Move Fast and Build Things with Chris McAdoo

"What is the most human, natural, joy-filled way we could solve this problem?"

Chris McAdoo has been a musician, a brand strategist, a startup advisor, and an artist since he was 13 years old. He's worked with national lab scientists sending things to space and artists introducing their work to the world for the first time. And he's noticed something: it's the same conversation every time.

Why don't people love the thing I made the way I love it?

In this episode of Damns Given, Nick and Chris go deep on what's actually going on between craft and market — and why the answer isn't to make better work. The work is fine. The gap is context. The gap is relationship. The gap is the hard turn from seeking attention to paying it.

They cover the brief window in internet history when showing up was enough and why that era socialized a generation into believing the algorithm would find their people for them. Why the people building extractive platforms don't actually like people — and how that shapes everything about what those platforms do and don't do. Why the inefficiencies we disrupted out of existence were load-bearing — and what we're left holding now that they're gone. Why the house concert in Knoxville probably made more money than the venue tour. Why your customer persona named Suzy is useless and the conversation with the real Debra who came to your show on a Thursday night is everything.

And what it means to ask, as Nick puts it: what's the most human, natural, joy-filled way we could solve this problem?

Nick closes with a reflection that came out of a conversation with a colleague: this economy, this uncertainty, this K-shaped gap — it's already creating discomfort whether you acknowledge it or not. Moving toward discomfort isn't going to make things worse. You're already uncomfortable. You might as well grow.

Chris McAdoo: chrismcadoo.com | chrismcadoospeaks.com | fightingshapeimpact.com
More at damnsgiven.com | TrustMadeGrowth.com | CultureCraft.com

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

I'm Nick Richmeyer, and this is Dam's Given, a podcast where we explore how to free your venture from the extraction economy, realigning it to the timeless ways that humans build, collaborate, and buy. Dams Given, a podcast this week about the future of craft, of creative thinking, and what it means to build something people want to buy. There's a conversation happening right now between tech people and craft people, and it isn't really going very well. The tech site says craft is quaint and that's cute and so nice, and go have your art and opera. You know, people still listen to opera, the 12 people that listen, and for everything else, there's AI. And AI can approximate that, put its best in place, and replace the mass middle of the market. And that is true at a variety of craft levels. I've had this conversation with consultants and others who engage the middle market and our sell services into the B2B environment. And there's increasing frustration about the perception that what these folks do, what they make, can be replaced by AI when they know it can't be. And part of what AI does, right, is it shrinks the value stack. It says, oh, well, we thought value went from way down here to way up here, and there's a price range all the way through that from very low commoditized to very high elite. What it does, it says, no, actually, the value stack isn't that really tall thing. It's really short. And the bottom half of the value stack should be free. And all the other part of the commercial enterprise around whatever it is that you're selling should fit in this much smaller space. And that argument from the AI movement has taken hold in the marketplace. People believe that to be true. And the crap people say, well, gosh, this is technology is ruining everything and destroying everything. Nothing's good anymore. You can't make good stuff. No one appreciates anything. No one has any taste. And the reality is, as was almost always the case when we're on the horns of a dilemma, is that both those sides are wrong. Or at least they represent a shared set of assumptions that aren't serving us. Today, I bring on Chris McAdoo, who's a really unique voice. He spent his entire career living in the space between these two camps as a musician, a visual artist, a brand strategist, and as an advisor to startups, tech startups, trying to figure out who they're actually for. He's working with scientists at national labs, sending things to space, and artists introducing their work to for the first time. And because of that interesting Venn diagram and intersection, he's noticing these similar things from both rooms, this same flawed set of assumptions that the problem is almost never the quality of the work. The problem is what happens between the work and the world. What I tell our clients is every venture is a negotiated thing. Once you decide to hang up a shingle and put it out in the world, it's not you. It's not them. It's not even your customers. It's not even your team. It is this negotiated thing. Something I go into deep detail on how to actually do that negotiation in my book, The Damn Rules. But today we're going to talk about it specifically around this area of craft, people who make things and why it matters more than ever and why it just isn't enough to make a thing. You have to negotiate the thing. We're going to talk about this brief window in internet history when showing up was enough. Boy, that was a really fun time. And what that window kind of socialized into us, into an entire generation of builders and creators that is not useful. We're going to talk about how in the music industry today a house concert probably makes more than a venue tour, or certainly more than putting up your records on Spotify. And we're going to talk about, and we're going to end up somewhere which is a home base for me and a place that I invite everybody we work to, and a place that I invite everybody we work with and talk to to move toward. And that is the point in which we stop seeking attention and start paying it. Just would love it if you would join me in welcoming Chris McAdoo to Dam's Given. All right, well, Chris, welcome. Um, as I mentioned in the intro, Chris is like, you know, one of these multi-hyphenates joining us. Uh he's a musician, a brand guy, a strategist for startups. But really, you and I started talking, and the reason why I want to talk to you today has a lot to do with this kind of false collision that we're having between like the tech people and the craft people, and they can't get along. And you know, I don't mean to minimize that in some ways for good reason. But I think we've got to have really structured and thoughtful conversation around some of our really tough sacred cows, like craft. And it's not that there is no room for craft, it's not that it doesn't matter anymore. In fact, maybe it matters more than ever, but we have to think really well about what to do about it. Uh, Chris is gonna help us with that. Um, thanks for joining us, Chris. Um, starting, what got you thinking about sort of this relationship between sort of craft and business and how all these things meet together? I know you've got a lot of inputs that is your creativity, but give us a sense of that.

