Technology Deep Takes with Craig Nashleanas
“What makes meaningful stories will never change.”
This week on the podcast, Ben is joined by Lens Distortions’ Craig Nashleanas to dig into how creatives are doing meaningful work in an increasingly digitized and automated world.
The guys dive into the ever-evolving realm of AI, discussing its transformative impact on the creative industries and our daily lives. With AI becoming increasingly integrated into our world, how can we leverage its potential for the better?
Ben and Craig discuss what the emerging metaverse space means for the future of work, entertainment, and social interaction. Is it all just science fiction, or with tools like Apple Vision Pro, is it becoming a reality right before our eyes?
We'll explore the pitfalls of social media and discuss the responsibility of social media companies in mitigating these issues. How can we balance the benefits of connectivity and the risks of digital addiction and misinformation?
You don’t want to miss this exciting hot takes episode with Craig Nashleanas.
Check it out on your favorite podcast catcher.
Ep. 50:
Technology Deep Takes with Craig Nashleanas
Automated Transcript
Ben Lueders (00:00):
How do you make meaningful work in a noisy world? Welcome to Growing a Fruitful Brand where we discuss how to create and grow a brand that makes the world a better place for you, your customers, and your employees. I'm Ben Lutter, founder and art director of Fruitful Design and Strategy, and I'm joined today by my good friend Craig, co-founder of Lens Distortions. A few weeks ago I had his business partner and my other friend, Jonathan Kaiser on the podcast. And in that episode we get all into what Lens distortions is, what they do and all about the ethos behind their brand. So if you want to learn more about Lens Distortions, check out that episode. But really the reason I've got Craig here today is because we had this amazing coffee conversation a few months ago and the whole time I'm thinking this guy needs his own podcast. He thinks so deeply about everything. So welcome to the podcast.
Craig Nashleanas (00:52):
Thank you. It's good to be here.
Ben Lueders (00:54):
And so when we were talking offline, we were saying we don't necessarily want to get into the ins and outs of every technology and every trend that's happening right now, but really more we want to talk more about how to think about the changes around us. How do we think about the technology and the different mediums that are changing around us? How do we think about that? Well, so to kind of tee us up, Craig, what is your general consensus of the changing world that we live in, especially for us in the creative field?
Craig Nashleanas (01:33):
That's a big question. I would say that my general consensus is I don't know what's happening or what's going to happen by and large, but it can be fun to speculate. But I mean that genuinely in that there's a lot of people who claim to know a lot of things about how the world is changing, what the next 10 years are going to look like, disruption, whatever. I think things are moving fast, but when the dust settles and what that looks like could look a lot of different ways. And so I think it's a lot of observing and just sort of watching and predicting. But one thing I've kind of chewed on is thinking back to the 2000, 2001 kind of.com bubble that was going on, and we were pretty young at
Ben Lueders (02:19):
That time.
Craig Nashleanas (02:19):
It's been a while, but it seemed like the overarching idea there was that everyone thought the future is now, it's here, we're ready for it, let's go. People invested in everything and thought this is here to stay. And it actually, it was kind of a preview of all the things to come, but the world wasn't ready for it all at once. And so you had a lot of stuff that kind of fizzled out and a lot of,
Ben Lueders (02:41):
But I think of his pets.com.
Craig Nashleanas (02:43):
Do you remember when
Ben Lueders (02:43):
Pets.com did all those superb bowl ads? And they're a little sock puppet. They lasted like a year after that or
Craig Nashleanas (02:49):
Something. I think that's what a lot of people think of stuff like that. Anything that can be put on the internet, people will want to buy internet and they'll want it now. Well, I mean that is true today, but it took 20 years to get that. And so I mean, I think a similar thing with AI and machine learning and all of that, it's certainly a glimpse of the future of things that we will use and we can already start using it in super meaningful ways now. But also there's all kinds of stuff you can do with it that isn't quite refined or isn't quite ready or requires so much handholding or prompting from somebody that's actually saving them time in some of those aspects. So I dunno, I'm not worried about it. I also think for me personally in our company, I mean we serve creators. We serve people who are using their creative skills to create something that didn't exist before.
Ben Lueders (03:42):
And
Craig Nashleanas (03:42):
Last I checked, they weren't going through all that work just because they had to do it manually and they hated it or whatever. They liked the creative, you liked the creative process. Right, exactly. So yeah, I think it is stuff that creative people, this is another tool in their tool chest to automate some of the stuff that maybe is more cumbersome or whatever. Certainly something to pay attention to, something that we will pay attention to in our company and try to figure out how to integrate and use in thoughtful and tasteful ways. But it's not like a new thing. I mean, AI is a technology on a huge, massive scale, bigger than a lot of things, but it's still sort of technology times what it's amplifying, what it's being trained to do, what humans for now are still picking what that it should be levering against. So yeah, it needs to be thoughtfully used, I guess I would say. And I'm more skeptical of humans' ability to use AI in meaningful ways than I am of AI being able to eventually do whatever we want it to.
Ben Lueders (04:50):
Is there anyone that you think should be concerned about their job because of ai? I think that's one of the things that, especially when First Dolly and some of these visual things, I think there's a lot of designers and illustrators that are like understand, oops. I mean, I think
Craig Nashleanas (05:09):
Siri,
Ben Lueders (05:09):
My watch just went off, I think, did you hear that?
Craig Nashleanas (05:13):
But Siri should be concerned about her job because AI is here to eat her lunch. But
Ben Lueders (05:18):
That's
Craig Nashleanas (05:19):
Awesome. Yeah, I mean, I think that if you're doing something that's a pretty monotonous task, that's just like whoever's employing you to do it wasn't able to find another way to replicate that. If it's a commodity, that's what technology's good at replacing over time. It's something that people are doing over and over and over again.
Ben Lueders (05:40):
But in that analogy, in that example, it's like, again, it's not so much about replacing Java, more like being a tool in someone's, I think of how AI technology has improved the time that I used to spend trying to cut people out of in Photoshop. And now that stuff is instantaneous, and I see a lot of that kind of stuff. Like this was just a monotonous. Now, if your whole job was just cutting people out in Photoshop, which has been actual jobs for people, I guess some of them might be concerned, but I'd hope that those people would be able to use this technology to make their jobs even better and deeper.
