Peter Smart on Why Your Design Skills Still Matter in the Age of AI

0:00From the Association of Registered Graphic Designers, this is the Design Thinkers podcast. Design Thinkers is Canada's largest graphic design conference. Originally launched to mark the conference's 25th anniversary, the podcast now reaches a global audience of designers and creatives. Join our host and RGG president, Nicola Hamilton, as she connects with Design Thinker speakers to explore the work and ideas shaping today's design industry. This week on the Design Thinkers podcast, I'm joined by Peter Smart, Chief Experience Officer and Managing Partner at Fantasy. Based in the Bay Area, Fantasy is a creative partner behind some of the world's most widely used digital products, working with companies like Disney, Nike, Spotify, Netflix, Meta, and Google.

0:47In this conversation, Peter shares how he's thinking about the next shift in digital product design, one where fixed interfaces and screen-based experiences may no longer be the default. We talk about what happens when products become more dynamic and more personalized, how AI is reshaping the relationships between brands and users, and why designers may need to redefine their own value. We also get into some of the trends Peter is seeing and why he thinks the most important thing designers can do right now is zoom out to look beyond the tools, understand where value is shifting, and rethink what they're really designing.

1:25This episode is for anyone trying to make sense of where design is heading. Maybe you're early in your career or leading a team or simply wondering how to stay relevant in a moment that seems to be changing every single day. I am basing this a little bit on your talk description, but this, I'm assuming, this idea of you putting forward an idea about the way we've been designing digital products around screens and sort of fixed interfaces and that those ideas might not hold up much longer. And I think that a lot of designers, that's both like really exciting, but also maybe kind of unsettling.

2:04Peter Smart:Yes, absolutely. Yeah, no, that's cool. I'm happy to talk about that. Yeah. Generative interfaces, next paradigm for digital products. Honestly, I feel like the talk going through my mind for this audience is maybe on the theme of zoom out. And it's something that I think a lot of folks when you're filling your day-to-day with like LinkedIn and X and feeds of how folks are starting to use Claude and these new tools and these new software development life cycles and it changes every single day it's so disconcerting like even for someone like me who's trying to stay ahead of it like what does ahead actually mean and you feel like you've understood a concept but then the next day like there's a brand new protocol or a brand new way of actually being able to you know to design and I think a lot of actually how I spend a lot of my time with with leaders is helping them to zoom out and think about the locus of their value and what it is that they are actually doing and I think for designers I mean speaking for myself like the zoom out I actually think is like the most comforting and rewarding thing that we can do for ourselves because what we do is just always has been always will be so valuable how we define ourselves and how we too often ascribe our value to like what it is that we produce like wireframes that can make things feel way more disconcerting than they actually are but when you take a step back and realize like actually what we do as designers is in is bring creative problem solving to really challenging problems and imbue the things that we touch with more value that is never going to stop being valuable it's just about learning the new ways to do that um so yeah i don't know if like because i came up through design thinking like i the fact that we have a conference called the design thinking conference it's just so fantastic because these are fundamental skill sets and the fundamental parts of design which don't change how can we return back to that is yeah some of the stuff I'm noodling on and not trying to into the weeds I think for folks on like even things like generative interfaces of course we could go there and that that could be really exciting we could show that but it will also change and it's it's about helping folks understand that that's okay like change is the only constant there's two things that sort of popped into my brain as you were saying that and the first is that idea that it's going to be valuable and that those fundamental skills of design thinking and creative strategy like those things are not going anywhere and I I think a lot about I'm a print designer I'm a magazine designer sort of through and through and I think one of the things that's been so fascinating is the conversations with other designers who are specializing in more digital products and are so quick to disregard my experience and my skill level.

5:09And I do a lot of digital work too, because the actual fundamentals of editorial design are the same fundamentals as UX user experience and reader experience are the same tool set. They're just different languages. And so I do sometimes think about how quickly we forget about those zoom out skills, like those things that we all share, the ways of thinking, the ability to sort of integrate different perspectives.

