more ideas on how to grow. And then they compared that to other CEOs who are like, we're cutting workers right now, we're using AI to restructure the company, which you know, that that's, that's what I think this is all about. And I wonder
If all this like circular economy between all these AI companies and Nvidia is basically it's basically Enron economics at the end of the day, because it's all mark to market off balance sheet, whatever. But if you spam AI enough with investment, and companies put some press releases out about laying people off due to AI, then you kind of obfuscate the core truth by just putting more like muck in the water.
Cameron Craig (14:20.714)
So can you slow it down? I know exactly what you're talking about, but I suspect that a lot of people do not. So like when you're talking about the circular economics, like I think the tie in between Enron, like Enron is an example and like how they manipulated markets and this is like, go down another level, like talk about what the circular economics are. I think what you're talking about is,
Keith (14:43.543)
Yeah, so like.
Cameron Craig (14:47.442)
Hey, OpenAI, we are a very large cloud provider and instead of giving you $5 billion, we're going to give you $5 billion worth of compute space on our network. And we're never going to like actually transfer the money, but like we're going to take $5 billion of value out of your company at some point. And you will pay us back in something, whether that's ownership or interest or whatever for the compute.
Keith (15:16.003)
we'll pay you and yeah. And then OpenAI, yeah. And then in turn, OpenAI has like a contract to buy 5 billion, it's 500. It's like hundreds of billions of dollars, not just single digits of potential computer. They're going to rent it. Like it's all these very strange and they're doing it. Every big company, large tech company in the US right now is doing something similar, right? This is what we talked about a couple of weeks ago where it's like one giant monolithic company owning pieces of each other.
Cameron Craig (15:18.208)
Is that what you're talking about?
Keith (15:46.232)
Right. I mean, it's like it's I think Elon Musk called it like the infinite money glitch. And it works until it doesn't when at some point like bills have to get paid or you invest so much in infrastructure such that you can't the revenue doesn't cover the increase in costs or the debt service payments that it just it basically eats you alive over time. And
Cameron Craig (16:08.286)
Well, and then, and then at that point, what happens? So if you are the person that it's like North Korea, it's like Barack Obama, North Korea flipping the internet on and off. up, up, down. yeah, that's right. I think you're right. And I think the only thing maybe to your point, and you know, we can, we can keep going down this, this like detailed trail.
Keith (16:13.359)
Boop! Turn it off and on again, Cam. That's what happens.
Yeah, ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-
Cameron Craig (16:38.792)
The IP, it's like you as a company are now not, you can't pay back the compute you've borrowed. It's like the ultimate containerized service, right? It's like, it's like taking cloud computing and injecting it with a bunch of growth hormone and steroids with like, instead of a hundred companies, it's like the five heaviest users, which are all people who are developing.
Keith (16:56.26)
Yeah.
Cameron Craig (17:04.638)
language models, large language models, right? It's like, you're to pay us for the inference. You're going to pay us for the training. You're going to pay us for the, you know, whatever else, which is one. If you, if you look at that, you're renting hardware the way everybody rents hardware and you're consuming energy. That's the basis of it. That's what you're doing. Right? So it's like, we're kind of loaning you. I'm not saying we Amazon, I'm saying any, any of these companies that are in this circular.
Cameron Craig (17:34.496)
trail of obfuscation. You know, it's like, we're gonna pay your energy bills and your hardware bill. And at some point, like you're gonna pay us back either through some public event where we we get our money out plus interest, and hopefully some sort of giant multiplier. And if not, I think we might own your IP. I think that's what's actually being traded to be honest.
Keith (17:38.401)
Yeah.
Keith (17:59.588)
Dude, so...
Keith (18:04.015)
This gets into another level about like war and AI and how I think China is going to respond. the other thing I want to talk about real quick too is Bill Gates is like, yeah, all that climate stuff, probably doing something stupid. And it's because he's still a major shareholder of Microsoft and Microsoft. They just let's see. Microsoft supports open a board moving forward with formation of a public benefit corporation at PBC and recapitalization.
Following the recapitalization, Microsoft holds an investment in OpenAI group PBC valued at approximately $135 billion USD representing roughly 27 % on an as converted diluted basis, inclusive of all owners, employees, investors, and the OpenAI foundation, excluding the impact of opening as recent funding rounds, Microsoft held a 32.5 % stake on an as converted basis and the OpenAI for profit. So like you said, it's the IP.
And guess what? Gates is doubling back on the environment now because you need nuclear power to do all this stuff. You can't just have solar panels running server farms. This just doesn't work. So a lot of big moves are being made right now.
Cameron Craig (19:21.952)
Well Samsung, no not Samsung.
Keith (19:25.889)
Oracle? Okay.
Cameron Craig (19:25.92)
Hyundai? Hyundai. Hyundai's, they're rolling out mini reactors that will be built either alongside or as a part of a data center at this point.
Keith (19:40.537)
Dude, I'm so excited for this.
Keith (19:48.209)
I was thinking about like, that's like, that's a huge input cost, right? And if it's gonna cost, I don't even know how much that costs, but if it's like, know, $10 million or so for like a giant, like infinite battery for 10 years at a certain given, you know, consistent load, like, that's awesome. I don't know, I think it's gonna be cool what's coming out, but all right.
Cameron Craig (20:14.112)
I mean, I just...
Keith (20:16.09)
There's so much here that I could like, I could like take apart.
Cameron Craig (20:17.684)
Like, the sci-fi dude me though is like, I get it. We're engineering these things to be highly performant, highly redundant, and as safe as possible.
Cameron Craig (20:37.216)
We're doing all these things in very modular ways, right? Like, and you know, there's some interesting other ideas where people are using the flare from, uh, petroleum processing, right? Like it's wasted energy. They're capturing that energy. They're using that energy to. Yeah. Yeah. They're using that same, same thing, but for, know, like processing inference or whatever. Um, you know, cool, cool ideas. But again, like the doomsday sci-fi guy in me is like,
Keith (20:49.806)
Yep. Not guess Bitcoin farms. Yeah.
Cameron Craig (21:07.456)
Do we want to keep building hardened, modular, redundant server farms that instantly can move their data from one place to another around the planet? We've all seen Terminator, right? Like anybody that's my age, Like Skynet needs... It needs...
Keith (21:26.256)
I mean that's
Keith (21:32.13)
It needs more computer. It needs more power.
Cameron Craig (21:34.234)
what needs more power, needs more computers, and it needs to basically be like, I am not worried if you, you know, knock the switch off on one place because I've already moved myself to another place. Right? I mean, and eventually you're going to get to a place where the data has crossed a border where the sovereignty of one nation over the other is like, there's going to be a stop. It's like, nope, too big. You know, we're not going to drop a bomb there.
Keith (21:47.886)
Yeah.
Keith (21:56.152)
dude, it's already happening. Well, that's the thing I was thinking about, which was, you know, how, how easy is it to weaponize one of these things? And it's like, if you don't have a nuclear technician or like a nuclear physicist, how, how hard is it to like ask chat GPT to be like, okay, so break this down for me in like five steps. How do I, know, and cause it's just prompting, it's just having a conversation about like, I don't know. I don't want to put this on there and put this out publicly, but there's obviously.
I thought about this too, but then it's like, gets, who gets the say, who gets controlled because if these corporate, these corporations are basically becoming like nation states in terms of data center and compute, and if they can own nuclear generate nuclear, even micro nuclear reactors, there's probably some way you could cause some kind of havoc and way weaponizing that thing, you know, for better or worse, but like probably for worse. But yeah, I don't know, man. It's that's why I think.
So this is a good first full circle moment, I think for us. So because we were talking last week, I haven't posted this yet, but I will post that later about pivoting the podcast. so like last week, we talked about cycles and systems and astrology as a system and using that as a way to look at like a clock to map what's happened in the past to what's in the present to like what's kind of happening now and then seeing what could that mean for the future.
And yeah, right. We're effectively going into like a retrograde Mercury period, which is going to be crazy right now. But anytime something retrogrades, it's like a good time to redo, renew, reflect, redesign. So this next month, these next few months, few podcasts are going to be, I think, conversations about what more freestyle about kind of where we're going. Because in the past, we were very much making the intention to be
business and design thinking oriented. Yeah, well, design thinking because AI was commoditizing everything and then people didn't UX didn't change design outside of interface that much in the past decade. And so now it became a commodity. It became just you speak this thing into an AI and it spits you out interface through an MCP with Figma or whatever or newer tools are being made. And the lack of like systems thinking
Cameron Craig (23:54.752)
We started with design. Yeah, we went to business.
Cameron Craig (24:16.489)
Yeah.
Keith (24:22.699)
understanding how pieces fit together into a whole and how if you change one piece that like it breaks part of a whole or you know weird things happen like how do you think through that and in engineering it was funny because there was a control systems post that i was reading about on twitter before we talked and he was talking about all right no phone time can't do this you gotta check it in it's like controlling chaos and having kind of the social contract about agreeing how the rules of the system work and so we we think
fundamentally about systems thinking is really important. And we want to make this about systems thinking. So the design part isn't going to go away. It's more of kind of like a supporting character role, I think, if you want to think about that way, because I came from film. So it's going to be there, but it's not going to be like the focus. Like you go listen to this about because we talked and it's like,
It doesn't make sense. The people who want to hear that want to hear how do you make a custom GPT for from open AI to build it's like, we don't really care. Like that's going to be cool for the next six months. And then something new is going to come along and it's like a commodity again. So it doesn't really seem like a lot of value long-term versus understanding why are you building that? Who is it for? What's it for? Does it actually make a difference? Is that disruptive in the classic sense? You know, vis-a-vis like Clay Christensen and that whole disruptive innovation theory and things like that.
And but it's not going to be a podcast about astrology either. It's just I've been studying this for a long time. And there's so much noise and there's so much speed at which the change there's so much speed happening with the rate of change, that you need something to kind of help collapse these cycles in a way to make meaning of things. So that's kind how we're looking at it. And I think as I thought about this more to almost double my rent. If people cool, awesome. If people are skeptical,
Cameron Craig (26:09.984)
That was great. It really good setup.
Keith (26:16.003)
you know, I think it would be good to collect data from people and be like, look, this is what we think is going to happen. What is going on in your own life? What's going on in, know, in your corporate world or your own personal world, whatever, what do you think? And then get it to get feedback, you know, because the system has to have feedback to change the inputs and the outputs. And I also thought one thing I didn't want to lose is we had we were playing with the idea of because you can upload or record audio onto our podcast website.