Craig Nashleanas (06:21):
And I think that there's aspects of what people will use AI or generative art in this case for that they're in some ways replacing something that's already been commoditized with a different way to kind of do it. Because I say that, I mean there's great artists that make stuff from scratch that get paid to do that, and that's really, really good. But we're also in a world where everything's on the internet and people have produced free stock imagery of all kinds of stuff. And so you already have people leveraging that free stock imagery. And so the price has gone down what people are willing to pay a true artist to make something custom has become that's sort of less in demand, but in some ways that makes it more special for the people who are willing to employ an artist to do something manually and put a labor of love into it that makes it special.
(07:09)
But yeah, I think it's like if you are creating a custom generated art of something you prompted it to versus searching free or cheap stock imagery to find something that is similar, that could be an example of where it's actually just improved the workflow, but it hasn't necessarily devalued of human's work. The commoditization of human's work kind of happened before that in some way, which is an unfortunate thing in some ways, but I'm just saying AI didn't do that. It's just sort of opportunistically adding technology to something that was already disrupted by technology over time. The internet made cheap assets available
Ben Lueders (07:53):
For. So Craig, how would you define meaningful work? I think as creatives, we all want to create work that is meaningful, right? That's lasting, that's timeless, but how would you define that? And I know this is really broad, that's the point of today's conversation. Think about some of these broader thoughts, but how would you encourage creatives to seek out meaningful work or go about it?
Craig Nashleanas (08:24):
Yeah, I mean, meaningful work and meaningful creativity is in no way separated from what's meaningful for people and relationships. And what, I mean, at the end of the day, I think you're a StoryBrand certified agency. That whole thing is about story and the power of story, and people respond to story. And so whether you're illustrating a logo, something you do regularly, or you are cutting together a film, or you're writing a song or an album or whatever, you're telling stories. You are in some ways telling a story as old as time of just the human experience. So that is where meaning comes from, is people,
(09:06)
People we love or know or people we can relate to going through this thing called life where there's challenges and triumphs and end result of that. And that's the story. And so I often like to think about meaningful work and meaningful creating and storytelling sort of as the opposite. What's the opposite of meaningful? And it's shallow. In our company, we always say in an increasingly superficial and commoditized world, we exist to help people create more meaningful work. And we believe that. I mean, the world's getting increasingly more noisy and there's a lot of shallow stuff and a lot of people are optimizing for what gets clicks, what's going to get attention. And that's fine, but that's a tactic that's not saying what's worth getting attention or what do we convictionally want Instagram to be, or what do we want culture to
Ben Lueders (10:02):
Be like? I think about this every time I create the YouTube thumbnails for this podcast, and do I need to have those little red arrows that point at something? Do you
Craig Nashleanas (10:10):
Use the clickbait playbook
Ben Lueders (10:12):
Or
Craig Nashleanas (10:13):
Do you use the design aesthetic that's
Ben Lueders (10:15):
True to
Craig Nashleanas (10:15):
You? And guess what? Your design aesthetic is cooler, but we'll probably get less clicks because it doesn't clicks, doesn't hack the brain in the right way at
Ben Lueders (10:22):
Some point. The cool thing about YouTube is you can switch all that stuff out later too and try different things. And so one night I'm going to switch everything to these really click Beatty terrible things, and we're going to see how much better our podcast does. But anyways,
Craig Nashleanas (10:36):
Every other one, the title also has to be like, we're finished. I'm done. That's right. It's over whatever Raj
Ben Lueders (10:43):
Yelling.
Craig Nashleanas (10:45):
Exactly.
Ben Lueders (10:46):
Yeah, exactly. But yeah, I mean I feel that, I think probably now, because I have just everyone else a podcast and posting more content and all this stuff, you just start noticing like, oh gosh, it is a noisy world. There's so much going on. And then now you take Instagram for example, think of all the AI generated things you're seeing too. And I don't know if it's just me because I am an illustrator and because I am what I would consider an artist, I still feel like I gravitate more towards things are really created by hand. Things are created really by other people. Sometimes an AI generated thing might get me to click and be like, oh, that's really interesting. There was actually an account that I started following. It was beautiful interior interiors of buildings and stuff like that, and cabins, and it was just beautiful. I thought it was amazing photography. It's actually all AI generated.
Craig Nashleanas (11:49):
You thought it was like an architecture portfolio, but it was actually a kid in his basement somewhere else. Exactly. Just
Ben Lueders (11:55):
Generating these beyond perfect aesthetics of little cabins and stuff.
Craig Nashleanas (12:02):
And so the thing with that is, I am sure you probably feel this. I am so desensitized to amazing visuals. I've been around them for so long, and Instagram puts so many of them in front of us. It's like we're not impressed by incredibly refined visual compositions and just imagery. Right? And so I think that leaves you going like, cool, this is stimulating, but I'm looking for story and meaning. I mean, you could just scroll forever and see stuff that looks really, really cool, but eventually you're like, whoa, what's the point?
Ben Lueders (12:38):
Well, and I think that's why, yeah, people connect. They connect with humor, storytelling, stuff like that. One of the AI things that took the World by Storm, which I'm sure you've seen is all those Wess Anderson versions of Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. I just saw one of a Harry Potter one that people had made. But I think it's the story that's really interesting. It's like, oh, that is a fun mashup that we can imagine. What would Harry Potter be like if it was directed by Wess Anderson? And it's a fun exercise in creativity, in thinking. I think that's one of the more interesting, I think, use cases of AI in that kind realm. But kind of back to the bigger question, what thoughts do you have around, we've already started talking about Instagram, social media and stuff like that. How do you think about those things? Obviously I don't get the sense that you spend a ton of time just scrolling feeds. Is that safe to say?