5:38Peter Smart:No, I love it. You're designing for a human being. It's on both sides of the coin. Like you're designing for a human being who has to navigate a thing and extract value out of it. And by virtue of you putting your creativity into the thing, the artifact, be it a magazine or be it something on digital display or be it something entirely invisible, but it's just a design system you have prescribed to it more value than it had before you did that and so like the people who are really talented at this thing called design bring with them all of that value and they emboss it like onto that thing and it becomes better for the user using it it becomes better for the business that you're serving and so you know that is completely transferable across every single domain it's why really we're just the same as architects and furniture designers and interior designers it's all design.

6:29Peter Smart:It's all the same thing. And folks can get pretty territorial unnecessarily. Well, and I say that to students too, right? I think designers who are sort of entering this field at the early stages of their careers, I think they're probably the folks who are the most stressed about what that means because they're sort of thinking about this need to specialize so quickly, this need to sort of pick a lane and stay in that lane, which can be totally helpful for them but also those lanes are going to change again in another five ten years like UI UX wasn't a job title a decade ago probably and it's so funny and I can so believe that folks who are stepping into this in this moment are just the most concerned they should actually be the most confident because they've not just spent 20 years of their career becoming dogmatic about the way things should or should not be done.

7:21Peter Smart:Like it is, it's not to do with actually age, it's flexibility. It's your ability to, again, going back to great design thinking, like ask yourself first principle questions and be okay with coming up with different answers today than you did like five years ago. And folks who are just entering in can just look at everything with a blank canvas and ask themselves the same design thinking first principle questions about how am I going to solve this problem? What's the right way to gather the best insight? And the answer not be predetermined in their head and biased towards a certain way of doing it.

7:57Peter Smart:It is a really wonderful position to actually be in. There's a company called Cloudflare and they're hiring. And I just met that team and just a great metaphor, I think, for why folks who are entering the industry to have a lot of confidence, they're aggressively hiring interns. Why? Because these are the folks who have the curiosity of mind they're able to ask what we call them like um dangerously simple questions on why we do it this way and is there a better way and maybe i can find it and then people who are willing to experiment and try and fail and like not be too perturbed like by that like the stakes perhaps like a much lower capacity to do it there's an excitement for it it's there aggressively i think it's 1111 you know interns that they're trying to sort of bring into the company like really really quickly i think a lot of companies there's a strange dialogue happening around like kind of more junior and entry-level positions specifically like on this topic and the companies that are smart are the ones who realize that we to aggressively bring folks in and the companies who um are more kind of defensive and who aren't going to be able to necessarily adapt with the times are the ones who are consolidating and trying to work out how we deliver the same thing, but just with less people.

9:17Peter Smart:The wrong equation. You need to actually figure out, no, what we deliver is actually going, it's already changed. The question is, are you keeping up? And if you're just constricting what you're already doing, delivering the same old thing, just more efficiently or cheaper or whatever, sure, your overhead for a little bit is going to contract. But the market and what it values is already moving away from that thing. You need to bring in the fresh blood. You need to bring in the new ideas, the creativity, the talent, the ingenuity to conceive of the new. And yes, it may come from the organization that you already have.

9:56Peter Smart:But hey, wouldn't it be amazing to fertilize it with the brilliant minds of this next generation. And I guarantee you, I mean, I've seen this lived out so many times like in fantasy, we've gone through waves of hiring interns where we've had the capacity to do so. We're a boutique shop. So not every year can we do it. But like when we do do it, the amount we learn from folks who are kind of coming in and the way that they think is just so inspiring. I would say my encouragement, Yeah, back to that like zoom out concept. It's like you're probably actually some of the most valuable people on the planet right now.