SPEAKER_00 4:50

Yeah, so all of these different things. Nick, when we started talking about this concept of craft isn't enough, I would actually say, to your point, it's more important than ever. And so it's more important that we take it seriously. And I've kind of done my own thing, both as a as an artist, as a person who's owned business and everything, since I was like 13 years old. And so it has always occurred to me, there's never a lack of ideas, but there's always a lack of execution. And so, you know, you've now you've probably had those conversations like, oh man, I've got this great idea. I just need somebody to do it. And you're like, you're like, well, no, that's the hard part, like that is the actual hard part. And so I've had the opportunity to sort of be all of these different things, but then also had the opportunity to work with people across the spectrum. And so one interesting thing that I have seen is if I'm talking to a the smartest person in the room, a national lab-ranked scientist sending stuff to space, or an artist introducing their work, their passion to the world, same conversation. I love this. Why don't people understand it? Man, why don't people love the thing that I'm doing in the same way that I do? And then you sort of work back from there. It's like you can't take for granted that people are going to hear what you're saying, see what you're doing, or understand what you're trying to accomplish without you being able to communicate. Like, guys, this is this is why this is valuable. This is why you understand your audience, you know, understanding your audience and understanding what it means to them.

SPEAKER_01 6:42

Let's let's start there. Let's break that down a little bit because I think there's so many layers going on there. And I think what's really fascinating and why I wanted you in this conversation is because it's easy to see how this might affect the entrepreneur, or it's easy to see how this might affect the designer who makes logos for a living, or it's easy to see how this might affect some of these more narrow segments. But when you start to see it thematically across all of these different areas, for me, that start, you know, triggers my systems thinking brain of like, oh, something really funky is going on here, right? And it seems like one of the early layers of this is this embedded idea that because I love a thing, people should like it.

unknown 7:25

Right.

SPEAKER_01 7:25

So whether that's the entrepreneur, you know, whether that's the entrepreneur who invented some, you know, piece of tech or whatever, you know. But that whole concept is so pervasive, and I think is really running against some, you know, rough-shod ground these days. But speak to that layer of it first. It's this like, I made a thing, why don't people love it?

SPEAKER_00 7:48

Oh, dude, okay. So, yeah, personal examples, right? Like, I love Tom Waits. And if anybody out there listening is familiar with Tom Waits, you either love him or you hate him. Either way, totally cool. Right? Like you, you in everybody develops their personal taste and their personal cultures. And we all have our particular lived experiences that bring us to everything that we step into. And so I think one of the things that I've had to come to terms with about that side of it is that how I guess like how presumptive of me to think that you know, you would like the same books, experiences, things I make, or things that we're gonna share in the same way that I do, because it presumes that what I am saying is right. And while it may be in some in some ways, like everyone is coming at everything from their own point of view. That's right. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 8:51

I I do think I want you to react to this because we're seeing this a lot. I I see this a lot more in people who are like 30 to 50, right? There there is some younger generation thing, but people who grew up on the internet, right? Like so, particularly those of us who grew up when the internet still worked. Um, we lived before it has been inshitified. Right, exactly. I mean, quite literally, right? There's that early stage in the insidification cycle where everything is built for the user. And the user, right? So we all had that lived experience that for a very brief amount of time, you could like, you know, the blogger area, why you just stand up a blog and all of a sudden people are reading it, you know, or you show up on YouTube and you put out a few videos and all of a sudden people are watching. So there's this lived experience for a very brief window of time under a very specific set of constraints that I think socialized this idea that, hey, if you just show up and you use the magical powers of the internet, people will find you and love you. And it just ain't true, right? I mean, how does that gel with your experience?

SPEAKER_00 9:56

Dude, Soylent Green is made out of people. And as it turns, also, for anybody who gets that reference, you know, it certainly shows that you were in the gifted and talented programs in middle school.