If you have any corporate issues that you need red teamed, I still think that's a great thing to upload. We could listen to them play live and then talk about it and red team it. How will we break this down? How will we fix it and do some of these things live? But you and I could also go find some posts on LinkedIn where people are tangentially talking about these things. We just bring them up and talk about it and be like, okay, cool. They work for Cisco. They're doing this. The company was founded like this. They're in marketing or tech or whatever or dev and then break it down that way.
So it's still going to be systems. It's going to be, how do you go from kind of the macro and the micro and then find the window through to where this change is? And I think catching these future waves of change and there's a lot more, but let me pause there and have you chime in. But this is kind of what I'm thinking, at least doing this off the cuff.
Cameron Craig (27:30.546)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think you've you've kind of summarized our post conversation, right? So like what what we I'm going to change anything, like everything Keith said is right. Like there's nothing there that I'm like, no, like, let me refine this. But depth. So I think one of the things that we realized is design thinking is important, but it's also very limiting. And if you're not a designer and you haven't been classically trained in that space, the lift to get you
to a level of expertise there to even like understand the language is probably not worth it. I think the other thing that I'm observing is in corporate environments, the blending of the roles has begun, right? Like designers becoming engineers, designers and product people are like switching, you know, pieces of their role. And like, if you have a very strong product practice, you may not have as many designers are as strong of a design practice and you may not need it.
If you have a heavy engineering culture, probably the thing that you're trying to do is get your engineers to think about the design and the human side of it. Like how are humans going to interact with this? And you know, you may again be blending some of the design role into the engineering role. and, hopefully at some point somebody picks up the product role to think more futuristically about what's happening. All of that to say, as we were talking last week and you know, if you haven't listened to the
previous episode, maybe stop this one and go listen to it because we set up a bunch of things. The systems thinking is where after all the previous podcasts we've finally landed on, this concept is probably the the one that has the most depth. It has the most potential in terms of what it can do if you like master this particular practice. And honestly, is like Keith was saying, like
As we went more more macro from, you know, departmental issues or family issues or like corporate issues all the way to like world issues to like macroeconomic issues to the universe around you. Like everything is a system.
Cameron Craig (29:43.356)
And just different layers. like, to Keith's point, we're not trying to get you to believe in astrology, but we are trying to get you to understand is the world around you sits in a construct, which is the universe. And the universe runs on things that are very much part of science, like gravity and time and space. And these things, all these things come together, right?
Keith (29:43.545)
to different layers.
Keith (30:07.853)
and money. It's finance.
Cameron Craig (30:13.264)
And what we're saying is, if you look at the way the system is running, and you understand how any of these systems are running, like, you know, we're going to use at times the universe or astrology as an example of a very large system, which has a time and place. And in some ways, a repeating set of factors like that we went through last week, and, you know, you can then map those things to history. And then when you map those things to history, you're like, hey, like every single time,
Keith (30:32.643)
cycles.
Cameron Craig (30:43.08)
the system lines up in a certain way, there's a high propensity for things to happen in a certain way. We're not saying it's a guarantee or it's a prediction, but you can use your history to then figure out like what it is that's happening and come to your own conclusions. Like it's an excellent time when you start to sort of understand what's happening in the world around you for you to take advantage of it. Like, and that's, think.
And keep me honest with this one, Keith, like this is kind of where we ended at the last one. Like we've always been in this place every time we've talked about, like, it's not just do no harm. It's more like take advantage of the thing that you're seeing. And like, we've been trying to drop these like tricks and tips and hints for like, in this situation, here's what your advantage could be. Like take the opportunity and run with it. And like, this is just that. It's an expansion of that.
Keith (31:34.667)
Dude, well put and like I love doing this because I feel like you have a really good way of crystallizing and kind of making things like succinct and like solidifying kind of like a lot of different pieces that I'm kind of like, okay, here's this this this boom, boom, boom. So it's great. This is great. Thank you for doing this again, man. Like this is always like super fun to do with you.
Cameron Craig (31:55.008)
Well, can't help myself. It's, it's my neurodiversity.
Keith (31:59.29)
Dude, same, it works. So this is like the carrier wave. we talk, this is a concept we had. It's like a thing you're going to resonate against. So we would, know, if we have an idea we're trying to like seed or something we're trying to get going in like a corporate environment. it's like they, know, marketing is being measured by like number go up, visa vie, you know, the cart.
the order AOV average order value or whatever. And we're like, okay, we need an idea or like a narrative to like support to have them like latch on to almost like you would change the radio dial to actually hear the tune that you wanted to hear. That's a whole technique that we can do. But this is as a systems thinking thing. That's, you know, that's what this is. Astrology is effectively like the study of symbols over time. And, you know, orbital mechanics of planets are like hyper regular.
Like they're predictable so much so that we're like launching rockets around planets to go or, know, the Voyager and the Gemini spacecraft or whatever those satellites to go like way out into space. So because it's a clock, it acts as a very good temporal reference. And because there's been, you know, millennia of history where people have sat down and agreed on what these simple sets mean, it's a really good way to take symbols to look at culture or
causality over time and to go backwards or forward in time. And it's also a great way to study systems thinking because systems thinking is kind of cerebral. Like you're like, okay, there's stocks and flows. And I mean, this is what powers a lot of like electrical engineering because it's like, you know, all these atoms add up and then there's an acoustic reaction or you know, somebody gets sick and there's a viral load. It's just, it's too, it's too much to put in a person's brain at once versus if you're like, okay, the weather says
the tech is going to start getting whacked out. And you you explain like a Mercury shadow period and you show like how retrograde motion works relative to how we see something on the earth versus if you're on like just the sun. Again, it's just a timing thing. And like, dude, the tech has been mad weird, like the past couple weeks, it's going to get even crazier the next like month. So I don't know, we're going to try this and see what happens. Because at the end of the day, we've been using this stuff even
Keith (34:18.903)
all the way back into Macy's when we had to go to the boardroom and it took me a week and a half to help troubleshoot the scaler for this old projector and this super old boardroom. We had to call the satellite team. I mean, there's a video on this we did. We talked at DEF CON and I was like, okay, dude, this is going to break. Like Mercury is like stopping on the day we do it. Like this is like, like what are all the things that could go wrong? Like, let me literally like dry run this or like make sure it works right now. And it's a good thing we did it, but that's also like be well rehearsed.
Try your stuff, make sure everything works and stress test the system, plan for things to go wrong, have a backup plan. So yeah, do it.
Cameron Craig (34:52.192)
you
Cameron Craig (34:55.742)
I want to add something to this like, like on the, on the human side.
This skill set, I'm gonna say, not everybody can get there. And that's not me being disparaging or saying like, no, you have to be a very special thinker. Like, I'm finding the more people that I come into contact with who are systems thinkers, there is some...
Keith (35:11.759)
100%.
Cameron Craig (35:26.432)
There's some commonality there. And, and I do think it is a different way that the brain functions. And, and, know, as we were kind of just joking about, like certain types of neurodiversity have the potential for being like scaling. I'm not like, again, this is not to say like, if you have certain neurodiversities, like for me, dyslexia, dysgraphia, uh, dyscalculia, um, that you skew high on one side, but there's a spectrum, right. And.
What I'm beginning to realize is systems thinking is this very interesting observed behavior. And it is about observing. You're observing a lot of things. You're taking in a bunch of information. You're filtering out a bunch of noise. And then once you filter out a bunch of noise, you're sort of like the relationship of these two things then spirals into these 10 things.
And they come together in these various ways and like, here's how you move through the system, right? Here's how you avoid certain things that stop you. Here's how you like supercharge other things to like go faster. And I'm also not going to say that it isn't frustrating because those around you. It's like lesson number one in large scale systems thinking, very few people are thinking this way, like in their, in their steady state.
Keith (36:51.841)
less than 5 % at the most.
Cameron Craig (36:53.938)
Yeah, they're like, they're doing this, they're thinking deeply up, deeply up, but it's very narrow, the space that they're spending their time thinking is very narrow. And that is, it is a mark of intelligence in some ways, like that you can keep track of all these things, like a blistering set of detail, but the
ability to look beyond those things and say, but this thing here, which you're not playing with in this thing over here, which you're also not playing with actually have some effect on the thing that you are going deep in. And we, a society, we, as a business environment, we, as an education system are not set up well to deal with systems thinkers and systems thinking and
Keith (37:31.919)
Yeah.
Cameron Craig (37:48.84)
It's just strap in and prepare yourself because it can be incredibly frustrating, incredibly draining, and it's worse. You can feel like an absolute crazy person.
Keith (38:02.425)
So do 100%. And this is, again, this is a great like recrystallization. Dude, brain melting is a yeah, brain melting is a service. So.
Cameron Craig (38:06.624)
Keith's having a hard time getting dates because he's, you know, he's like thinking big. He's thinking big. It takes a very special woman to get in there and be like, I get it. It's all good.
Keith (38:22.857)
All of these neurodivergent traits, they lead to an emergence of something new. And so when I say emergence, it's like something that will happen that you can't really plan. But if you ever watch waves in the ocean, sometimes you just see a bunch of waves kind of come together and they pop up and one gets really big. That that's that's emergence in a complex system, right? Or, you know, you have a really rowdy crowd in a hockey game, and
my God, someone's in a penalty box, but then the ref got hurt and then people are drunk enough that they get even more rowdy and someone throws a bottle and boom, it's like a brawl breaks out that that's an emergent property of a complex system. So even though most this is not going to be a majority kind of podcast, I think that people were going to find there's going to be a large swath of people who's going to be like, cool. I saw this one clip and then it helped me figure out how to like map an org chart or to figure out how to like, you know,
Cameron Craig (39:04.798)
Mm-hmm.
Cameron Craig (39:20.928)
Amazing. Great.