10:35Peter Smart:The question is, do you know it? And can you position yourselves to like speak to the problems that these companies have and market yourselves accordingly like to that need? But now I would have high hopes as someone who's entering into the workforce right now. Are there things, are there certain skills as you're talking to companies or leaders, are there certain skills that they seem to be looking for? I know that's a big question. no and it's all kinds of like very practical things like they're looking for like more than anything so if I just think about some of the recent conversations I've had with like CDOs who who are these kind of forward leading like folks I would think about like Katie Dillard Stripe for example and there are many others kind of in this in this category they're looking for people who are going to look at problems just differently and so I think it is a, if we think about design thinking for a second, then we go back to the fundamentals of what we're trying to do.

11:29Peter Smart:We're trying to come up with novel human insight that allows us to solve a problem better for people. And so the first question you're asking yourself is, well, how are we understanding what people really need? How are we getting that information? Here's the way we typically do it. Is there a better way of doing it? And then people who can go from curiosity and inquisition to thesis or hypothesis or testing or experimentation and trialing and coming back with answers and saying actually there is maybe a better way of doing this here's three things that i've tried none of which are perfect but i think there's something potentially in like be here that which could be further built upon that is worth its weight in gold is it's like looking at what is and questioning like what if i think that that is just so so powerful then very tactically you might hear about folks who are talking about like agents and agentic workflows and i think there's a real block there's gonna there will continue to be a real premium placed on folks who are systems and into integrative thinkers um if we were to kind of shift the topic more towards generative interfaces contextualize this just for a second like the mechanization of design has meant that we've kind of reduced everything down to like templatized systems and I mean I loved the days of print I came up through print and I just it it was a time in life where you had a blank page in front of you there was never going to be that same page again and in the early days of digital like that sphere was true but what we've done really over the last like decade and a half is mechanized design down to a series of kind of very repeatable templates and components and modules.

13:16Peter Smart:And there are very good reasons for that. But then when we think about what's happening with AI is you've built effectively a pattern system and that pattern system is learnable and is then reproducible. So great, that's the current model. What we're moving to though is this new paradigm of agentic-centric experiences, number one, not all of them will be visual. Lots of them will be ambient and things which we're experiencing through audio in our ears. But when things are visual, our expectation as human beings is that they're going to be deeply personal to us. And so one metaphor, kind of when we go back to the skill set, is if we imagine I'm interacting with a Patagonia, like the future of the Patagonia, let's call it a website how it manifests for me is gonna be so different nicola to how it manifests for you and what you care about what i care about that isn't a templating problem anymore that isn't a like who can design the perfect like rounding of the corner of the button like problem anymore that's a systems problem that's a how we how do we translate what we know about nicola what she's willing to share into a deeply human experience specifically for her and make a scalable system where one of a million people could show up and have that exact same like wow I feel seen and served and supported in this interaction and to deliver on that is going to require brand new forms of systems thinking and I think probably just like real appreciation and adjacent like depth of knowledge in what does it actually take to deliver on these things what are the component parts so the model um that folks often talk about it's a classic ideo model it's just like the t-shape i would actually say like you need more stems on your t's like you need you know to probably have like you know one area you feel like you're fairly good in but if you're if you are going broad then developing like a hands-on like affinity for Like, what does it mean to translate?

15:31Peter Smart:I don't know. How does MCP work, for example? Like, what does it mean to have a handshake that's secure between MCP and A2UI? Like, even your thing is, I am really good at coming up with experiences that visually are going to just impress upon people this sense of brand. Fantastic. Like, go deep. Like, lean into your superpowers. but knowing that the way that that visual system is going to show up is based on things like A2UI and these other technologies. That's one example. I think you have to go deep and get hands-on in a whole bunch of other areas, which are now dependent on what it is that you do.

16:16Well, there's a couple of things that have sort of like in this sort of generative UI conversation that's happening, there's a couple of ideas that sort of keep bubbling to the surface. And one of them is how are we going to handle customer service or help support tech support in some way when there's no way to sort of share the system or the version of that platform that anyone's seeing? Have you thought about that at all?

