The Future Is Analog
Episode Stats
Summary
In 2016, David Sacks wrote a book called Revenge of the Analog, which made the case that even as we march towards an ever more digital future, we were increasingly returning to real, tangible things: choosing vinyl records over streaming, brick and mortar bookstores over Amazon, and in person conversations over skype over Skype. In the intervening years, the Pandemic hit, and David argues that the future is indeed analog. Today, on the show, David explains how the pandemic gave us a trial run of an entirely digital future and made us realize we don t really want it or at least not all of it.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast
00:00:10.860
in 2016 david sacks wrote a book called revenge of the analog which made the case that even as
00:00:17.100
we march towards an ever more digital future we were increasingly returning to real tangible
00:00:21.400
things choosing vinyl records over streaming brick and mortar bookstores over amazon and
00:00:25.920
in-person conversations over skype in the intervening years the pandemic hit and david
00:00:30.660
argues truly reaffirmed his case which he lays out in his latest book the future is analog today on
00:00:36.300
the show david explains how the pandemic gave us a trial run of an entirely digital future and made
00:00:41.460
us realize we don't really want it or at least we don't want all of it we discuss the drawbacks that
00:00:46.380
came from going virtual with work school shopping socializing and religious worship and discuss how
00:00:51.820
we're not as smart when we don't use our embodied cognition how information is different from
00:00:55.480
education and why there are a few things quite as awful as a zoom cocktail party after the show's
00:01:00.700
over check out our show notes at aom.is slash futures analog all right david sacks welcome back to the
00:01:16.780
show it is a pleasure to be back here brad so we had you on back in 2017 that's a long time ago
00:01:23.140
to discuss your book the revenge of the analog where you highlighted these you know pockets in
00:01:28.860
our culture where people were intentionally choosing analog versions of things we now do
00:01:34.280
digitally so like people listening to the vinyl instead of streaming i guess now the thing is uh
00:01:39.640
cassette tapes are coming back too so that you probably could have talked about that i never
00:01:43.160
predicted that right i never i still astounds me yeah we got playing board games instead of video
00:01:48.880
games you know people going to independent bookstores etc in your new book same thing about
00:01:53.740
the analog but you make the case that the pandemic showed that the future is indeed analog why is that
00:02:00.680
i mean because didn't the pandemic show that we could move everything to to screens and to the to the cloud
00:02:06.040
well that was the promise right the promise of the digital future was that going forward
00:02:12.080
you know everything could be done through a computer through a screen or maybe a vr headset
00:02:18.460
which is like a screen that you strap to your eyes and for years that was kind of the the heart of the
00:02:23.980
sales pitch of every company pitching to a venture capitalist of you know companies getting up and
00:02:29.040
doing their best sort of steve jobs product demonstration the core of the sort of sci-fi singularity
00:02:36.280
technological futurism which really was kind of the heart of the way we thought about the future
00:02:41.840
that the future was going to be digital the amount of times i heard the term the future is going to
00:02:46.140
be digital the future is digital you know when i was out talking about the revenge of analog when i
00:02:50.140
was giving talks or doing interviews and people like well what do you mean that you know the revenge
00:02:53.880
of analog everything's digital now and everything's becoming more digital and i think what the pandemic
00:02:59.160
showed us was a preview a test drive if you will of that digital future right one day we were going
00:03:08.460
about our lives we were doing things on computer but we were also going to restaurants and our kids
00:03:11.660
were going to school and we were going into offices and seeing plays and you know doing all the things
00:03:17.740
that one does out in the real analog world and the next day you know march 15th 2020 everybody in the
00:03:24.540
world except people in new zealand are inside and they're conducting every single aspect of their life
00:03:29.580
through the screen so we actually got for at least a few months or even a few years depending on your
00:03:34.180
circumstances to test drive the digital future right and on the surface as you said it worked you can
00:03:44.020
work entirely remotely if your job isn't like you know surgery or construction or driving something you can
00:03:52.820
send your children or be a university student you know entirely for computer without ever stepping into a
00:03:58.560
school you can stream all the culture you want music plays dance theater improv you know you name it
00:04:07.360
just from your screen through various services you can be a good christian or good jew or good muslim
00:04:14.900
and attend all your rituals and do all the things you have to do through streaming services or through
00:04:20.580
various online platforms you can live in theory a full and complete life in the digital world in a
00:04:28.220
non-vr metaverse if you want to call it that and on the surface that will work but what did we
00:04:33.940
actually discover for the most part and for most people that had its limits and we came up against
00:04:40.760
those limits very quickly within like days of going into quarantine and lockdown you know that there
00:04:48.160
are certain aspects and many aspects of our analog life our life beyond the screen of of real face-to-face
00:04:56.420
relationships and physical spaces and the interaction with all of them in our bodies
00:05:02.800
that are irreplaceable and that the digital version of that is a far cry that that's no substitute and
00:05:11.320
no equivalent of the real deal so i mean at what point in the in the lockdown in the pandemic
00:05:18.740
did you realize this is not great because like for me i remember when it first happened it's kind of
00:05:22.540
exciting i think for a lot of people it's like oh this is new this is different uh don't they go
00:05:26.460
out this is kind of cool but then they reached a point where you're like oh geez when's this going
00:05:31.400
to be over was there a moment when you were like this is no longer this is not fun anymore
00:05:36.140
i would say you know four days into it for me i mean i think it was just you know there was a point
00:05:44.040
in one day where it was like every screen in this house i was in which is my mother-in-law's kind
00:05:50.040
of weekend house where we had gone to get more space was on like you know she has so many tvs it's
00:05:55.540
like an airport lounge every tv was on you know playing cartoons for the kids or you know someone
00:06:00.680
was doing exercise class in one or just like cnn on like a like a bad you know pizza takeout place
00:06:07.900
that just keeps the news on on silent you know everyone was on their phones and tablets you know
00:06:12.780
i was bouncing from zoom calls for work to zoom things for podcast interviews to promote another book
00:06:18.000
i had to typing things on microsoft word documents to you know trying to get my child onto google
00:06:23.740
classroom so her teacher could give her assignments that we then had to do on another computer while
00:06:27.080
my wife was coaching people downstairs and it was just like there was one day probably i don't know
00:06:31.600
you know within the first week where it's like five o'clock i finally come up for air and i realized