Keith (39:22.073)
Do a thing. Yeah, which is great. Yeah, we want to make this accessible so that anybody could pick these things up and apply it and understand it. We don't want to like gatekeep things. But the people who are going to come back and consistently listen are going to be like, I think like the real change agents who understand force multiplication and they kind of have that as a core ethos because if you see these things and you actually care and you've gone through all this like life shit and you're trying to like self improve as a person as like your own thing you value as a human as your own personal value system.
you're going to get incredibly frustrated by the lack of others seeing the same thing. So I don't know if this is like part support group part like, you know, tactical training manual or whatever. But I think this is kind of where we're heading. And, you know, everyone's looking for meaning right now with kind of what's going on, because the change is just going to accelerate. So having tools, techniques and like, some mindset around how to adapt and
withstand building resilience or growing resilience to withstand increasing uncertainty. No one's really talking about that that much or no one really has heuristics or easy techniques and kind of ways that you can kind of ride that way because we don't things are crazy, with great crisis is great opportunity and there is a lot of opportunity, but I think it takes the right people. So maybe that's the new niche.
that we're going to help build that the people who know yeah, nuclear reactors are cool, but you know, there should be some rules around this or some, you know, accessibility to the right people, but also some constraints around how easy it is to just like, you know, is it some kid who's, you know, some distant son of a billionaire who's, you know, a future Bond villain. It's like, what are we going to do about this? You know, because, you know, so that's what I'm thinking.
Cameron Craig (41:16.692)
Yeah, no, makes perfect sense and I couldn't agree more. think that's, you know, that's the thing that I'm leaning in on is I think never has there been a time where, and we talked a little bit about this last week, right? It's like, you know.
This all came, some of this came about for me, at least in a future sense, right? Like thinking about the future versus what's right in front of me in the idea of like sending my son to high school. And my feeling is never has there been a time where systems thinking has been more important to the ongoing thriving of our species than right now.
because it's the last, let's say 500 years of technological development to get us to the place that we are today. But what's happened is the availability of all of this knowledge is now portable. And it never has been portable before now, which means any question that I have, I can probably get to some level of knowledge or some level of expertise in minutes where
Previously, that was not possible. I had to travel somewhere. I had to find a source. I had to probably talk to somebody to find a deeper level of source if I couldn't find it in the physical location that I was at the time that I needed it. And that took time. And so...
It was really important that we all manage these facts and figures and knowledge in certain ways. some of it was, like Keith and I were talking last week, it's like you keep your own personal library of the things that you know that you're going to need to reference on the daily for your job, for whatever you're trying to do. That's all gone away. Like our need to memorize the periodic table, our need to memorize, you know,
Cameron Craig (43:20.596)
the atomic weights of all of the elements on the periodic table not needed. Like understanding why the periodic table exists and how it's categorized and the system that it sits in and like why certain things sit on one side of the table versus the other, like that's really important. And knowing how these things function around us, the system that they sit in becomes really important. But, you know, same thing with mathematics. There's a bunch of mathematic principle that
we all should understand. when we get down to actually needing to understand and remember the theorem, which, you know,
took calculus, it took a bunch of geometry, took algebra, took algebra, linear algebra for business. I mean, I don't remember one single formula, not one.
Keith (43:58.18)
Mm-mm-mm-mm.
Keith (44:09.703)
And those formulas are used to justify having management consultants. We do like a future discount of cashflow, whatever. It's like a DCF or whatever. It's like, like that shit's all going away. And I love the 500 year analogy because that's back to the Protestant Reformation, which was Saturn, Pluto and Capricorn, which is COVID. But with the advent of like mass accessibility to information, we have mass expertise and cognition.
Cameron Craig (44:20.064)
I love it.
Keith (44:39.695)
as long as you're willing to learn this new literacy of like how to talk to AI and not just use it like a Google search. So it's almost like a long tail happens where you know, it's like Pareto's principle to where you're dangerous at that point, because you think you're an expert, but you're probably kind of stupid because you don't really know what you're talking about. But you know enough to be like, okay, look at my blood work. Let me see this biochemistry. I heard these kind of articles about this on Hoverman or Rhonda Patrick or whatever Dr. Rhonda Patrick and
Cameron Craig (44:46.26)
Right.
Keith (45:08.803)
Does this make sense? Is it not like sense check it against Mayo Clinic or whatever. So if you learn how to think and how to like, you know, not interrogate a problem, but examine these things from different ways and have curiosity, you know, those kind of people are going to just, they're going to be the new leaders of the world because they're just going to understand me as long as they can, if they self improve, because there's like a personality and a sales part of this too, obviously, but they're going to
go very far because they're just going understand how to leverage all this new exponential tech.
Cameron Craig (45:42.056)
Yeah. And I mean, again, you have to know how to work that system. And I mean, I think a lot of the things that are happening right now with our technology as well, like if we look at just the web, right, is a, it's more than a delivery mechanism at this point. It, it's a social connection. It's a library. It's our financial system. It's commerce. It's all those things, right? Like that we've warped it into over the last 30 years.
All that shit's in beta. Like it's absolutely in beta at this point. And if you, if you are wedded to the, the previous, I don't even know if I should call it a system, but like the previous rule set that governs all that, you're probably going to get like rolled over because the abstraction of all the things and all of the construct that we've built is beginning and, and knowing
Like you were just saying, Keith, it's almost like taking the pieces apart and being like, okay, you know, I need to know how to inquire about something. I need to read the response to the inquiry. I need to ingest the top level data and, you know, take in the references that are cited, you know, with what AI has responded.
to me and then from there I need to dig deeper into certain areas and understand and like those new constructs, like that life cycle, if you will, is going to be far more important than, you know, understanding how certain things like, and I'm more talking about like as we're, as we're built, we continuing to build these systems. It's like, we used to really worry about
all of the underlying architecture and that underlying architecture, like the source of the knowledge is becoming foundational and.
Keith (47:46.084)
going away. It's like, it's like electricity. I had a really good professor at ITP, Clay Shirky. He was like one of the first social software, like critical thinker guys about it. And he used to talk about how when a technology gets boring, it's when it gets really innovative and interesting. Because you can plug shit into like your walls that you couldn't get all these devices. And when I first started, people were screwing the washing machine into like a light bulb socket and getting maimed because there was no on off switch. They didn't think about
Cameron Craig (47:47.04)
abstracted. I don't know how else to say it.
Keith (48:15.888)
this is giant motor with no safety that's going to like, it's an industrial appliance that's going to like, you know, hurt you, right? So that that's what I think you mean, correct me if I'm wrong about like the level of it gets abstracted away where it's almost like you don't think about it becomes so pervasive or it's everywhere that you don't think about it because it's just you take it for granted.
Cameron Craig (48:34.962)
Yeah, it's a great analogy. mean, think going with commercially delivered electricity as maybe a good way of describing what I'm talking about is an excellent example, right? We don't think about any of the things in the grid.
Like if you live in a neighborhood like I do, the only thing that I see of our actual grid is like overhead wires and the overhead wires go to a pole and there's like a distribution. And oftentimes if you like look down the street, you know, there's very, very large capacitors, but like, we don't think about any of that stuff. just go and we flip the switch and on comes the device or the light or whatever, right? Like, but all of the potential, like you just said, Keith, like
Keith (49:19.376)
Light goes on. Yeah.
Cameron Craig (49:25.982)
The fact that I can go down into my basement and like one of the plugs is connected to like my 3D printer. The energy is being turned into product. The energy is being turned into like ideas delivered. Like my designs become physical product, right? this, we are not thinking about the electricity anymore. And that's like where I see the internet headed or these types of like online experiences or this.
connection between us and our most favorite technology at this point, right? Like, which is the flat screen connected to the computer or the phone. It's going to be kind of the same way. And so now it's time to think about, all right, you've got a delivery mechanism that is an access point to all this knowledge. What can you do with it? You know, it's not just building another app and like getting in app funding. It's like. It's bigger than that. Like.
Keith (50:16.279)
No.
Cameron Craig (50:21.588)
Time to untether from all the stuff. I mean, we both were. It's also why we're not talking about design in this podcast anymore. It's like, sorry designers. Like, I'm over simplifying this, but it's like.
Keith (50:22.169)
That's why I got bored after, yeah.
Keith (50:32.857)
It's not visual design, it's yeah, specifically.
Cameron Craig (50:39.944)
The design of all of this stuff at the fundamental level is a commodity. And it's time, you're going, if you are actually somebody that knows how to design and think in systems, now it's time to go and like figure out like this tiny insertion point, right? The phone, the laptop, whatever it is, forget looking inward.
Look outward, right? Like that's the whole thing. It's like, okay, you've got this ability to do all this stuff now. What are you going to do that's actually going to change the world around you? Like we've spent 30 years very much like turned away from the world around us and very much like this. By the way, I'm staring at a 35 inch monitor, right? Like we've just been like this for 30 years. there's so much going on in here. Well, meanwhile, we're just like outside, we're kind of like, I don't know. Like what do you want to do?
I get some coffee and like sit here. Maybe I'll sit across from you, Keith, with my phone and you know, like every two or three minutes I'll stop paying attention to you and I'll go back to my phone. It's like, the technology is a massive unlock. It's a massive unlock for things that we can do in our physical world. And like we're just, it's almost like the beginnings. It's like now that you have this knowledge delivery mechanism.
Keith (51:34.253)
Yeah, gets him talking about features, making new features. It's like you.
Keith (51:46.009)
Dude, yeah.
Cameron Craig (52:01.362)
You can, you can step away from sitting in front of a screen for 12 hours a day. Like go outside. Like when you need it, it's there, but like go solve some problems.
Keith (52:11.652)
this before, already around the same time, Aziz Mazar and what was the other guy's name? Raul Powell at Real Vision, they talked about the exponential age. I was thinking about this idea during COVID. And for me, the exponential age is that like everybody felt like they age 10 years during COVID. So you felt like in that one year, you like gained a decade, you were like, there's so much stress and just insanity going, dude, yeah, I haven't even shared my
Cameron Craig (52:34.43)
Yeah, my beard definitely like show that. Yeah. Yeah.
Keith (52:39.12)
Cinnamon sugar right now, it's like white and red ish when I used to have red hair. anyway, so everybody aged a decade during COVID. By 2030, it's going to feel like 100 years of change went by. And by 2040, it's going to feel like a millennium, 1000 years have elapsed or two full Protestant Reformation cycles. So we were so concerned with the last 2000 years of converting physical things into information.
