Podcast

Kevin Mooney (00:30.762)
So anyways, thank you so much for being here. I really, really appreciate it. It's so cool to have you here and talk to you and get to know you because like we were just talking about, I don't have much information about you.

Heather Crank (00:41.897)
Okay, fair. That's fair.

Kevin Mooney (00:59.49)
Just our interactions on the system. And of course, I have stalked your website and looked at your work. Yeah. Yeah. But I also know that you are right here in Bend, which is really freaking cool. You're down in DRW, right? Yeah. I have not heard the woodhood. That's great.

Heather Crank (01:07.437)
Yes. Thank you.

Heather Crank (01:14.525)
Mm-hmm. Yes. yeah, I'm in the woodhead. The woodhead. Yeah, it's a whole different thing out here.

Kevin Mooney (01:32.578)
Yeah, my in-laws live out there. They're off of, just past the country store. I forget the turn. You turn left and then it's down like Navajo or something like that.

Heather Crank (01:38.669)
Oh yeah. Yeah. Uh huh. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm deeper in. I'm like really in the woodhood. Yeah. Uh, it was inexpensive. But also I have two acres out here of forest. So

Kevin Mooney (01:46.306)
Got it. So that's why you're in the woodhood.

Kevin Mooney (01:52.974)
So cool. What took you out there?

Heather Crank (02:06.509)
Yeah, I actually, so you probably don't know this, but I grew up in Bend. And my grandma immigrated to Bend from Canada in what was it, 1920, 1930s. So my family, I'm part of the founding people who founded Bend. I'm a unicorn.

Kevin Mooney (02:12.376)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (02:19.863)
Whoa.

Kevin Mooney (02:26.439)
Wow.

You are a unicorn. I've been here for a little over 20 years and I'm like, I'm a local at this point in time. But you hear about the Bend Natives and you're a Bend founder. That is really cool.

Heather Crank (02:36.745)
You are local at this point. Yeah.

Heather Crank (02:42.733)
I'm a Bend Fownder. Yeah, I never thought it would be cool. I didn't think it'd be cool. And I spent most of my adult life in cities and I came back about, I think it's been about nine years ago now to help my mom with my grandma who wasn't doing well.

Kevin Mooney (02:52.448)
Sure.

Heather Crank (03:09.849)
And yeah, this property that I'm on was up for auction because it had been abandoned. You know, wood hoods style with toilets and broken down cars. Yeah, so yeah, we fixed this up and still fixing it up.

Kevin Mooney (03:20.142)
For sure. Yeah. Yes.

Kevin Mooney (03:31.712)
Why did your grandmother choose Bend?

Heather Crank (03:35.797)
You know, her mom moved here. And I don't know the original story why they immigrated from Canada. I don't know. My grandpa has a whole different story. He came from Pitcher, Oklahoma, and they met at Bend High School. I know. Yeah, he was running moonshine.

Kevin Mooney (03:46.35)
Interesting.

Kevin Mooney (03:55.438)
That's crazy. Wow.

Heather Crank (04:02.342)
And I think that was part of it, but it's a crazy story.

Kevin Mooney (04:06.094)
That's so cool. my gosh. I mean, just to think, so I'm in the O'Kane building, which was built in 1916, and I'm actually in Hugh O'Kane's, this is technically his residence. So, Suite 30 in this building, it's got living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, and two bedrooms in here.

Heather Crank (04:13.752)
yeah! Yes.

Kevin Mooney (04:35.042)
And so I'm, technically sitting in the dining room of Hue O'Kane right now. It is, it's really cool. So we actually ran the agency out of this office for five or six years. When we closed the agency down, we left and then I guess fast forward a year and a half later, I was like, I want to get back in there. So I got back in here. I split it with my wife. She's in one of the offices and I'm in one of them. And so.

Heather Crank (04:39.594)
Cool.

Heather Crank (05:04.364)
How cool.

Kevin Mooney (05:05.461)
Yeah, it's really fun. have, you know, we've decorated the living room, so we've got, you know, a couch and some chairs and things in here. So it's just like set it up and have people in and do all the fun things there. But I guess where I was going with that was 1919, 1920, when your grandparents came here, that was, that had to have been a weird time. I mean, a great time, but a very weird time.

Heather Crank (05:11.709)
Nice.

Heather Crank (05:33.772)
for sure. Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (05:34.988)
So I can only imagine the stories that you have.

Heather Crank (05:38.705)
Yeah, there's some good, I mean, she used, there's so many stories. don't want to you with all of them, but, I like, I'm not, my grandpa worked in the old mill, of course. And, my grandma worked downtown in the, you know, the old building that is the old,

Kevin Mooney (05:44.334)
Please don't, no, please don't, don't hold back. No, don't hold back.

Heather Crank (06:01.962)
I forget what they call it. It used to be a jail, but now it's a museum. It's right downtown. It was like the legal building of the time. So she was a transcriber for legal, what do they call this? Stenographers, legal proceedings. And she said the jail was located two feet from where she worked. So she would listen to the people, know.

Kevin Mooney (06:17.067)
Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Mooney (06:24.514)
Whoa.

Heather Crank (06:29.514)
being rowdy, but they were really amazing, full blown West type pioneers, know, tough as nails.

Kevin Mooney (06:38.038)
Yeah. Well, I think you had to be at that time here. I mean, this was a wild spot. couldn't in the twenties. What was there like 3000 people here? Maybe like in the hundreds.

Heather Crank (06:43.85)
Mm-hmm.

Heather Crank (06:51.186)
I'm sure it was less. Yeah, I mean, my grandpa came out partly he was running moonshine and partly to work in the mill because logging was a big thing. And yeah, I don't know the story of my grandma. But anyway, so all of my family's here, all of them, like my mom, my uncle, my dad, like this family central.

Kevin Mooney (07:02.339)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (07:15.918)
So cool. And so you said that you had traveled for most of your adult life, meaning you lived in cities. Where'd you go?

Heather Crank (07:21.834)
Yeah. So I've lived a lot of places. Yeah, I've lived in Seattle, I've lived in Oakland, I've lived in Denver. I met my husband in New York. just, I've been everywhere.

Kevin Mooney (07:28.887)
Yeah?

Kevin Mooney (07:41.102)
That's so awesome. Was that just like the travel phase of your 20s or something like that?

Heather Crank (07:46.701)
Well, yeah, I mean part of it was you know wanted out of this small town at the time was not like it is now and Yeah, I went to I have two degrees I went to school at Southern Oregon University in Ashland and then I Went moved to Seattle worked at the Attorney General's office for a while

and on my off time was a modern dancer and then decided I didn't want to starve so and I wanted to be an artist so I moved myself to the Bay Area to go to design school.

Kevin Mooney (08:23.032)
Nice. And what did you study at design school? Is it just, I'm very uneducated when it comes to like, are there individual disciplines at those art schools? Yeah. So what did you study?

Heather Crank (08:37.242)
yeah, for sure. Yeah, there I started in graphic design, but then I was I think it was the second part of that program I ended up in motion design because I if you know, do you know Petrola? Who's good friends with Christo who teaches at the Art Center?

Kevin Mooney (08:59.502)
I don't think so, no.

Heather Crank (09:01.436)
She said to me the other day, which was really interesting, that people who gravitate towards motion design are probably musicians. And having been a dancer when I went from graphic design to motion design, that component really made sense to me. So yeah, I kind of fell in love.

Kevin Mooney (09:20.258)
Yeah, that's awesome. And so that's basically what you decided to do for your career from that moment forward.

Heather Crank (09:27.818)
Yeah, until the last two years. And then the whole world changed. Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (09:34.72)
Yes. And then, and then like, so we can probably go back and dive into some of those things, but where are you now? What are you doing?

Heather Crank (09:43.341)
So I have a studio that I run out of my home, like you. It's called Kermonti and I've done that for a long time. And then about three years ago, I got really into AI stuff, which made me a little bit of a pariah, but I was curious. I was just curious, what is this thing?

Kevin Mooney (10:05.281)
Yeah.

Heather Crank (10:07.698)
And I use, I still use AI a lot, but motion design really tanked a lot along with creative industries. So I started working more in AI and kind of, I'm kind of straddling the two and all of a sudden this year motion design came roaring back. Yeah, everybody's busy. I don't know how long it's going to last, but I'm riding the wave right now. So yeah, motion design, art direction.

Kevin Mooney (10:27.576)
Really?

Kevin Mooney (10:33.026)
Yeah.

Heather Crank (10:37.632)
That's kind of my stick up here in the wood hood.

Kevin Mooney (10:40.182)
Yeah, nice. Yeah, I don't know a ton about motion design. I'm very familiar with it. I know what it is. I've dabbled in a little bit of all of the disciplines in the arts, Meaning like, I've messed around in After Effects. I got not a lot of skills, but I could pull some all right stuff together.

Heather Crank (10:56.086)
Hello?

Kevin Mooney (11:09.592)
I think if you give me a template, can manipulate that template to do what I want. So I'm pretty solid. But when I was in high school, so I grew up in a town called Loomis outside of Sacramento. So up interstate 80. And in high school, I thought I wanted to be a graphic designer. And I wanted to go to Chico State.

Heather Crank (11:37.196)
wait, why? I knew it! I knew it! Uh-huh.

