David Sax | The Future is Analog

Srini Rao: David, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

David Sax: My pleasure 

Srini Rao: So you have a new book out called The Futur is analog. I loved your previous book, The Revenge of Analog, as somebody who swears by physical books, writes in a bullet journal every day and is always big on meeting people face to face instead of online.

I would much rather be doing this with you in person, but geographic limitations being what they are. But before we get into all of that, I wanted to start by asking you, what is the very first job that you ever had and what impact did that end up having on what you ended up doing with your life and your career?

Thank

David Sax: Ski instructor. Yeah.

Srini Rao: Okay. That is a cool ass first job. Like most people at work, I worked at McDonald's yeah, listen, they don't call it white privilege for no reason, right? Yeah. But also I was in high school. I I was someone who was obsessed with skiing and has always been.

David Sax: I've been skiing since I was three years old. I'm a better skier than I am a writer. And pretty much everything else in life. And I had seen an article in powder magazine about the ski bum lifestyle. And I brought it to my friend, Stephen, Dan, aka Steely Dan and like a grade nine assembly.

Dude, when we finish high school, we got to move out west and get jobs as ski instructors. And we had just watched the seminal ski movie called Aspen Extreme, starring Paul Gross and Peter Berg, who went on to become a major director. Yeah. And it's the fish out of water tale of two ski bums from Michigan who moved to Aspen to become ski instructors and everything that happens to them.

Sort of a. A drama. Great movie. Wait,

Srini Rao: isn't there a beautiful British woman who's the main female? Bryce. You're speaking of Bryce. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. A fabulous movie. Ella Hughes. If I could start an Aspen Extreme podcast, I would. So yeah, I got a job for a couple of years teaching here at the local hill in outside Toronto, which when you talk about glamorous, cool jobs you're talking about 12 four year olds and trying to just get the ski the boot into the binding.

David Sax: That's like half the time. Like it's literally the most backbreaking job outside of like heavy construction or like working in an open pit Chinese coal mine. Like it's, it is the twisting required. But great. And then ended up teaching. I taught in Whistler. I've taught in Australia. I tried teaching my kids, but then I'm like, Nope, I need some 16 year old to do this for me because my back can't handle it.

Yeah. What

Srini Rao: did your students, particularly the younger ones teach you? About being a better

David Sax: teacher I think you just gotta you have to let go of a certain type of belief of how things are going to go because each student each day is different and the weather is different and the snow is different, right?

There's all these elements that you have no control over and you really have to adapt to all those things that you have no control over and do as much as you can to let it roll off your back. Because if you're going to become frustrated by the conditions, or someone's becoming frustrated, you have 1 person in the class.

He's much better than the others. You're not going to get anywhere. And so it's that release of control and acceptance of a certain kind of. Inevitability of the variability of life that allows you to figure it out and just know that no, you're not there to make every single person the greatest skier in the world.

You're just there to show them a good time, keep them safe, maybe teach them one thing that allows them to enjoy this. Sport that they're paying a tremendous amount of money to do even for one day. Yeah. Better,

Srini Rao: right? It's funny in the moment you said show them a good time. I'm sure you've seen the South Park episode, right?

Where they're teaching the kids how to ski and the guy is just pizza, french fry. If you pizza when you're supposed to french fry, you're gonna have a bad time. That's

David Sax: it. That's all you need to know really. So get out there on the mountain. Kids. Speaking

Srini Rao: of kids on the mountain the thing that's so intriguing to me, I.

Remember being up at this place called Mountain High here in Southern California, and there's this little girl with her dad and she starts just bombing down these moguls and she looks back at her dad. She's Come on, dad. You're dragging. I'm like, wow. So what is it about that? Like when? Kids start, particularly with sports like skiing or surfing, you see these kids who start at such a young age, it part of me thinks they don't have any semblance of fear their center of gravity is like, why is it that they pick up things like this so fast at a younger age?