00:06:37.460
i've been staring at screens and everyone in the house has been staring at screens all day
00:06:40.860
and it's like we have to go out we have to take a walk and nobody wanted to no no no like the kids
00:06:45.520
were just ensconced in their screen my wife's working and i went out and i took a walk it was
00:06:49.300
rainy and cold and miserable and i all of a sudden for the first time the entire day i felt alive i was
00:06:55.400
out i was hearing birds it was like i don't know it was like it was like i was on like psychedelics
00:07:00.360
and like i had been like reborn to see this world outside of the screen and realize just how out of whack
00:07:07.080
that was and how i cannot live you know another day like this let alone the rest of my life that this
00:07:12.260
is no future i want a part of so in the book you break down the book into different aspects of
00:07:18.140
our lives and explore the downsides of moving that aspect into the digital world and you kind of use
00:07:24.600
the day of the week as sort of the organizing principle and monday you explore the world of work
00:07:30.440
for those who shifted to work from home what was the biggest problem of transitioning to remote work
00:07:35.960
what in your research and you that you did yeah i i think what we realized and what i even knew
00:07:42.320
is that there is a big difference between work in quotation marks which is seen as this kind of
00:07:50.320
measure of economic productivity based upon certain tasks you are paid to do and much of that can be done
00:07:56.980
online and if you're an information worker if you're someone whose work is done on computers already
00:08:00.900
basically and the broader world of work that folds around that right the relationships you have with
00:08:07.960
people you work with in an office the setting there the building the restaurants around it the place where
00:08:15.700
you work the environment that that's in all of that comes together to form something greater around
00:08:23.280
work that actually informs the work that you do so i talked to an interviewed gentleman a researcher in
00:08:30.700
new york his name is andres hofbrauer and he studied architecture studios and how they work and he said
00:08:36.920
during the pandemic a lot of the architects he had studied and talked to had noted that the work that
00:08:42.140
they were doing was quickly declining in quality that they were able to work on projects that they had
00:08:48.740
already been engaging in prior to going virtual but anything new was really difficult to get new ideas for
00:08:55.540
there was something missing and he talked about the process of embodied cognition embodied cognition
00:09:01.260
is the learning that we get the information we get from our surroundings so think about an
00:09:07.100
architecture studio right you have a bunch of desks you have an office you know it's in a tower it's in
00:09:11.260
a loft wherever it is you know they're all kind of the same you know beams and whatever and yet around
00:09:18.020
that are all these sort of different visual sensorial cues that an architect will pick up on in their day to
00:09:24.360
day right tile samples you know sheets of metal swabs of paint different renderings and photos and
00:09:32.780
clippings of ideas for a building or maybe different iterations of a design for a building for example
00:09:37.960
that plus the individuals whose different jobs are there you might have an engineer you might have an
00:09:43.480
urban planner you might have someone who's the lawyer you might have someone who deals with you know
00:09:47.340
interiors and facial materials all working together people who you bump into on your way to get coffee
00:09:53.540
on your way to the elevator and the five minutes before a meeting and you have conversations and
00:09:58.180
in those conversations many of the ideas and structures and pieces of that building are being
00:10:02.640
discussed or you're walking by on your way to go out for lunch and you see a drawing on someone's
00:10:09.420
desk you see a piece of a model you see something and so all of that builds this collective
00:10:14.760
understanding of work in an idea and that along with the different things like trust right human
00:10:20.920
relationships built not just on the tasks people do but on conversation on time spent together on
00:10:28.500
time spent talking about things that have nothing to do with work right and the understanding of
00:10:33.440
people's personalities and how they work and now you take all of that and you get rid of it and you
00:10:38.080
just have the tasks the work that someone does their deliverables or their things and all of that
00:10:45.240
communication embodied cognition is reduced down to what you can digitize and send through a flat piece
00:10:52.120
of glass on a platform like slack or google work or whatever right whatever it is teams i don't know
00:10:58.220
what it doesn't matter what whatever that thing is so you lose a lot of that information there and
00:11:02.840
information is inherently social and you know there were a lot of studies that came out very early in the
00:11:08.680
pandemic and they said you know oh well this is going to be great for productivity because people are
00:11:12.940
working more hours you know and they're being distracted less by time with the commute or you
00:11:19.040
know random office banter and chit chat and stupid little birthday cakes but you know there was a big
00:11:23.820
study that was done by microsoft corporation which actually led the way in many ways saying we're going
00:11:27.860
to do a lot of remote and it studied i think 60 000 people across all their divisions you know microsoft
00:11:33.580
linkedin xbox whatever and said like look we what we are seeing is a decline in communication amongst
00:11:41.900
different teams people talk to the exact people they have to talk to and no one else and over time
00:11:47.040
they forecast kind of an atrophying of creativity and productivity because things were increasingly
00:11:54.280
siloed and so you know it doesn't mean that everyone should go back to the office five days a week but it
00:12:01.000
certainly means that if you go entirely digital with your work there are sacrifices that can be made and
00:12:06.460
over the long term we're going to see the consequences of that which will be unfolding
00:12:10.080
as work becomes more atomized and it's just this notion of like here's the task and you do this task
00:12:17.160
here's the task and you do this task without all those other aspects that is actually what makes work
00:12:22.720
work okay so it sounds like there are times when working remotely works right when it's task-based
00:12:28.020
stuff like you're doing a spreadsheet i also think a lot of people they don't want to give up
00:12:32.100
working from home all together right they tried it during the pandemic and they figured man i really
00:12:36.680
like this i want to keep doing this but what your chapter on work is showing is that there are times
00:12:42.960
if you want to be creative and be productive with your creativity you really got to be in person
00:12:48.980
and what you talk about is that figuring this balance out it's going to be tricky because
00:12:56.100
first you know we have to redefine what productivity even means you know you talk about shifting away
00:13:01.580
from this industrial revolution mindset of you know productivity is numbers of hours worked to
00:13:08.980
something where it's more like you know what leads to creative output and you say this could take
00:13:14.160
this could take decades to figure out so it's it's going to take a long time but i mean i think the the
00:13:18.700
big takeaway is we lose that embodied cognition when we move everything to completely virtual i mean
00:13:25.740