Craig Nashleanas (13:46):
Well, I mean, I'm human like everyone else. So I think I get into seasons where I do that and I notice it. And I would say, I'm in that season right now and I spend more time on feeds than I'd
Ben Lueders (13:59):
You'd like
Craig Nashleanas (13:59):
To. But the thing is, knowing that you have a weakness to something doesn't make you resistant to it. The ways that you have to. I mean, I've had seasons of life where I've unfollowed everyone on Instagram, so I still had it. You could D me or whatever, but there was no stimuli to be like, there's just nothing in my feed. Unfortunately, meta got pretty good at, we'll just show you other stuff. If you don't follow anyone, we'll just show you other stuff. But trying to stop that habit of just impulsively kind of filling your empty space with that. But yeah, and then the other things, I mean truly, you might not know this. There's most people know about screen time, but you can set up reminders to automatically close you out of any given app. So I have that set up specifically only for Instagram. It's the only app on my phone that's that way. But then also interesting, I found this recently within Instagram there's a similar thing. We'll pop up a reminder, of course it won't close the app. They're just trying to be like, wait, see, we were responsible.
Ben Lueders (15:01):
We did what we had to do.
Craig Nashleanas (15:02):
This was to convince some regulators that we're not a highly addictive drug. But yeah, that's in there too. So I actually have them both turned on both at the iOS level and at the Instagram app level so that it will be annoying. I want to be stuck in a doom scroll, and then Im get one popup and I'm like, no, just 15 more minutes. And then another one pops up and I'm like, okay, I've got a problem. It's time to be done.
Ben Lueders (15:28):
I didn't even realize that.
Craig Nashleanas (15:30):
But you need those things to break you out of just the like, oh, that's interesting. You go down these rabbit trails of chasing stuff.
Ben Lueders (15:37):
Well, and I think one thing that I've noticed kind of change about me, I think now that I'm creating more content, whether it be with the podcast or other things for my company or even myself personally on my personal Instagram sharing illustration work that I'm doing, I think when I'm actually creating and contributing instead of just consuming, it's a different relationship too. And I think that there's something interesting about that. There's something about if it's all one way, it feels kind of weird. It feels like an addiction or
Craig Nashleanas (16:16):
Something.
Ben Lueders (16:17):
It's not a two-way kind of relationship. And so I have, similar to you, I have kind of a love hate relationship with social media in general, but I find that it feels healthier when I'm actually contributing
(16:32)
To it as well and telling stories and sharing things, and then also interacting with people too. It is social media, isn't that the original point was to help connect us with people. I feel like the way that it's become, it's not very social, it's hard to be social. It's more like it's all about likes. It's all about you are just scrolling, just consuming. But if you stop and actually say something meaningful on a post or dmm somebody, I think John and I have probably had more conversations on Instagram dms than we have anywhere where else. And you can still do that.
Craig Nashleanas (17:12):
Well actually, and that's most normal. I think everyone is mostly posting stuff and then their friends are private messaging them about it. And even the head of Instagram, I saw something a few months ago where he was, messaging is just the thing that's growing more than everything else. It's not as much this broadcasting platform as it is. Everything is just different ways to message. And we saw this with the apps over time. It used to be a portfolio for cool pictures that you took with your phone. And now it's like, well, what's the difference primarily between Instagram and Facebook and WhatsApp and all these things? They own all the messaging apps and they're all just like, and then they added in the features that Snapchat had. Let's do ephemeral messages. That's what stories are, right? And then they're like, oh, people are doing that more because it's less intimidating and they just make this thing and it goes away. Or they just send it to their close friends. So everything is just kind of a different way of framing up an excuse to post some stuff. So your friends will message you in some ways. Now influencers, I don't know, that's maybe a little bit more about likes and comments and that. And I don't know, I never tapped on anyone. I don't know is posts so interesting? I dunno. I try to not give the algorithm information either. You got to be like,
Ben Lueders (18:33):
Craig knows too much.
Craig Nashleanas (18:35):
Yes,
Ben Lueders (18:36):
Maybe. Yeah. Doesn't want to give him too much. Well, it is interesting. I found, and I'm sure this is the search page or the page, whatever you call it on Instagram, it's serving up stuff that it thinks that you like based on your activity. So I started realizing, I started noticing as I started liking and clicking on more watch related stuff. So I, I've really gotten into watches. John and I were geeking about it, geeking out about it before and after our podcast interview. And now you go to my search page. It's just all watches, which is awesome.
Craig Nashleanas (19:17):
The reason I'm laughing is because I remember one time, probably a year or two ago, I got in this weird cycle if Instagram thought I liked really big trucks like monster trucks.
Ben Lueders (19:28):
Isn't that your thing?
Craig Nashleanas (19:29):
Yeah. I mean
Ben Lueders (19:30):
I was telling algorithm, that's the problem, loves these.
Craig Nashleanas (19:33):
Yeah, I don't recall ever searching for anything related to that or I don't know how it got that idea, but then I was kind of intrigued. And so then it's like, well, hold on. Don't let your eyes, don't let your gaze look at that because they've somehow broken their relationship with your
Ben Lueders (19:49):
IPhone and are
Craig Nashleanas (19:50):
Actually using the sensors to read your, I'm not conspiratorial, but if you linger on anything, they'll show you more of that. So it's like, yeah,
Ben Lueders (19:58):
They do know if you linger. That's interesting. And so that's why Craig is so into trucks now. You should have seen the truck he drove up in guys. It was a monster truck. And it's all thanks to Mark Zuckerberg because he put that on my feed
Craig Nashleanas (20:10):
And I bought it.
Ben Lueders (20:12):
Do you have any hot takes as far as, since we're talking about social media, any hot takes on where you see social media going?
Craig Nashleanas (20:24):
I don't know. I mean, I'm not super optimistic about wherever I see it going. I think the unfortunate thing is that it's all popular social media. All the predominant platforms are built on the premise of how do we hack human psychology to get their attention fixated? And there's plenty of people like expats of these companies who've come out and said, I don't like what I was part of building there. And so there's an interesting dilemma though. And even what we're doing, our company, we're trying, we're hoping that the stuff that we sell has a high correlation to ending up in meaningful content. Of course, we can't control what content is a part of, but then I even think about how do we help support those people so their work gets noticed. If you make a really great documentary about a local organization in Omaha who's doing super meaningful work, that's a meaningful story and therefore that's the substance for meaningful storytelling. But how do you get that noticed and how do you get it noticed without doing the sugary clickbait playbook that gets other things noticed? Hey, here's three hacks to do this thing or whatever,
(21:37)
Super authoritative, just talking to the camera and grabbing people's attention. How do you help? And a lot of times social media is just escapism. It's sort of a way to be entertained and distracted from whatever's going on in your daily life, and that's fine. But if these platforms are also how we're disseminating content and disseminating meaningful stories, how did those break through? And so for us, it's like we only make music that's pretty tasteful and pretty well-suited for a meaningful story. So we just hope that by limiting the selection to stuff that is a good fit for meaningful stories, people will make more of it.