And then you get to be my age. I was 30 something when I learned to snowboard, but the first time I went in college, I was the only one of my friends who couldn't get down the mountain without falling. Now, none of those people could hold a candle to me on the mountain.

David Sax: Yeah. I think it's it's, it the inbuilt fear the genuine analog realities of the human body and its lack of elasticity over the years which decreases as you age.

It's interesting, like I taught kids as young as three and I taught people for their first time, like in their seventies and eighties. And I think as a kid, like your conception of the world is so pure. If something's fun, you want to do it to its absolute max.

If you don't like something and you're afraid you're going to break down in tears. Adults are in between. We know how to manage those emotions, whereas kids are so open and honest about it. So all of a sudden the kids are terrified when they start, they're really scared.

And I've seen that with even my own kids. With skiing or biking, right? And then all of a sudden there's they pass, they might pass a certain point and it clicks and all of a sudden it's like off to the races and bombing down. My daughter is has that she's always had this sort of fearlessness with skiing.

And I remember when she was. For and we were in Lake Louise, Alberta, and my brother, who's like a speed demon just took off down the mountain. She's like a good man and just went after him like so much faster than a much bigger super mountain than she'd ever been on. And I just remember watching her go and all of a sudden her legs start to wobble and like.

It just explodes, right? Like that. She just, she she's like the poorly designed airplane that fails the test. Like it just crashed down, but there was no conception of I better moderate my speed down this Hill. It was just like, I'm going for it. And and I think that's something that you learn as you get older in life that there are consequences that you're, you should maybe moderate your speed on certain things, but the purity of the mind of a child.

Doesn't allow for that. That's wonderful. That's you know, that's why playgrounds are awesome and kids are constantly breaking their arms constantly. Like it's carnage. That's funny because my parents there's one toy within their means that they would not buy me for the life of them and it was a skateboard and I remember after I started surfing, I was in Venice one day because I was staying at my parents house and they're inland and I brought home a longboard and I was like, what the hell is that?

Srini Rao: I was like, you know what? I'm 36 years old. This is a skateboard. I'm done with your no skateboarding bullshit. I'm like. I'm going to skateboard. And my dad went to Costco and he's, he said, here's a helmet. Please use it. Nice. And that was it. Yeah. But it was funny. I jokingly say, I was like, that's what happens, mom.

I'm like you and my logic. I told my mom, I was like, you realize how stupid that argument was? She was like kids who skateboard break bones. I was like, yeah, adults who skateboard break bones and those bones don't heal. And then you end up with a son who's got a pathological inability to avoid anything that.

That involves a board under his feet.

David Sax: Yeah, it's funny. I'm I'm also like a late later to life skater, right? Like I I took up surfing, skateboarding and surfing when I was in my twenties. Cause I'm live in land and I don't know, it was never something that I did.

And yeah, there's I got a surfskate last year, which is a type of skateboard and. I remember I went to I took it out to the park and I was doing it to the hockey, the sort of hockey rank and it was like, I just in a pair of slip on vans and my ankles were killing.

I was hobbling the next day and I went to the skate store and the first guy who owns the store was like, yeah, you need a pair of high tops that'll give you the support. And then I went back to try them on once he'd ordered them in. And the young guy, there's I don't know, man, you could just try stretching.

I was like in 20 years. Yeah. You're going to feel this but yeah, the freedom of it's funny if you're like, oh, I'm on a I work out six times a week with the trainer. People were like, good for you. Good for you, David. Yeah, that's what you should be doing. Oh, I'm really into my tennis game, but you're like, yeah, I'm into skating.

You're like, what kind of a loser are you, man? You're your Forties. What do you do in skating? You have a child and a mortgage. Yeah. I had a friend who was asking me about this. He's what is it that draws people like you to action sports? Because I was a terrible athlete. I was the most improved player.

Srini Rao: I think that's what draws us.