Kevin Mooney (11:39.072)
A for the parties, definitely for the parties. but then I heard that they had a really great graphic design program there. And those, mean, the, the, the idea of going to college stopped for me. Cause essentially I moved to bend and there was a lot of external forces in, all of that, meaning Sacramento just wasn't a

Heather Crank (11:58.363)
Kevin Mooney (12:08.526)
place for me. There was just kind of a lot of that California vibe that I was I was kind of done with. I grew up there as a great place. It was safe, but it was time for something different. And out of high school, I did a lot of traveling with some some friends and Bend was one of the places to go. And it was like, go up there and go skiing. And one day my buddy was like, Hey, do you want to move to bend and be ski bums? And I was like, Yeah, for sure.

Heather Crank (12:09.558)
I understand.

Heather Crank (12:28.956)
yeah.

yeah.

Kevin Mooney (12:38.666)
So we quit our jobs. Two weeks later, we were packing our trucks full of everything that we had and we drove up to Bend and this was 2005. And when we got here, there was no place to rent or anything. It was just dead. Like the housing crash had already started, right? Yeah.

Heather Crank (12:57.196)
yeah, right it was dead

Kevin Mooney (13:06.902)
It was dead. We luckily found a place. It was this little town home and it was 400 bucks for rent and we were like, we'll take it. It's the only place in town that's available and we got there for the first few months. There was no jobs. There was nothing. I couldn't get a job at red carpet car wash in the winter time. It was bad. so we burned through our savings pretty quickly and ended up

Heather Crank (13:28.158)
my god, serious.

Kevin Mooney (13:37.31)
through a temp agency got in at jeldwin. And so we both worked at jeldwin for a few years, in the mill basically. Yeah. And the, and the mill part there off of a Boyd acres and running big equipment, risking our fingers every day and all of that stuff. where, where I'm going with this was the college dream basically disappeared.

Heather Crank (13:41.302)
Well...

Heather Crank (13:50.825)
in the middle.

Heather Crank (13:56.272)
yeah.

Heather Crank (13:59.757)
God!

Heather Crank (14:07.264)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (14:07.328)
You know, as soon as you moved to Bend, it was like, shit, how do we survive? Like college was a distant thing for me. Yeah. So after a few years of working at Jeldwin, it was like, all right, maybe we should go back to college. was COCC and then OSU had a little satellite. was like just a little tiny space there. And then they offered the business program and I went into business.

Heather Crank (14:12.982)
Yeah.

Yes, yeah, I get it.

Kevin Mooney (14:35.734)
And so the, the graphic design path was, was like one that I wanted to mess around with, but it wasn't available to me. So I went into business and then business didn't teach me anything. just, it was just kind of whatever, but long story.

Heather Crank (14:52.428)
Wait, it didn't teach you anything? Seriously?

Kevin Mooney (14:56.682)
I don't think it there was, if I were to look back on it and be really honest, there was one course that was memorable that I can remember saying this taught me more about business than anything else. And it was an entrepreneurship class. And essentially we played a game.

And it was a digital game where you would put the inputs in and it would tell you what the outputs were and you've ranked amongst your, your other classmates. And we had to basically it was a shoe company and you had to pick, pick a spot on the board. Where are you going to start? Are you going to be the low cost leader? Are you going to be bougie and unique, you know, with your high price point, you know, where do you kind of fit and

It just taught me a lot about business models and real world application of principles. But everything else was just kind of like, read this textbook, answer these questions. You know, marketing, the marketing course was, I don't know, kind of bad. And so I didn't know what to do with my life coming out of that. And I got some really bad jobs here in town and

Heather Crank (16:02.604)
Heather Crank (16:16.684)
You

Kevin Mooney (16:18.574)
Like I worked at a food cart the first year after graduating college and you're like, Oh man, I got a $500 bill a month coming here really soon. How am going to pay for this? Blah, blah. Long story short, I can kind of skip the middle of it, but I, I eventually fell into like the creative space. And that's when I started dabbling back into graphic design, but kind of learning.

Heather Crank (16:31.658)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kevin Mooney (16:48.622)
through doing on my own and.

Heather Crank (16:49.962)
Right. Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (16:55.092)
I had a, I guess I should tell some of the middle space a little bit. I started a company that sold kids scooters. Like the ones that you see at the skate park. Yeah. So I didn't have the resources to do the design, do the video work, make the logo. So I did it all. and I basically taught myself.

Heather Crank (17:05.548)
Okay. yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (17:23.052)
All the things that I know now and one of those things was like some motion design hacking it together. You know, you get a template first and then you're like, okay, now this doesn't do what I wanted to do. So how can I actually make it? But I, if I stare at the template long enough, I can, I can be like, okay, there's, there's this line here. And you know, when the, when the time, the little line thing hits this point, okay. I could like,

Heather Crank (17:45.407)
my god.

Heather Crank (17:51.032)
my god. Serious. Wow.

Kevin Mooney (17:54.062)
arduous process of just staring at these things for hours and hours and hours until I could decode it. And, and then I started putting some things together and then I did some pretty fun stuff like all by hand. Actually, I should probably send you a couple of videos that I've done there. They're, they're, they're pretty, they're pretty fun. They're all in the scooter industry. So that's the content itself is like,

Heather Crank (18:01.62)
Wow.

Heather Crank (18:11.372)
I would love it.

Kevin Mooney (18:22.476)
I think what I did was really kind of cool. So yeah, it's a very long way of saying that I understand a little bit about your,

Heather Crank (18:24.948)
Okay, send him my way.

Heather Crank (18:33.98)
Yes. Yes.

Kevin Mooney (18:39.407)
yeah, geez, I don't know. I kind of went on a big rant there. I don't know where to take it.

Heather Crank (18:45.618)
so Bend, so it's changed a lot, especially during the pandemic, so many people moved here, even in the last three years, completely different place.

Kevin Mooney (18:48.59)
Sure, yeah. Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (19:00.354)
Yeah. Yeah, it's wild. I mean, I think it's really good to hear that you're getting work again in that space. I guess I'm curious if some of that is from here or if it's none of it's here.

Heather Crank (19:10.284)
yeah, for sure.

Heather Crank (19:16.524)
No, none of it's here. The only I have never had work locally. The only thing I've done locally was I was part of the Bend Design Conference for about eight or eightish years. And I did a bunch of programming for them and built exhibits. But that's kind of it locally. The the work here has seemed to be more web based. So and I'm not a web designer.

Kevin Mooney (19:30.455)
Yeah.

Heather Crank (19:46.718)
But it does seem like the creative industry is becoming more active here as people, especially from California, move here and think it's a good place to start a business. So there's a lot of that going on. And my experience is web design in the past seemed to come first when gentrification is happening in a town. And then that seems to be followed by motion design because we're like the cherry on top.

Kevin Mooney (19:54.798)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Mooney (19:58.936)
Yeah.

Heather Crank (20:15.837)
So people need money, they build the thing, they need money. And then when they're ready to go into hardcore advertising marketing, they come to the motion designers.

Kevin Mooney (20:15.959)
interesting.

Kevin Mooney (20:26.112)
Interesting.

Yeah, I would agree that the web is the first thing. And I don't quite understand why. Do you have any insight on that?

Heather Crank (20:34.419)
It's always the first thing.

Heather Crank (20:40.851)
I don't know, you know, when I moved to Denver, it was smallish and then it gentrified and it was the exact same pattern. And, and it's happening here. And that's kind of why I recognize it because I was, when I went to Denver, I was struggling at to find work. And I was with this small group of motion designers at the time. We were all trying to kind of figure out how to navigate the creative industry there. Excuse me. And the reason I moved to

Denver was because I had graduated from California College of Arts in San Francisco and I couldn't find a really good job. My rent was really expensive. My husband worked at an art foundry as a master mold maker and they were going under. And so we were like, we have to jump. can't afford this. So we jumped to Denver very impulsively.

Kevin Mooney (21:30.158)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Mooney (21:35.224)
Sure.

Heather Crank (21:37.04)
and thought it would be easier and it wasn't. So Denver started out kind of like here was a smallish town and there was a lot of web, a lot a lot of web and I would interview and they wouldn't they couldn't understand what I did exactly compared to the the web world and then motion followed and it's happening right now in Bend.

Bend is a little behind.

Kevin Mooney (22:05.294)
Yeah, I mean, that's what kind of drew me to this place. There's so many nuances and not to take us off of the motion design, but you know, you used to be able to walk down the street and people would stop in their cars, like they would stop way back in anticipation for you to cross. And you're like, my gosh, do I?

Heather Crank (22:29.343)
Yeah. It's true.

Kevin Mooney (22:35.118)
I guess I should cross right now. Like they're all waiting for me.

Heather Crank (22:38.431)
Yeah.

Heather Crank (22:42.481)
It's true, it's so sweet!

Kevin Mooney (22:44.33)
It was, it was a very interesting thing. And I just really liked how there was a thrift way store and, there was just places like that, that you, you went, I suppose Newport was around when I moved here, but that was like, that was fancy. yeah, it's just, it's just really interesting how it used to be culturally different.

Heather Crank (22:51.62)
Thriftway my god. Yeah!

Heather Crank (23:04.595)
Yeah, it was fancy.