Ben Lueders (22:18):
And
Craig Nashleanas (22:18):
That maybe music has this amazing ability to make you feel emotions. So maybe one of the ways that people can cut through the noise is just with using music and thoughtful editing to grab people's emotions and be like,
(22:35)
But yeah, it is a tough problem to solve. And yeah, sometimes too, all apart from content creation, I just think it seems like attention spans are going in one direction, which is shorter. And you see this with kids, their ability just to pay attention. Can kids even watch movies now? I don't know. Probably, but probably not as well as we used to be able to watch a two hour movie. Because if you're just watching short stuff and switching to the next thing and switching to the next thing I'm interested in, are there ways for people to do one thing for a long time? So I think YouTube's interesting this way because there are some creators that are really good at storytelling and they'll keep people engaged for an hour. We're going to go do this thing today, come with me, whatever.
Ben Lueders (23:17):
That's right, guys like us. I mean, I'm sure this will be an hour conversation and you're going to listen all the way to the end and And subscribe.
Craig Nashleanas (23:24):
Yeah,
Ben Lueders (23:25):
Ring that bell.
Craig Nashleanas (23:25):
That's meaningful storytelling too. I mean, this have to be tug at your heartstrings type stuff. It's like, do you have the ability to keep people engaged and do something relatable and whatever versus just flood their brain with dopamine for five seconds before they do that again and again and again.
Ben Lueders (23:44):
Do you think that the social media platforms, Facebook, mark Zuckerberg, you already joked about Elon Musk, these guys that they're going to swing the other way, they're going to see all the signs and be like, oh man, we've been getting people addicted to their devices and they're really going to deincentivize those things. Or is it like, no, it is about making money. It's about attention span. We have to keep these things as addictive. Will the feed ever end?
Craig Nashleanas (24:16):
Will
Ben Lueders (24:17):
They, for example, I've seen, I know that there are some feeds and stuff that they'll only scroll so far I've heard that, or the Visco app doesn't display likes. I guess apparently in the settings of Instagram you can shut off seeing likes.
Craig Nashleanas (24:35):
I
Ben Lueders (24:35):
Was just talking to a friend who actually has a lot of followers on Instagram, but he turned off the ability to see likes on Instagram, and I thought that was interesting.
Craig Nashleanas (24:45):
Yeah, I mean, I think that unfortunately we're not immune to this either, but the things that we like aren't the same things as what we know we need. And so you could be like, oh, I love Instagram. I love looking at just big trucks.
Ben Lueders (25:03):
That's my thing.
Craig Nashleanas (25:05):
And be like, also, I waste an hour a day doing that or something. But it still doesn't necessarily change the habit. And so people know that they don't even want to necessarily use these apps the way they do, but they still do. And so until, I mean, I think a lot of these business owners and publicly owned companies, they're just trying to say, what can we do to increase engagement and continue to grow and all of this, and I'm not against publicly owned companies in any way, but I just don't think they have very good incentives to do things that are healthy. They have good incentives to do things that keep the apps going. But
Ben Lueders (25:42):
I guess
Craig Nashleanas (25:43):
If I had to guess, I would say that more likely than them changing in meaningful ways is that they'll just be subverted by the next generation of things. In a younger generation of people will give traction to something that's a little bit different, a little more personal, maybe more specific to their close group of friends, more casual, something like that. And then the big incumbent platforms will figure out ways to try to adapt and latch onto that. I mean, that kind of happened. Instagram was for people who are now in their thirties and forties in the Bay Area, it started, right?
Ben Lueders (26:22):
And do you remember some of those terrible photo filters they had
Craig Nashleanas (26:27):
Back? They were great.
Ben Lueders (26:30):
Took a picture of your food and
Craig Nashleanas (26:32):
It's like CP really
Ben Lueders (26:34):
Ex Pro
Craig Nashleanas (26:35):
Two maybe was one of 'em. That's funny. I think that where I was going with that is Instagram adopted the things from a more younger generational app like Snapchat, and then it's interesting. Now TikTok seems hotter than everything else, and so I'm sure the apps are figuring out ways to integrate.
Ben Lueders (26:59):
And you're big on TikTok, right?
Craig Nashleanas (27:01):
Yeah, man. Yeah. I spend an hour a day looking at big trucks on Instagram, but I spend 10 hours a day learning dance moves on
Ben Lueders (27:09):
TikTok. So
Craig Nashleanas (27:11):
No, yeah, don't,
Ben Lueders (27:13):
I've not ventured there.
Craig Nashleanas (27:14):
I
Ben Lueders (27:15):
Have not ventured on the TikTok.
Craig Nashleanas (27:17):
Yeah.
Ben Lueders (27:19):
One thing that I think is interesting too is focusing limiting yourself even as company, one of the first things that we advise other companies, because everyone wants to know what should I be doing on social media? One of the first things we say is pick one. It'd be better if you were posting more regularly and engaging more on LinkedIn or X or whatever your social media of choice is than trying to get on Pinterest and get on this and get on that feeling. And so just focusing and it is okay if you don't have one of the 10 social media platforms and which ones make the most sense for you and what you're trying to accomplish. And so I think giving people permission to show discretion and just wisdom on what can I handle. Recently, we pretty much just post on LinkedIn and Instagram,
Craig Nashleanas (28:26):
Fruitful
Ben Lueders (28:27):
And YouTube, I guess YouTube and YouTube is my favorite. I love YouTube. I spend probably the most time on YouTube these days.
Craig Nashleanas (28:34):
Do you get more traction if you say, I love YouTube.