SPEAKER_01 10:10

Well, we'll put we'll put the hint in the show notes if that's not a familiar.

SPEAKER_00 10:14

I think that what you have, and maybe you maybe you have seen this as well, is you have folks that are now building these platforms. These are second, third, fourth, fifth generation platforms. And when I say platforms, I am talking about now social media or whatever you want to Google, YouTube, all of it. Yeah. All that stuff, all of this has been bought, sold, and turned over so many times that the motives are different. What is the intention? What is the incentive for those platforms to exist? And I think we need to be very clear about like the incentive is profit for the companies that own them. And I'm not even saying that in a negative way because companies need to make money. But when you take that into account, that the people that are building a lot of these quote unquote connective tissues in that in the olden times, there was this there was this actual sense of curiosity, of this surprised connection. But we have now, I think, people that are building extractive machines to connect us, and they don't like people. And so they're building things built upon assumptions that may not align with the actual experience of people that like to go to the grocery store. I they like to go to shows, they like to make their own music, they like to learn to play guitar because it's a skill you want to master. And I think when you when you speak about those, a lot of those surprises and the things that I think we may have experienced in that first wave of what this internet is, we're real. But our but these next generation have never lived with that excitement and experience of like, wait a second, I can just send a message to my friend? Because of course you can. You know, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:21

Oh, yeah, I I I think what you raise is really important. And I think again, we've talked about this on this show before. Talking with folks offline, I can tell that we we can never talk about it enough. Yeah, there was a very brief window where we weren't the product, and we were actually people using an innovation, and that innovation was doing a thing. But the the subtext of that is that we had very, very patient capital for 10 or 15 years. Those early stages, these businesses didn't make any money. They were burning money on the hopes that someday they could figure out how to turn it into revenue. And and guess what? They figured it out, right? It took them a while, but they figured out how to turn all of our, hey, look at me doing a thing, whether that's hey, look at my business or look at my song I wrote or whatever it is. They figured out a way to turn all of our look at me doing a thing into their own form of revenue. And that changes the dynamic entirely.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

You just introduced a phrase that I think is really important, patient capital. Right. So, and these are conversations that also, and this is more towards the younger audience. Like, if you would have told 20-year-old art major Chris McAdoo that he would ever say the words or understand what patient capital meant, he'd be like, I don't know if he would believe you. But what what what that is, is you're right. The technologies that are being developed now are filled with patient capital. And so what you saw there is when there is money to the money that has the ability to wait, it has the ability to lock in on a here's where we here's where we go. Here's where we start to extract, here's where we start to exclude, here's where, and this is like you know, a common example, and we'll just go ahead and get hot on it, right? You look at some of the platforms out there that allow for, you know, hey, you upload an image and you can all of a sudden make that image, you know, sexually exploitative or this. And when that company, XAI, got a lot of blowback, I'm like, hey, we don't want this. Instead of saying, oh, we messed up and we should probably be in trouble for this and we should cancel all this, that company said, you know what, guys, you're right. We're just gonna put this in the paid version.

SPEAKER_01 14:56

Because they under, I mean, again, they understood the basic economic forces, is that there was demand for this. They just needed to be able to provide some sense of, you know, protecting the children, so to speak. And and I've talked about this, is that I really believe that a lot of this discussion that we're having about, oh, we need to get kids off of tech, we need to get kids off of social media, we need to get teenagers off these platforms. I'm not saying it's necessarily bad, although the data is pretty mixed on whether it's actually working. What I what my visibility into it, and I have teenagers, is that this is like a socially acceptable way to deal with our own guilt about what we've built. So we're not willing to protect ourselves. We're not willing to, we're not willing to protect the economy, we're not willing to protect our peers, business peers. So we we'll we'll leverage it in the only thing we'll allow ourselves to do, which is to protect the children. And the reality is we've allowed for really a platform economy that doesn't serve hardly anybody, to be honest. Like really serves only a very small number of people. Because what's interesting, you said there's patient capital right now, and I agree with that. But what's really fascinating is the patient capital of 15 years ago was hey, let's try banking, let's try design, let's try that. Like it's it's money that was trying a bunch of different things. And now we're at a level of the iteration where the only thing that matters is platforms. So there is patient capital, but the but almost all of it. In fact, I just saw a recent statistic that last year, 80% of venture capital went to AI platforms. So yeah, that that I that capital is proving to be somewhat patient, like we're gonna build out massive data centers and we're gonna do all this stuff, but it's now in a very, very narrow space.