Kevin Mooney (23:12.694)
And it had a different feel and it was very small feeling and it that's been lost, completely gone. And I guess that's, don't know, it's maybe good for some things and bad for other things. And I probably like to live in it's bad zone, but that's okay. but back to the motion design stuff, I'm kind of curious about it.

Heather Crank (23:19.528)
it's gone. Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (23:40.468)
And it is interesting about the wave, how it starts in web. I see it sort of in the small little pocket that I'm in at the, at the agency. We basically just did brand stuff. That's all we wanted to do. And nobody knew what brand was or how to, how to do it. So the entry point was always a website. We need a website.

Heather Crank (23:43.955)
Yeah.

Heather Crank (23:54.387)
Right. Yeah.

Heather Crank (23:59.765)
Right.

Yeah.

Heather Crank (24:06.667)
Yeah, that's it.

Kevin Mooney (24:08.756)
And then the job was how do we switch their mindset from, probably don't need a website or you will need a website at some point in time, but what do we put on that website? We probably need to start over here. And I don't know in the last year or so I've, I've switched to more of a marketing role where it seems easier for me to sell because I can say that there's an outcome.

Heather Crank (24:21.301)
That's right. Right.

Kevin Mooney (24:37.688)
from the work that I'm doing as opposed to brand. It's like, here's all your brand stuff. And they're like, I spent a bunch of money. What did I get? I just got a book. They don't quite get that thing. And I'm assuming that motion design is very similar, but it seems like motion design can be tied to some outcome because you use it in advertising or I suppose it depends on the application of it.

Heather Crank (24:47.879)
Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Mooney (25:05.202)
but in this marketing zone, now I, I, I still feel that divide. I need to get awareness. I need to get my products out there, whatever, whatever, but I need a website. Kind of always goes back to that. So how does the cycle go from that being the entry point to motion design coming into the picture?

Heather Crank (25:19.283)
Yeah.

Heather Crank (25:29.323)
So I think you're right, people recognize that they need something to be more visible, but they don't understand the problem that they're solving. And then your job is to help them understand why, the problem, to help define the problem. So they understand who their niche is, how they position themselves, what the branding is doing, why it's important. And then once I kind of have that sense,

then it moves into the advertising, you know, marketing realm. And then that's where you would find motion design is once you have your identity set, you know, who your niche is, you know, a problem you're here to solve. Then how do you go out into the world and beyond your website, beyond your identity, beyond your niche, and how do you reach people?

And then motion design is really great because as you know, it creates dopamine reaction in people's brains. So we are literally the cherry on top. like...

Kevin Mooney (26:30.732)
Of Yeah.

Heather Crank (26:35.977)
hook you in there, make you want to watch and learn stuff about a company or hopefully, and we're entertaining. So if people understand the value of motion design and why people watch it, then they're more apt to use it. So it's also part of the educational component as well. People are not going to want to spend money on motion design if they don't understand the value of it or why it's important. Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (26:42.54)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (27:03.0)
Yeah.

So where do you see motion design going? Maybe in terms of the AI stuff, maybe in terms of the accessibility to tools now? Like it seems like you can do some wild stuff from your phone sitting on your couch. Whereas before you needed a CD to put in your computer to run a program.

Heather Crank (27:25.738)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (27:34.284)
You know, where, where do you see it? Where do see that going?

Heather Crank (27:37.996)
so, poor motion design. I don't know where this is going. The reason is because...

I see a lot of, I've done a lot of AI experimentation and I'm really well versed in a lot of AI programs. In fact, I teach workshops to artists and designers to help them level up just so that they understand what that technology is. So they can make choices because you can't make choices if you don't understand what you're dealing with.

So AI is really great for automation. It's fantastic for production work. And I personally am really happy about some of those things. the fact I can drop out of background in two seconds makes me super happy. I don't want to spend my time doing that, but there's a lot of fear around it's going to take jobs and replace people and not that that's...

Kevin Mooney (28:30.626)
Yeah.

Heather Crank (28:42.911)
That's a definite possibility, but there is a human component to this where AI does not understand things like context and culture. And I don't think it ever will because it doesn't have feelings. So.

Kevin Mooney (28:56.558)
Sure. And the thing about culture and context is that it shifts constantly even by a fraction here and there, right? So I don't need to continue with that, but it just shifts all the time. So I don't think it can pick up.

Heather Crank (29:02.742)
Heather Crank (29:12.043)
No, no, no, I mean, it's not in a body, excuse me, so it doesn't experience the things that we experience having a brain, right? We're kind of hardwired to understand certain experiences to have feelings and emotions around certain things. Like I said, the dopamine reaction with motion is a physical human experience, not an AI experience. So

What I think is going to happen, the feature of motion design is we're going to, we're already doing it. We're swinging one way where anybody and everybody is jumping in saying, I don't need to understand design principles. I don't need to be an artist. I don't need to be educated. I can just use AI. And we see sort of the dumbing down and the watering down of design and even thinking the way we think about problems. And we just hand our power over to something else.

But because it doesn't understand the things that are so important to design.

think we're going to swing back the other way, which I think is what's just starting to happen where people used it. They lost some money because of the limitations and the lack of understanding. And they bought into some hype. AI is super powerful. It's an amazing tool, but it's a tool. It's not just the solution to the problem. So I think design's feeling this across the board. And then motion design, of course, is always also getting hit with things like

Kevin Mooney (30:39.534)
Yeah.

Heather Crank (30:47.241)
the writers strike and now some problems in Hollywood and the fires like it's all affecting us. So the future is kind of tenuous. I'm not sure where it's going. I don't think it'll go away, but I do think it will change.

Kevin Mooney (31:04.61)
Yeah, it's interesting. I probably need to reach out and get some training on these things because it's not that it's not that I am against AI. It's not that I am too stupid to figure it out. It's that it happens. It's been happening so fast and that I can't keep up with it. And

Heather Crank (31:29.739)
so fast.

Kevin Mooney (31:33.55)
There's so many options that you don't really know which one to go with.

Kevin Mooney (31:45.048)
I'll ask like chat GPT, you know, how can I use you to take the production off of my hands? And it tells me all this stuff and either I don't understand it or I can't see the application of that. So I'm still doing everything manually. I'll use chat GPT to refine. I'll use it to kind of maybe get some inspiration.

I'll use it mostly in writing to kind of clean things up, but you know, it's kind of a son of a bitch because you have something that you think is almost beautifully written and you're like, I just need to like shift this just a hair. And then it rewrites it completely different. And you're like, no, I didn't ask for that. And you're like,

Heather Crank (32:34.761)
Hahaha!

Heather Crank (32:38.58)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (32:40.62)
I guess what I'm saying, and I don't need a masterclass from you right this moment, but I'm saying like, I don't know how to get the production off my hands and cause every time I've tried, it's just complete garbage. And maybe it's the tools that I'm using. Maybe it's, maybe it's the prompts that I'm giving, you know, but, but I don't understand that stuff right now. And in my opinion, I don't see how people are creating these beautiful AI videos and motion designs and, and. For photos and things like that. It's just.

To me, it's not there yet, but maybe I'm wrong.

Heather Crank (33:15.115)
Yeah, I give it a 60 % there right now. I think it's knowing how to ask the right questions, which is, you know, that's like the design conundrum, like asking the right questions, but also understanding like how to, manipulate's not the right word, but how to use a tool in the way to get the right outcome.

Kevin Mooney (33:27.278)
Mm-hmm.

Heather Crank (33:42.739)
I do think it will take more and more production off our hands and we've got Adobe Max, I think, coming up here and they always have some mind blowing crazy thing that makes our life easier with AI now that they're on the AI train. But I do think it's a really powerful tool. It can do a lot of amazing things.

Kevin Mooney (34:00.034)
Yeah.

Heather Crank (34:10.603)
but it's not gonna replace humans and we'll just see what happens. in the next, I think in the next year, we're gonna see huge jumps and I'm with you. I had to take a break because it was moving so fast. I got really overwhelmed, really, really overwhelmed.

Kevin Mooney (34:27.224)
Yeah.

I had to take a break because I was maybe leaning on it too much. And I realized that I had become dumber in the matter of like, not even kidding within a week or two where I just, every task, I just plug it into chat GPT and be like, I need this thing. And I just kind of started to gloss over and I caught myself. I'm like, Whoa, holy.

Holy cow, I can't do this. And that was around the same time that the study came out from Harvard that said using it reduced, you know, uh, I don't remember what it reduced, reduced, uh, the usage of your brain by 40 % or something. And I was like, uh, this is the only thing that I have that separates me from anybody else in this town. Cause I also do.

Heather Crank (35:01.055)
Yep.

Heather Crank (35:04.487)
Heather Crank (35:17.355)
Yeah

Heather Crank (35:23.307)
Great.

Kevin Mooney (35:24.236)
web design. also do marketing. I also do advertising. I also do branding. I also do graphic design and copywriting and all that stuff. This is the only thing that separates me from anybody else. So you either like me and my style. And if I abandoned that, I have nothing left. I'm just a production facility. So I really had to catch myself and go, Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on. What am I doing here? And I think I just, I just turned it off for a while.

Heather Crank (35:40.447)
Yep. That's right. That's it.

Kevin Mooney (35:53.571)
I don't think you can literally turn it off, but I just consciously said I'm not even going to look at that screen anymore.