Ben Lueders (28:36):
That's right. I love you. YouTube. I'm hoping this video will get bumped up in views because of that. And all the money, obviously all the money that we get from our views. Now,
Craig Nashleanas (28:49):
Unfortunately, there's not a widely known overlord on YouTube
Ben Lueders (28:53):
Whose name
Craig Nashleanas (28:54):
You can mention, the CEO changed somewhat recently, but you don't got Zuck or
Ben Lueders (28:59):
Musk
Craig Nashleanas (28:59):
Or
Ben Lueders (29:00):
In fact, if we say their names, we might actually go down. I don't know. I'm not sure who we should be saying. Actually.
Craig Nashleanas (29:06):
I think the algorithm favors controversy. So true. No matter what. I think we're good.
Ben Lueders (29:13):
That's probably true. Okay, speaking of hot takes though, do you have a hot take on, this wasn't in our questions that I sent over, but the Metaverse, how are you feeling about the Metaverse these days?
Craig Nashleanas (29:26):
Yeah, it's interesting. Jonathan, my business partner, and I remember having a debate a couple years ago where he was like, this is so dumb. Nobody wants this. It's not going to work. And I remember telling him, I don't disagree with you about the first part, but I think that these companies are just going to will it into existence. They're going to figure out a way to do it and figure out a way to commercialize it and get people hooked on it or whatever. And that remains to be seen. But I dunno if you saw the thing with Lex Friedman,
Ben Lueders (30:00):
Dude, I was just it up
Craig Nashleanas (30:02):
Being scanned in. I was just
Ben Lueders (30:03):
About to bring that up,
Craig Nashleanas (30:04):
His sort of emotional reaction. So he got scanned into the Metaverse and had a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg where they weren't in the same room, but he felt like they were sitting across from each other like we are, or
Ben Lueders (30:16):
If you watch this, are we in the metaverse? I don't know. Yeah. Actually, we're going to reveal at the end that this is actually not the Mark
Craig Nashleanas (30:22):
Zuckerberg
Ben Lueders (30:24):
And I'm Lex Friedman. I've just been changing my voice for this,
Craig Nashleanas (30:27):
And now we're going to
Ben Lueders (30:27):
Fight. Now we're going to fight
Craig Nashleanas (30:29):
The controversy.
Ben Lueders (30:31):
We're going to wrestle right here on the mat. We're going to get into some Brazilian, is that what they do? But yeah, that kind of did blow me away just because the Metaverse, it was a fun thing to make fun of a few years ago, and it was like these disembodied,
(30:48)
We sport looking people, no arms or legs, and it is just the graphics itself is just like, why would I ever choose to do this instead of just live in real life? I am not really following. Then I watched some of that interview Lex Friedman with Mark Zuckerberg, and I was like, okay, this is next level. I still don't fully understand all the, and I probably still identify with John Kaiser, why do we need this? But at the same time, it's like I'm paying closer attention. I'm taking it a little bit more seriously. I'm interested to know where this could go.
Craig Nashleanas (31:24):
Well, I think it's similar to the AI conversation where what technology makes possible does not mean the same thing as how do people leverage this in meaningful ways,
Ben Lueders (31:36):
Right?
Craig Nashleanas (31:37):
So I mean, it's funny, as you were talking, I was even thinking just about my mind always tries to go down the road to the future of how else will people use this? And I was thinking about things like if you could have a parent or a loved one who is scanned in and is an avatar and it has their voice and AI could potentially make them say anything, or they just have a recording of them and say that loved one passes away and then you're able to go in the metaverse and have a conversation or to sit and listen to them. Is that actually good for you? Or should you have the closure of like, no, this person has moved on.
Ben Lueders (32:14):
Well, doesn't Alexa already do that? I thought there was some big story about how Alexa can take the voice of anyone and that they had already people having conversations with, I think it was Alexa, there's so much, this technology is moving so fast. But I already heard Raj shared that with me, a story of basically having AI conversations with a deceased relative's voice
Craig Nashleanas (32:38):
That seems like very emotionally treacherous. I
Ben Lueders (32:44):
Think that that's an ethical line,
Craig Nashleanas (32:45):
Isn't it? Yeah. I think my dad died when I was 20, was 13 years ago. I don't want to open that Pandora's box back. I have 13 years of somewhat closure on that. Absolutely. So I think about stuff like that, but at the same time, and I think a lot of people would agree with our consensus on that there. Some people would disagree and say, oh no, absolutely not. I want that. But for those who agree with what we just said, that probably wouldn't be emotionally healthy, does that mean that they're not going to be tempted to do it?
Ben Lueders (33:21):
Oh yeah. Well, and you're seeing it in movies already, right? Obviously the aging of actors and stuff like that. And I was reading this article about, because in the new Indiana Jones movie, there's just really, really compelling aging of Harrison Ford that just looks so real better than anything that had come before. And you're seeing more and more of this kind of stuff, and it's like, wow, are actors' careers now going to be extended way longer? And then what about after they die? It's
Craig Nashleanas (33:50):
Like
Ben Lueders (33:50):
Now we can have CGI, Harrison Ford if he ever passes away. I don't know. I feel like there's all this, and this is why I love having you in here because you think about these kinds
Craig Nashleanas (34:03):
Of things.
Ben Lueders (34:03):
Would you consider yourself a futurist? When I think of you, I think what you just said about you like to play things out, and I feel like a lot of people, they're just interacting right here. Okay, do I want to do this? Yeah, I'll go download this AI thing. And I feel like that's one of the things I find so interesting about you is you seem to have this ability to play things out into the future. I don't know, do you agree with that?
Craig Nashleanas (34:29):
I mean, I agree with the description that you just, I mean, I'm just a big picture thinker.
(34:35)
If we talk about building something at work, I think about, okay, would people like that now? But then I think about basically technical debt and what sort of obligation does that create? And is this something that we can sustain and commit to for a long period of time, or are we going to make people happy now only to make them less happy when we fail to do this well? So that's why I sort of have that same thought about and skepticism about, like I said, AI and stuff. It's like I don't doubt that we can make all this stuff, but I'm almost more skeptical of humans' ability to be consistent and disciplined about using things in a thoughtful and good way or making a feature and continuing to support it in a software product the way it should be supported or whatever. So you asked, do I consider myself a futurist? I mean, I don't know. I aren't futurists people who are usually generally optimistic about the future.