i've noticed that in my own works a lot of my work is through a screen but sometimes there's things
00:13:30.000
where i have to get tactile with it right where i have to like you know you get a whiteboard and
00:13:33.780
you're doing stuff on a whiteboard and working things out or you're getting pen and paper and
00:13:37.160
working things out and what's interesting you know there's companies that have tried to digitize that
00:13:41.320
and i've used some of those services before where you can kind of create a digital whiteboard and
00:13:46.020
you know that but it's not the same it doesn't it doesn't grab i don't know it just it just seems
00:13:50.760
flat and i don't get anything out of it yeah i interviewed uh someone named jennifer kolstad who's the head
00:13:56.320
of interior design for ford's offices around the world and during 2020 2021 you know her and her team
00:14:05.740
were really trying to design and figure out what the future of the office was going to be
00:14:12.620
for ford the ford motor company right and they were using all these virtual tools and remote tools
00:14:19.220
miro and you know google docs and whatever to try to do it and they were just getting nowhere she said
00:14:24.940
it was like a sand trap you were just so focused on this thing and the different capabilities of
00:14:29.340
the tools and so what they did was they got everyone together in a in a detroit office boardroom
00:14:33.900
you know they had to wear masks everyone had to be vaccinated they had to sign like waivers that they
00:14:38.280
wouldn't sue them if they got sick and she said they got it done in three hours because it was just
00:14:42.080
a wall with whiteboard and drawing and people pinning things up that they printed out and it was like
00:14:47.480
it was it was she said it was just seeing that in the physical space changed everything and i think
00:14:53.040
that is that basic truth that i realized sitting at home trying to do everything remotely and i think
00:14:59.060
a lot of people did and it's something that we forget which is that we are we have bodies right
00:15:05.880
we are not screens you know we have not uploaded our brains as ray kurzweil and peter teal want us to do
00:15:12.180
and live in the cloud or zuckerberg and his you know headsets or whatever and his stupid avatars
00:15:17.900
like we are flesh and blood creatures we exist in the analog world as much as we might try to deny
00:15:22.840
that and when we remove that we're removing a lot of our capabilities we're removing a lot of our
00:15:28.480
intelligence in a way and the benefits of our evolution all right so it sounds like the future
00:15:33.820
of work we got to change our idea of productivity but then also don't downplay the importance of
00:15:38.220
analog like and that's going to be different for every person every company and totally we're
00:15:42.960
going to be figuring this out let's talk about school for you for decades you know we've been
00:15:48.460
hearing about the the promises of online digital school we need technology ed tech i remember when
00:15:53.760
i was a kid in the 80s and 90s it was all like we got to get computers in the school multimedia
00:15:58.580
multimedia in carta with cd-rom we finally got online school with the pandemic what do we learn about
00:16:06.380
digital school i mean this is you know if you can find me somewhere in the world someone who's like
00:16:14.980
you know what this was a tremendous success like if you could find someone who's like a student
00:16:20.920
or a teacher or a school and they're like you know what this is what we're doing we're moving our
00:16:26.240
entire school online this was such a success for the vast vast vast majority i'm talking 99.9 percent
00:16:32.440
of students teachers schools whether we're talking kindergarten to you know harvard grad school it was
00:16:38.100
a dismal failure and a real eye-opening cold water bath in the limits of digital learning and the
00:16:49.480
realities of what education is the difference between education and learning and information delivery
00:16:58.180
because again as you said for years we're going back to like thomas edison and his claim that we
00:17:04.760
wouldn't need schools because of you know phonographs and radio and and film that lectures would be
00:17:10.720
delivered that way and we would do away with these buildings even people selling encyclopedias you
00:17:14.620
know in the 19th and 18th century right up to sort of cd-roms and cartas as you wonderfully
00:17:19.700
reminded me you know nicholas negroponte and the one laptop per child we're going to have these
00:17:23.840
hand-cranked laptops we're going to drop them from planes to kids in africa so they can learn
00:17:27.620
right like there has been this this notion that schools are these horribly inefficient
00:17:35.460
institutions and they're ill-suited for teaching people the skills of the digital era and the
00:17:41.780
digital future and so if we can bring some efficiency to this and the secret sauce of silicon valley
00:17:47.160
and make it remote like think of what we can do you know a million young steve jobs as will bloom
00:17:52.760
and that was always false every experiment that was done in it you know sending giving every kid a
00:17:58.840
laptop in in public schools in in various southern states in different countries the mooc movement the
00:18:05.460
massive online open course movement by sebastian thurn a bunch of brilliant google engineers which
00:18:10.680
received billions of dollars in funding and tons of universities tried like all of them were failures
00:18:15.900
they resulted in worse learning worse scores you know the moocs pretty much every one of these large
00:18:21.860
online courses i mean they have like a 10 completion rate not even talking about learning not even talking
00:18:27.480
about outcomes only 10 of people will do all the classes in that thing that is i mean could you
00:18:33.520
imagine a school that had 10 attendance that's insane the information was always there and yet it
00:18:39.220
was this question of oh well we just need more people to do it we just need the technology to be better
00:18:43.700
so the technology was pretty great you had zoom you had google classroom you know these were platforms
00:18:48.680
and i saw it with my own children you know the teacher was there and they were able to put things
00:18:52.520
up on the screen they were able to send things out and everybody could post things like wasn't a
00:18:56.240
perfect technology but there's no such thing right and there was time to implement it it wasn't just
00:19:00.880
done for three weeks yeah it was chaotic at first but you know many schools like the kid the ones my
00:19:05.220
kids went to were closed for almost a year right so there was time for people to get used to learning
00:19:11.100
about that that thing and and do it and there was money right it wasn't just underfunded public schools
00:19:16.860
that were doing it in in poor countries it was the wealthiest countries in the world the wealthiest
00:19:21.140
private schools in the world and all of them sucked all of it failed every student pretty much was
00:19:27.480
miserable it was terrible there was learning loss there was a loss of comprehension but more than
00:19:33.240
anything there was this horrible experience of watching your children floundering in front of an ipad
00:19:42.580
day in day out when they all just wanted to go to school yeah and so it was great it was great no
00:19:50.060
yeah i mean it was a weird like i always tell my kids you know you have the weirdest experience with
00:19:55.920
school ever no one's ever had this like how old are your kids 12 and 9 so i tell them like this never
00:20:02.340
happened to me like never happened to your grandparents it didn't happen to your great
00:20:04.820