Heather Crank (35:59.754)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (36:02.488)
Yeah, yeah, I think it's.

You know, back in the day when you wanted to produce an ad, you didn't even have a computer. You had to cut out photos and set your type and lay it all out. Right. Like it was just a completely different thing. So every new evolution of tools feels like it's going to take my job at some point in time. So I get that we can all have that feeling in this industry, but

I do think that there's always going to be people who value the human aspect of it and just say, I understand that a tool can make this for me, but I want what you do. So I think that's always going to exist, but I'm also super curious. Like, where is this going to go? Are we going to get to a place where all of the production is handled by one of these? It seems like it'd be pretty nice. I think.

personally I would like it because I'm not the best production guy. I'm a little bit more in the head space and thinking and trying to solve problems and making the connections and seeing the big arc from where we are now to where we want to be. How do we pull that together? But then when it comes to me pushing pixels around and I start to glitch a little bit and my eyes start to tweak and it's just a weird space. So.

I don't know, maybe hoping that you can share with me someday how we can use some of these tools better.

Heather Crank (37:44.081)
Yeah, give it just a few more months. It's coming. It's coming. Have you watched the podcast called The Diary of a CEO with Stephen Bartlett? There's a brand new one with Mo Gawatt. Do you know him? Google, I think he's a Google ex chief was one of the chief officers.

Kevin Mooney (37:49.336)
Really?

Kevin Mooney (37:56.672)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (38:11.476)
Yeah, I listened to the one with Daniel Priestley. The other guy was at Replet, the CEO of Replet. I think it's a mon. Anyways, it's not that, but you're not talking about that one, correct? OK, so it's a different one.

Heather Crank (38:29.188)
No, no. This one came out just a couple days ago. And Mo Gawdat has is like one of the big thinkers around AI and the future and where we're going. I would watch it. It will blow, blow your mind. Yeah, it's a he he two years ago, he had a great interview with him. And he kind of

Kevin Mooney (38:43.64)
Cool.

Heather Crank (38:58.27)
about what's happening right now and he goes on in this interview to adjust some of his thoughts on it based on what's happening and where he sees that this is going. So I love him. He's amazing. Stephen Bartlett is an amazing host. I really love that podcast. I think you would be surprised.

Kevin Mooney (39:10.69)
Very cool.

Kevin Mooney (39:17.848)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (39:22.126)
I'll check it out. I'm definitely, I'm definitely interested, you know, and I'm also interested in, where this stuff is going. Like if we're, are we in the matrix? You know, or like all of that, that idea like is, is AI just our awakening to the things that have already been happening. mean, we're getting down some weird rabbit holes here, but I'm also interested in that part of the AI. What is this thing? Do we understand what we're doing?

Heather Crank (39:34.163)
Yeah

Kevin Mooney (39:51.882)
Is it going to become sentient? I don't know. Yeah.

Heather Crank (39:57.173)
So that reminds me of one other thing. There are two amazing AI people in town, and they have a conference every fall called Artificiality, Dave and Helen Edwards. And last time I spoke with them, because I was really curious.

Kevin Mooney (40:07.448)
Mm-hmm.

Heather Crank (40:17.298)
I asked them about what is the future of this? Where is it going? And Helen is an AI scientist. She used to work for bigger companies predicting future trends in AI. And she feels that the next

era of study is going to be consciousness and can we recreate it and that's kind of where we're at with AI right now. It's already learning. They're forming little groups within their server and learning from each other which they didn't expect to happen without human interaction. So there is kind of a, I wouldn't call it consciousness but a drive.

to expand whatever they are. Yeah, so we'll see. It's really, it's gonna get crazy.

Kevin Mooney (41:07.982)
So crazy.

Yeah, I mean, we've already heard the stories of like Google having to pull the plug on a system because it's created in a language that nobody understands and talking to itself in some other encrypted language. Like that's some wild stuff. So it absolutely does not surprise me that there's these little clusters of like knowledge base that's kind of starting to form. And I mean, if you think about

Heather Crank (41:35.338)
Yes.

Kevin Mooney (41:42.222)
If you think about the human brain.

Kevin Mooney (41:47.278)
I suppose it depends on the personality type of the person, but generally speaking, information is understood through patterns. That's the general consensus of it, right? It's not like one through five are the answers. It's like this thing happened in this time period under these circumstances.

Heather Crank (42:00.339)
Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Heather Crank (42:09.172)
Right.

Kevin Mooney (42:16.776)
And I can see that that is happening over in this place in a different time in a different industry or different grouping of people, but the similar thing is happening. So it's all pattern recognition. And when you have billions of inputs a day, or I don't even know what that is, like you would have to assume that these things are starting to look for patterns. Will it turn around and then say, this is the definitive

Heather Crank (42:27.422)
Right.

Kevin Mooney (42:46.356)
answer based on those clusters. don't know. Will it start to break those clusters out into more clusters and deeper and will it continue to learn? And then at what point in time will it start making decisions or assumptions on its own based on the knowledge that it's learned from our inputs? It's a wild one.

Heather Crank (43:08.522)
Yeah, the interesting part about this is the intelligence level. You know, like, I think a really smart human, what's your IQ? Like 100, 100 and something. I think Einstein's like 150 or 40 or somewhere around there.

AI's intelligence is growing exponentially. So once it reaches like an IQ of 6000, we have no idea what that looks like, kind of thought process that is, what the decision making looks like. But I have hope because in general, higher level of intelligence

for humans is like our prefrontal cortex when we develop this front part of our brain. And that's around things like cooperation and problem solving and creativity. So if AI is increasing in intelligence, my hope is it's going to see problems very differently and it's not gonna see it like an animal in our reptilian brain with war and violence and fighting. And I think...

It could be maybe better for us in the long run, but don't quote me on that. I don't know. Don't hold me to that. But I'm hoping. no, no. No, I'm hoping, I'm hoping that's the truth that I can use human's evolution, biological evolution as sort of a way to gauge how

Kevin Mooney (44:28.366)
I'm going to hold you to that Heather. When the terminator show up, I'm going to be, calling Heather.

Heather Crank (44:50.602)
intelligence evolves because they're learning like children. know, the AIs are we're teaching them like we would teach our own kids.

Kevin Mooney (45:02.254)
I like that you have a positive outlook on it. I don't necessarily think that I have a doomsday outlook on it, but in my own pattern recognition that I have in my brain and the whole arc of it, I guess I've just seen too many movies that seem crazy. Is it gonna be so smart that it's like, these humans are so dumb, we can just wipe them out so easily.

Heather Crank (45:29.972)
Sure. Pest control. Yeah, that could be a thing. It could be like, they're too distracted. If intelligence, if high level intelligence understands what creates a harmonious balanced planet where things don't fall apart, we're a problem.

Kevin Mooney (45:31.766)
Right? Like, is that a thing?

Kevin Mooney (45:53.164)
Right.

Maybe it treats us like we have treated animals, you know, where it's like, no, we can hunt them. We just don't want the populations to be below this amount.

Heather Crank (46:00.202)
I hope.

Heather Crank (46:07.38)
my God, I never even thought about that.

Kevin Mooney (46:09.526)
I don't know. that just randomly popped in, but you know, that's what we do to control populations. So what if it says the same about us at some point in time? Because let's face it, we have a lot of humans on this planet. And so what if it says, Hey, we've got too many humans. We have to take care of this, this problem. We don't want to kill them all off, but we're going to take some of them out. Will it, will it ask us if we can choose who goes?

Heather Crank (46:15.188)
That's true.

Heather Crank (46:23.43)
overpopulation, yeah.

Heather Crank (46:31.048)
Right?

Heather Crank (46:34.492)
Yeah, that's possible.

God. It's dark. We're going dark.

Kevin Mooney (46:39.086)
No, I'm kidding. yes. It's, it's a really crazy thing. I don't know. I am trying to ride the wave though, and enjoy the help in certain areas. I'm not super worried about losing the job just yet, but I, you know, part of the thing that I'm doing with the podcast is an attempt to start to move away from.

client work and I hate to say it, join the club and be a talking head on the internet. And so that's what we're doing here, but maybe people like it. Maybe, maybe people like me, maybe people like you. And if they do, then we're not so reliant on the machines or the AI. It'll

Heather Crank (47:14.217)
Yeah.

Heather Crank (47:27.74)
Right. Well, also think, sorry, it's just a good time for human connection. Like, we need each other right now a lot.

Kevin Mooney (47:32.908)
Yeah.

Yeah, I, I agree. I, when I joined José's community, my brain was not in that zone. I, I guess I thought, this is a great place where I get to learn from José Like how cool I get to be a part of his, his club and he's going to be teaching me stuff all the time. And then I like very quickly realized like,

Heather Crank (47:55.218)
Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (48:05.486)
it's not really like that. And then we had a conversation, I suppose it was last week, and he was sharing, you know, his idea of the community and where it's going and what he would like it to be. And I thought that was really cool and really interesting where the community can be anything that it wants to be. I'm not in control of, of this ship. Like we're all here. We can all talk about our, our problems.

good things that happen in our day, Bad things, everything, and let it form its own identity. And I thought that was really cool and really interesting. And now that we're having more talks about AI and such, it's like, no, I do need a spot like that. I never kind of thought of myself as someone who needed that, but now I realize I very much do.