Ben Lueders (35:27):
I don't know if that's necessarily true.
Craig Nashleanas (35:29):
Maybe are they just long-term thinkers? I mean, I'm not a future optimist actually. I have pretty sobering thoughts about a lot of things. I'm also, I'm generally optimistic and I generally think that things will move forward into the future and we'll figure out a way to adapt and stuff.
Ben Lueders (35:44):
Well, that's why I think I had you here was I don't, like you already said it, you're not a conspiracy theory.
Craig Nashleanas (35:51):
Not at all. But
Ben Lueders (35:52):
I think you have this cautious thoughtfulness. I'm
Craig Nashleanas (35:56):
Skeptical. Skeptical
Ben Lueders (35:57):
Have good
Craig Nashleanas (35:57):
Way. You have to prove it out so things don't just work positively because something was set in motion and then it just ends up in a positive place. I mean, it takes, again, people thoughtfully stewarding things to a healthy thing with things like renewable energy or solar or nuclear. You can even have a debate on that. We're broadening this. We go,
Ben Lueders (36:23):
I'm
Craig Nashleanas (36:24):
Way out of my depth on this, but no,
Ben Lueders (36:25):
No, let's go one at a time.
Craig Nashleanas (36:27):
All I know is that people need energy resources to do stuff. And so people smarter than us are trying to figure out how to do that in a thoughtful way. But they're also creating massive responsibility. And so I'm always just more skeptical of our complexity and messiness as humans to not fumble things like we will,
Ben Lueders (36:46):
When are you running for office, Craig?
Craig Nashleanas (36:48):
That's
Ben Lueders (36:48):
Really what this is. This rate
Craig Nashleanas (36:50):
Never because of that aging technology, we're just going to get all these freaking old guys that
Ben Lueders (36:54):
Keep doing
Craig Nashleanas (36:55):
Stuff. We can't get 'em out of here. And it's so yes, at this rate never. But also I don't want to sign up for that. Who
Ben Lueders (37:04):
Are the people that are
Craig Nashleanas (37:05):
Signing up for that? I know.
Ben Lueders (37:06):
Well, I mean, right, it's the wrong people. But I think that it is interesting though. We do need more people who are thinking not just short term, who are not just thinking about, oh man, this is going to make my job so much easier, or this is going to be cool or fun, or I can make money fast this way. See a lot of people jumping on a new technology, whether it's like NFTs or whatever, trying to gamify all this stuff in the short term instead of taking a step back, taking a big deep breath. And how might this play out and not,
Craig Nashleanas (37:41):
Well, just from a risk standpoint of we only have so much time and attention to invest in stuff. So if you can slow down a little bit and think about what do I want to learn more about and get better at and participate in, that's going to be a game that I can play for a long time or an activity I can participate in for a long time versus go all in on a opportunity or something and then have that go sort of nowhere now, I mean fail fast. People say all kinds of stuff like that, but I'm just saying
Ben Lueders (38:10):
Fail
Craig Nashleanas (38:11):
Forward NFTs. If you got really, really into that, maybe you're building the future version that's going to be more sustainable and even keel. But for the rest of the people who were just jumping in on a trend, all of their knowledge about that is currently sort of sitting dormant. The underlying technology of that is obviously here to stay. Blockchain is different than nft, right? I
Ben Lueders (38:34):
Was just going to say, can we talk about that for a second? I love this. We should just call this hot takes technology, hot takes.
Craig Nashleanas (38:39):
I don't know anything about any of this
Ben Lueders (38:41):
Stuff. I know know. That's what I love about you though. It's like, it's not that you're an expert on any one of these things, but kind of the whole thing you think critically of. So I am curious, just any quick hot takes about blockchain technology.
Craig Nashleanas (38:57):
I mean, I think blockchain, it seems like that's the future for a lot of things like contracts and financial stuff. Just records and sort of indisputable records and
Ben Lueders (39:09):
Not super sexy stuff necessarily, but important.
Craig Nashleanas (39:12):
No, it'll solve really important problems, but the most important problem isn't like a scary ape club or whatever.
Ben Lueders (39:21):
What is that? APE
Craig Nashleanas (39:22):
Board? Ape Yacht
Ben Lueders (39:23):
Club. Yacht Club. There you go, man. We are so current.
Craig Nashleanas (39:26):
We
Ben Lueders (39:26):
Are just
Craig Nashleanas (39:27):
To buy mine tread.
Ben Lueders (39:29):
Did you jump on the N
Craig Nashleanas (39:30):
FTT thing at all? No, I don't. Did you? I don't give money to strangers on the internet. It's just not a big part of my life. No strangers give me money on the internet every day. That's true. It's great. It's
Ben Lueders (39:42):
Nice to be that on that side. And I'm trustworthy. You
Craig Nashleanas (39:43):
Can give money to our company on the internet. We will
Ben Lueders (39:45):
Deliver on what we say
Craig Nashleanas (39:46):
We do. But
Ben Lueders (39:49):
Were you an early adopter into Bitcoin or Ethereum? Were you into any of that stuff
Craig Nashleanas (39:55):
Or are you No, no. I mean, I had a client before we went all in on lens distortions. I was doing some consulting and had a client who was big into Bitcoin and they asked if they could pay me in Bitcoin. And so I was like, I guess, and I set up a wallet and all that did. And when it had multiplied quite a bit, I sold it Wow. Way before it multiplied like it did in the last few years.
Ben Lueders (40:22):
So you should have held onto that
Craig Nashleanas (40:23):
A little longer. But I made a good decision knowing that the future, I don't feel bad about my decision at all because it wasn't foolish in the least fit. Do I wish hindsight's 2020? But of course,
Ben Lueders (40:36):
Of course.
Craig Nashleanas (40:37):
That's the thing. You can't really control that. So you got to make decisions you can live with. And so I mean, I'm pretty macro risk averse. The number one rule of business and of life basically is don't die. You get paid by a client in something and then that money is worth more money a few years later. That is a good thing. Could that money be worth nothing if you hold onto a few years more? I thought, yeah, maybe. Who knows? I don't know anything about this. Also, I don't know enough about this or care enough about this to track it closely and understand where it's headed, what its momentum is, anything like that. So know what you know and know what you don't know, and then just sleep. Do what you can do to sleep at night. So
Ben Lueders (41:23):
That's the clip right there.