grandparents right where you just like you're not going to go to school for a year yeah and so i think
00:20:08.660
you know given that the situation was different we did okay with it but yeah i noticed with my kids
00:20:14.280
the teachers could only do so much the assignments they give were pretty like pretty easy it was like
00:20:19.700
draw a picture of a plant and it's like well that's it you know and i i mean i didn't i couldn't get
00:20:25.280
angry because like what else are you gonna do and then i also noticed my kids they were starting
00:20:28.980
to check out with some of the assignments but also there was they'd have times where the teachers
00:20:32.900
would schedule these zoom meetings where you can get together with all the kids and like do a story
00:20:37.040
time i thought it was interesting my kids did it at first but then after a while like i don't want
00:20:40.760
to do that anymore i don't like yeah this isn't real school i don't like the zoom meetings yeah
00:20:44.540
and so this gets to the core of this this thing that i talked about before which is the difference
00:20:49.240
between information and education right if i want to teach you to do something if i want to teach you
00:20:54.700
a skill arithmetic like you know basic you know multiplication i can teach that online you
00:21:01.260
know con academy great like go online you can find all these con academy videos how to do these
00:21:05.020
things but education is a deeper thing and there is a wonderful professor at stanford named larry cuban
00:21:10.780
that i interviewed for the last book and i i reached back to him again and i said what do we learn from
00:21:15.240
this and he said it's it is the difference between information and education education is a far greater
00:21:24.580
thing than information it is a series of relationships a human relationship that is built in person
00:21:30.420
which you can't do online between a teacher and the students and students and each other and
00:21:37.260
and the students and other classes and teachers and other teachers and a school and other schools and
00:21:41.840
a community right when you think about your children's school i think about my kid's school
00:21:45.280
it's a community there are interactions constantly between parents talking to other parents and
00:21:50.180
students talking to other students and the relationships and love and fight and jokes and
00:21:55.220
whatever like all of that is part of the thing the authority that the teacher has in front of that
00:22:00.800
classroom is and and the trust that they're able to build by being an authority figure that is also someone
00:22:07.980
who is respected is what allows them to teach that arithmetic to the child and for the child to care about
00:22:14.740
that for the child to respect them to talk to their peers when they're having an issue to to learn
00:22:20.060
together and and really build something that's the building block of complicated modern society right
00:22:26.820
but online all we have is the information because the relationship is so weak when your teacher is just a
00:22:33.740
little you know four inch square on a screen that you don't have that relationship you don't have
00:22:39.640
that trust my son was in kindergarten when we began this right junior kindergarten which is like pre-k in
00:22:44.560
america and i'm in canada and you know like he was jumping up and down you know pulling his pants down
00:22:52.980
and he would put the thing on mute you know would ignore his teachers and they had no authority whereas
00:22:57.900
in the classroom he knew he had to sit there he knew he had to listen he knew he couldn't make a poo joke
00:23:04.160
in the middle of you know her reading a story or he would actually get in trouble but at home that was
00:23:09.780
removed the teacher was just some pixel on a screen right and i think you saw that across so
00:23:16.200
if anyone now is arguing that you know virtual school is the future of education i mean i think
00:23:22.660
they will actually be run out of town tarred feathered and sort of chased and then there's also
00:23:28.380
that embodied cognition part right when you're an education or school is like the place right that all
00:23:33.000
the weird smells like there's like i think all of us you know you can remember the smell of your
00:23:37.300
elementary school and you bump in with the environment you might see a flyer for some
00:23:42.160
robot club or whatever and that doesn't happen online you can't get that and then there's just
00:23:47.840
the social aspect i think our kids can kind of be like canaries in the coal mine to show us things
00:23:54.760
about ourselves that we don't see i noticed this with my kids particularly my daughter you know when
00:23:59.640
we shifted to online school she just like withered like a plant and it was awful just it was terrible
00:24:06.100
you know it just broke my heart to see her but then when we went back to school in person she just
00:24:10.600
like you know she just like regenerated it was like you could almost see her coming back to life
00:24:14.200
because she needed that social aspect of school so much so i mean i think the takeaway from that for
00:24:19.960
me from that experience was like you know people need people we're gonna take a quick break for your
00:24:24.740
and now back to the show shifting gears another thing you talk about in the book was online commerce
00:24:33.320
and you know during the pandemic people started doing more of their shopping online like everything
00:24:38.720
was mediated through amazon or doordash or some other online service and it kind of made e-commerce
00:24:45.420
monolithic and you know limited your options and it was terrible for smaller businesses you know a lot of
00:24:51.580
brick and mortar businesses struggled went out of business just remember reading stories in the
00:24:55.920
newspaper about local businesses that have been in business for decades went out of business and then
00:25:00.900
speaking from the consumer's point of view i find online shopping there's some benefits to it for
00:25:06.000
example you know you can you don't have to leave your house but i find i hate shopping online actually
00:25:10.960
because it's because you need so shopping for clothes for example terrible something like that looks
00:25:16.600
really good you buy it and you get it's like this doesn't fit it looks doesn't look like what i thought
00:25:21.260
it would look like in person and then you have to send it like sending stuff back like my wife and i
00:25:26.520
once a week we have this sort of to do of like we had to return stuff and it's a big paying you got to
00:25:31.120
do the thing and even for the um i don't think a lot of people realize this on the business end
00:25:36.280
return logistics is one of the most complicated expensive things that a business does a lot of it
00:25:42.840
they just throw out yeah you know or sell for like pennies on the dollar it's like some real
00:25:47.220
grapes of wrath stuff right uh so i don't like online shop like clothes i don't like i hate buying
00:25:52.420
clothes online even like buying like doing groceries online you know oh good luck to you with the ripe
00:25:58.120
tomato right like the produce that's the thing you never get good produce right because you can't pick
00:26:03.880
out the avocado you want when you go to a grocery store whether it's a whole foods or a random you
00:26:09.880
know fruit store or whatever it is right and you want to buy a tomato or tomatoes you know what do
00:26:16.400
you do you look with your eyes you touch with your hands you you smell with your nose right you might
00:26:24.880
ask someone something right you know you have these senses that all of which is kind of rendered flat
00:26:32.020