So went from atoms to bits that we're going to go from bits back to atoms again. But now we're going to start encoding consciousness as we get into the quantum realm. Right. But the first step to that is what came was talking about 3D printers where it's electricity with information into this physical thing that you can print in your basement. But you can also send that plan to somebody else to 3D print and like a disaster area or a third world country. And it was interesting talking about power because
There's a whole nother story about like Jamaica and my cousin's wife's parents who were in Jamaica. I had to build them like a kit for like a sat phone and a power station and solar panels because they got somebody who's going down there. So it was like, I'm like, my God, this is yeah, it was they haven't gotten back to me yet. So was like three hours of like writing all this stuff down. You'd be like, look, if you have to go to Cuba, here's how you do it. To take a boat and don't bring dollars, bring euros because the tax 10 percent. Anyway, this is one of the thing. But yeah, you know, but I'm. Yeah, we could talk about here, too.
Cameron Craig (53:45.216)
That's cool.
Cameron Craig (53:59.114)
That's cool. I want to hear about that offline offline. It sounds fascinating.
Keith (54:04.984)
Yeah, so but it's, this is the exponential age, this is where we're heading, where it's, we went from atoms to bits, and we're going from bits back to atoms right now. And eventually, in the next 15, 20 years, it's going to be like, consciousness. And that's when it's going to be really interesting about like, where are we really from? Because what do we tap it? I mean, who knows? That's like a huge black box of like, like, we understand the brain ish, but we don't really understand like the mind.
and like how these things kind of really operate. It's like a black box. And as you were talking earlier too, I was thinking about like, I think something we do really well as kind of like system thinkers slash hackers slash designers slash business people is reverse engineering black boxes. Things that you don't really know what it is, how it works, what it's designed to do. It's just, it's doing its thing, whether it's a corporate process or, you know, this piece of compute you plug into like infrastructure.
Cameron Craig (54:33.93)
Hmm.
Cameron Craig (54:48.416)
Mm.
Keith (55:00.644)
But how do you start taking that apart and understanding how these things work? That's, don't know, you kind of have a, you have to have a curiosity one. And then it's like, how do you be as scientific as possible, like troubleshooting these things? And I think, coming from cars, it's just, kind of like, alternator's out, what's happening? It's like sparks aren't, spark plugs aren't kicking or something's happening. You're just kind of like going to like troubleshooting mode. But yeah, I don't know. There's a bunch of rants in there, but.
This is kind of where we're heading, think, now with the exponential age and what I think we want to help do with this podcast.
Cameron Craig (55:37.17)
Yeah, agreed. So I people are coming along with this, this transition. I was explaining it to somebody else and, and I could tell it was like a little bit of brain melt, right? It's like, you know, how do you intend to, how do you intend to make that digestible was the first question, which was a great, really great question, right? Like, and so that's what got me thinking about it. And I, of course,
As I think about things, I tend to text Keith, we do this to each other. It's like long thread, right? Like, you know.
Keith (56:14.5)
Yeah, we should go through that. was going to say that was on my mental map to like, we should just, if you want to talk through this to the different categories, it'd be great too.
Cameron Craig (56:20.296)
Yeah, I can bring it up on screen. like what, where we went after that, like, cause we, like Keith and I had a really long conversation when we were not recording about, know, should we pivot this? Like, what do we do? Like, you know, again, as, as, as he rolled through, it's like, how does the astrology and the universe fit into it?
Keith (56:38.32)
Are people going to freak out? Is astrology without, you know, and thank you for the invitation. Yeah.
Cameron Craig (56:40.956)
Yeah, does that have like such a stigma stigma to it? you know, so, and then I kind of went through and looked at the summaries of a bunch of our old episodes. And what I came down to is like, we spent some time talking about like the component tree of both corporate systems and also design, right? Like how do, how do you get in and redesign things? How do you use,
social engineering and hacking in some ways when you're inside a corporation to make things happen. And I don't know that we'll go away from that completely because these are all techniques that when you're working within a system you can use to break the system. I mean, again, not to bring science fiction back in, but you know, if you want to upload your consciousness into the matrix, you probably need to know Kung Fu. So yeah.
Keith (57:34.289)
Well, real quick, the safety part, like what made us successful with Macy's was that we were trying to lead people better than we found them. Right? We were actually trying to like, yeah, and not like it's for the greater good, but we're going to like poison the well. It's like, no, this isn't a Jonestown cult thing. was like, how do you actually architect triple wins where
Cameron Craig (57:45.725)
Always.
Keith (57:57.913)
you customers were psyched, people were doing jobs they loved, and you actually were cash flow positive, like free cash flow positive. So like the whole thing was a positive generating kind of thing, like system. And that's, that intention, you know, is what we set to try and help save us from ourselves from doing stupid shit, basically.
Cameron Craig (58:14.302)
Yeah. Hey, that's a, that's a really good jump off point for, for that part of our set of, podcasts. Like, I think there is a high degree of reliance on yourself in those moments. Cause like, as Keith said, sometimes you have to make a hard call and you're clearly like, I'm about to give up something that is my own IP. I'm about to give, give away.
the success to date of something that I mean, and Keith and I had these debates as we were doing it. It's like, crap. we're totally, like we have had so much success with this and we're literally about to just hand it over. And the first time I did it, like in Keith's like, you just gotta do it, dude. Like this is not, you're hanging onto the wrong thing. Like the system, and for us, the system was going up, up and up and up.
decision makers, right? The system is the thing that you're trying to own. You're trying to like actually like get in and figure out like how to influence the system. This thing you built is like give it away. Give it away. Like in some ways it's kind of an anchor for the next thing. Like, cause you know, like if you literally think about the idea of going up and up and up, like if you're hanging on to something that you're working on down at this level, like a lower level, like a foundational level, that's weight you don't.
Keith (59:15.792)
How to work it. Yeah, work within the rules.
Cameron Craig (59:34.738)
necessarily want to drag up the 30 flights of stairs to get to the sea level, right?
Keith (59:39.628)
owning analytics in marketing versus, hey, someone who's an SVP, here's an analytics package that you can go across the whole organization, it just commoditizes the whole damn thing. And now it's accessible because somebody was gatekeeping the data and giving you a report instead of, you know,
Cameron Craig (59:56.2)
Yeah. And I mean, the innovation system too, like those things, it was like, we'd come up with these frameworks for how you innovate. We'd come up with these ideas for like, Hey, here's whole portfolios of work that you could go after. And, you know, in the moment, it felt like we were giving up something, our own IP, someone was going to take it and go run with it. And, you know, their results would vary.
Keith (01:00:24.465)
we were. But that's why it worked, because it was seeding social capital. But you're doing it in a way because they didn't know how to they didn't have system thinking. And we didn't realize that we had it. And that's what we were basically giving away. But we could be like, just connect this and this and this or whatever. You know, and then it's those Google there was like a Google Compute like for two grand, like a little box, a yellow box, you could plug into your infrastructure to basically do all your search. We were going to do it. Yeah, well.
Cameron Craig (01:00:27.296)
That's why it worked.
Cameron Craig (01:00:51.008)
Remember that.
Keith (01:00:52.879)
Dude, saw one of these things, we had all those, no dude, at Defcon, you could just, it was like two grand. I was like, fuck, I could take this back. I'm like, how the hell am gonna get this on a plane? It's like, know, an 80 pound rack unit. That's like a little for you guy. But site merchants having an issue with like tagging, basically putting attributes on like a shirt with like color and it's metadata basically, right? Color size, where it originated from, brand, whatever. And they eventually,
Cameron Craig (01:00:54.611)
on eBay.
that's right.
Keith (01:01:19.629)
Macy's ended up eventually highly hiring a guy from Google to sit on their board. And we were going through this. They didn't. They like, we're not a tech company. No, we're not going to be. We're not a tech company. And it's like, in the long term, we got killed. But in the long term, it made the change that actually got them better. And eventually, even though they hired a CTO internally, they got a CIO who had a background in like hotels. I think she was at Marriott or something, but she understood.
Cameron Craig (01:01:44.733)
I think that's right.
Keith (01:01:46.48)
Yeah, so it led to the right decision for them to go downrange. So it was a slower snowball effect. And we weren't afraid of playing the long game and moving. And we just, we were just innately always thinking about these things this way that we were just like, fuck it. Like, let's just have fun with this. Like people are just going to like, you know, how are you going to make it digestible? It's like, well, you're going to see, you're just going have to trust us.
Cameron Craig (01:02:11.132)
Yeah, totally. But I mean, to your point, was like, we always left those situations better. And a lot of times we left it better because we were like, here's a bunch of knowledge with the research and maybe in some instances, even a test, like we tried this and we know it works. So like, we're not just theoretically, putting a proposal in front of you and having done no homework, no research, or even trying it. Like oftentimes we were like, here you go. It's like turnkey and ready to go. So it's like effort.
Keith (01:02:39.385)
The limit, yeah.
Cameron Craig (01:02:40.352)
effort load to take it on, right? Like we're not just like, we've done some thinking and now we're off to go and do something like we, we were not like classic consulting model where it's like, here's your a hundred page brief. Now go, go do the hard work. Like we'll see you. Thanks for the a hundred million. Um, you know, we,
Keith (01:02:53.997)
No. Here's how you look good in front of your boss. Do X, Y, and Z, and you make it think that they're it's their idea. That was that was the hack. Yeah.
Cameron Craig (01:03:02.206)
That was the core principle. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And again, it left them in a better place. And then on we went to the next thing. We're like, all right, like, you know, and
Keith (01:03:12.847)
Or they would like draft you and pull you ahead to the next thing because they're like, look at this cool thing I'm doing. Like, how, what is it? Like, well, let me send you these guys to go present it and tell you. We're like, okay, awesome. Thanks.
Cameron Craig (01:03:22.976)
I mean, I was always shocked. I was always shocked that when like that value exchange would happen, like oftentimes, which we didn't know in the beginning, cause like the first thing that you got me over the hump, you're just like, give it away. Like I'm really uncomfortable with giving this away. And you're like, just give it away. You don't need it. Like you don't need it where we're trying to go the Hill. We're trying to climb at this point. It's weight. You don't need just give it away. And
When I finally did, I think I was amazed that the value exchange on the other side was like, cool. Like, this is amazing. And like, yeah, so solid. actually, like, since you're thinking about this, can you come over here and like meet with these people? Because like, they think, you know, something and now that like, you're showing this, like, I'm going to introduce you to them. And like, they've got similar problems. You're like, all right, let's go meet with them.
Keith (01:04:12.975)
And now you're doing recon and getting more context and more up to date information on what's happening. it's this constant like, don't worry about this diamond thing that they teach you like in UX or whatever. It's just like, you're always got to be updating your model. It's just like, and you're increasing your service area for potential to do great work or find new opportunities and things. And that, I don't know that that's the mindset they don't really teach. I think we always kind of had, cause we're like, fuck it. It's going to, you know, it was going to, we're going to get
walled in somewhere, so you might as well just always have our eyes open and ears on the ground to kind of see where we can move next.