Heather Crank (49:00.074)
Yeah, I mean, I'm super introverted. And I'm not, you know, like you won't find me like, doing the social thing very often. Not cruising around, but I do. It is really nice to be part of a community and to to reach out and touch base with people. Because it can be really isolating and lonely running your own business out in a forest.

Kevin Mooney (49:09.866)
Not cruising around.

Heather Crank (49:28.198)
and also the woodhood and as AI takes over, know, it's like, and we lose some of that humanity. I mean, I think people underestimate how hardwired we are to need that thing.

Kevin Mooney (49:28.664)
The wood hood.

Kevin Mooney (49:44.578)
Yeah, I think about that a lot. You know, moving up here was my attempt to get away from people and they all followed. I'm not saying they followed me, but I'm saying that people moved up here and now it's one of those places where I'm like, gosh, there's too many people. I don't want them here. But I guess the whole point to tie it into what you're talking about is that I've realized that in, I don't know the last few years, like

Heather Crank (49:55.548)
That was bad.

Kevin Mooney (50:14.732)
I would be nothing without people around me. I may not like people and I might have opinions on people, but I would also be nothing without people. So it's a, it's this weird like dichotomy that lives in my brain and I share that same sentiment as you. It's like I would be nothing without them.

Heather Crank (50:33.746)
Yeah, it's got to be the right people.

Kevin Mooney (50:36.598)
Yeah. Do you know your, your personality type from Myers-Briggs? Do you mind sharing it?

Heather Crank (50:41.258)
I I'm an INFJ.

Kevin Mooney (50:46.378)
INFJ, awesome, that's so great. So I'm an ENTP. Yeah, very extroverted. But, and José did a little bit of a reading on our show and he's been sending me some things. I'm the, I'm like the introverted extrovert. So yeah, it's.

Heather Crank (50:53.162)
so you're extirated.

Kevin Mooney (51:13.122)
I get energy from being around people and doing things, but I have to retract and go into like a cave. And a cave can just be like, could just be a quiet room by myself to think and decompress and process. And, it's a really odd thing. I say introverted extrovert because I'm not one of those extroverts that just wants to go out and do like,

dance club and go party and then go from the mountain to the river. You know, I just, can't be that, that person. I've got one thing in the day that I can do. If I go out, I'm coming back and I just need, I need to sit down and lay down and be done with the day. the reason I asked you that question is because you said you're super introverted and

Heather Crank (51:43.53)
you

Heather Crank (51:47.028)
my god. Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (52:12.18)
as a Myers-Briggs buff. I know the INFJ well. I'm married to one. I know the INFJ very well and I studied the INFJ because because when I okay.

Heather Crank (52:18.173)
no! You know the type.

Heather Crank (52:25.649)
no.

Kevin Mooney (52:29.88)
I'll make it quick. Around 30, I had my first big heartbreak and I couldn't understand, you know, why things like this would happen. Why, why when I say something, somebody else doesn't understand what I say and vice versa. So I went down this journey of understanding Myers-Briggs and the personality types and learning about myself and, and then I was like, well, what is the perfect match for it?

ENTP and then the internet said INFJ and I was like, well, what is an INFJ? Who are they? What do they do? and I learned a lot about them and I'm still learning a lot about the INFJ, but my wife is, she's introverted, but she's like, I kind of have to be out in the world and experience all these things. And so that's a very different.

than what you kind of talk about. And it's funny that it's the same type, but I know there's variables in there. And so I just wanted to talk about the, I don't know, I guess maybe the, necessarily the type, but why you're so introverted and like what it is that has kind of kept you in the wood hoods.

Heather Crank (53:32.328)
Right.

Heather Crank (53:51.794)
Hmm. Well, I'm, I'm introverted and I'm also a little bit shy. The shy part, you know, that's more of a psychological component that I developed over time, based on some life experiences. Yeah, being a weirdo growing up in a small town was one of those things. then big city things.

Kevin Mooney (53:57.934)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Mooney (54:07.278)
Interesting.

Kevin Mooney (54:13.41)
and then moving to big cities and doing big city things.

Heather Crank (54:19.273)
I've always been introverted, but I love people. And I love community and I'm kind of like your wife. Like I've traveled a lot. I need to be out. I don't like to be too isolated, but I'm exhausted by it. Totally exhausted. Like when I would do the Bend Design Conference, it would take me two weeks to recover because that was 400 people.

Kevin Mooney (54:38.786)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Mooney (54:46.158)
Whoa.

Heather Crank (54:49.817)
all of this interaction and working with a lot of teams and then the day of the 400 people, people would recognize me. I would be, people would always mistake me for an extrovert because I know how to do the thing, but it's really hard.

Kevin Mooney (55:07.662)
Mm-hmm.

So there's an odd thing about the INFJ that I knew a little bit about, but my wife has told me and she didn't understand it for a long time until we started talking about personality types and then it sort of dawned on her. she, I'll butcher the quote, but she says something to the effect of people are just drawn to me. I could be in a coffee shop, having coffee, reading a book and people will just walk up to me.

Heather Crank (55:33.085)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yep. That's right.

Kevin Mooney (55:40.534)
And start talking to me. And I don't have a clue why I'm the opposite as the extrovert. Nobody walks up to me and says hi to me. Nobody wants to talk to me.

Heather Crank (55:50.666)
That's really funny. I'm show you when I talk to you. yeah. I think it's that INFJs have a lot of empathy. And I think we have a lot of openness, naturally. And people are drawn to that. I don't know. It's like a magnetic thing. Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (56:15.668)
It really, it really is. Yeah. I think, I think even my wife questions, you know, my intent when we started dating, she hasn't said this. I'm, just projecting, but it's probably stemming from something like that because she can be anywhere and people just, I don't know. I like your shoes or your hair or what are you reading or there's some force out there that just draws people to that, that type.

Heather Crank (56:36.137)
Yes.

Heather Crank (56:42.355)
Yeah. Yep.

Kevin Mooney (56:44.302)
And she feels the same way when she does her big weekly. I'm sorry. It's not a weekly thing. Um, she works for a, a software company and they do an offsite where they all go get together at a location. do company stuff. know what an offsite is. Um, when she gets back from that week, I don't even know how long it takes her to recover, but it's like, don't talk to me.

Heather Crank (57:13.061)
Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Kevin Mooney (57:13.718)
to just leave me alone. It's just like I have to and I understand it because I need that almost every day so I can come out. I can come to work. I go out to lunch and hang out with people. I talk to people on the street like it's just this weird thing. But when I'm done. All set, I'm done for the day. Yeah, going back out in the world is like. boy alright, let's gear back up.

Heather Crank (57:31.847)
Yeah, you're done. You're done.

Kevin Mooney (57:41.366)
And she's kind of the opposite because she comes to work, she sits in her box and she does her box. Though she talks to people all day, it's not the same input. And so she's done with work and she's like, let's go down to the river. And I'm like, man, I'm so done.

Heather Crank (57:56.818)
Yeah. Yeah. And nature also recharges INFJs. So yeah.

Kevin Mooney (58:05.514)
Yeah, it really does. Yeah. And my wife, she just can't wait to go down to the river and just have a picnic. And I'm like, I don't know. I need, I need my cave. I need to go to my cave right now. So there's always this like balance that we have to strike in our relationship there, but it is very interesting that the INFJ and how they, how they attract people, how they need to be recharged.

Heather Crank (58:14.663)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (58:36.366)
So it's interesting, I would assume that there's a lot of INFJs in like design. It seems like that would be the right space for them.

Heather Crank (58:47.471)
You would think... I... I... You know...

Kevin Mooney (58:49.88)
But there's also not a lot of INFJs out there, period. So.

Heather Crank (58:53.222)
No, I don't meet a lot of them. Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (58:56.94)
Yeah. I remember when I was dating, I w think I had written in my profile, like, are you an INFJ? I want to meet you at what, at one point, cause I tried a lot of different lines, right? Cause I was trying to stand out. was trying to be different, whatever, whatever. And at one point I'm pretty sure I was like, I just need to find the INFJs. Are you guys out there? Nobody responded.

Heather Crank (59:04.521)
Are you kidding me? Seriously?

Heather Crank (59:13.339)
Uh-huh.

Seriously.

Heather Crank (59:24.291)
Yeah, we're not I guess we're not there's not a lot of us. Does your does your wife also have that thing of feeling other people's energy really easily? Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (59:28.59)
Nope, not at all.

Kevin Mooney (59:36.938)
gosh, yes. She absorbs it. And if you're around multiple people and there's multiple types of energy going on, she's absorbing all of that. And I've had to learn.

Well, not only not to react to that, something's like, why, what's going on? Like, how did, how did your energy shift so much? Because I don't know if it's unique to an ENTP or not, but I don't take on anybody's energy other than, other than my wife. Like I'll take, I'll take her energy on, which is comprised of everybody's energy in the room. So it is a lot.

Heather Crank (01:00:01.386)
Hmm.

Heather Crank (01:00:10.705)
Yeah, you're so like... Yeah. Of course. Of course.

Heather Crank (01:00:21.595)
Right. It's a lot.