16:39Peter Smart:Yeah, no, that's great. So yes. And I have two, two things. One, just going to zoom out. I think there's going to be way more people in customer service than less people. Yeah. Can we do it better though? Like, can we figure out how to do that better than we've been doing it. Totally. I think volume of people who are looking for human support increases, not because things are less easy to use, but because we place a premium, we will place an increasing premium on things that feel trustworthy, human, right? So that's just number one. Also, number two, just like backing that up, like just throughout history, we always do this.

17:17Peter Smart:We say the accountants, they're all gone. Like spreadsheets have come along. there was an accounting boom directly after spreadsheets were kind of first launched with VisiCalc. But if we think about the customer service problem of deeply personal experiences and how do you solve it? I do think it's just an extension of CRM and the way that folks understand the interactions that you've had so far. And there's going to be a lot of agent-to-agent support taking place, which I think will be the front line predominantly for, let's call it a percentage of like the needs that I might inherently have and support that I might need in a moment where my agent who's traveling with me can be interceding on my behalf to work with the agentic system which is ultimately delivering it to me and they can figure it out where things do need to be elevated I think there's going to be even more sophisticated ways of being able to explain here's the experience that Peter or Nicola have had and this is the issue that we're running into and it's what we're trying to solve and here's what we've tried in a more kind of automated way we've not been able to kind of crack the nut like it's a very like niche problem like we need human intervention here I think we're going to see really weird situation I say weird it feels weird to us right now but like imagine if you and I were on this on this call but in this like podcast recording Peter's personal agent was also here and your personal agent was also here like and this is four-way conversation taking place we're going to see a lot of that like there's going to be a lot of that something from you know new grads kind of going into the workforce is the leaders that I work with a question they're asking themselves are am I hiring Nicola or am I hiring Nicola and her agent and is it just one agent or does Nicola actually have a team that comes and who am I interviewing in the interview process Am I literally sitting down and interviewing her agent or am I interviewing just them, right?

19:16Peter Smart:Like it's a really fascinating, but very real set of questions that are being asked. And so, yeah, customer support and how ingrained our agents are going to be into our lives is very real. Okay. So that like that, that very real set of questions that sort of zoom out idea, this idea of the audience can't see my face, But as my eyes were getting wider about this idea of you having a team of agents that are also getting hired, then I start thinking about like so much of what we're experiencing right now is different technology. It's an advancement in technology. It's new innovation. But the pendulum just like keeps swinging from one direction to the other.

19:52So this idea that technology took over the field of customer service for so long and now we're going to swing back to the other direction where we're, you know, have this hypothesis that we're going to need a lot more customer service agents. In the future, this idea of having like a team of agents, it brings me to the question of do we need to be producing stuff at that capacity? Like this is sort of ultimately my tech question often is just because we can, does it mean we should? I think about the pace at which I've been asked to operate in the last 10 years being so much more, so much faster, so much more output.

20:28And we're sort of thinking about having our personal agents be able to increase that output in some way or take some of that off of us. But does that take us off of us? Do we all just become middle managers in some capacity?

20:42Peter Smart:Yeah, no, I'm with you. I mean, just what is technology? Technology is about creating a tool which allows us to get faster to more value beyond what our human body is capable of. Like that is what technology actually is. Through human history, we've just made better and better tools that enable us to do, I think, what you're describing, produce more value and produce it faster. And so we're feeling the ontological shock right now in this moment of, wait, how much more value and how much faster? But the trend is the same, but it's just, hey, at least the expectations of what this technology can potentially do for us are just so daunting.

21:23Peter Smart:Wait a second, can't we all slow down for a second? And I think rates of change in general are going to send like even more shocks through society as this proliferates like even more. Like it's not just about productivity. It's going to be about our legal systems, our judiciaries, our education systems. Like there's just so much that society isn't ready for where there's going to be a lot of, but wait, can we slow down? And I think that's a perfectly, not just perfectly right question. It is a very important question to be asking just in general. The idea of can we produce more and can we do it faster?