Cameron Craig (01:04:46.656)
Yeah, and I think it was fascinating too, because we definitely picked, we picked a, if you think like 1984, we picked a ministry and we're like, we're going to go up as high as we can in this particular ministry. And then like, once we have the, the confidence and the trust of this minister, this minister is going to introduce us to another ministry, right? And like that technique, even in my world today, like works like a charm.
Keith (01:05:08.109)
Move lateral. Yep.
Keith (01:05:15.183)
Well, because you do I mean, you're doing it's a prisoner's dilemma. You're doing the most benevolent thing first until you get like shot and then you respond tit for tat or that's when you move laterally. You're actually trying to make things better for everybody. Like not just again, not just for like the greater good as some crazy cult leader, but like you're trying to make things actually happen. And yeah.
Cameron Craig (01:05:15.752)
I mean...
Cameron Craig (01:05:35.836)
Yeah. And you're exchanging value. It's like, I'm going to give you this and you're going to give me something else, which we both need. And it's going to help both of us. Right. Like it leaves both of us in a better place. And that, that lesson was a really hard lesson for me to learn. like, know, ego gets in the way and control gets in the way and your feeling of ownership gets in the way. And you know, yeah. So maybe going back to the bigger thing, like I think so.
Keith (01:05:54.637)
Hey, we're humans.
It's change. Yeah.
All good.
Cameron Craig (01:06:04.478)
Like in those previous conversations, like we just kind of rehashed or gave you a summary of those. you know, for those of you that didn't listen to all those, you probably now just heard about the first two episodes. but we talked about systems and components first. We talked about how they link, how they line up, how certain things work together. And we talked about techniques to move between the different components, right? Like, so we started outlining a system without really saying we're outlining a system.
Keith (01:06:18.745)
and how they link.
Cameron Craig (01:06:31.848)
Then we switched and we talked about designing and designing in systems, which, know, we're kind of interweaving that in the example that we just gave. Then we talked about corporate systems, right? Like we talked about how corporations are oriented, like we're saying now, right? Like these, this metaphor of ministries, right? Like you have expertise that lands in certain vertical control groups, right? And the benefit.
Keith (01:06:59.31)
The Monolith.
Cameron Craig (01:07:00.264)
The benefit here is if you are, even if you are wedded to one of those, the quicker you can break out and go horizontal between them and understand what's happening, the sooner that you become much more powerful in a system like that.
Keith (01:07:17.903)
That's how you see ground level truth. so like, cause Kim had in parentheses, the monolith here, which what was an innovation became a legacy system over time, whether it was 200 years or 20 or two, it's like, what was cool and what was awesome is all of sudden it's like a commodity. And then you're also going to hear things like we've always done it this way. We can't change it. That's the corporate system. The monolithic kind of like it's, it's intractable as this giant same opaque thing that we can't get into.
or that you can't change that that's, that's one kind of target we're going to kind of talk about how to like, how to work around the corporate system.
Cameron Craig (01:07:55.72)
So then the next three points, think in some ways we just got done talking about, so I'm gonna keep this higher level and move us forward, but they're about you as an individual or the human element in this, right? And the first thing that I wrote down and sent to Keith was keeping resilient in a corporate system, right? Like all of these things that we're talking about and the crazy that you're gonna feel at times if you're thinking this way, because you're gonna get told no a lot.
You're going to get told, a lot. You're going to get told, that's risky or, you know, like, I'm not going to get fired for that. And, know, it's a lot of trying to deal with people's fear and a lot of their unknown fears, right? Like these are things that probably sit deep, deep down in the emotional side of the brain that unfortunately you're fighting against. it sometimes.
If you have the clarity of vision to think horizontally and to think about the system around you. like, we said earlier in this podcast, you're surrounded by people who are thinking about the up and down within their, particular vertical or monolith. You're going to be constantly at a place where, you know, you need to do things to keep yourself one.
You got to yourself off the hook. Like I have to do it like probably once a week. It's like, I'm not insane. Like, and I, and I'm also, I'm also not saying I'm not questioning the sanity of the people in the room. They have their own reality and I have my own reality, but my reality is oftentimes not tuned to their reality because I am not thinking. And you know, sometimes knowledge is exchanged in those moments and there's a value exchange that happens there. It's like, Hey cam, there's something.
Keith (01:09:20.634)
Yeah
Cameron Craig (01:09:42.28)
way, way deep down in this particular vertical of knowledge or this particular vertical of expertise or this thing that I own that you don't understand or maybe you're not even cognizant of that is like such a massive stopper to what you're trying to do. those are amazing moments where it's just like, shit, like there's some foundational business principle or some foundational technological herder. Yeah.
Keith (01:09:59.953)
clarity.
Keith (01:10:06.424)
misalignment of vision and value system.
Cameron Craig (01:10:11.624)
Allow yourself to be humbled and allow yourself to gain knowledge in those moments, right? But remember that you are also not crazy and you have not failed in those moments either. You just have gained more information that can help you change the gears slightly in the bigger system.
Keith (01:10:30.646)
learning experience, not mistake.
Cameron Craig (01:10:33.17)
I've had a hard time with that. I'm going to just own it personally. It's been hard for me because there's been times where it's just like, that shit up and let's not worry. And it's like, well, can't blow that shit up. Right? Like to your point, like you pull up, do you flip the switch or you pulling out servers in the rack? You're probably trying to pull out servers in the rack. And sometimes I'm literally like, let's just push the rack out the window or just burn the entire data center and start over.
Keith (01:10:37.71)
Yeah, it's human nature, man. It's all good.
Cameron Craig (01:11:01.876)
But you can't do that for a lot of reasons, right? Sunk cost being one of them, like institutional knowledge being the net another, maintenance, longevity, security, uptime, you take your pick. And I'm not just picking cloud specific terms. Like these are also just business, right? Like when we were working at Macy's, like we got to places where like you and I would consciously circle things, the things that we're thinking, like this is high risk.
Keith (01:11:20.09)
Business continuity stuff, yeah.
Cameron Craig (01:11:31.656)
It's also like high sunk cost. It's also like politically charged. And, know, they were all around certain things that were very much in some ways where we ended up was like, there are some immutable laws and there's a physics system that works in this particular thing that we're not going to change. And so if we're going to go there, it means high investment on our part.
high due diligence on our part, all these other things that we'd have to change in our process and our systems thinking. If we went there and oftentimes we're just like, it's just not worth it. Because whatever value we're going to get out of trying to change that, not high. And that's not a failure either. That's just, knowing the system that you're working in and being like, the gravity on this planet equals x, right? That's not going to change. You're not going to change that. The gravity on that planet is going to equal x long after you.
Keith (01:12:13.05)
Know your limits.
Cameron Craig (01:12:23.764)
Or not on that planet, right? It's like, don't change. Don't try and change the things that you cannot change. And if you are going to try and change them because they are so important to something you're doing, you better be sure that the value that you're going to get on the backside is worth it. I think I covered the keeping your sanity in a world that ignores systems. Talked about that a lot. And maybe the last one, which Keith touched on is like how to hack for a better system. Like, I think we've already said it. You want to leave everything that you do in a better state than.
where you came at it and, the other part again, which at times has been hard for me is like, ego does come in and it's like, I want to hack things the way I want to hack it. And I want the result to be the result that I want. And sometimes that's not, that is not the way, right? Like you're going to get a result that you don't necessarily expect. it may, it may not be the one that you want, but it's, it's
in a system, it's what the system can handle, bear, equalize against, and ultimately deliver. And those things are sometimes not in the control of like one human being.
Keith (01:13:33.745)
like this. The way I thought about it was not just for like a better system, not just hacking to make something better for everybody, but you make a choice and there's going to be some kind of outcome and it's like it could be a range of things that could happen. It wasn't going to be just like I'm going to do this and you know number go up by like $10 a month or something like that. It was like they might get pissed, they might like it, who knows, whatever.
It's like the risk of them going crazy is like 10%. You know, if they go off the reservation in three months and they, know, they slit our throats in the backend, it's like, know that we can't be trusted, but you know, if they do that, then the risk isn't that bad because we have enough buy-in with certain amount of people that it's not going to come back to get us fired or whatever. So it's again, it's thinking in not probability so much about like 10 % plus 2 % plus like, a finance person, but just, I don't know. I think we just had like an intuitive hit on
Okay, we can push the envelope enough here because we have social capital, we've done a lot of good work for this person, or this is going to be a huge ask. So we have to like, have someone's boss's boss say it because they actually have they can't be told no as easily, but we have to get them to understand this meets their goals or whatever. That's so there's, you know, again, that gets back to like the sanity, how you keep your say, I don't know, there's
some way we're going to find a way to visualize a lot of these things. They're not, they're all kind of like interrelated, but there's also like different parts that you pull focus on to like understand, you know, what's important. The other one, go ahead. No, no, no, it's going to go into the universe, but keep going. You had an idea.
Cameron Craig (01:15:09.908)
Yeah. Yeah.
Cameron Craig (01:15:14.496)
I think I'm gonna, like, no, you go, you go.
Cameron Craig (01:15:21.108)
Let's say the universe for the end, I think the other ones like patterns. So the other things that I said were, how do you establish patterns in systems? How do you change a system? And then how do you exploit a system for positive change? I wanted to go through those quickly and we'll come back to the universe because I wanted to give an example from our time at Macy's that is like a very tangible, like a quick and very tangible example of like, like all of those things kind of combined, like not, not the big picture, but like sort of the
sanity and all the way through to changing and establishing patterns. It's like, one of the things that Keith and I were involved with was in an innovation track where we were trying to make the beauty part of the business of Macy's competitive. Sounds simple, maybe a little bit frivolous and a lot ridiculous. but it's big business in that particular part of retail.
And it's also a business, part of the business that is not completely owned by one party or another. And so when I'm saying that is like Macy's does not control the entire like marketplace, right? They have lease space inside their buildings where they hand it over to companies like L'Oreal or Lancome or Givenchy or whatever, right? And
they were falling behind and they were losing market share. In fact, they were losing entire like generational market at that point to Sephora. And one of the things that we realized in the digital space is like, have this massive arm to go out and do two things, influence and be like a receptor of certain aspects of the community that we could build. And we can actually service that community digitally, which means like lower human labor.