Kevin Mooney (01:00:25.294)
But yeah, she very much takes on that energy. It's an interesting thing. And I don't. I don't know.

Heather Crank (01:00:32.029)
That would be so nice. Yeah. Yeah, I actually when I was I became aware of that when I was about 13, I was really struggling with understanding where my energy began and stopped and where somebody else's energy began and stopped. And I've kind of gotten better at it. But it's a struggle. Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:00:55.031)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:00:58.754)
Yeah, I didn't. I mean, I was, I didn't start paying attention to myself until around 30. And maybe that's in line with the male's prefrontal cortex not developing, you know, and I don't want to say it finally developed at 30, but maybe it did.

Heather Crank (01:01:27.465)
I would agree

Kevin Mooney (01:01:32.078)
And so, you know, I spent all of my life up until that time of just experiencing things and doing things. And I'd lived a very extroverted life. And it was just constantly going places and doing things. You'd just get in the car and you'd drive to a new state. You didn't even know where you were going. You just got in the car and you just went.

That's how I landed in Bend. That's how I discovered all the places in Oregon that I think are beautiful. It's just wake up, get in the car and go and drive. And it wasn't until around 30 that I had that moment in time that I'm like, whoa, hold on. I have to figure this thing out. And I've been on that journey for the last 10 years. But it's interesting to hear that you say around 13 is when you figured or started thinking about that.

Heather Crank (01:02:27.697)
Yeah, I did.

Kevin Mooney (01:02:29.186)
That's yeah. mean, that's my wife has a very similar story, right? Like at a very young age, she was like, what the hell is going? Like, why do people, why do people talk to me all the time? Why do people like me, whatever? I always had this idea in my head that I was different from a very young age, but the context to me was this little family box that I was in.

Heather Crank (01:02:36.393)
What the hell?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:02:59.598)
So I was like, I'm different from my parents and I'm different from my siblings, but I didn't really expand that box out into the friend group or anything there. My parents are on the opposite spectrum of me in the Myers-Briggs. So whatever their letters are, the only one that matters is the N or the S.

Heather Crank (01:03:02.609)
Yeah.

Heather Crank (01:03:20.459)
really?

Kevin Mooney (01:03:27.288)
And my parents are sensors and I'm an intuitive. And that is the, that's the main letter that kind of shifts how you process information. And so my parents are the type of people who they rely on information given to them. They're not going to think too deeply about it. So when the doctor says, you need to take this medicine, they take the medicine.

Heather Crank (01:03:30.811)
I love you.

Heather Crank (01:03:38.553)
Really?

Heather Crank (01:03:56.669)
right.

Kevin Mooney (01:03:57.516)
And when the doctor tells me I'm supposed to take a medicine, go, wait a minute. Why?

Heather Crank (01:03:59.69)
Why?

huh.

Kevin Mooney (01:04:07.438)
So growing up, being around two parents that were like that, was constantly in a why, why anything state? That was maybe one of the motivations to move away and to get away from them was just like, it didn't matter what the scenario was. I didn't do my homework. And my parents are like, you have to do your homework because you have to get good grades because you have to graduate to get a good job to get it.

Heather Crank (01:04:34.822)
boy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:04:37.506)
And I'm like, why?

Heather Crank (01:04:39.977)
boy.

Kevin Mooney (01:04:43.864)
So I'm sure I was a terror as a kid.

Kevin Mooney (01:04:50.968)
So I always thought I was different and I was different from them, but it didn't start to extrapolate out into the greater world until I had moved away and then started to explore new friendships and new opportunities and people and then get into the working world and sort of develop that. I wish that I could have recognized that a little bit sooner, but maybe it's that male thing that doesn't happen until later in life. I don't know.

Heather Crank (01:05:19.025)
It's true. No shade. It's the truth.

Kevin Mooney (01:05:21.368)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:05:25.964)
It is, it really is. And I feel thankful and lucky that I didn't do anything terrible before that happened, right, that would have changed the path that I'm on right now.

Heather Crank (01:05:38.097)
Yeah. Yes.

Kevin Mooney (01:05:39.584)
Any any any number of things could have happened at any point in time.

Heather Crank (01:05:43.017)
This is very true. Yes. Yes.

Kevin Mooney (01:05:46.146)
Yeah. Gosh, how did we get so far away from design? Yeah. Entrepreneurship. It is, it's a part of our art journey. I guess I could tie it all back really quick. How did you, it just comes in the form of a question. How did you decide that out of art school you wanted to...

Heather Crank (01:05:51.763)
design entrepreneurship because all this stuff feeds into it.

Heather Crank (01:06:01.13)
Yeah.

Heather Crank (01:06:10.162)
Okay.

Kevin Mooney (01:06:15.34)
work for yourself as opposed to, I don't know, join an agency or a firm or something like that. What did that path look like?

Heather Crank (01:06:21.577)
So I did work for a couple companies, I, know, it's better now, but at that time, the motion design world, there weren't a lot of women. And I was having a really hard go of it. I'm also really independent, discipline type of person. And I don't, I don't, create my own structure naturally. So sort of a natural,

inclination to run my own thing. And I also am really independent. I don't like being told what to do. So there's that too. And I just wasn't getting the life and the result that I wanted working for bigger companies.

Kevin Mooney (01:06:57.774)
Yeah.

Heather Crank (01:07:12.635)
Also as a humanitarian, some of the ethics surrounding some of these companies, I just couldn't align myself with what I was seeing. So there were multiple reasons. really, entrepreneurship just really suits my personality type too, you know?

Kevin Mooney (01:07:33.4)
Mm-hmm.

Heather Crank (01:07:35.497)
Um, and it's a great way if you're not getting the result you wanted to just kind of take control of your own life and make choices that are better suited for you. It's not for everybody. It definitely some people it's a really, um, scary to do that. You have to be a risk taker.

Kevin Mooney (01:07:54.691)
Yeah.

I'm a risk taker and I think oftentimes this isn't for me. That's how wild it is. Yeah.

Heather Crank (01:08:02.939)
Yeah, it's hard. It's hard. It's a harder path. For sure.

Kevin Mooney (01:08:08.942)
If you don't mind sharing, I'd like to know what the things were that happened in the agencies that were kind of against your values that you were like, again, you don't have to share names or details or anything like that. I'm just curious because I've seen some of those things happen in my life and I don't know if I just skirted my way around them.

Heather Crank (01:08:34.697)
you

Kevin Mooney (01:08:35.34)
And I never said them, like, want to know what they were and how you handled it and what that looked like.

Heather Crank (01:08:40.265)
So, just right off the bat, there was a lot of sexism, a lot of it, an incredible amount of it. In some of the agencies I worked for, there were some big drug problems with people. partly it's the...

Kevin Mooney (01:08:57.326)
Whoa.

Heather Crank (01:09:02.215)
you know, work all night grind mentality. So all nighter, all nighter, all nighter, all nighter. And how are you going to maintain that? There's one way there's some people made certain choices and got themselves into a little bit of a situation. I also have some issues with hierarchical

Kevin Mooney (01:09:12.386)
Yeah, there's one way. There's a couple ways I suppose, yeah.

Heather Crank (01:09:29.257)
treatment or the way sometimes people will pit people against each other that sort of doggy dog competitive thing. I'm a very inclusive person and I think we come to better solutions when we cooperate and I'm not interested in the you're better, you're worse. So subjective and it can affect people's lives. I've watched so many people be

Kevin Mooney (01:09:54.103)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Heather Crank (01:09:58.697)
tremendously wounded by that. And it was just that specific environment, not that they couldn't do great things. It's an empathy thing too, right? Like I'm going to immediately see, have that ability to immediately see people's talents and skill and what makes them really adept at certain things. And it would just bug.

Kevin Mooney (01:10:05.954)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:10:09.325)
Yeah.

Heather Crank (01:10:26.876)
bug me when I would watch bullying happening because someone was not as outspoken or maybe they were more introverted like me and someone was talking over them in a meeting and taking their ideas and making them their own, you know, so I just can't get behind that, that culture. I cannot, I cannot get behind it.

Kevin Mooney (01:10:30.221)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:10:48.951)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:10:52.366)
Did you have any positive interactions in an agency or something like that? Or a company?

Heather Crank (01:10:59.08)
I did. I had one company I was working for where I had the most amazing creative director of all time. And he was so encouraging and respectful. And the way he handled his team, it was joyful. Everybody loved him. We loved doing our job. felt...

like really empowered as a team and he built community, which is very different than the competitive thing. And we all felt like we had our own unique skills and talents. And he made us aware of our weaknesses, but it wasn't in a derogatory kind of way. It was like, this is not where you belong. You belong over here, but it was positive. Leadership matters in a big way.

Kevin Mooney (01:11:47.566)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Mooney (01:11:51.286)
Yeah, I realized that at the agency and

You know, we had a team of seven, I think maybe at one point in time. And, you know, I don't think I, I would love to hear from the people that I worked with at that time. If what I'm about to say is, is incorrect, but I would like to think that I never put anybody down. I never put us in a.

competitive situation where it's like you better outperform that person, otherwise they're going to take your job or something. But I.

Heather Crank (01:12:26.056)
That's right. That's right. Yep.