Craig Nashleanas (41:25):
Yeah.
Ben Lueders (41:26):
Okay. So speaking of hot takes, I like this. You do have so many good ones. Any hot takes on Elon Musk, Twitter becoming X, any of that brand,
Craig Nashleanas (41:38):
Brand stuff. I mean, it's interesting.
Ben Lueders (41:42):
Are you an Elon Musk fan?
Craig Nashleanas (41:46):
I would not say I'm a fan, but I'm also not. He's a very complicated person, obviously has done incredible things. And obviously because he's got some serious chips on his shoulder, which is a understandable thing. A lot of ways I kind of feel for him. But I mean obviously incredibly impressive person doing things on a scale that you or I never will.
Ben Lueders (42:11):
Well speak for yourself. Alright, well, you haven't seen how many views this video is going to get, obviously.
Craig Nashleanas (42:18):
Well, yeah. I mean our contentment will stop far short of that, the things that he's motivated to do.
Ben Lueders (42:23):
But
Craig Nashleanas (42:23):
Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I don't have a lot of, I don't think X is going away. I don't think that it will just completely fold up and flop or anything like that. I mean, I think was changing it to X, a good move. I don't know, Twitter had so much brand equity as great, whatever, but he's not trying to stay true to what it originally was. I think he sees it as a thing that he can kind of evolve into what his original dream for a thing called X was, right? I mean, he became part of PayPal because he had started something called X,
Ben Lueders (42:57):
Right? Yeah. A lot of people don't know that or have
Craig Nashleanas (43:00):
Forgotten he owned x.com or was a founder of x.com and that merged with PayPal and became the successful PayPal. How
Ben Lueders (43:05):
Long ago? I mean, this was
Craig Nashleanas (43:07):
2000 a long early two thousands, I think. Maybe late nineties. And so I think he still had x.com or something. That's why he was able
Ben Lueders (43:15):
To do it. I think he lost it and then had to get it again.
Craig Nashleanas (43:18):
And
Ben Lueders (43:18):
There's an interesting story here for sure.
Craig Nashleanas (43:20):
He probably just paid a couple hundred million to get it or something. I
Ben Lueders (43:24):
Didn't have to think twice. But
Craig Nashleanas (43:25):
Yeah, I mean I think it's fascinating. It's not like I'm scouring the internet looking for other people's hot takes on him because you just bump into those without looking for 'em. But people said he thrives on chaos. This is what he does.
Ben Lueders (43:42):
Well, there's that new biography about
Craig Nashleanas (43:45):
Him. Yeah, Walter Isaac Isaacson. Have you read it? I was listened to an interview with Walter Isaacson about it and it made me kind of want to read it. But same. Yeah, I think it's a helpful thing for people just to understand. You don't do that great of things without being haunted by some serious weighty stuff. Elon Musk believes that we should go to Mars because it's our only hope for humanity. And so he's like, no one else is working hard enough on this. That's my understanding is that he's actually operating from a very firm conviction that we have to save humanity. And so let's
Ben Lueders (44:19):
Do this. And that's the key to it. And you believe that as well?
Craig Nashleanas (44:22):
Well, I don't think we're going to save ourselves.
Ben Lueders (44:28):
Well said. Well said. But
Craig Nashleanas (44:29):
Bitcoin I think will save us. That's right.
Ben Lueders (44:32):
See the Bored Ape Yacht Club will save us. Yes, you've heard it first here
Craig Nashleanas (44:36):
In the end, but AI comes for us. Lean on your bored ape. That's right. Lean on your boarding.
Ben Lueders (44:42):
So we've talked about Elon. We've talked about a lot of things. I love this. This is going to be really fun to cut up in little shorts, but I want to know, what are your thoughts about Apple going into the future? Obviously Apple had Steve Jobs back in the day. I don't even know how many years it's been now that Steve Jobs has passed on. I
Craig Nashleanas (45:04):
Believe he passed away in 2011. Wow.
Ben Lueders (45:06):
That's crazy to think if that's true. And I'm sure
Craig Nashleanas (45:11):
I don't know everything in this conversation, I'm speaking out of certain,
Ben Lueders (45:18):
We'll have to cut that. But any thoughts around Apple, kind of like what they're doing right now, apple Vision Pro? Do you have a hot take on that or any of the technology that they're dabbling with?
Craig Nashleanas (45:33):
I mean, their move to their own processors has been great. They're making really great processors really fast, except a big leap from where they were at before. I bought a computer in 2014, and I've been using all the way up till now, and it was the most overclocked every be you could get. And it was getting me by. But then I bought the cheapest MacBook, just the most basic one.
(45:56)
And our CT was telling me, he is like, if you buy the cheapest one, it is going to be like 10 times better than what you currently have. And what I had was working fine. It could do everything I needed. And I got this the most basic MacBook error, and it is like, this is night and day. This is insane. And so we just went through a big jump, and I'm not smart enough to talk about it, but I know engineers have been talking about, yeah, we went through a pretty big leap in computing power kind of there. But what I wonder about with that, again, my skepticism is like, well, so will we just sort of take that for granted and say, cool, we'll just build more resource, heavy software applications that
Ben Lueders (46:31):
Then
Craig Nashleanas (46:32):
Put a heavier load for that processor to handle or whatever. But I dunno, that's kind of getting in the nitty gritty. I think Apple overall, at the current moment, they're not doing anything that's super, super interesting. Got a broad cultural level that we can see. And I think that's what's interesting is that they have always walked this fine line between appeal to the masses and making culturally relevant technology. Steve Jobs classic bicycle of the mind, and it's standing at the intersection of humanities and technologies. Those were kind of his ideas that he stole from someone else. Turns out, not stole, borrow, was it you? No. Yes. No.
Ben Lueders (47:14):
12 year old. Craig said that one
Craig Nashleanas (47:15):
Time. I'm actually a hundred years old, and because of this
Ben Lueders (47:18):
Aging
Craig Nashleanas (47:18):
Technology, I look very young.