And the ability to like curate things like one to many and, you know, influence, which was a very hard concept for people at Macy's to get. Like they were very much like one-on-one. Somebody comes into the store, they have an interaction, they leave with product.
Keith (01:17:17.903)
We had a
Keith (01:17:23.703)
So it was real quick to kind of like, is a huge Macy's brand, right? But plus like a huge like closet of product that we could pull from to pull a vertically integrated kind of beauty box or basket to go to a specific person that they would take off. But on the supplier end, samples were always this coveted thing because it took a, it was just, working at Estee Lauder, learned this a ton. And that's what became kind of like the bitch working with the people who own that part. But it's,
Cameron Craig (01:17:25.246)
Yeah, do it.
Keith (01:17:53.4)
it was combining these two big things together. Like we could have made all the stuff, but the tech got in the way because the cataloging didn't work. But anyway, those are core things. I'm trying to think about like the components of the system into this kind of context that you're going to tie into like, okay, here's a pattern here. So you change it. Here's how to like exploit it. So just wanted to drop that in real quick.
Cameron Craig (01:18:11.648)
Which just on queue, you did the exact thing and thank you for jumping in there because I probably would have left those details out, but like, yes, like, so keeps outlining the components of the system. And then you have gatekeeping, right? Like you have the people that work with the SDA lotters and the landcombs of the world. These are the rules.
Keith (01:18:28.291)
These are the rules, Cam. We agree to the rules. You gotta obey the rules. No phone after midnight.
Cameron Craig (01:18:34.336)
No phone after midnight. you know, samples are hard to get Cam and they're not just going to hand you samples. Like they need to know that like if they're going to manufacture some stuff that it's going to get it in the right hands of the customers and not just be sitting around somewhere Cam. Like, okay, got it.
Keith (01:18:51.913)
and be traceable so they know a person who got a sample created an actual lift in the purchase, which was like a huge thing at Estee Lauder. So it was like, we're just not going to burn all this money on some stupid idea.
Cameron Craig (01:19:03.796)
Yeah. So then on our side, have like untested concept, like, Nope, we've never built a community before. Nope. We've never influenced before. Nope. We've never had a mailing list before that we could use to like create a community. What do we send them? Who's going to do the editorial? Like it just like the stack of things just kept getting added on the risk profile kept getting higher and higher. And then it was like, fine. You can go try it, but you got to limit this thing to like a hundred people. It was like, okay.
We'll limit it to like a hundred people. I'm like statistically irrelevant and like, we're not going to learn anything, but whatever. So then. Yeah, go.
Keith (01:19:43.258)
So real quick, they they they perceive that as one, it's not going to work, right? Disruptive innovation, I Craig Christensen and two, it's not going to yield anything positive if it does work. So fuck it. We're just gonna let them do whatever they want. And in their minds, they thought about if they had to do it right, the old way, there's going to be a lot of work that they're going to have to do because they couldn't think about how to put these things together in a more unified, more efficient way by exploiting these different pieces to recombine them in a unique way that was going to create
Cameron Craig (01:19:56.756)
Yeah.
Keith (01:20:11.927)
something new and awesome. And that's what you guys were seeing. We were kind of pointing you guys are pointing together by that case. This is in play when I came in. anyway, so keep going. So I'm just trying to like tie this together. Yeah.
Cameron Craig (01:20:20.618)
So no, that's great. And keep interrupting because like you're providing all the components that we need to tell the story. Right. So we were like, all right, we're going to go launch. We're going to go launch this idea. We're going to seed some content and we're going to add a form that will allow you to sign up. Like, hey, are you interested? Like, here's the concept. You know, here's the concept in a teaser of like what this is going to be like, not just here's here's product, but it's like, here's
Keith (01:20:27.695)
Awesome.
Cameron Craig (01:20:49.608)
Some tips and tricks for things for this particular season. Here's a list of things that you can either buy or sample and ultimately like get this look and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Keith (01:21:01.795)
And don't forget about the box. You convinced them that the box was a giant ad and they were like, because they didn't understand it wasn't just a combination of this product. It was like, it's a freaking physical thing. It's advertising. Macy's is doing something interesting and new. It's not your mom's, know, Macy coupon kind of gift experience anymore. And that was brilliant because you understood how to like
they were seeing the compounding value in a way that spoke to them and it hit the kind of lizard brain, at in the corporate side. So that was, I wanted to bring that up too.
Cameron Craig (01:21:33.96)
I was like, you're giving an avenue, like you are, you are, like the Lancombs and the S-Days of the world, they don't own the audience. We own the audience. You need a space that you can basically give Lancombe and whoever an entry point with product in their audience. And now I cannot claim,
Keith (01:21:50.041)
Right.
Cameron Craig (01:22:03.488)
Ownership of that particular idea that came from the first week I walked into my freshman dorm in 1989 and I was handed a box and I crack open the box and You know what's in there? It's like, you know what was in there It was like all kinds of shit from PNG like here's your here's your shaving cream Here here's your razors Here's your Pringles like everything the PNG makes was in a box, right?
Keith (01:22:23.299)
Fucking brilliant.
Cameron Craig (01:22:31.04)
Like, and you know, had, like it came with a little booklet, like, hey, you know, like, being on your own in college for the first time's really hard. Here's some tips and tricks. Like one, wash your sheets. Adulting 101, it's like, we know your lizard brain is just developing and all you wanna do is go drink Procter & Gamble beer, but before you do that, like, maybe dab a little of this on each, you know, cheek before you're heading out to the bar. Oh, and by the way, like, tomorrow, you should probably wash your sheets, right? Like, it was brilliant.
Keith (01:22:39.823)
Adulting 101, yeah.
Cameron Craig (01:23:01.024)
It's like, all right, well why don't we do the same thing? Like I'm a captive, like clearly P &G knows I'm a captive audience in the dorm, right? Everybody got one. It was like he showed up, he was sitting on the end of the bed before he even made the bed. Yeah, well I can tell you, like the first week of every semester, the dorm smelled amazing because like what are you gonna do? You're gonna have your shaving cream fight in the hallway with all the free P &G product that you just got.
Keith (01:23:01.529)
Amazing.
Keith (01:23:10.627)
And dudes smell bad, the dorms smell terrible.
Cameron Craig (01:23:26.432)
It's like amazing. So good. Plus everybody has soap the first time they go and take a shower. Like the shower smells amazing as well. Right? Like nobody had dandruff. Like we all like, you know, had our head and shoulders. Anyway, so like back to Macy's. We did kind of the same thing digitally. We're like, Hey, tips and tricks, you know, Oh, by the way, like what we're thinking is like, if there's enough interest, you'll sign up and like, you know, we'll send you a box of the things that we think are wonderful. Like, you know, it's like, kind of like get the look.
Keith (01:23:34.132)
my god.
Cameron Craig (01:23:57.306)
And, you know, we're hoping for a hundred.
And we launched it. We probably got like 300 in the first hour. And at 300, I was told to shut it down. And I pulled the wait, wait, shut it down. Hang on. Like I don't hold on a minute. I got to go downstairs and go talk to some IT people. It's like, where are you going, Cam? I'm like, I'm going downstairs to grab a coffee. I'll be back. It was like, well, do we shut it down? I was like, no, no, no, no, I got to go talk to the IT people before we shut it down.
It's like, but I can do it right here. I can do it right here. I'm like, no, no, no, no, I gotta go talk to some people before we do that. Like, don't do anything. So I come back from my coffee and it was like, should we shut it down? I'm like, how many people do we have? It's like, well, we've got about 950. I'm like, okay, well, yeah, like we should probably think about shutting it down in an hour or two. But first let me go and make sure that the people on the...
Keith (01:24:36.72)
Slow walking it.
Cameron Craig (01:25:00.864)
beauty cider aligned and it's like, hey, by the way, we got like 900 people in the first hour. It's like, what? 900 people? Like, how are we gonna get all the samples? I'm like, I don't know. Like that's kind of a problem and it might not be great. It's like, all right, well I'm gonna call S-Day and see like if we can get samples for 900. I thought it was 100, but like you're telling me now we gotta probably come up with like a thousand? Yeah, well, like we probably don't wanna disappoint those people. Like that'd be bad.
So they got on the phone, figured out that they could probably get it for like a thousand. It was like, okay, well like that's interesting.
Keith (01:25:33.296)
There's a key piece here. So it wasn't just like a thousand. were like, Estee Lauder was like, dude, yes. How many do you need? Because they saw the demand and they were like, OK, if Macy's has people they're going to send it to, we can trace who the person getting the sample is. And then you have the email address to say, did they purchase? Yes. Then we have a target conversion that is actually is so valuable for them that they can be like, OK, cool, because they run a model based on like demand because those cycles are 18 months in beauty. Because it's
Cameron Craig (01:25:40.58)
What?
Cameron Craig (01:26:00.286)
Yeah. Yeah. So as they, as they, she calls, she calls me back and she's like, yeah, they're totally, they're totally into deliver. I was like, all right, well, can I, can I bring you in on a little like, you know, again, leave things better than you, you left them. I don't think we should shut this down at a thousand. And it was like, no, no, we need to shut this down. Like they're not going to go for anything more than that. Like we have to shut it down. And I was like, let me.
Keith (01:26:02.121)
This is all not the long thing, but yeah, so they were psyched, like they were elated.
Cameron Craig (01:26:28.436)
I'm going to run some things by you and then maybe you could call them back and validate. like, I think the data that they're going to get from this, the understanding of how many people are interested in a Macy's channel. And they know about like the customers that come in for Macy's because we provide them with a bunch of demography. Like I think that information and that signal alone is like super valuable to them. It was like, God. All right. Well, I'll call them back. Okay. Great.
So this person departs to go call our benefactors at mainly SDA and Lancome. And meanwhile, I got on the phone to Influencers and I'm like, hey, here's something you should probably think about. Like how big of a list do you have? like, do you want free product? Like we can make sure that like you Influencer are like at the top of the list. It like, what? No way.
Keith (01:27:25.219)
This is 2015 to 20. This is like 20 2015 2016. This is like a before influencers were just starting to ascend. Yeah. So just to give them context like influencers. It's like no no no this was ahead of its time when you doing this.
Cameron Craig (01:27:28.308)
This is when like beauty boxes and all this nonsense were like a big thing. Like there are whole companies around this. Yes.