SPEAKER_00 16:41

And what's gonna be interesting around that, because I help I I a lot of times I'm working with companies that are raising, you know, capital, all this kind of stuff, is the thing that I have sort of shouted from the rooftops for a couple of years is like saying you are AI powered or this or that. We used the dirty word now, but it's like saying you're that is kind of like saying you and I are using computers to do this. And here is definitely one thing I would say to those folks that you know, back to the craft isn't enough, right? Like back to that. Like, what can we we see what's happened, but what can we do about it is starting to become smarter and paying attention to like what are these incentives? What are they trying to build? Why are they trying to build it? And and I think there's these bets being made, and some of them are going to fail in a dramatic, dramatic fashion. And so the things that I like to think about about that uh is what is what are the things that we can do, or we can focus on the things that aren't going to change. And that means like if you are an artist, if you are a trying to build a business, if you are a leader, people do not want to feel unappreciated, people don't want worse service, people don't want all of those things. And I am looking forward to once the sort of froth settles down, and I think it's gonna be like 12, maybe 24 months around this. What happens when people start you know what what happens when we're back in person? What happens when trust becomes hard to verify, right? Without looking somebody in the eye.

SPEAKER_01 18:39

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what I you're more optimistic than I am. I think we're I think we're in like a I mean, it depends on what froth we mean. This sort of like chewing through the supposed bubble and all of that, I think, yeah, 12 to 24 cycle, we'll know where we are with that. The sense of kind of permanent unknown, permanent insecurity, by virtue of the word permanent, I think we're in this for a while. And maybe for those of us who are early to you know, mid to late mid-career, we might be in it for our entire career. And so then I think which gets us back to your point, which is we're gonna have to learn how to make these kind of first principles, core behavioral decisions that are a little bit era agnostic because we actually can't even figure out what era we're in. Every new substack that comes out renames the era, right? Is it the AI era? Is it the deep fake era? Is it the attention era? Is it the right the era's been renamed 87 times? We can't decide what era we're in. And that I think further validates that we have to get back to these first principles. And I think that's really coming full circle. What you and I were talking about when we were talking about craft not being enough. It's not that craft doesn't matter, it's that you're gonna have to figure out how to bring that thing that you made into a network of relationships, into a way of going to market, into a way of engaging with other people that may not be dependent on yesterday's favorite algorithm.

SPEAKER_00 20:11

Well, and what may actually to what you're I I love that because what you're really talking about is context. What context are you operating in? To a lot of folks, I think that depending on it depends on how you for a lot of people, it depends on how you were brought up and how you relate to what is it? Uh what's the say he's like how you relate to being uncomfortable. And I've had, I think, the good fortune of like even growing up, both my father and mother were entrepreneurial. And so I've never lived in a situation and or understood it as a familial thing, like where you know, mom and dad go to work and come home and get a pay and turkeys, you know, at Thanksgiving. Like, we've I've always operated under this, like, all right, sort of constantly learning, constantly evolving, and constantly pivoting. And I think that's gonna be even more important. I mean, for not just to your point, yeah, not just for a certain few of us, but for I mean, almost everybody. Uh but here's the thing, I would argue that that's always been the case. Because when people are saying things about a certain technology and it's gonna it could it it's gonna replace us or whatever, people will argue, no, it can't because blank blank blank. No, it can't. It doesn't have to be good at its job, it doesn't have to be all those things, but you do. Like all of us being able to show up in that way, like what should have we and what could have we been doing all along? You know, does this become a time? Point in in history where people are like, wait a second. Like, we should have been teaching, teaching and learning with these navigable skills this whole time.

SPEAKER_01 22:11

Yeah, I mean, I think I think we're seeing a resurgence of that, right? One of the one of the themes of the news in the last two or three weeks, it's graduation time and you know, CEOs are getting booed off graduation stages and stuff like that. Like, one of the big themes that is, and and there was the big Canvas blackout, if I don't know if the year, you know, of the ed tech platform is massive pushback on ed tech. And that maybe it wasn't the best idea in the world with declining, you know, reading scores everywhere to have computers be the primary source by which, you know, our children learn, right? These things of like, we we had to try some things. And it's not about like a stupid us 10 years ago. It's just we had to try some things, we've learned some things. And now what do we want to do with what we've learned, right? You know, you see, and it isn't necessarily about, oh, it was better back then. I mean, I was there back then. I'm not sure how much better it was, but have as with all change, we've lost some things in the change. And what can we do to do this work of recovery? And I want to come back to your idea, which I think a lot of this is about context. So I want you to speak to this as a musician because I'm gonna say something I know almost nothing about, and then you can correct it and make us all smarter. So, to me, like an example of context is if I'm a songwriter and I want to get seen in the world and you know, but you know, have people listen to my music and et cetera. There was a stretch of time where it was like, okay, well, then you go put some videos on TikTok, you put some stuff on YouTube, et cetera. No context. That the way to be found is to have no context. Just go on these global platforms that just sort of hopefully use the algorithm to ship you to magically the right people. Now you're seeing this artist-owned, smaller scale, you know, platforms where, hey, you're not gonna get shipped to a hundred thousand people by way of an algorithm, but 3,000 people are gonna find you by way of natural networks and they're gonna love you. Right. This really small, long tail kind of stuff. I think the music industry sorting this out in interesting ways, and I'd love for you to speak to that.