Kevin Mooney (01:12:34.734)
I do and did have like a vision in mind for this. And if we weren't hitting that vision as an ENTP, you can be very excitable and kind of loud and boisterous, right? And sometimes it's perceived as anger, but it's not necessarily anger. It's more like it's meant to drive and get us all excited and do that. And so,

Heather Crank (01:12:59.016)
Great. I understand that.

Kevin Mooney (01:13:03.618)
I guess I'd like to know from them and maybe I should bring a few of them on the show and ask them this, this question. So I just want to know who, who I was at that point in time, I had blinders on, you know, I was a partner, so I had steak in the company. So it was, you know, I wasn't just brought on to just manage a team or lead creative or something. I had steak in the company and I wanted to push.

us and our abilities up and up and up. I wanted to be recognized. You know, I didn't think that we were going to hit a widening Kennedy level or something like that, but, you know, I wanted to be in like the murmur zone or, or parliament or, know, one of those, those zones where it's like, and those are people that I admire and their, their style is,

the style that I have kind of taken on. And so I wanted to push us up out of our local zone of doing the same things and kind of let's get up into that zone. So this is maybe just all to say, I wonder if I did some of the things that you just liked in your experience, but I wonder if I also did some of the things that you would have liked. Not for approval, just my own learning experience of what that agency experience was like for the whole team.

Heather Crank (01:14:31.854)
Yeah, I mean, I don't mean that I, I'm not driven. I'm really ambitious and driven. And I like to push the envelope. And I like to explore. It's just how it's done. Like, are you being respectful? Are you using someone to the best of their ability? Or are you tearing them down because you're insecure in yourself? And then what are the repercussions and leaders have to really think about how their ability

Kevin Mooney (01:14:38.123)
yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:14:42.286)
It's just how it's done.

Kevin Mooney (01:14:47.448)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:15:04.536)
Yeah, well, my wife is the VP of sales at that software company and I get to kind of sit back and hear and observe and watch and listen to the things that she's doing. And that is what she's super keen on. You know, I think it's what makes a great leader isn't, can you identify the best work?

Heather Crank (01:15:08.168)
you

Kevin Mooney (01:15:29.942)
It's like who this person is, what their intentions are, where their ethics kind of live, what their vibes are, and that's what my wife is all about and sounds like you're very much in that same zone. I don't quite know how to identify those things the way that you guys do.

Heather Crank (01:15:38.386)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Kevin Mooney (01:15:51.106)
I don't know, I maybe lead in a different way. Sure, possibly. As long as it's good and not bad. Yeah.

Heather Crank (01:15:54.673)
That's good though. You need different. Well, it's important. As long as it's respectful. That's the thing, right? Like I'm not saying my creative director if I messed up or I didn't hit the mark, he let me know very quickly and very clearly. And it wasn't, he wasn't just handling me with kid gloves ever, ever. I mean, that's not what I mean. I just mean

Kevin Mooney (01:16:11.682)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:16:18.53)
Yeah, for sure.

Heather Crank (01:16:23.952)
there's no I don't think there's a reason to crush somebody or hurt or bruise their ego to the point that they want to leave the industry or

they cannot perform to the level they want to perform because everybody has their different like ambitions. Some people don't aren't driven, they just want to do their job and do it well. Some people want to climb the ladder, you know, it's all different. So if you understand

Kevin Mooney (01:16:44.12)
Mm-hmm.

Heather Crank (01:16:56.1)
In fact, one of my old design professors used to say to me, everybody has their price and everybody has different needs. And if you know what they are, then you can really work with people and negotiate, which I think is that's the crux of it. Instead of running over top, you know?

Kevin Mooney (01:17:12.814)
Sure. Yeah, yeah. Did you find it challenging in that working for a company or an agency to adapt to styles? Like, was that part of the reason that you were like, I'm getting beat up by the creative director. They're asking me to do these things that I don't even really like in the first place. if I don't like it, how am I supposed to produce it?

And was that maybe one of the reasons that you were like going solo? I can, I can do things that feel good to me and let people find that. Or are you still in the place where you're like, no, I, I still have to make stuff that I don't really like.

Heather Crank (01:17:41.391)
you

Heather Crank (01:17:54.569)
I do a lot of stuff I don't like. Yeah, that's I think that's just part of the job, know, is I may like it or not like it, but I'm there to solve your problem. And some of the problems, they're very production oriented, they're very make this flawless. You know, it's not about design. It's not about

my artistry in a certain sense, it's about make this perfect based on my standard. And my personal standard may be very, very different than somebody else's. I got to make money. You know?

Kevin Mooney (01:18:38.456)
Yeah. Yeah.

100%. Yeah. Brian and I were talking about the difference between art and design in our call. and we've been talking about that balance and this was something I learned at the agency in the early days of it. And it was how I learned about José was, was core, right? And, I shamelessly admitted to Brian yesterday that

When I discovered Core,

I didn't think, Hey, this is a great way to align business outcomes to the design. I thought this is a great way that I can get the client off my back by saying, you told me this, this, this, and this, I made you something that solves these problems and you don't like it. Well, too bad, tough shit because

Heather Crank (01:19:33.638)
Yes. Yes.

Heather Crank (01:19:38.972)
Yes.

Kevin Mooney (01:19:43.832)
this is what solves that problem. And that's a really selfish and kind of ego driven approach. I'm happy to say that now it is more like, okay, you don't like what I created, that's fine. But now tell me how your changes will address these problems that we talked about before, right? So it serves a very similar purpose. I just have a more mature response to how that goes.

Heather Crank (01:20:10.792)
Yeah, it takes time, you know, it just takes time like, yeah, yeah, it's clients. you know, learning how to communicate and understand the needs and then holding your boundaries so you don't feel taken advantage of, right, but everybody is getting what they need, you know, because it's, it's

Kevin Mooney (01:20:15.415)
Yeah.

Heather Crank (01:20:40.476)
You need the equal power dynamic for sure. If that's off, it's back.

Kevin Mooney (01:20:43.256)
Yeah.

So if you, yeah, I agree 100%. So if you had to do your professional career over again, would you go down the same path?

Heather Crank (01:20:59.336)
Oh, that's you know what? I don't know. I think

Heather Crank (01:21:06.684)
there was so much financial pressure for me. didn't, you know, I put myself through the degree program, I took out loans. I kind of was in a position where I needed to find a way to support myself. If I had total freedom, I probably would be an artist, honestly, yeah. Money wasn't a thing.

Kevin Mooney (01:21:29.89)
Yeah, if money wasn't a thing and you just wanted to be you.

Heather Crank (01:21:35.241)
Yeah, but I think a lot of artists recognize that at a certain point if you want to make a living, you've got to find a way to plug that talent into something, what's the word, a little more, not corporate, you know, involved in the exterior world. Because being an artist,

Kevin Mooney (01:21:54.37)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Heather Crank (01:22:02.085)
it's you know, I still do it for myself all the time. And if for some if for some reason, at some point, that part of me gets attention, I'm able to make money that way, that would be great. But the vehicle of design was a was a nice parallel for me. So I don't know, it would all depend on money. And now technology is different.

Kevin Mooney (01:22:28.12)
Sure.

Heather Crank (01:22:29.842)
So I don't know. This is a good question. I'm not sure.

Kevin Mooney (01:22:31.682)
Yeah. What type of art would it be?

Heather Crank (01:22:37.631)
Um, this is also a good question because the reason I like AI so much is before I went into design, I was studying dance theater and postmodern literature. You're not going to really make a lot of money. Um, yeah. So.

Kevin Mooney (01:22:50.372)
huh. Yeah, okay.

Heather Crank (01:22:58.406)
Why I like AI so much is it combines the written word with the visual, which is a lot of what I like to work with. And I think that a lot of people do the opposite. A lot of artists heard someone say the other day, some people make to think and some people think to make. like people, isn't that cool? I think.

Kevin Mooney (01:23:23.694)
that's cool. Yeah.

Heather Crank (01:23:27.918)
Some visual artists think through their process, which is why they hate AI. And people like me who I always use words first, I already know what I want and then I'm using AI to make it.

Heather Crank (01:23:45.17)
So it's a process thing.

Kevin Mooney (01:23:47.242)
It is. I wonder what I do. I have never thought of this. I wonder if I make to think or think to make. I have a feeling that I think to make.

Kevin Mooney (01:24:02.136)
Boy, I'd have to like, well, I'd have to think about this. This is going to be stuck in my head all day.

Heather Crank (01:24:08.936)
I I could remember his name. was like, wow, that is, that's it. That's it. Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:24:16.546)
Whoa. So.

I might have misunderstood, but what is the art that you would do if you had to do this all over again?

Heather Crank (01:24:27.346)
So that's the thing is that there are new, my whole point, sorry, is that there are new forms emerging right now that I think I am very, very drawn to that's gonna intersect with technology, but it's not here yet. But I see it coming and I'm kind of in anticipation of what's going to open. So I think...

what I may be doing in a year will look very different than what I'm doing right now but it's not here yet.

Kevin Mooney (01:24:59.982)
Can you share what that is? Or you just wanna like not put it out there in the world.

Heather Crank (01:25:01.192)
So.

we can. I'll give you how about give you a little a

Kevin Mooney (01:25:08.724)
Yeah, give me a little taster. just want to like little scoop of the ice cream.