David Sax: Yeah. That's what draws us to action sports

Srini Rao: because I said I was the most improved player on my seventh grade basketball team, which just means you're the shittiest player on the team in seventh grade. It's not like Jimmy Butler in the NBA when he's the most improved player, it actually means something.

But that was like a big draw to me. I said, here's the thing in an action sport like surfing or snowboarding, if somebody else is, if you're You know, performing shitty that day, you don't bring down the level of performance for everybody else. Yeah. No one cares. Yeah. Yeah. Which is, I think, the real appeal to it.

In a lot of ways, it's selfish. It's basically, because we're not good team players, we choose

David Sax: action sports. There's some truth.

Srini Rao: Yeah. Harsh. I got to ask what is the narrative about careers and making your way in the world with your parents considering. Since you decided to go be a ski bum, because I can damn well tell you if I told my parents, Hey, I'm going to go to be a ski bum instead of go to Berkeley.

They would have been like, the hell you are. It was a sort of gap year thing. So it was always understood that this was not a permanent thing. My parents are the ones who got me into skiing. They're the ones who are the most passionate skiers who like every trip we took as a family, as a kid was pretty much to a ski trip.

David Sax: So trust me, they were real happy. I was out in Whistler. They came and visited like. three times. You're going to university next year, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. And I did, and then spent every Friday in university skiing in Vermont. It was

Srini Rao: okay. Yeah. Speaking of which, so how do you go from ski instructor to journalist to writing books about.

Yeah. The downsides of technology. One turn at a time, three, one turn at a time. As TJ Burke would say we're, we all have multiple loves in our life, right? So growing up I loved, I love skiing. I loved Weird Al. I loved reading. I was a kid who my parents would send me.

David Sax: Archie Comics and Newsweek to summer camp in the mail and candy or whatever I love the news and I loved reading books and I was reading novels and nonfiction books, like, when I was in junior high and so I always had this love for writing and and ideas in the world and I wanted to be in university, a journalist, I want to be a war correspondent and even though the Iraq war started I don't know, like 6 months after I graduated, I was like, I don't really feel like dying and ended up in Argentina and just writing and had ideas.

And the 1 of those ideas turned into a book and I wrote 2 books about food and and as a freelancer, which is what I've always been. I've never had a job. Literally the last job I had was teaching skiing. I've always just had the. necessity and the ability, the freedom to pursue whatever dumb idea was in my head, whatever curiosity that was nagging at me.

And and so the first analog book, which is actually the third book I've written that book came out of continually noticing things that were happening, these sort of countervailing trends, which was that despite all we were hearing and seeing about How everything was becoming digital, and this was at the time I first started noticing this right after the iPhone was launched 2007, 2008 at the same time, I was seeing all these other things happening that were analog, not digital, and they're having this growth records.

We're coming back. Bookstores were reopening in my neighborhood. Board game cafes were appearing in the city around me. Everybody was carrying moleskin journals or other sorts of paper journals. There was this growth of all the things that I was being told were obsolete and going away.

And yet they continued to grow despite all the predictions that their demise, despite the sort of Nacing that was going around that. And I really wanted to know what was behind that, why that was happening. And so that led to the first book in this series, if you want to call them The Rerent of Analog came out in 2016.

But I had the idea... I think almost eight years previously, and it just took a while for that to come to fruition. And this new book came out of that in that same way of that curiosity, but in more of a. Urgent situation as it related to what I was going through at the beginning of the pandemic.

Yeah.

Srini Rao: That's, that, that was the sense that I got was this was like a this is my giant rant on how miserable life was during the pandemic with some really eloquent, with context, explanations for, with context. Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah. No, without a doubt. And we'll get into that.

So one question about your life as a writer, this is something I wonder, having spent time abroad myself having lived in different countries, I feel like that has been so informative on my perspective as a writer. I would not be a writer if I hadn't spent the six months I did in Brazil when I was a graduate student, because that's where I caught my first wave.