SPEAKER_00 24:18

Well, I I'll I'll speak on I can speak to it, and I'll sort of do a dual path here, both as a from the music industry as well as the fine arts as artists. Yeah, even better. Because that that's where I spend more of my time or in that world too. But what you have are everyone knows that um that interview with the guy, the cre the creator of Suno that said, like, well, people don't really like to make music because it's hard to learn an instrument, it's hard to do that, it's hard to do that. And then there's the same thing over here on these generative platforms who are like, well, it's hard to learn to paint. It's hard to learn to do these things. And I think one, eventually that artifice that artifice breaks down because people have to care about it. And what I've learned both as a professional artist and and a creator and all of these kind of things is people buy into you as much as they do the art. And so they're conf, I think, I think it's really easy to confuse the finished product with the whole, with the whole process. Like the fact that someone may like a thing and they're gonna do an AI version of it and put it on their wall. Hey, we're gonna do that anyway. They're not your fan, they're not your client, they're not your partner. And so your point, man, you're talking about, you know, you're finding those 3,000 people. There is a technologist guy named Kevin Kenny, and he talks about 1,000 true fans. And so I think the nature of what success, I think the nature of fame, I think the nature of what it feels like to quote unquote make it are going to look very different. Because to your point, I I've seen actually literally just last week, there was a great artist that came through my town here, Knoxville, Tennessee, and played like two house concerts and probably made more money, right? Because they didn't have to book a venue, they didn't have to do all of these kind of things. And they were very successful. And so I think we have to be able, in the same way that I was also, it's like Gandalf style. I was there in the beginning, you know, for our kids generation, and really even for us, but but what was isn't anymore. And so what opportunities does that open up? And even if it looks different than it did even five years ago, 10, but especially 20, that's okay. But that's a new business model. And I think the ability to be creative in that craft is like if you really love your thing, if you really love the thing that you are doing and building, or the people that you work with, or the experiences that you create, like figure out, you got it. There's part of it that you figure out like, what does that sustainable model look like moving forward rather than sort of trying to wind the tape back, you know, to a to a time uh that wasn't working all that well either.

SPEAKER_01 27:27

Yeah, there's so much of it that's that that's fantasy, right? That you know it like it's it's funny to, I don't know, like watch an a 10-year-old American Idol episode or a 10-year-old survivor episode, these these things, and you you see like how we thought about the world at the time. You know, and it would be like, well, this kid got a million views on YouTube, and now he's gonna be the next big, you know. I remember that era, you go, oh my gosh, all you got to do is go on YouTube and you get a million, right? Yeah. Instead of realizing the arbitrage of it, that there's a million kids who went on YouTube and got zero, so that this kid could be the one that got a million. And of course it plays into the sort of American fantasy of, well, but maybe I'm the one and I just have to believe in myself and whatever. And I think part of what we're cultivating, and I think part of what you're cultivating with your clients, and we certainly cultivate here in this conversation, is a different kind of vision for the future. That instead of rolling the dice on somebody's, you know, sort of vagus algorithm, that it'll hopefully grab us and shoot us to our 15 minutes of fame, is well, wouldn't it be great to work with a small number of people, whatever that size is for what the venture you're doing and the work that you do, to work with a small number of people who totally believe in what we do, and that I could get to control my future in the process. That sounds fun, right?

SPEAKER_00 28:52

Yeah. And that actually is a thing that is available to us, like in a lot of different than it was, you know. I I love, I I think that is that's a big one. I there's another, there's an author, a guy named Eric Reese.

SPEAKER_01 29:11

Yeah, Eric Reese is doing great work right now.

SPEAKER_00 29:13

And right now, yeah, he's got a great, he's got a new book out, but uh now, and his last book was all about human flourishing. And he happens to be talking about, he's a venture capital guy, but he happened to be talking about technology companies, but you could apply it to just about anything, in that if we are developing something solely because we are like, you don't develop the tech for the tech. You don't develop the like we develop it so that we as people live better lives. And whatever we are doing, I think from if we're trying to, you know, if we're trying to make art, if we're trying to make music, or if we're trying to lead a team, or if we're trying to build a business, or all of those kind of things, there is this, yeah, it's like if we're not doing it for each other and we're not building something that matters for people that keeps us moving forward, like what are we doing?