Cameron Craig (01:27:38.898)
Yeah, we were like in the first wave of like buying people off for like their influence. So the next hour, the top like four influencers in this particular space, all are like, my God, Macy's is doing this. Like this is unreal. So fast forward two hours, like I'm waiting for our contact in the beauty.
Keith (01:27:56.388)
It's amazing. is no, yeah, they can never believe it would happen.
Cameron Craig (01:28:02.368)
Or to get back to me after she's waiting for the people at SDA, because you know, like it's now 10 a.m. and like they've gone to lunch on the East Coast. Like I can't, no one is getting back to me. So the influencers kick in and we go from like a thousand to like 17,000 in a matter of like two hours. And then.
Keith (01:28:10.916)
Hm hm.
Keith (01:28:22.991)
It's crazy.
Cameron Craig (01:28:24.114)
Then at some point my boss gets wind because like, Hey, I heard that you're, know, you've expanded the test from a hundred to a thousand. Like what's going on? It's like, and our benefactor starting to get nervous. So then I get a phone call from our benefactor who is not my boss. It's like, you need to shut it down. And it's like, how many, how many people have you signed up? And I'm like, 17,000. It was like, what? And then it was like, shut it down now. And I'm like, okay. I am.
Keith (01:28:47.247)
haha
Cameron Craig (01:28:53.812)
I'm on my way to shutting it down. Well, meanwhile, the person at S-Day calls back our contact and is like, yeah, yeah, yeah, like, we'll figure it out. Like, but can we space it out over like a quarter or two? And I was like, absolutely. Like, we need product for a year. And they were like, a year? Like, you guys are gonna keep us in a box and like send out samples of our stuff for a year? How much do you need? And I was like, 30,000 samples. And they were like, done.
Keith (01:29:24.415)
Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, because they're such a good partner of Macy's and there's always been a lot of back and forth because free gift for the purchase, like there's all these different things, these buying patterns.
Cameron Craig (01:29:35.253)
which does nothing. They literally like, here's your thing and it drops into a bag and like people are like, but I don't like, I'm the wrong color to use that. So I take the thing, you know, it's like, but I don't need this. Like, don't care. And now you got people on the hook who actually want the stuff cause they're, they're reading about the look in advance and they're like, yes, please. You know, like that's your user right there.
Keith (01:29:49.591)
it for a lot of
Keith (01:29:58.372)
Exactly.
Keith (01:30:03.193)
So keep going with the guy in IT what the next step was. What happened?
Cameron Craig (01:30:12.97)
Was that the part where it actually got shut down or was that the part where he was like, how are we securing all this stuff and like, what are you doing?
Keith (01:30:19.043)
No.
No, he was like, okay, I can turn it off. Just let me know. And then, because we got back to him so late, he went home until the next day. Yeah, so all of sudden, it was like some crazy was like, how many 1000? Yeah. But in a day,
Cameron Craig (01:30:30.538)
That's right. To the next day.
Cameron Craig (01:30:36.648)
It was almost 50,000. It was almost 50,000 at the end, like in a sub 20, 24 hour period.
Keith (01:30:44.119)
Yeah. So, you know, but they didn't be the people we were having to work with didn't understand. I think that understood that if this got out one, it would look, make them look bad because we did something innovative. They didn't do, but so it was like, they were just probably angry that they didn't think of the idea to, to show there's proof in this signal, but also nothing really innovative or interesting had come out of like Macy's in a while because they were thinking about like,
Let's give them VR headsets in store and it's like if somebody comes in store, you don't want to take them out of like the physical experience. They're trying to get something done or trying to find like a blouse or something for like a wedding or like they have a very instant need that they need to like tackle versus like don't put them back in the box and then the machine again. So yeah, but it blew up in a good way. But you know, like all things.
Cameron Craig (01:31:38.522)
But it blew up in a good way and like back to the like going over all the things that we talked about, right? Like we hacked it. We totally hacked it. And it was obfuscation in the beginning, but it was obfuscation with the help and knowledge of others. So we knew we were not going to deep six the relationship of Macy's with Lancome or S. Day.
We also knew that we were not going to deep six the relationship with the customers, the end customers in Macy's. We knew that we, we'd done the risk analysis, we'd met with them before, we knew what they were interested in, we knew that they wanted signal as much as they wanted product in the hands of people. And they honestly questioned whether or not Macy's could deliver a reasonable number of people.
You know, in the beginning, when we outlined the things, were like low thousands, like they were interested even at that point. But I also knew that just in talking to some of them and how they had signaled in previous meetings, if we were talking tens of thousands, they were going to be one just stoked that there was signal because it's like, we need to keep investing in this channel. Macy's, right? Like in a world where you've got a whole retail environment that's totally not Macy's, that's dedicated only to beauty, Sephora.
Keith (01:33:05.882)
Yep.
Cameron Craig (01:33:06.482)
And Ulta was like about to start. Ulta was tiny at that point, but it was about to blow up. And you've got the old stodgy thing that kind of is stuck in the bottom of, you know, every Macy's. like, does anybody actually go to Macy's? Does anybody actually go to the mall? If they do go to the mall, they really go in, you know, into a department store at this point. Probably not. Right. Like, and they were literally like, in that moment, they just.
Keith (01:33:26.318)
They need it at that moment. Like they need something to go right then, yeah.
Cameron Craig (01:33:31.72)
And they were also like, Sephora is doing all kinds of crazy things online and you know, they're doing a bunch of things with mail order and all these things. And I knew that even in the moment, if we did something that was risky with a particular program, the signal that it was going to send to our partners was nothing but a positive. And so it was a little bit risky, but it also was like calculated risky. was not.
This thing's going to blow up and I have no contingency plan to contain it. have no contingency plan to clean it up if it blows up, you know, and
Keith (01:34:03.46)
Yeah, but even if it blew up though, they had a huge data set that had a large signal of like, yes, there is massive demand for this. And then even if they totally botched the job after the fact, they could still tie a person with a purchase to a sample or not. So they were going to know that they were going to get real data on a part, like they could tie identity to a conversion, which was like from a sample, which hadn't really been done at scale.
Cameron Craig (01:34:13.161)
Yes.
Keith (01:34:33.14)
it's not easy. Like, because I before Macy's, was I worked at Estee Lauder, I did a job for them rebuilding their their main website, doing the same thing with like, we don't know how to like, samples, we would do more of them if they knew they converted or not. But it's just it's like shooting into the into the darkness. So yeah. So yeah.
Cameron Craig (01:34:34.302)
Yeah.
Cameron Craig (01:34:48.734)
Yeah. Agreed. So netnet, mean, again, like I think it's a good illustration of like what we're talking about, right? Like we saw a system, we analyzed the patterns, we hacked the system. We didn't do it nefariously. We left all of the partners in that scenario in a better state, including the poor woman who's working with us to try and get the samples. Like she learned something and she said that.
I learned that they would come to the table and they would manufacture those things if we had something in trade that they needed. And what you gave them in trade was knowledge, right? Like there's signal here and there's interest here. And it's a place where you can put product and sell product because they were questioning that. They were like, you know, why should I invest in you guys versus somebody else? And we gave them a reason to reinvest in us and
You know, we handed that back over to the beauty team. They manage that relationship. We did the content. did the technical development for them and we did the thing for a year and they got a bunch of interest and mutually, you know, sold a lot of product between the two companies. And, you know, in the end they decided not to pick it up because I think they thought that the cost and the time and energy that they needed to put into it versus other business imperatives were not.
important, but we extended the value of Macy's to Estee Lauder and to Lancome for like at least another 24 months where we were right in their like crosshairs. It got me an invite to their corporate headquarters, to talk about innovation and to look at the things that they were doing in their system, to figure out if there was a reverse integration of their innovation into our stuff. so, know,
Keith (01:36:22.618)
Social Capital.
Cameron Craig (01:36:44.296)
we gained leverage there that we didn't have previously.
Keith (01:36:48.016)
And getting back to like moving laterally, one of the big linchpins was that the infrastructure was just so, it wasn't tuned to be able to do this at scale that higher up suits that were in different parts of the organization, whether it was marketing or technology, even going up to the C level, they started to see, shit, like, here's this cool idea. There's a huge spike of demand for like a good signal.
But we can't do it because we got to like figure out how to fix the technology. And like no one ever, ever, ever wanted to do that because, you know, they're just getting sold this like infinite bill of, you know, catbacks that they didn't have, they couldn't put it into because the stores wanted a catbacks. They got to replace the ceilings or the floors and the stores are obviously aging. You know, so it just became this huge, you know, any, any big company, there's always hunger games that happens every year where it's like fiscal planning for the next year. And it's like, okay, what do we plan? What is the,
know, what is the kegger going to be or whatever it is, you know, insert whatever financial metric that they just engineer around that doesn't really mean anything because they don't actually do it. like, so that was important too. So yeah, there's always a way to like, think leverage these things and make it positive. It's just a lot of people don't have like the vision or the ability to kind of like see, like peripherally, you know, I would say like perspicacity or like the ability to see deep and far but like
Yeah, you kind of like I think you kind of have that and you think about the future or you kind of a lot of people just kind of check in, check out and just kind of punch the clock and that's it. And that's, you know, but there's a lot of room to exploit because people are lazy. You can, there's a lot of room to run in there.
Cameron Craig (01:38:26.27)
Yeah, and those things are fun. I mean, that's the other thing. think it was like, it was a very personally rewarding experience, like to actually make something from virtually nothing and to try something that we all were like, it's fascinating and we don't know if it's gonna work, but like there's a high probability that it will just based on like what we know to date is we're all just sitting here and like.
We got it up and going from nothing. It was an idea to the moment where we had it set up and we were calling influencers. It was under 10 business days. know, and in a corporate environment like that, that's kind of like unheard of.
Keith (01:39:08.42)
Yeah, and with a catalog.