on a screen and it's just a photo of a tomato a stock photo of a tomato and what we what's interesting
00:26:38.380
is what we've seen is that you know it went from e-commerce went from something like i don't know
00:26:44.400
11 or 12 of u.s retail sales excluding gas or some other category to the peak of the pandemic like
00:26:52.560
we're talking i don't know april may of 2020 16 and all these retail analysts and people and e-commerce
00:26:59.680
boosters were like this is it this is the new normal you know it's just going to keep growing and no
00:27:03.300
one's ever going back to stores and then as soon as they reopened stores like people were back you
00:27:08.520
know back in the grocery store back in the clothing store i remember it was the first day they reopened
00:27:12.720
retail stores here in toronto it was like may or june of 2020 and it was limited shopping and blah blah
00:27:18.260
blah and there was a huge lineup around the corner for a vinyl record store sonic boom it was record store
00:27:24.220
day like these are you know you don't have to feel a vinyl record to know like it's it's a piece of
00:27:30.920
plastic it's really durable these things last forever right you you can very easily click and
00:27:34.980
collect it people voted with their feet and now you've actually seen e-commerce sales sliding and
00:27:40.340
the e-commerce sales of amazon are down like i don't know a tremendous tremendous percentage and
00:27:45.420
it's like 30 40 or something like that shopify same thing too they just over assume that people
00:27:51.400
only want that i think it's it's that mix right like there are certain things i know i want a
00:27:57.220
specific thing so for example i'm a big skier i wanted to buy new skis but i wanted a specific pair
00:28:04.060
of new skis dinastar you know m pro 99 millimeter waist and i knew i could get them on sale and i looked
00:28:13.040
and looked and looked because you can't just go into every ski store they won't have them they're a year
00:28:16.300
old and i found a pair from a local store here in toronto that uses shopify for its e-commerce
00:28:22.940
solution and i bought it and i went and picked it up but i knew i wanted that and then i had to get
00:28:27.160
the like bindings that went with it and like i hunted those down a specific specific thing right i know
00:28:33.440
that that's what i want but like grocery shopping i've done it it was it was there was a part of it
00:28:37.840
that was convenient the delivery i it's really annoying to spend an hour online like clicking through
00:28:42.800
every single item in a grocery store to sort of find it it's a lot easier to just walk down the
00:28:47.660
aisle and be like oh yeah peanut butter oh yeah bread oh yeah you know tortillas oh yeah well
00:28:51.440
hock and cheese like that looks good that looks tasty i'll get that i'll get that i'll get that you
00:28:55.220
know three hundred dollars later or five because of hyperinflation um and and so you know again it's
00:29:02.520
it's it's this notion of where does it make sense and i think what the future we're looking at
00:29:09.060
and the future i hope and the hopeful future that i sort of talk about in the book for commerce is
00:29:14.320
what is what is the best balance right what is a future where you know digital commerce is supportive
00:29:23.260
of analog brick and mortar commerce where where does where does it allow you to to order something
00:29:32.780
from a store or see what a store has that's near you and get it delivered or pick it up
00:29:37.580
without competing with that store right i think the amazon model and the the three third-party
00:29:43.340
delivery service model is competitive it's like that classic silicon valley own the market we're
00:29:48.200
going to be the only grocery store left we're going to put everybody out of business right
00:29:51.460
and it just doesn't work that way in the real world it's not like a software platform there's
00:29:56.720
tons of stores for everyone for every demographic or every price point for every neighborhood
00:30:00.800
and people want a mix of that they want the convenience but they don't want it
00:30:04.820
only one option well i think another place why people are flocking back to in-person shopping is
00:30:11.180
you get to talk to someone who's an expert right so yeah perfect example is outdoor gear like
00:30:16.560
backpacks tents now we're talking baby right so uh this past year we needed some new backpacking
00:30:23.420
equipment and you can go online it's just so confusing because you're reading like just reviews
00:30:27.340
from just tons of different people here's what this is by the way the art of manly this is right
00:30:32.500
right well so what and my wife was looking for one and she was just i'm just overwhelmed there's
00:30:37.860
too many choices so we went there's a uh this really great outdoor store in my hometown of edmond
00:30:43.360
oklahoma it's called native summit and we went there it's it's small it's not huge it's not like an
00:30:49.500
rei or an academy or whatever it's small it's well curated and the guys that own it and run it like
00:30:55.460
they're outdoorsmen right and so beard game is strong yeah the guy had a beard their hacky sack
00:31:01.400
they got there i bought it i actually bought a hacky sack i bought a hacky sack and a frisbee
00:31:05.800
while i was there but it was great because that you could try on the backpack and they would fit it
00:31:10.520
right for you and if you had questions they can answer it you couldn't do that online no i went i
00:31:16.520
have a a jacket from patagonia that i bought a couple years ago when the when the last book came
00:31:20.800
out when revenge of analog came out it was cold i was on book tour about a jacket used it like crazy
00:31:25.240
it has so many holes in it so you know they have this whole repair thing so i went in and we talked
00:31:29.480
and debated about repairing it not and you know they like they show me the new ones and and she's
00:31:34.900
like honestly if i were you like here's my opinion here's what i can do and i can get it and they
00:31:38.700
sent it away for a free repair and i got it back and it's as good as new and then i had to buy another
00:31:42.840
jacket a shell to go over top of it and we went and like picked up all the things and she showed them
00:31:47.700
to me and tried them on she's like well what are you doing where are you skiing and how often are you
00:31:51.280
doing carrying your skis on your shoulder you're wearing a backpack like all these different points
00:31:55.020
of information which yes i could have gone and researched and gone on every blog and read every
00:32:02.220
review and gone down that internet rabbit hole to find that most information about which jacket i
00:32:07.120
wanted or i could have had the pleasure of just going to the store and touching and feeling it and
00:32:11.440
having it and at the end of the day she didn't have the size and color i wanted so she's like look
00:32:15.160
go ahead order it online we'll ship it to you you know you can come here and pick it up like
00:32:18.620
no problemo or here's a free shipping code like it still went through the company and it still
00:32:24.360
worked with their e-commerce but i got the best of both worlds right i got that tactile analog human
00:32:30.400
experience and not only that but i'm now loyal as loyal as a middle-aged white man could be to
00:32:37.320
patagonia right you know i was like that was great like this is a company that stands for a certain
00:32:42.500
thing and they really showed up and sort of stood behind that that's that deeper relationship and it's
00:32:47.280
good for their business i'm gonna go buy my next jacket there when this one you know dies in 20 years
00:32:52.360
after they repaired or whatever so you have a section about how our conversation is mediated