22:00Peter Smart:Hey, I have a comfort with the level of my production like today. Is that not enough? I think that's a really, really difficult question economically. I was listening to Matthew Prince, who is the CEO of Cloudflare. He did a fantastic talk at South by Southwest, I think it was last week. And, you know, he's got very strong opinions about like, where's the world going? And what does it mean for employment? And what's going to happen like in the market, like over the next few years? If you just think about it from a CFO's perspective, I think it's a very daunting perspective where you're talking about the difference between folks who, to use his analogy, manually are screwing in screws and folks who have figured out how to hold an electric screwdriver.

22:45Peter Smart:if someone is able to screw in a hundred screws in the same time that it takes one person to screw in one hey you could be the most artisanal screw it in of screws to ever have existed the flair the finesse of the way that you do it would just be french kiss like perfection but i cannot justify paying you the same as someone who can screw in a hundred screws in that same time and I think his point was like look it's not that your argument is wrong it's just purely economic and I think that if we kind of go back to the premise that technology has come along always to get to greater value faster I don't think there's any kind of reversing that I think it's just AI is we're on this bell curve of we've gone from manual to kind of the mechanized mechanization we've then kind of gone to the information era and now we're going into this like you know intelligence era the rate of change and the amount of impact and the speed with which things are expected is just it's more of a I wouldn't go as far as to say like exponential but maybe exponential is a way of thinking about that like rate of change so yeah no it's a challenging one but it's it's real what other questions are you thinking about like when you're sort of doing this zoom out, what are the other questions that are bouncing around in your brain right now?

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25:11Peter Smart:So I spend a lot of time with leaders helping them think about their business and where it's all going. A lot of industries are going to and are already facing existential crisis. Like if we just think about Hollywood as one example of this. I was at a dinner with the founder of a production company, a storytelling company, 10 people in Indonesia who've just sold their first television series to Netflix. 10 people in Indonesia who've just sold a television series to Netflix. The amount of people, cost, research and development, piloting, and you're talking about tens of thousands of people like to would have a hand in the production of a new television series in traditional you know kind of studio in the traditional studio model now the question is one it's not the doing which matters most it's what you're imbuing into it as a in this case like a designer like and the quality of the storytelling I think is something which is not easily like reproducible but again purely from an economic standpoint like one can be produce for hundreds a thousandth uh even more less you know fractionally so the as one example like across so many different industries leaders are being faced with this question if what i do today can now be done by a greater number of competitors who can move more nimbly with more coherence they're not having to deal with the baggage of a 10 000 person 100 000 person like you know organization number one where are we going like what is the where's the new locus of value yeah how do I reinvest in something exactly that like and then number two how do I actually move my organization rapidly like towards that new future and develop coherence and so a lot of what I spend my time on is coherence, clarity, vision, strategy, piloting it, building theses, which you can then go and confirm before you bet the family farm, and then rapidly accelerating like towards that.

27:28Peter Smart:There's an old African proverb that talks about if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. And in an organization, you need both. But it's that there's a time for alone, there's a time for like together. And I think it's about actually the middle ground between, hey, when you're kind of conceiving of new vision and kind of developing clarity about where you want to go, how are you then cascading that through your organization so that you can advance really, really quickly. There's actually a real problem sometimes with leaders who try to move their entire tanker of an organization it's it's not a very efficient way to do it so in on the theme of zoom out I would say we all just need to zoom out in this moment zoom out when we think about what it is that we're doing zoom out to understand where is the new value going to be not where is it now where is it going to be and how am I positioning myself for that value.