And that first wave was the start of everything. That's interesting. A place called Garopaba in the South of Brazil. Oh, Santa Catarina? It's about two hours. Yeah, Santa Catarina. Garopaba!

David Sax: It's about two hours. Garopaba gente! Uma boa onda! Ha! Your Portuguese is good. Brazilian Portuguese. Yeah. Yeah.

Srini Rao: Yeah, exactly. If you're a karaoke, you have to elongate every word and say, El goshto. My boy.

David Sax: Yeah. Yeah. My favorite is the the guys who would hang out outside the butchikims, the little like street side bars in the like flip flops and the like little singlet and they would speak in this, they would call out to each other in this it wasn't even words.

It'd be like, Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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Srini Rao: Exactly. So the funny thing is like you go to every state in Brazil is like a different country. They speak different. They look different. So this time I spent about two weeks in Minas Gerais. I was in Belo Horizonte for two weeks, but The thing that I wonder is how that has shaped your perspectives in your worldview as a writer.

Because one thing I never forgot when I interviewed Robert Greene about his book, Mastery, he said, the analogy is biodiversity. He said, the more species you have in an ecosystem, the richer that ecosystem is. And that pretty much became my defining philosophy. Philosophy for how I chose podcast guests for how I read books, and I found that to be so true.

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percent agree. It's. It's let me put it in my analog digital terms, because that's the language that I've been using for this book and talking about. It's digital provides you this binary thing of information. And if you're going to go look up a subject or get into it, you're going to go and find all this information rendered into binary terms.

You want to learn about it. Surfing can go online. You can watch a billion videos. You can read a billion blogs. You can learn as much as you can about surfing, about board design, about wave dynamics, about all these sorts of things. And that's great. But when you get in the ocean, that's not going to do very much for you, right?

Because the world is analog and we are analog and that means that we have bodies and our bodies exist in the world and we learn and grow by being out in that world. And if you spend your entire life in one place, Your growth is limited by what you're able to learn there, even if you could read all the great works from all over the world and see every video and chat with people all over the world virtually, like you, you get nothing more.

in depth and enriching as a human than being out in the world, whether that's out of your house in your neighborhood or out traveling beyond it as far as you can go, the information that you're able to get when you go somewhere wherever that is, is incomparable to anything you can get through text or images.

And and it reminds me of this thing at the beginning of the pandemic, I had a friend this is like week two. And people are like, really looking for stuff to do and friends like, Oh, I went on safari last year. I'm inviting you to a, like a slideshow of our safari.

Like I put it together and I was like, I cannot do that. No, sorry. Like I've seen pictures of lions in Africa, but like nothing compares to the one time I was in South Africa and I was on a safari. And when I saw a lion creeping to go chase a warthog at dusk at this park, and I'm watching its body movements, and I'm like, my God, these like giant golden retrievers in the way that they're moving this is just incredible to watch the this it's not a picture.

This is the real thing. Yeah. I think that's a comparable. It's the reason why I love doing this because it's allowed me to travel all over the world and not just talk to people in other places, but see and smell and taste and experience everything that conversation is. Built around. That's incredible.

It's the shittiest thing about this book is that I wrote it entirely at home because I remember the borders were closed in my country. I couldn't go anywhere. So let's get into the book because you, one of the very first things that you say. about the start of the pandemic is that the digital future was finally here and it fucking sucked.

Srini Rao: I'm sure there are nicer words that better writers would use to describe that realization, but for me, it fucking sucked sums up the experience just about perfectly. And that was early in the pandemic from what it sounds like. Yeah.

David Sax: Yeah it was if you were to describe a dystopian prison to someone, you're like, you can get whatever you want.

You want any food you want, press a button, it's going to come to your house, to your door. You want anything you want delivered, any sort of good, you want games, you want books, you want toys, you want surfboards click a button, it's going to show up at your door. You want to talk to anyone, click anyone in the world you can talk to.