SPEAKER_01 30:10

Yeah, and it's interesting. I mean, it's interesting to treat Reese as a as a text case here because it shows a little bit of how our our brains get a little mucked up and how we have to really be generous with each other. You know, like his original idea, lean startup, the idea of having an MVP and failing fast and iterating through and all of this stuff. What I think no one understood at the time is all of that methodology was based on the assumption that you were building a thing that was gonna help people, that was gonna be that was gonna do good and be beneficial. And now you're seeing Eric Reese, not it's not fair to say that he's on like an apology tour, but a little bit of a like a repositioning and going, hey, people took my ideas and took them to places that I never imagined them going. And now I want to recenter this into something much more human, and that it really isn't just about building something fast, right? His new book is about you know resilience. How do you build something that's worth having for a really long time? You know, I think there are people in the world who'd be like, well, screw that guy. He basically created Silicon Valley. And I think, again, this is like, come on, folks, like we all are learning and growing. We're all getting there, we're all waking up to these this reality as the levels that we are. And now we can figure out our next steps together.

SPEAKER_00 31:30

Well, that like a thing that I like to say and a point of view that I'll start a lot of sort of set the tone for facilitations as well as just when I'm talking with anybody, is an absolute repudiation of break of move fast and break things. Hate it with every ounce of my body. And I say move fast and build things. And because what a lot of people have now sort of experienced from that first wave of breaking things is like when you break something, somebody has to pick it up, somebody has to clean it up. And so you're not necessarily thinking about the downstream effects of what you are doing. But when you come like you to your point, when you're building together, and I'm actually sometimes very literally like, hey, how's my neighbor? Hey, like I am going, as maybe a creative professional or somebody or whatever, it's like I'm going to go and be involved with this thing that I care about that takes time out of my day because I care about it. There is no forward motion in a positive way without cost. And sometimes that cost is is literal money, but sometimes it's time, sometimes it's attention. But I think that we are at this opportunity, this point in time where working together to move fast, yes, but to build rather than to break things is something we can all come together, um, I think in a really powerful way around.

SPEAKER_01 33:01

Well, we have to, right? We we've we we spent a generation disrupting and deconstructing. And you and I were a part of that generation. Me, I'm a little bit older than you, me, a little, my, my group a little bit more so. And I stood on stages and let's said, let's Uberize everything. And then last week I'm in New York and I'm begging for a taxi because if I have to deal with Uber one more time, I'm gonna free and scream. Because we didn't think about we, I uh, you know, here's my public mayaculpa. We didn't think about the second and third and fourth degree consequences of dismantling what we dismantled and how much they were load-bearing. And and and this stuff matters. And now we get to go back and go, okay, well, we we kind of have an economy and a society that needs some support structure again because we tore out all of the load-bearing columns. So, what do we want to build? What do we want to build in our neighborhood? What do we want to build in our industry? What do we want to, and and that we is so important.

SPEAKER_00 33:56

We and you uh the load-bearing, the inefficiencies were load-bearing. Like that is the thing, is we continue to sort of want to incentivize, like, this is inefficient, let's do this. But no, like, I think the things that we can do now, again, to be craft first, but to also be like positional around each other is like, wait a second, wait a second. Why would we want to stop doing X, Y, Z? What are we not looking at? What are we not thinking about? And who is it going to affect if we take away, like to your point, like what is load bearing? Because if we just start taking sledgehammers to things, which we have seen the effects of, incredible harm can be done. And so if you know, you know, if you really think about it, if you know the people that live in the uh that house, you're not gonna take a sledgehammer to it.

SPEAKER_01 34:57

That's right. I mean, you there's no way that, you know, when they were building Uber, they were having focus groups with taxi drivers. They just weren't, right? That that this is this is every everything was worthwhile collateral damage and it'll all work out in the end. And and we've learned, right? But now we have to, now we have to do make different choices.

SPEAKER_00 35:19

Well, and if you remember too, or if anybody else was, you know, paying attention when Uber first came out, we can use that as an example because it came out as the best version of itself. Do you remember when you would get in an Uber and the guy, you know, the guy's like, oh, would you like a mint? Here's a here's a freshly squeezed lemon. I don't know. It felt new and you're like, wow, they really, this is nice. The last, you know, traveling, and like you said, like I I would give anything not to get in the back of one of those cars. And it's because when it started out, they were still like, here's the best version of ourselves. And then piece by piece, it gets inshidified to use that term. But it's like, what if we just stop paying attention to this? What if we stopped doing this? What if we stopped doing that? And it extracts the most margin out of every ride. But take Uber and apply that to uh, you know, so many different, you know, situations. And I think too, people underestimate, again, because the the people building these systems don't like people. People underestimate, for instance, even self-checkout lines at the grocery store. I changed the grocery store I went to for like two years because my buddy's kid worked there. And I like to see, I like to see James. I was like, oh, hey James, how's how's school going? Not because I cared about one brand over another, but it was like, oh, cool, cool. That's neat that he's got a first person job. And that's a very human thing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:58