28:26Peter Smart:Zooming out and saying what is the higher order of value? Again, thinking less about final deliverables and more about the type of problems and challenges that you can solve and how transferable those are. What skill sets do you need for that? And then I would suggest to zoom out to ask ourselves, like, what is the human future that we ultimately want for ourselves and are we designing it? And I think it's so easy to get caught up in the technology and what it's capable of but the question is like what do we want from it I think that's a really important zoom out question to be asking ourselves well I think that's probably like the underlying anxiety for a lot of people as they're thinking about this is you know what does a world that is more generative that is sort of building things custom for me which means using my data which means like sort of all of those questions but I think some of it is that constant innovation question of like you know should we actually do this just because we can doesn't mean that we should actually see this through to completion and I think a lot of designers also understand that these these tools like certain certain applications of these tools will become obsolete in a few years they're fun and interesting now and we're going to find out that they're not actually that useful or that we can't generate enough revenue on them or that they're you know flattening a lot of forests unnecessarily totally as a human being of one what i observe in this moment is that there are just millions of human beings of one who are all trying to figure this out and the the situation is more malleable than perhaps we realize it is i think about what's happening in the us when it comes to you know government contracts for example like the way those conversations have gone i have no judgment ultimately for like the decisions that the us government are going to make and who they're going to choose to partner with.

30:16Peter Smart:But what's very clear is that it's not a foregone conclusion that AI companies are going to go a certain way and that the culture of companies actually determines a lot of their like trajectories. And every individual who is part of a culture has the opportunity and is already inherently shaping it by their presence. The question is like, are we going to lean into the amount that we can actually influence the culture that we are like already part of i think that we are being forced to reckon with a lot of like very existential questions which feel too big for us to like fully answer i think a lot about again zooming out like just uh what can we learn from hindsight like what can we learn from you know right now there's stuff going through the courts here in the u.s and with with facebook and meta and you know just social media in general like in zooming out you know you're talking about like well-intentioned people who genuinely want to do a good job and put like positive things out into the world like by and large is that true of everybody maybe not but like often the negative consequences that we see from technology aren't because there's maniacal people behind the scenes It's people who have good intentions, but don't have the foresight or indeed the lessons from history to look back and then willingness or time or space or leadership to make space for exactly the questions that you're asking.

31:46Peter Smart:So I think that also just, again, like it speaks to the culture of the organizations that you're part of. But like one of the things that you can do as a designer, like really effectively, because you're a really good, typically, again, not to overgeneralize, but like what are some of the common skill sets of designers? They tend to be good pattern spotters. They tend to be good, you know, receivers of signal. They tend to like understand human beings and kind of strip away surface and kind of go a little bit deeper. And if you can, in your own context, be someone who can actually, again, help others to zoom out and point back to, well, look, we can continue to go down this path the same speed but we should be aware of the fact that if we go to the path like these are the things that we might be risking signposts along the way that we might need to look out for to let us know we're going the way rather than the right way the voice of the human-centered individuals in companies right now is just like so important so and so and so so valuable for, I don't know to what extent, like I believe this fully, but the optimistic part of me doesn't believe this.

32:56Peter Smart:For the system, if we're in a flourishing like marketplace where there's lots of competition for the AI systems that we're going to use, the ones that ultimately make your life better and actually serve you in theory should win. Now, the extent to which I fully believe that like I don't know as I look back at hindsight you know algorithmic feeds are a form of AI and like how aligned are they to like our human ideals like I don't know well anymore I think that the evolution of those over time was driven by things that maybe changed as those businesses got bigger and their aspirations shifted spot on and what they're measuring and how they're incentivized and how their economics work like it's yes absolutely the way to think about it but if we would just to think about the context of like a personal a personal agent let's imagine there's like five six seven eight nine like 10 hopefully hopefully like 10 competing companies that are out there that are all trying to let's imagine there's lots of different contexts by which you might have different like agents as well but let's imagine there's this one that you're kind of keeping around like with you and it's got the context of your life that's an incredibly privileged and important position to be taking up like in someone's life when you're talking about a level of like awareness of context which again to us is probably going to feel quite uncomfortable and so who are we trusting what are they doing with our data and then when and if a company ever breaches the social contract that human beings are going to have with those companies there's going to be like very very quick I would say like disenfranchisement like with those companies and swaps to new that's true if you can keep like 10 or 11 of these companies in the marketplace competing if we end up with like one or two we might be in more trouble let's see yeah well that's the history repeating itself right like I do think social media becomes that thing to think about if we had other places to go that had critical mass I think that would sort of change change the way we use those platforms.