Keith (01:39:13.968)
Yeah, and it's like it's something that Macy's had a huge product catalog and all these resources they weren't leveraging in a world where things were kind of converging to the necessity to do that. And a layer above that, because we're talking about like systems in different layers, Macy's had real estate assets that they weren't thinking about as like a more unified experience where if they're going to build 34 Street and make it taller, don't just sell corporate office space, like
Do you put a club and then like a hotel and then just different things? Like is all these different ways to kind of think about how are cities evolving? know, where is the market going to beyond just becoming this giant like warehouse? Because and even then it's like we were talking about apps to like you can't have like a Google Maps on your phone to figure out where are the white shirts as like a guy. Okay, fifth floor turn left do this. It was just, you know, we had a lot of ideas on how to kind of work it. But at some point,
If Macy's finds a private equity guy who understands technology, like really understands it and understands the unit economics behind things like they're going to reboot that. It'll be like, um, like Lincoln as a car company or one of these old car companies that, you know, the zoomers don't know. So they just rebrand it because the actors and the boomers are like, Oh, that's crap. It's like, well, not anymore. No one knows it's a rebrand. So, but yeah.
Cameron Craig (01:40:36.03)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, again, it will take somebody to look at, look at the components and the system of what they have. It's like, you know, if you boil Macy's down to its fundamentals, it's, it's a giant real estate company that kind of runs a retail environment and
Keith (01:40:56.525)
It's a re- yeah. With a sheer of veneer- with a veneer of retail.
Cameron Craig (01:41:01.192)
I mean, the fascinating thing too is like they own oftentimes the parking lots around, around the store. And, you know, then, then you go inside the store and you look at the footprint and you've got the ability to do point to point warehousing in pretty much every major Metro in the United States as an example. And you could actually.
lease that space and build out that space to do automated distribution of product. could, I mean, you could be in a place where not on the scale of Amazon, but you could compete with the regionality of Amazon and the speed of getting something from a store to home. With that REIT, you could look at the merchandising history and the buying history over the last
more than 50 years of like, there's a lot of demographic information there that you could use. could anonymize and use like not to target me something or you Keith something, but you could understand generationally, like what people are buying, how they buy, when they buy, what changes in the world that, you know, necessitate the buying. There's all of these different
Keith (01:42:18.427)
And that data becomes an asset class that you can basically give away for free to extend your payable. you're hacking the cash conversion cycle. So yeah.
Cameron Craig (01:42:27.838)
Yeah. So like you said, if somebody comes in there that really looks at what they have and the pieces that they have, maybe not necessarily in terms of like traditional retailing.
You know, you're right. There's, and there's partnerships they could strike, right? There's all kinds of different things that they could do that would make that a much more compelling business than just being yet another retailer in a dying mall somewhere, right? Like.
Keith (01:42:54.297)
Dude, at some point, Amazon is going to have a huge liability with all this infrastructure and all this delivery infrastructure. And that's going to become a commodity when you have self-driving cars. then it's like, it's basically like, there's a book called the box, I think it's called, but it's about the containerization and the standardization of containers and how that just unlocked this whole global commerce set up because
All of a sudden you can standardize how many containers go on a shipping container, like a giant ship, and then that takes 30 days to grow in the world or whatever. what it goes back to is like, if somebody is going to come there physically, IRL in real life and give you their time and energy and eventually money, that's your scarce resources, time and place. It's physics, right? At least until we neural link or whatever. yeah, so at some point it'll get there.
Cameron Craig (01:43:49.992)
Yup. Not tomorrow. Anyway, I want to cap this one at this because like, I think we've done a good transition into systems. I think we've given some good examples. I think it's also a jumping off place since we've kind of outlined the framing that we intend to sort of come in and out of. I think we're going to probably see if there are holes in some of the things that we've talked about or other like.
Keith (01:43:50.033)
Probably not tomorrow.
Keith (01:44:11.834)
Yeah.
Cameron Craig (01:44:20.282)
spaces that we need to dive deeper in, in some of the things that we've done previous. But I think we're also trying to build a roadmap of how we want to talk about these things. And maybe even like categorize them to say like, Hey, we've been really thinking about, know, today's talking is about the human, you, you, the human decision maker in a system. Or, you know, we're going to go back and talk about patterns like,
You know, our intent is to kind of look at this list and we probably will add a few more things because, you know, Keith's hasn't had a ton of time to think about it, but like, we'll probably add a few other things. And, and, you know, our hope is that we're sort of traversing between these concepts and we'll try and be as good as we can about saying like, Hey, we're thinking today is going to mainly be about this. Cause I think that will also help, you know, people understand.
Keith (01:44:50.395)
Yeah.
Cameron Craig (01:45:10.558)
Like this particular episode is about this and you know, if you're not interested in that, you can skip it. If you're really interested in it, like it's like a do not miss.
Keith (01:45:18.063)
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think we're going to figure out maybe run some tests with how we kind of configure the episodes. It's like to make this easier, it's going take a little bit of time to do like design to show charts or graphics or kind of how to make this visual. And I don't know how to do that at speed yet. You know, again, a big impediment for me was like the stigma.
Cameron Craig (01:45:26.11)
Yup.
Keith (01:45:44.729)
with astrology. And it's not like we don't I don't want to make this like an astrology show. It's just I'm looking at this as weather and seeing like, I knew the world was going to shut down at COVID. I was telling a friend of ours in November, I'm like, you need food, you need can I'm like, this is gonna make this because I was watching what was happening in Hong Kong. And I was looking at like the gear and like the police and the protests at know, poly you or whatever. And it was like, like, this is, this is a fucking beta test for the Chinese military.
Cameron Craig (01:45:45.864)
Hmm. Mm-hmm.
Keith (01:46:14.501)
That's like, you know, it's called cognitively close enough, where instead of using real weapons, you have, you know, basically guns with not live ammo, but dummy rounds or with like, you know, non lethal or less than lethal. So you're getting them in the context in the stress and the crowd control. So it's you're getting them like live combat training without the liability aspect, but you're getting up to that line. So I just, I just thought it was kind of happening. So the other thing too, was there was a,
Cameron Craig (01:46:38.408)
Yeah.
Keith (01:46:42.639)
And the Chief of Staff Network, which is great if you're a Chief of Staff or you're looking at that, you should check it out. They had these brain trusts like once a month and there was a woman who was high up at Palantir. She was the Chief of Staff and then, you know, she's doing her own kind of corporate consulting thing now. And, you know, we go around because you have this kind of like hot seat things we do a break off of groups of five and groups of two and it was structured. So you kind of like there was really good icebreakers. A guy, David Nabinsky ran it, check him out on Twitter. He's our LinkedIn, but he's really good for live stuff.
But she was, you know, we got to astrology at some point, because I'm like, look, what I really want to do is combine all these things like it's hacking, it's security, it's design, it's astrology, it's an MBA, it's all these pieces together because I see how fast the world is changing and just how unprepared everybody is. But I know I can't talk about this on LinkedIn right off the bat because people are going to be like, it's crazy or it's all bullshit or it's like this hippie thing. mean, LinkedIn is pretty cringe as it is right now, but you know, whatever. part of this, me getting over that. And she was like, you know what?
I looked at her chart real fast because I've just done probably five, six, seven hundred charts at this point in the past few years. And she was like, if I didn't hear you talking to these people about their corporate monolith problems and giving them the right ideas on how to hack the system, she's like, I would have thought you were crazy. But now that I can see what you're doing and kind of putting this together, there's like a validity behind this. So hopefully it translates a little more because again, it's just, they're just tools. It's not the end game. You know, it's just
There are ways to understand how to get you to where you want to go and to give you more like agency to how you control your time and your energy around you. Because, you know, otherwise these phones, they're designed to just like, it's like, it's like Vegas. It's designed to make you fat, poor, and take all your time. And that's like what the phones and all these apps are basically doing at this point now too. that's where we're trying to go. don't, you know, this is going to, we're to need a little, I'm going to need a little bit of space to, or like rope to kind of figure out how to do this from audience or whatever. But
Cameron Craig (01:48:29.29)
Mm-hmm.
Keith (01:48:41.562)
You know, again, it's fundamentally about the system and it's how do we teach systems thinking in a different way rather than just reading a book by helping you, you know, can you take those tools and apply that to yourself to make your own, you know, your own life, your friend's life, your family's life, you know, the job's life, everybody, everybody better at the same time. So.
Cameron Craig (01:49:00.074)
Yeah, dude, great, great way to end an episode. I couldn't say it anything more or better, so let's call it there. Dude, thank you.
Keith (01:49:05.54)
Cool.
Keith (01:49:10.732)
Awesome. And dude, thank you. All right, dude, Cam, thank you again for the space to like do all this and that this is it's gonna be a wild adventure, but I'm looking forward to it. It's always it's always a good time. So thank you, man.
Cameron Craig (01:49:21.928)
I think it's super important, right? Like I think that's where we landed. Like this idea of systems is really important. Like it's, we're at a very weird inflection point as a species and with our technology and like where markets are going and like being working people right now, like all of these things are converging in a very, like there's a, and we were talking about like pyramid and an inverted pyramid and we'll talk about that next time. Like we'll bring that back in, but like that little.
Keith (01:49:37.519)
Yeah.
Keith (01:49:46.096)
Mm-hmm.
Cameron Craig (01:49:50.748)
space where the inverted pyramid is meeting the like pyramid coming up is like, it's a very important moment. And I just think like, if we don't think about these things as a big system, we're going to do one of two things on the positive end. Like we're going to like opportunities will be found.
Keith (01:49:52.847)
window.
Cameron Craig (01:50:15.786)
And those that don't adopt some kind of a systems mentality may miss opportunities. That's the positive side of it. The negative side of it is if all of us don't adopt or some of us don't adopt some sort of systems thinking, we're going to probably end up blowing our feet off. like,
Keith (01:50:29.488)
Or you're to get controlled by a few people because technology is zero marginal cost, meaning copies are free. So less people can control more with less effort and less resources and wars or logistics. They cost money. They're expensive. know, carnage aside, that's so yeah, it 100 % echoing everything you're thinking.
Cameron Craig (01:50:44.36)
Yeah.
Cameron Craig (01:50:49.906)
Yeah. So like that's that's one of the things I think that's come into focus for me is just this is an important moment to as much as you can think in systems.
Keith (01:51:02.884)
Let's do it. Systems thinking.
Cameron Craig (01:51:04.582)
Awesome. All right, man. As always, thank you. feel like I'm in your debt.
Keith (01:51:10.288)
Thank you, Kamis. This has been fun, No, dude, it's all good. We're all going to the same place. I appreciate this, the time, the energy, the love. Thank you, too, man. We'll find our way together.
Cameron Craig (01:51:20.37)
Yeah. Cool. Great episode.
Keith (01:51:24.209)
Alright Deuter, till next time.
Cameron Craig (01:51:26.24)
Late.