Let's I wanna I wanna in some ways like the place that we've landed. I'm I'm imagining all of our listeners are like, yeah, yeah, you guys, screw Uber, we hate those guys, you know, like you sort of imagine everybody's, you know, and and I don't, I never want us to just sort of play the hits, you know, like right. Because I think part of why we started this and and really where we are right here is okay, if I'm listening and I'm a person who makes a thing that's human first and value for and is crafty and cool, and maybe it's code-based, maybe it's in the real world, maybe it's a piece of art, it doesn't matter. It's my thing that I'm making, right? I think the hardest bridge to cross, though, is I'm still sitting here wishing somebody would care about it. And what I have to pivot to is how do I take this thing that I have and find some people that I can use it to care about them? And I have so many agency owners, solos, people who in my network who are like, are we, you know, in the age of AR, are we going to find people who love what we do? And my honest response to them is, well, who does what you do love? And how would they know? How would they know? Is there a group of people that you're like, this is for you? And I'm talking to you, and I'm embedded with in your community, and I'm at your industry event, and I'm getting to know you, and people like you, and I'm I've become an expert on whatever libraries, because I really want to work with libraries. I've become an expert on, you know, that behavior of taking attention and pushing it outward and going, I'm gonna pay attention, not seek attention, I think is what we're both advocating for, but it's a hard turn.

SPEAKER_00 38:46

It is a you just nailed it though. I mean, that is if you are in the marketplace, in which we all are, and again, back to you could be making music, you could be making code, you could be building a business. I don't want to hear about you, I want to hear about me. In every customer profile you've ever heard, in every hero's journey, you in this case, I like the chance to make a Lord of the Rings reference when I can. Whenever you can. Everybody thinks of Frodo as the hero of that story. And that makes sense. But when you think about Sam Wise Gamge, at the end, Frodo's ready to give up. He's the one that carries him up the mountain. That is our role. So when we're trying to, when we are engaging with an audience, when we have a potential client, when we have a potential collector, whatever that means, how can we help them? What are their pain points? What are they going through? What do they love? Like you said, what do they love? What do they care about? And we re I think it's too easy, and we've been doing this for years and years. It's too easy for us to reduce people to sock puppet personas. And so I always I always advocate when I'm talking with well artists or a lot of our companies, I don't want you to tell me that Susie is definitely a 42-year-old mother of two and like blah, blah, blah. Like, no, no, no. Talk to Deborah, the lady that is actually your customer. Talk to the person that actually came to your show. Talk to the person that actually wants to see more of your work and ask them questions, not about how much they like your work, but like, what what made you show up tonight? What it's about them. It's not about you. What made you what made you come out on a Thursday? What made you show up in this way at work rather than another way? And you start to learn about them in a way that I think it comes back to that things that never change. People want to feel heard. People want to feel that the decisions they make have an influence on others. And I hope that they I hope that they want that influence to be positive.

SPEAKER_01 41:09

I think that's true. I mean, I think there that by and large, you know, one of the things that's been said ad nauseum in this sort of hyper-growth, hyper-acceleration of technology is, you know, code is fast, but evolution is slow. And so we are who we are. We are who we were in 1800, we are who we were in 1450. Like human beings just don't evolve that fast. And so our instinctual nature of how we make decisions, what gives us comfort, what gives us joy, what gives us meaning is really not that inventive. It's not that new, it's not that creative, it's pretty pretty baked in. And so ventures and leaders who are willing to do the hard thing of going, well, I'm just gonna do the human thing. You know, like I hear a lot of people being like, gosh, I wish the economy wasn't as extractive and this extraction, this, and extraction that. And I write a lot about extraction for this reason. And then, but what am I supposed to do? Well, what is the least extractive thing you could do to solve the problem that you're in? I said this to a client of mine the other day. I said, okay, we have this giant goal we're trying to reach. What's the most human, natural, joy-filled way we could solve it? What a great way to say that. And that doesn't necessarily mean we're gonna get the one right answer, but man, it points us in such a completely different direction, and we get really, really different ideas.

SPEAKER_00 42:42

Well, I think too, with that approach, you are also being mindful of everybody else in the room. And who's when you're trying to make things better, you're actually who's in the room and also who's not in the room, and who are we making these decisions for? And I also think people wildly underestimate small things. Absolutely. Like do you underestimate that in you know, I making something up, like in the office every morning, you come and make the coffee, or you're kind to the parking valet, or you make sure that whatever that is. And if you had everybody doing just one little thing that helped, man, that made me feel better. With no necessary, it's not a quid pro quo, it's not an oh, I'll do a nice thing, and then you'll do a nice thing. You're like, no, I'm just gonna do a nice thing because it's joyful. Because it makes life better. You know, be selfish about it. It makes life better for me. And it's those small steps, those things that we can do that make um over time make a huge difference.