35:02Are there like concrete things? So I'm thinking about there are likely so many listeners who are working in ad agencies, small studios, big in-house creative teams. And a lot of organizations are asking their teams to start using onboarding AI in as many ways as possible right now in a variety of different parts of their job. Are there like concrete takeaways from even talking to leaders in the space and thinking about these things? Are there concrete things people can either be doing, pushing back against, playing around with small activities they can take on if they aren't necessarily empowered to ask the CEO tricky questions?

35:41Peter Smart:Sure. So I could answer this very practically in the course of people's day jobs. I would say probably in 95 % of companies, you're going to be asked the question of like, what are you doing? So if we just actually start with the most important thing. There is a real deference of leadership in this moment where actually leaders aren't creating the right coherence for their teams to be able to answer that question. Number one, that's actually the most important thing that you should look for when you're joining a company isn't, if you're being asked the question, like, what are you doing with AI?

36:09Peter Smart:And it's like this blanket question. You're probably in an environment that has not really got a picture of like where it's going and the direction by which you should be experimenting and the type of problems that you're trying to solve for and what you're ultimately looking for through your experimentation, and how you're measuring the value of your experiment. So the first thing is actually like when a company has coherence, it can create the frame for the team to say, hey, we're looking for you to start experimenting with AI to deliver a specific new form of value or to create a new form of experience.

36:46Peter Smart:We believe it's possible, we just don't know how yet. Or to accelerate a particular process, things become way more targeted because they can describe the macro narrative. At the individual level, as a leader, the thing that I've tried to instill in people that I meet is that this is for you, it's not for me. That as much as an organization is itself having to try and reinvent, like where is the value going? Every human has to do the same thing. We can't go back to the manual versus the electric screwdriver, the recasting of what it is that I'm actually producing in the world is like very, very real.

37:27The thing that you may have

37:29Peter Smart:specialized yourself in, I think about wireframes all the time, like the thing that you might specialize yourself in and define yourself in producing, that thing is going to go away. And so when folks talked to any individual about like, hey, what are you doing? It's sure like very selfishly like ask yourself that question like what am I doing to understand where this new value is moving and readying myself for that new world do not sit back do not put your head in the sand like do not see it as an organizational responsibility to train you it's it's there are no experts there are folks who can create better frames for your experimentation.

38:16Peter Smart:There are folks who can carve out dedicated time for your experimentation, but there are no answers yet. It's not their responsibility to give you answers. It's your, I would say, I would say in an encouraging way, it is your personal opportunity to actually make yourself incredibly like well-suited to this new world that we're stepping into, but only you can do that for yourself this isn't like the way that you want to like this isn't going to be a company funded like training program where we sit down for nine seminars and like it's spoon-fed to you and like here's the answers and you've been like trained to this new way we're in the gap generation when my kids i have three kids hopefully when they come up some of the gap that we're experiencing now like some of this might have been normalized again there might be a period maybe of like kind of plateauing and new standards that they can be kind of trained into but these standards are being written in like real time and so don't look to others to come with the finished solution you're going to have to lean in yourself the last thing i would say is when like specifically when and again like it's it's important that you do it especially as about like how are you carving out the time to do it at a macro level inside a company carving out a team who are dedicated to thinking about some of these things super smart really like a good thing to do you can be part of that team like oh my goodness like it's mutually beneficial right if you're not part of that team when you find yourself in your day job having to produce what you typically produce and they're saying but also like how are you learning that's a common friction i would say like we would experience that at fantasy it's you know we have our day job we've got to run this train but at the same time we have to ready the tracks like over here like how are we going to do it so we're really experimenting with like ways in which we can you know bring it into our every day we've done a company retreat so we've made it the focus we've done you know hackathons like inside the company and just try like other different ways of carving out that time i would say it reminds me and I hope that others can like adopt some of this.