00:32:58.140
through technology and you that picked up during the pandemic like we've been doing this people
00:33:01.960
have been talking about oh you know social interaction isn't the same on the screen but
00:33:06.260
on the pandemic a lot of people are forced to do that and you talk about your experience with zoom
00:33:10.800
cocktail parties why did this well-intentioned idea completely fall flat you know i have a friend
00:33:19.180
dan he's uh he's is israeli originally he's a lawyer and he got a new job early on in the pandemic
00:33:25.960
here in toronto with a engineering company as an in-house lawyer and he's like you know it's not
00:33:30.920
bad you know but they invited me to this thing this zoom cocktail so i go i show up i take off you know
00:33:36.120
my shirt i change into my other shirt and i show up with a glass of wine and i look around and no one
00:33:41.980
else has a drink in their hand and i'm like oh this is a conference call right that sums it up
00:33:48.360
you know what is a cocktail party a cocktail party is like the most unstructured social gathering
00:33:56.320
that there is here's a group of people we have selected this group of people because they are
00:34:01.060
i don't know related to each other they work together they're linked by a common interest whatever
00:34:05.200
here is a space here is some alcohol to you know lubricate and allow the conversation to to go and
00:34:11.780
i'm sure there are sort of non-alcoholic versions of it which is just like you know a potluck or a
00:34:16.160
gathering or whatever you want to call it right and that's it go talk talk freely talk amongst
00:34:20.540
yourselves make different groups go one-to-one have some one-to-one conversations and then someone else
00:34:24.820
is going to come in it's a third person conversation whatever and the conversation just flows naturally in
00:34:29.460
that space with body language and gesticulations and uh unsaid things and facial expressions and the
00:34:36.720
music and you know the booze and all of that like that forms a cocktail party and and when it is when
00:34:42.700
it's great it's an incredible thing and when it's bad you know it can be a little boring but it's not the
00:34:49.060
worst thing in the world the worst thing in the world is the zoom version of that which is like and now
00:34:53.740
it's your turn to speak brett right now it's your turn to speak sheila and what about you
00:34:59.400
ahmed yes that was funny it's just so antithetical to the natural human rhythm of conversation
00:35:09.460
because conversation is something that we've evolved to do in person over hundreds of thousands
00:35:17.380
of years it's our greatest skill as humans when you also talk about your experience you belong to
00:35:23.240
some book clubs before the pandemic started i have one book club yeah you're only one you belong i
00:35:29.140
i belong to i i belong to a couple book clubs before the pandemic and then we we tried to keep
00:35:34.620
it going at the start right with like doing doing it on zoom or something but then eventually just
00:35:40.380
petered out like no one wanted to do it anymore and i think it's because of that it's just it's not
00:35:44.840
the same so when we were in person my experience was you you talk about the book whatever but then
00:35:50.180
like the conversation would shift to other just random stuff you talk about family you talk about
00:35:55.120
stuff that's going on at work and the conversation would just be flowing and you know two hours would
00:36:00.260
pass and you're like oh my gosh it's time i got to get to bed it was great and you just felt awesome
00:36:05.100
and it was a memorable experience then you did the zoom version and it just it was it dragged on and
00:36:11.820
on and on and you're like when is this going to be over and then you know people be like when are we
00:36:16.320
going to do the next one and people like well i don't know you know it just hemming and on
00:36:20.260
and eventually just stopped it just stopped yes i had the exact same experience as you i mean we did
00:36:26.880
one virtual one in april 2020 so very early on the book had been picked before the pandemic had
00:36:33.740
like come in and it was a book about like a species ending plague with time travel and
00:36:39.820
kind of aliens and it was like grotesque and violent and everyone hated the book and it was just like
00:36:46.800
it was it was a miserable experience of uh experience that has always been good like
00:36:53.660
we've read books that we've loved we've read books we've hated but the book club itself is always a
00:36:58.700
wonderful wonderful time and it's just conversation that's all it is it's you know seven people coming
00:37:07.520
together to talk about a particular cue but everything else that comes into it and that conversation just
00:37:15.600
flows in and out and it has its natural rhythm and it wraps itself around the evening or the weekend
00:37:21.560
if we're doing a sort of retreat one and it never gets old and it never gets stale and you're never
00:37:26.680
like all right well i gotta do this boring like it it never has that if you have you know a group of
00:37:32.380
friends or people or peers that you you like right that's the beauty of conversation and it just
00:37:38.900
loses its life online well you talk about there's this one researcher dr esam i think it isam e-s-s-a-m
00:37:48.740
yes yeah and marie esam esam yes so she pointed out you know a crucial difference between conversations
00:37:55.840
we have online and conversations we have in person is their impact on our memory and she pointed out like
00:38:01.480
do you remember like the zoom calls you did like i don't know but i remember i can remember like you
00:38:06.500
know book club meetings that i had a couple years ago that were just like it's i guess when you're
00:38:11.320
in person it's just you have so much information flooding you that's very rich that it hits it you
00:38:17.420
know you remember it as opposed to a screen it's very flat and one-dimensional and it's not as memorable
00:38:22.160
yeah i you know i remember where we were right i remember sitting there i remember talking to you
00:38:28.840
and and there was that music playing or we were at the ball game and oh yeah yeah that burger and then
00:38:33.720
that bird pooped on someone and you know and then we ran into that guy we knew like all those things
00:38:39.660
context it forms around it and informs the conversation again versus just the words it's
00:38:47.620
like a you know it's i mean this is a digital conversation we're having and i think it's a
00:38:52.420
great conversation but imagine if i was in oklahoma and we were talking or you were in here in toronto
00:38:57.940
and we were talking in the same room or at a bar or at a restaurant or going for a walk in the
00:39:03.360
park or something like that the conversation would be so much more because it would be informed by
00:39:10.200
those things around us there'd be a natural rhythm i could read your body language i could see on your
00:39:14.620
face when i'm talking too long or if something i said is not sitting right with you or if it if you
00:39:20.800
find something funny and you kind of smirk and smile right i can i can detect when you want to say
00:39:26.040
something because your body is kind of your body is kind of doing it and that is you know again
00:39:32.420
hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution has taught us to speak in that way and so when we
00:39:38.540
strip all that out we just have the words and it's it's functional for sure for certain things for a work
00:39:45.860
meeting or whatever you can get by you can get by with a conversation with you know your parents but
00:39:51.640
i don't know like does your family your parents or whatever and i don't know you know if they're