SPEAKER_01 43:57

I a hundred percent agree. I mean, I think We over-index to the big flashy moves. I think that's part of this the one of the consequences of our digital era. Um, see, that's one of the eras we were in. It's changed several times since then, but one of the consequences of our digital era is we over-index to the flashy and we under-index to the simple because it'll never show up on a dashboard. And the stuff that'll never show up on a dashboard is where the magic is right now. So we're near the end of our time, Chris, and this has been super fun. So let's do two things. One is where can people find you? Obviously, you want to let people know where they can find you and learn more about what you're doing because you're doing incubating, you're doing training, you're you're in like nine different things. So where can people find you?

SPEAKER_00 44:40

Yeah, like most folks in this new age economy era. Um, you know, yeah, you can find for art is uh ChrisMacado.com. I do a lot of speaking at ChrisMackadoospeaks.com, but then my main company uh is called Fighting Shape, uh, Fighting Shape Impact Company, and that's fightingshapeimpact.com.

SPEAKER_01 45:02

And then lastly, we ask everybody this when they swing by and hang out, is um what's giving you hope right now?

SPEAKER_00 45:09

Uh I can be very specific about that. Um, some of the work that I do both with you know with my kids and with some um students at uh the university level, 18 to 23 year olds. I have had some of the most meaningful experiences with some of the most curious people in the world. As a as a advisor to the a college here, um to the college of business, it gives me hope that there are people that are out, you know, sort of one generation below us that are asking great questions. That regardless of what we hear on the news uh and see uh you know on our feeds and everything, I believe that there is a vast majority of folks that when given the right, when given the right outlet, are curious and they care a lot. And I see it over and over again. So I'm gonna go with like the next generation's uh curiosity. And so it's up to us as sort of those next generations to protect that curiosity at all costs.

SPEAKER_01 46:25

That's right. That's right. It's funny. I I I maybe this might be true without exception. And I'm sure there's somewhere there's an exception, but I can't think of it. Whenever I talk to somebody with proximity to teenagers and early adults, you know, people like 16 to 25, they're like, these guys are gonna be all right. These kids are gonna like there, there's just there's so much optimism there. It's really exciting. All right, Chris. Well, thank you so much for hanging out with us. Thank you, man. We will uh hear more from you when they follow your links, which we'll have in the show notes.

SPEAKER_00 46:58

All right, much appreciated. And uh thanks to everybody for, you know, for the thanks to you and everybody for this opportunity.

SPEAKER_01 47:04

If this conversation put language to something you've been feeling but couldn't quite name, that's the show doing what it's supposed to do. The job of Damskiven is to surface our questions, surface our ambiguities, even dangerously surface our vulnerabilities, and ask, what if we lived inside of this in a different way? One of the things I was having a conversation with a colleague of mine actually on LinkedIn, which is never where good conversations happen. And he was talking about he kindly put the word out about my book coming out and introduced that to his community. And we stumbled into this phrase, you're already uncomfortable, you might as well grow. This economy, this environment, this uncertainty, this you know, K-shaped discrepancy between the haves and the haves not, it creates an enormous amount of discomfort and cognitive dissonance for people. So the reality is whether you're acknowledging it or not, you're already uncomfortable. So moving toward discomfort isn't going to make things worse. It actually is going to make things better. And if we can move toward discomfort, we might as well grow. We might as well actually tap into the energy in our vulnerability, tap into the energy and the questions that would that don't have answers because there's so much pent-up energy in there, and then use it to solve real problems and negotiate our ventures out into the world. As far as Chris, you can find him at chrismcadoo.com for his art, Chris McAdooSpeaks.com for him in front of an audience or your team. And then Fighting Shape Impact for his kind of main company and advisory work. All of those links are in the show notes. For everything happening in my world, the easiest place to always find me is nickrichmeier.com. And you can always subscribe at damnsgiven.com to the newsletter and everything that we're publishing. Uh, if you're watching on YouTube or if you're on Apple and this connected with you again, we ask that you provide a review and subscribe because we really want to help everybody off the algorithm recommendation machine. Algorithmic recommendations are keeping all of our brains frozen. And so the more you can use the tools and use the platform to tell it what you want and only engage with what you want, the better off you're gonna be. And so, for better or worse, like and subscribe and uh is a key way of doing that. As I try to say as often as possible, um, the future is coming at us, whether we like it or not. So forward forward. Let's get there together.