Heather Crank (01:25:12.584)
So you were talking about patterns earlier. And what really intrigues me are the way patterns create things and how they overlap. And what AI does is it uses a lot of patterns, but so does art. So I'm playing with this intersection right now of the idea of dreaming.

and AI hallucinations, and the combination and the way that patterns intersect and create our realities in our dreams and the way we process in the way AI processes information, there's a really interesting spot in that combination that I'm exploring. And I'm

I'd like to create work with my hands, but I'm using the AI hallucinations as the reference. that, you know how like when we dream in our subconscious, we're combining patterns and information and creating our realities out of that. And AI does something similar.

but it predicts the next step in a sequence. I'm kind of working on those two areas because there's something there that really intrigues me.

Kevin Mooney (01:26:30.574)
Whoa. That is really cool.

Heather Crank (01:26:34.568)
Thank you.

Kevin Mooney (01:26:38.316)
I kind of have to process what you just said.

Heather Crank (01:26:39.848)
you

Heather Crank (01:26:44.316)
Yeah, I keep thinking about it.

Kevin Mooney (01:26:48.974)
You know, my brain often, like I love ethereal things and I love living in the clouds and spiraling out of control. But as a T person, which is a thinker, you like, you always root it in this like logic, like, so that's why I kept asking you, but what, what are you saying? Right. And the answer you gave me is beautiful.

Heather Crank (01:26:56.552)
Mm-hmm.

Heather Crank (01:27:00.444)
Yeah.

Heather Crank (01:27:04.657)
Yes.

Heather Crank (01:27:09.254)
Right.

Kevin Mooney (01:27:18.648)
But there is no what in that thing. And so I'm still like.

spinning around going what what could this be? What is this? How does that even look? Do I even understand this?

Heather Crank (01:27:32.497)
Well.

I'll give you a little more concrete. how I started to explore it physically was I used photo, I made some custom Photoshop brushes and I began painting AI hallucinations that I would create based on my own dream life and then AI's interpretation of that dream life and what it would predict as next. And often because it's a dream, I would try to force it into making mistakes.

Kevin Mooney (01:27:56.11)
Whoa.

Heather Crank (01:28:03.033)
So that, you know, the subconscious full of all those bits and pieces of stuff that we process all day and some things we're not even aware that we see and it goes into the subconscious and we have to basically defrag our brains. Right?

Kevin Mooney (01:28:17.25)
Yes, yes, I use that. I use that metaphor a lot. Yep.

Heather Crank (01:28:21.392)
Yes. Yeah, so it's sort of like that, like, I'm playing and I want to paint it with my hands because I want that when you use your left hand, it's a direct connection to certain areas in your brain that you use in your subconscious. So I'm trying to connect those two very physical, very straightforward components of being human with

the way AI processes information and its fragments and its mistakes and its processing errors. So I'm just kind of exploring it. There's not a hardcore what yet, but I think eventually it will get there.

Kevin Mooney (01:28:56.6)
Wow.

Kevin Mooney (01:29:00.652)
Yeah.

No, I think what helped me is just that little example of how you're pulling it together. So it's not necessarily the why or the what it's the how and the how gives me some context of what that could be at some point in time. That is really fricking cool. That's yeah. I don't have anything to share like that.

Heather Crank (01:29:28.838)
You know, this is why I live in a forest.

Kevin Mooney (01:29:33.09)
The wood hood for sure. That is that's super cool. man so.

Kevin Mooney (01:29:47.308)
I don't know, this might be redundant, but I am curious, like, you had to go back to the very beginning, let's transport back to young Heather, what would you do if maybe you weren't in this entrepreneurial path?

Heather Crank (01:29:49.905)
Over.

Heather Crank (01:29:56.668)
all the way back.

Heather Crank (01:30:06.3)
Well, where I was, I probably would have gone...

It would have probably been somewhere dance, theater, or I also loved creative writing. Somewhere, one of those two paths for sure.

Kevin Mooney (01:30:22.958)
So it's still artistic and creative. That's what you would do.

That's I mean, that's cool. It means that you belong in this space. If I had to go back, I would have just tried to start a toilet paper company so that so that I don't even have to think about anything. People have to wipe their wipe themselves. So it's like, here's your toilet paper. I get to make some money and we're done. I don't have to think anymore. No more all of all of this stuff that you deal with with clients and creative and money and blah. You're just like.

Heather Crank (01:30:32.05)
Mm-hmm. For sure.

Heather Crank (01:30:37.466)
No. Serious?

Wow!

Heather Crank (01:30:49.766)
Wow.

Kevin Mooney (01:30:58.124)
I turn the machines on, the toilet paper comes out, people buy it. Done.

Heather Crank (01:31:05.724)
be a ski bum, right? Like, you just want to experience life. You just want to be present.

Kevin Mooney (01:31:07.01)
Hahaha!

Kevin Mooney (01:31:11.84)
It really is about that. I've thought about that more recently, like in the last few months. Like what makes me happy is really like this moment right here. And I'm not thinking about what happened 10 minutes before. I'm not thinking about what's gonna happen 30 minutes ahead. It really is right here that makes me happy. And I think a lot of P people have that, right? It's a little bit like.

Heather Crank (01:31:20.902)
Yeah.

Heather Crank (01:31:25.159)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:31:39.566)
less structured, I don't really want to be told what to do type of mentality. I think a lot of people with that trait, they do just kind of fly by the seat of their pants. And that is how I would live. So if money didn't exist, I don't know what I would do, but it would just be whatever I felt like that day. And I am happy in that spot.

Heather Crank (01:31:43.24)
you

Heather Crank (01:31:50.802)
Yeah.

Heather Crank (01:32:02.877)
I think that's a beautiful spot. No, but that's great. mean, honestly, I think that's how we're meant to live, but.

Kevin Mooney (01:32:04.28)
blinders.

Kevin Mooney (01:32:11.468)
Yeah, but the world keeps turning because of that structure that those J's put on it, you know? I mean, what would you do if you came to a stoplight and everyone was a P person? It's just crashing all the time. People would be like honking and crashing. We need the J people to be like, no, no. Green means go. Red means stop. And we're like, okay.

Heather Crank (01:32:14.702)
I know, I know, I know, I know. It's true.

Heather Crank (01:32:23.278)
my god, it would be chaos. Yeah.

What you doing?

Heather Crank (01:32:39.261)
That is a jade trait, my god. That is serious jade

Kevin Mooney (01:32:41.666)
Hahaha

Kevin Mooney (01:32:46.99)
So the world needs all types, you know? We need J people out

Heather Crank (01:32:51.354)
Yeah, true. Thank you. We just validated that. Thank you. my god.

Kevin Mooney (01:32:53.422)
Yes, of course. Yeah.

Where should we take it from here, Heather? Do you have a time constraint? Do you want to get going?

Heather Crank (01:33:05.576)
11.33. Well, you know, work.

Kevin Mooney (01:33:09.388)
Yeah, let's get you out of here. I appreciate you so much for being on here and sharing stories and wandering with me. It's very therapeutic for me and hopefully you got to say some things that you wanted to say.

Heather Crank (01:33:23.6)
I did and I'm super excited for you to do more of this. I think podcasting is such an amazing way to meet and connect with a lot of different people and to kind of expand your knowledge of even what's possible, like the amount of time Stephen's speaking with you today. It's like all of the, I'm having all these thoughts and ideas about things that weren't here this morning.

Kevin Mooney (01:33:49.422)
That's awesome. mean, same with me. I'm trying to figure out this intersection of dreams and art and AI. then I have to figure out whether I think to, yeah, so there's a lot. And I agree with you. it's part of the reason that I don't do questions. It's the reason that I just want, if we're comfortable with it.

Heather Crank (01:33:57.296)
God.

to make or make to think.

Kevin Mooney (01:34:16.778)
to just start talking and see where it goes and.

100 % somebody out there is going to say, well, you're not going to get any clicks that way because the theme twist and turn and whatever, but that's okay with me. I just like doing this. And now I know you way deeper than the few messages that we've shared on the community or whatever that we have posted. I have a much deeper understanding about you, your path, your journey, what makes you tick and, and

certainly how you think. So once again, thank you so much for doing this. I appreciate it.

Heather Crank (01:34:59.368)
You're so welcome.

Kevin Mooney (01:35:01.006)
Do you want to plug your company, your URLs, your podcast? Do you want to just let her rip?

Heather Crank (01:35:04.186)
sure, sure.

Yeah, so I also have a podcast with two other people. It's called the Developing Life. And you can find us on Spotify, YouTube, anywhere, Apple podcasts, we're all over the place. We focus a lot on community and the creative process and how that's evolving right now with all the changes in tech. I also have my own company called Cremonti. It's Cremonti.com. You can also find me under Heather Crank. There aren't a

lot of us. So if you just search me, you're gonna find me. Yeah, just you know, you'll find me and I tend to be pretty active on Instagram. But that's my I think Instagram and LinkedIn are my main socials right now I've kind of pulled back off some of the social media.

Kevin Mooney (01:35:40.942)
Just the pioneers have been. Just the pioneers.

Kevin Mooney (01:35:58.922)
sense. cool. Well thanks again I appreciate it. Stick around for a few minutes while we get this to upload and we're done. Thank you.

Heather Crank (01:36:08.595)
Welcome.

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