00:39:56.580
still around but like do they live or did they live at some point in the same city or have you lived
00:40:01.780
away from them yeah i've lived away they yeah my parents live about an hour away from they live in
00:40:06.220
oklahoma city right so when you speak to them on the phone or on facetime with your kids or whatever
00:40:12.760
like you know it's a very different thing from being in the same house as them or being yeah for sure
00:40:17.540
right right you you talk you catch up but there's just kind of like okay all right uh you know it's
00:40:23.580
like you know oh your mom's calling oh gosh okay here we go like all right hey mom how you doing you
00:40:28.140
know versus seeing them it's it's it wraps itself around the thing you're doing you're cooking you're
00:40:33.860
going for a walk you're walking the dog you're taking the kids to school you're playing at a
00:40:36.280
playground you're on a vacation together like the fabric of the conversation just weaves into the
00:40:41.820
rhythm of what you're doing that's natural no yeah for me i feel like the communication tools
00:40:47.220
whether it's phone email i don't know zoom or whatever text text whatever it's it's i think
00:40:53.220
it's useful for just passing along information right like coordinating okay this is what's going
00:40:57.540
on hey we're picking up this kid or blah you need to pick this up but having in-depth conversations
00:41:03.440
via a text or a phone call it doesn't work i'd rather use i'd rather have a phone call or zoom to
00:41:10.380
like set up hey when can we meet in person so we can have this conversation it'll be great yeah but
00:41:14.660
if someone calls me yeah i'm like i don't want to do that and obviously there's there's there's
00:41:19.220
limitations to it right like i have good friends who live in you know other parts of the country
00:41:24.060
of the world that i cannot go and see more than you know once a year or every few years and so we
00:41:30.740
catch up you know we have friends in argentina who listen to your podcast no less this is once for you
00:41:35.740
pablo i have you know friends in in new york you know i have i have very good friends in other places
00:41:40.840
and i can catch up with them on the phone or catch up with them on facetime and it's it gives me that
00:41:48.300
baseline but my god it's nothing compared to when i see them i've noticed with me i don't i don't mind
00:41:54.900
talking on like just voice only but like something about adding the the video element i don't like it
00:42:00.320
throws me off i can i can have a conversation on phone with somebody i don't mind doing that so i'll
00:42:04.120
catch up with a friend i'll go for a walk outside and just have my airpods in and just just yammer
00:42:09.980
away but i couldn't i don't like doing the video something about it throws me off and it's why on
00:42:14.740
the podcast i don't actually i'm not seeing you i never seen any of my guests they don't see me
00:42:18.640
this is this is and i appreciate this because everybody has been using podcast platforms and
00:42:24.080
i've been doing tons of podcasts because the book's coming out soon and they all want to do the
00:42:27.900
video i don't like it and i'm like oh and some of them are like oh will you upload the video
00:42:31.380
to youtube i'm like oh god okay i better brush my hair but yeah it it shifts it because what do
00:42:37.000
you do you're basically looking at your own face right that's the crazy part that's the craziest
00:42:41.960
part you're like it's like when was the last time you know i guess the equivalent is like you go to
00:42:47.940
some french bistro and they have like mirrored walls and you happen to be sitting facing the wall
00:42:53.320
and you see yourself in the mirror and so every often you're talking you end up glancing yourself
00:42:57.140
like man i look like a schmucker god i'm fat like yeah but this is like you're constantly
00:43:03.120
seeing yourself talking someone's like oh well all you gotta do is turn off the camera like
00:43:07.440
you know or just turn it off or have an actual conversation with someone yeah let's talk about
00:43:13.720
our spiritual life you talk about this how did our how did uh moving our spiritual life online how
00:43:18.340
did that pan out you know i think again like i'm jewish i'm not particularly religious person but i
00:43:25.320
you know put in the motions and and go to synagogue a couple times a year and i you know appreciated that
00:43:33.320
there was a tremendous convenience to being able to do these things virtually but i found them
00:43:40.160
bereft of any meaning you know i would do virtual passover with you know we we made you know the
00:43:50.280
brisket and my mom like handed the chicken soup through the door and we gave her some brisket and
00:43:55.300
we set up a computer and another computer for my wife's family because god forbid the two families
00:44:00.420
could share a zoom call and we did like this passover seder and it was just like okay that was
00:44:08.000
really easy to clean up right but i don't know yeah what's next and then you know usually jewish people
00:44:15.660
outside of israel for some ridiculous reason that we won't get into do two seders two nights in a row
00:44:21.700
right two passover dinners two nights in a row god only knows why god literally only knows why
00:44:27.540
and the second night someone's like oh what are we doing for the second night we're like nothing
00:44:31.240
no we're not doing that like we're not doing this again this year for the first time we had
00:44:37.420
the full in-person seder back and we decided to host it at our house which is like the smallest house
00:44:43.220
of anyone in the family it was a five-day ordeal of like buying shopping setting up cooking hosting
00:44:53.100
cleaning cleaning cleaning cleaning cleaning like you know just insane and it was so much work and
00:45:01.720
there was family dynamics and people fighting and whatever and it was actually very wonderful and
00:45:06.980
meaningful and that was the thing that i found that there is you know if you're looking to do
00:45:13.160
something that you know what is religion what is faith right on the surface it's kind of a set of rules
00:45:19.780
based upon you know a liturgy or texts and you can you know recite passages from the quran or you know
00:45:29.680
recite a buddhist mantra or you know say the shema the jewish sort of holy prayer or recite the lord's
00:45:38.180
prayer you know kneeling in your bedroom or in your living room by yourself or to a screen
00:45:42.580
and read along with it but that is that is like the basis of it what is really faith what do people
00:45:50.220
look for when they go to church on sunday they're there for that as the excuse for the greater community
00:45:58.960
and doing that with other people is the thing that gives it that sense of some greater purpose and
00:46:06.360
and our greater purpose or identity or whatever in this world as spiritual people and i think this
00:46:14.620
applies for people who aren't religious at all right you know i got a lot of faith and spiritual
00:46:21.320
nourishment this year or the past few years out of being outside like it was like that first walk when
00:46:28.500
i went out and i heard the birds chirping it was like any time i was feeling suffocated and isolated
00:46:35.220
and inhuman from you know ping-ponging between screens for all my activities i would go out and
00:46:43.840
i would go for a walk or on the weekends i would go for hikes and drag my children through the woods
00:46:48.280
kicking and screaming or bike rides long bike rides or you know skiing or surfing i got into lake
00:46:56.300
surfing like i'm talking about surfing in the great lakes in you know sub-zero temperatures
