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The old salty guy problem. The senior operator who knows everything and is about to walk out the door with fifteen years of judgment. This episode is the framework for capturing what he knows before the fire goes out.
No news cycle coverage today — we pivot to a single-thesis deep-dive on the retiring-expert problem. We introduce The Campfire Protocol, a 7-phase framework for turning tribal knowledge into an operational asset that survives the person.
The stakes. Boeing 737 MAX: $1.6 billion in direct losses traced to lost institutional knowledge. Shell ROCK: $300 to $400 million per year in retained value. NASA, unable to recover its own spacesuit manufacturing expertise, awarded Axiom a $1.3 billion contract in 2022 to rebuild what it had lost.
The 7 phases:
- CONSENT — the legal and personal permissions
- CORPUS — every artifact the expert has touched
- DISCOVERY — structured interviews on decision-making patterns
- INTERVIEW — recorded, transcribed, tagged ground truth
- SHADOW — AI watches the expert work for 30 to 90 days
- HANDOFF — the successor works with the AI for 90 days with the expert available
- STEWARDSHIP — ongoing maintenance so the knowledge base does not decay
Failure and success cases:
- IBM Watson at MD Anderson — $62 million written off in 2017
- Eudia at Duracell — outside counsel costs cut 50 percent by augmenting, not replacing
- NASA spacesuits — 19-year gap, full rebuild required
Legal anchors: California AB 2602 and SB 683, Tennessee ELVIS Act, Moffatt v. Air Canada (2024), Mobley v. Workday (2025) class cert, iTutorGroup EEOC $365,000 settlement, DDB Technologies v. MLB (2008).
The economics. Annual recurring: $18,000 to $24,000. One-time build: $70,000 to $175,000. Tooling: Guru, Dust.tt, Fathom, Fireflies, AssemblyAI, Microsoft Presidio, ElevenLabs PVC, Delphi.ai, Synthesia, HeyGen, D-ID.
"The campfire does not scale. The campfire goes out."
"You are not cloning a person. You are keeping the fire."
"The goal is to never lose the conversation."
If this was useful, send it to a fellow member. Stay sharp.