Ben Lueders (47:22):
Very
Craig Nashleanas (47:22):
Young as in a 30 something dad young. But
Ben Lueders (47:27):
That's the look he really wanted to go.
Craig Nashleanas (47:28):
Yes, I wanted to be believable. I
Ben Lueders (47:30):
Could have gone to 25, but decided to, how old are you?
Craig Nashleanas (47:35):
33. 33. 33.
Ben Lueders (47:36):
Yeah.
Craig Nashleanas (47:37):
No, but I guess I think, I don't have any reason to put a number to this or timeline, but I'm just sort of, the new iPhone just came out and everyone's mad. It seems like you didn't make anything new. You just made a different color and charge more for it or whatever. You
Ben Lueders (47:53):
Hear that a lot.
Craig Nashleanas (47:54):
Yeah. But I am guessing in the next, I mean everyone's kind of been saying this, but five years or whatever, they'll, what happens when Apple applies their way of thinking and their way of making things available to the everyday person over time and the way they did with the iPod or whatever, to self-driving cars or to other things. Yeah.
Ben Lueders (48:16):
Do you see Apple Vision Pro as part of that innovation? Like a step in the right direction? Or are you,
Craig Nashleanas (48:23):
It seems really niche to me. It might become a mainstream thing, but it's so expensive and such, so much technology in it that it can only really be used by mostly creative professionals. That's like, I feel like who could justify it? Or just wealthy people who want to spend money on something.
Ben Lueders (48:40):
Will you guys get one lens distortions?
Craig Nashleanas (48:44):
No. I mean, people on our team might buy them, but we don't have
Ben Lueders (48:48):
Have that in the budget.
Craig Nashleanas (48:49):
Oh, we don't have a reason to buy one.
Ben Lueders (48:52):
So
Craig Nashleanas (48:52):
I'm fascinated by it. I think it's cool. I'm not anti it. It's not in its current form, changing the world anyway.
Ben Lueders (49:01):
Yeah. Well, Raj and I talked about it a little bit when they first announced it, and I'm like, you, I'm pretty skeptical about new technology, and I feel like it's so easy for the stuff to kind of run our lives. And I'm not really into the hype, but Raj kind of helped me see kind use cases and even watching some of Apple's talking about it. I think the one that really kind of got me curious is just the idea of you put this on and you could be surrounded by screens, kind of like Tony Stark, but kind of in your head. And that's interesting. If you could really see the work that you're working on, if your laptop screen was now surrounding you, in some ways that might be the worst thing ever. But it could also, it has some interesting implications. I do feel like it looks super goofy when you see the video and couples sitting on a couch both wearing them and watching a movie or something, I feel like is very, but I mean, a lot of times new technology seems a little weird too.
Craig Nashleanas (50:06):
Yeah, I don't know. I'm kind of bored by what is the final 10% of completely optimizing the idea of watching a movie or something like that. And maybe it's a way bigger improvement than 10%, but
Ben Lueders (50:20):
I
Craig Nashleanas (50:20):
Can watch a movie on a 10 year old TV at my house that can't even do four K or something like that. And if it's a good movie, get lost in that world. I don't know. Is
Ben Lueders (50:33):
There a point that technology is like,
Craig Nashleanas (50:36):
I'm trying to spend less time on technology. I'm trying to be on my computer, then close it and go for a walk, do more of that. Yeah. I'm not trying to figure out ways to get more lost in it, because I can already do that with those get
Ben Lueders (50:50):
So immersive. It's like going for walks, still very immersive.
Craig Nashleanas (50:54):
Literally the most immersive sort of experience. You go outside and you're surrounded
Ben Lueders (50:58):
By all kinds of stuff. And he's talking about a walk in the metaverse. Of course, not in real, we don't
Craig Nashleanas (51:03):
Walk. I'm bored by Apple Vision Pro because I want Apple spacesuit that I can suit up on and then it can track all my limbs in metaverse.
Ben Lueders (51:12):
Oh man. Well, we've gone really broad today. We probably should bring this thing home. I'm just trying to think of how to bring it home. Craig, do you have any, especially for creatives now, I think for any of the creative professionals that might be listening, just any parting words of advice to them kind of as they're living in this fast paced world, specifically people trying to create meaningful things and tell stories.
Craig Nashleanas (51:43):
What makes meaningful stories will never change. What makes the importance of people applying taste to things will never change? So yeah, I mean, understanding the principles of a good story. Understanding taste is a subjective thing, but understanding what makes things tasteful or perceived as tasteful. Why did these people think this is tasteful? Develop your own taste, develop conviction around that, and then apply that to whatever technology's going on. The same person back in the day before electronics existed, the taste of a fine art painter could be applied to the craft of filmmaking. It can translate, right?
(52:27)
But that can't be just, you can't hand someone that taste in a product or something like that. So technology is, it's sort of unopinionated. You have to apply the opinion to it. And that opinion is meaningful because it's coming from someone you respect or someone you trust. People hire you because they trust you, they trust your expertise. So that's what I'd say is like be relational. Understand what makes humans tick, and develop your own taste, your own convictions. Don't worry as much about the playbook. Don't worry much about what gets the short-term results, but develop that taste. Figure out what is the areas of this that I want to be in for the long haul. And then make sure you adapt to technologies that's there. But know that there's always a place for
Ben Lueders (53:11):
Thoughtful, creative people to do stuff long-term.
Craig Nashleanas (53:13):
So be optimistic in that sense. And
Ben Lueders (53:18):
Yeah, I guess I'll leave it with that. Craig, thanks for being on the podcast.
Craig Nashleanas (53:23):
Good to be here. Thanks for having
Raj Lulla (53:24):
Me. Thanks. Joining us today on Growing Your Fruitful Brand. If you found today's show helpful, don't forget to subscribe and consider sharing it with someone who might also enjoy it.
Ben Lueders (53:32):
And if you'd like to work with Fruitful on a branding website or messaging project of your own, you can always reach out on our website Fruitful Design.
Raj Lulla (53:41):
Until next time, don't forget to grow something. Grow something good.
Ben Lueders (53:46):
You jerk.