00:47:02.440
with ice on my like wetsuit and it was the it was it was when i felt the most alive because i was as a
00:47:09.820
human being as a creature in this world bringing myself back into it fully in that context and i think
00:47:16.780
again you can't do that online right like you can you can go and sign up for peloton and get some
00:47:24.320
fancy ass bike delivered to your house put your shorts on and clip in and you can spin your little
00:47:29.420
legs and sweat sweat sweat sweat sweat and get your heart rate up but that is a very different thing
00:47:35.420
from getting out on your bicycle and riding on a country road or riding through the city or even
00:47:41.020
just like going in with your kid and going on like a little sort of puppet ride around the neighborhood
00:47:46.240
like that is those are two incomparable things one of them is just purely for your body or the other
00:47:52.440
one that's purely for your mind this is like everything body mind soul it's the full the full
00:47:58.560
high fidelity experience right so even something's spiritual that's ethereal needs physicality needs
00:48:04.460
the analog for it to really thrive i mean i just don't see how it doesn't like listen there are people
00:48:12.540
who love it they love going to zoom church or whatever zoom whatever religion you are right or you know
00:48:20.320
online thing and they're like yeah i get to read you know i can read the bible on my phone and i get
00:48:25.080
whatever passage i want and that gives me the spiritual fulfillment i need and then i can go
00:48:28.640
about my day and i don't have to drive to church and sit my butt in those hard pews and you know hear
00:48:33.620
the pastor grown on or i can just download the sermons and listen to them while i'm walking and that gives me
00:48:38.380
the fulfillment and if that's what someone needs hey praise be more power to them but i think
00:48:44.120
you know a spiritual life is an embodied life right the whole idea is that you're not separating
00:48:51.500
yourself from the world that you're actually engaging with it more and when you think about those
00:48:57.600
rituals religious rituals that are the ones that are the most significant they are the most physical
00:49:05.380
right you know our spirit is tied to our body if that's something you believe in
00:49:10.580
and you know to really engage in it it's it is that full body experience right it's that leap of
00:49:18.220
faith in that thing i don't think that's something that lends itself particularly well to like
00:49:22.400
digitized convenience and simplicity and delivery all right so the pandemic gave us the test run of the
00:49:28.300
complete digital life and it it's lacking and i think i think you're right my experience we need
00:49:34.120
the analog because as you say we are analog beings so we'll need that analog experience to live a
00:49:38.660
fulfilling flourishing life so you're not anti-tech some people like when you think what you people
00:49:43.960
talk about the the importance of analog they well you're anti you're it's like no you're doing a
00:49:47.880
podcast you promote your stuff online you're just making the case that look if you really want to
00:49:52.020
have a flourishing life we have to remember that we need to do stuff in the real world with our bodies
00:49:57.080
and have those in-person relationships if we if we want to have a flourishing life listen if people
00:50:02.600
read this book and and they take anything away from it it's the following right think about your own
00:50:07.920
life and think about the experience you lived through during those months and years when all you
00:50:14.080
had in the world out of necessity was digital when everything that you did work school conversation
00:50:21.920
religion you know shopping whatever culture all of that was done through a screen and through digital
00:50:27.760
technology were you content is that the future you want were there parts of it that you really
00:50:33.440
liked and you've adopted into your life and you want to sort of grow going forward and use more of that
00:50:37.920
technology and other parts of it that you know like a zoom cocktail party you viscerally reject
00:50:43.380
and and feel nauseous just at the sound of you know be honest with yourselves because i think for a long
00:50:48.880
time we have defaulted to digital technology and the people who create it and sell it and promote it
00:50:56.660
as the sort of byword for the future oh digital is the future and it's newer and it's better and this is
00:51:02.920
the way this is what progress is but you know progress can be sourdough bread right progress can
00:51:09.780
be bike lanes that were hastily put up in cities because people needed exercise and people realize
00:51:14.960
hey it's great to have bike lanes in toronto and tulsa we should build more of these we don't need
00:51:20.220
forget self-driving you know electric cars like this is the future of transportation that we want
00:51:24.220
right or sidewalk patios something we crave for years in north america and then all of a sudden got
00:51:30.120
and don't want to give up so you know be honest with yourself right what is the future you want
00:51:36.240
based on that lived experience based on that test drive that you had how much of it is analog how much
00:51:41.100
of it is digital and where do you stand in that what's your role in it well david this has been a
00:51:45.360
great conversation where can people go to learn more about the book and your work
00:51:48.140
they can go to i guess twitter oh god feels disgusting even saying that you know what
00:51:55.420
honestly if you search my name you'll find some stuff i have a website which i never update
00:52:00.380
the book can be purchased from independent bookstores wherever you are and if you don't
00:52:04.840
have one near you go to bookshop.org it's a great site a sort of e-commerce site that supports
00:52:10.960
independent bookstores and independent businesses near you and you can order the book from there or just
00:52:15.240
go into your local bookstore and and pick it up and if you don't want it ask the person who works
00:52:19.440
there what are the books you might like they'll have recommendations they'll have thoughts you'll
00:52:23.140
have a wonderful experience doing it well david sachs thanks for your time it's been a pleasure
00:52:26.600
my pleasure my guest today was david sachs he's the author of the book the future is analog you do the
00:52:33.140
analog thing go pick up a copy at your local bookstore find more information about his work at his
00:52:36.900
website sachsdavid.com also check out our show notes at aom.is slash futures analog where you find
00:52:42.280
links to resources we delve deeper into this topic
00:52:44.480
well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out our website at
00:52:55.740
artofmanless.com where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles
00:52:59.540
written over the years about pretty much anything you think of and if you'd like to enjoy ad free
00:53:03.160
episodes of the aom podcast you can do so on stitcher premium head over to stitcherpremium.com
00:53:07.620
sign up use code manless at checkout for a free month trial once you're signed up download the
00:53:11.700
stitcher app on android ios and you start enjoying ad free episodes of the aom podcast and if you
00:53:15.980
haven't done so already i'd appreciate it if you take one minute to use review not podcast or spotify
00:53:19.820
helps out a lot and if you've done that already thank you please consider sharing the show with a
00:53:23.640
friend or family member who think we get something out of it as always thank you for the continued
00:53:27.420
support until next time this is brett mckay remind you on listening way on podcast but put what you've