They're almost like silly or whimsical or some sort of... like adjacent to professional career, right? Especially if you're not like in design professionally, right? If you're some sort of like, you know, even content creators get treated this way, which is an interesting thing.

Carl, there's a couple other things I want to add so that we have a complete conversation about this.

One is you're selling their time back to them, but you're also helping them to reduce risk.

So you mentioned Netflix.

So not only are the people involved, their time is very valuable, but the risk if they make the wrong decision, if they launch with the wrong package has real tangible business impacts, both positive and negative.

So, for example, we know this.

Netflix is constantly testing different thumbnails for all their audiences, I think, to find which thumbnail is the most likely to be clicked on, depending on your demographic, your preferences for what kind of shows you want to watch.

Right.

So while being consistent, how somebody can focus on consistently putting a lot of content without losing the quality.

Yeah, well, when it comes to content and art, I think quantity leads to quality that while you're trying to figure out what to do, I think you just need to make lots of stuff.

So back in art school, when we were working through an idea, they would say, make 50 thumbnails, do 50 little concepts, work through all the good ideas, the typical ideas, the expected ideas, and eventually come to something that might be breakthrough for you.

And we then somehow forget about that process.

And because now we're designing in public, when we make something, it's like it needs to be perfect.

So the perfection filter allows us to not make a lot of content.

And so how can we expect to grow? We learn a lot by expressing and communicating.

You have to become... export it somewhere do it over and over and over and over again and that's how the quality is automatically coming out the it is visible clearly like okay this person has mastered his art and that's where it happened just because of his doing it consistently that's beautiful so you have had great success or i can say you are doing a lot interview podcast you are doing so many podcasts with so many people what role had podcasting played in your overall content creation journey content strategies that and what benefit has it brought into your own personal brand or in your branding

Using these three logos, what can you see in a piece of design that most trained designers still can't?

I've seen all of these logos before, just not here together like this.

Let's talk about the one that I can objectively speak about.

The first one's the Nike Swoosh logo.

I think in terms of a pure symbol, it is beautiful.

It's nearly perfect.

It, and it, it communicates the original intention, which is it just needs to look fast.

Where is his business gonna be in two years, in five years, in 10 years? Maybe not worrying about AI, but figuring out a path forward for hi- for him and his family.

You guys do have, I think, a, a more of that mindset, more of that bigger way of thinking.

Well, I just think like this, okay? If you were, um, a single person, man or woman, doesn't matter, and you're like, "Oh, no one will love me.

I'm not worthy of being loved," you might die a lonely person because you will make that into reality 'cause you will be not very approachable.

You won't go out.

And so you're creating a reality that supports a narrative and a belief system that you have.

I think that's problematic.

Versus someone who says, "You know what? I'm not much now, but the kind of person I see myself with in the future, the person who's gonna be the parent to my children or whatever, my life partner, they're gonna be like this." And then you ask yourself, "Who do I need to become in order for me to be attractive to that person, where that person would look at me and say, 'I'm the lucky one to be with you'"? So there's a couple of critical steps here.

Like it could be anything." And so, you know, you talked about people developing their sort of idea of like what is the wrapper on your water bottle? And I wanted to know with this idea of like being insecure, going on the internet, developing self-expression, how do you build a wrapper that you're comfortable with that allows you to create more prolific?

Yeah.

And everybody needs to know that.

Sometimes they both stink.

So people would say things like, "Your hat," or, "Well, who does he think he is? He's trying too hard," or, "Every time I tune in, there's another necklace and it's just getting out of control." Here's where it gets real interesting.

When you're in real life and people start saying that thing, now you're dealing with the heat in real life.

But people are very brave behind your back.

They're not so brave in front of you.

So how do I get started with that?

Ah.

I don't like the way you tracked or kerned that typeface.

My training is better than your training.

My master beats your master.

Right.

And so that's why it's really dangerous for us to be making these judging statements.

That's not to say that we shouldn't be keen observers of life.

[laughs]

You could look at it every day on your coffee table.

You're doing great, by the way.

You're way more creative than you might give yourself credit for.

Really.

So all I needed to do was give you the space to think and to prompt you because initially we started off with pretty default.

I would say more broad, generic answers like downsize maintenance.

Then we get into a little bit of the emotional attachment and then you sit with that for a little bit and you struggle.

Nothing is like jumping to mind.

And so I guess my question for you there is, what is the manipulation that you see go into really expensive items so that we can decide if we still wanna buy them or not? 'Cause it's not right or wrong, it's just should we?

Yeah.

Seth Godin wrote a great book on this, and it says all marketers are liars, and we, the consumer, are complicit in the lie.

We want to be lied to because the human mind loves a story, right? So if I showed you this amazing painting and told you someone in your family acquired it, and they passed away, and they've bequeathed it to you in their will, and it's a Jackson Pollock.

They bought it when they're...

You know, whatever, at a flea market somewhere in the Netherlands one day, and you're like, "Oh, my God, I have a Jackson Pollock." How much is that painting worth? Tens of millions of dollars.

And then they're like, "Oh, my bad, that was just a painter's tarp, just spillover paint." You're like, "How much is that worth?" And you're like, "Not a lot.

Yeah.

[laughs]

"But right now there's an I." And I keep writing, and the, and it keeps growing, keeps growing.

And then I discovered something.

Very difficult for me to write pretending to be an amalgamation of lots of people with no opinion.

It's very easy for me to write just as me.

I don't like this, I'm gonna write about this.

This pisses me off, I'm gonna write about that.

Yeah.

But tech markets evolve, consumer habits evolve, and in 2013, Chris notices a shift.

I started Blind in 1995 when the term motion design was not yet invented, and there was a real space for innovation in using desktop tools, desktop video tools in, in, to do work that was done by boxes that literally cost a million dollars.

We were working on our Macs to do this.

And I remember render times were, like, over an hour a frame.

So if you think about a commercial video is 24, 30 frames per second, it would take 24 hours to render one second of animation.

And we're not talking about complicated stuff either.

Like, a motion blur took that long.

What changes? Do you just, just chance upon something or?

Do you think it brought the right audience if you look at the metrics?

So to answer your other question about is this fans of Better Call Saul? It's been a couple of years since the series has ended.

So we're trying to capture peak attention.

This is the wrong time to be releasing a video like this, right? We're pretty slow to respond to things.

And so I think this is the right audience because it's me doing a deep dive breakdown of a concept from a TV show that most people just miss because I don't ever hear anybody talking about this episode.

And it was a brilliant example.

Now, this one was sitting in my to-do list for a couple of years.

So talking about all of this, back to the first question then is, how do you turn attention to profits for the viewers? What would be one piece of advice