You want to see any performance, click any performance on the screen, any performer anywhere in the world. You want to go to work. You don't even have to go anywhere. Just click your works there. You do it all. You have a meeting. You don't have to go to a meeting. You don't have to go to a stupid conference.

It's right there on the screen. You want to. boring family union, guess what? You don't even have to show up. You can mute yourself and your aunties and uncles all talk. And no one's if they ask you why you're not married yet or why you don't have kids, like this is specifically for the Indian listeners and the Jewish listeners and all the other that

Srini Rao: I was on, I was literally on a reality show that came out in the middle of the pandemic and I was having.

Phone calls just like that with everybody that my parents knew. Yeah.

David Sax: Why aren't you married? That's it's there's this girl. She's a lawyer. I'm like, great. I'll let you know if I have any legal problems.

You should have called her. Yeah. This is it. You can do all those things and more.

But here's the thing. You can never go outside. And you can never talk to anyone else in person, right? But that's it. This is you have everything you need here. And I think there was this initial kind of Oh my God, we have to do this. Okay. Actually, this isn't so bad. I very quickly realized and perhaps because I had two young children and I was dealing with this in their school, so that.

Yeah, I think really if it was like, Hey, five friends living in a house and all the drugs I can handle I think it was a very different thing than people, but I everyone I know eventually realized that this fucking sucks. Yeah look, I experienced the three friends in a house with all the drugs and alcohol you can handle.

Srini Rao: And after a certain point that

David Sax: even sucked. Yeah. Of course, because there's a limit to what you can get out of life from a screen. And there's a limit what you can get out of life by being in sort of one place and having a limited version of the entire human experience. It's the, it's what we're talking about.

It's Oh, I never left my small town. It's okay that's a limited version of what the world has to offer. Yeah. And and it was just so visceral to me. It was so visceral. I love this line where you said one day when we tell our grandchildren about this brief transformational period in history, we will save the particular hell of the zoom cocktail party for late at night when they're slightly more mature and can truly appreciate horror stories.

Srini Rao: And I I think about my, one of my birthday parties that took place on zoom and Indians are Loud as hell. And they all talk all over each other. So I literally had to just basically tell everybody, all right, I'm muting all of you fuckers. I'm like, one of you can talk at a time because this is utterly

David Sax: pointless.

Yeah. And then, and what they like paid tribute to you, you're like, you were Vladimir Putin or something and you're like, exactly, let me just say, you're a wonderful friend and next. Yeah. Let's talk about work in particular, because before you introduced the chapter on work. You talk about Moore's law and you say that no future is inevitable, but I'm fairly certain about two things.

Srini Rao: One is that digital technology will continue its advance. Moore's law, the law of market, and the best and brightest ideas will bring us new inventions and innovations in computing, which will unquestionably impact many aspects of our lives. The other is that the analog world remains the one that matters most.

It's the centerpiece of any human future, not the slideshow, the room of emotions and relationships, real community, human friendships, and love. And I remember thinking, this is great I hated going to an office. You and I people who have worked for ourselves for a long time, I was like, but then when I saw what you wrote about the office it made me realize why I enjoyed having a coworking space in Brazil that I went to every day.

And I. My dad is basically a retired professor. He's not retired officially yet, but I'm using his office. And honestly, it's really nice to have a place to come to. I'd never had that before. When I worked at home, I felt like there was no boundary between work and play. When I worked at home constantly.

David Sax: Yeah. And I think there is a pervasive loneliness to it. I'm someone who's always worked for myself and I've always worked at home. The one office job I had. Ski instructing not included was like, at some company in Toronto, my first summer off university, and they made newsletters for doctor's offices or dentist offices.

And my job was to take the newsletter, aspirin journalist that I was. And print, take the address of the dentist and place it on the newsletter, tape it on very carefully, put that in a Canon image runner copier and photocopy that however many hundred times and then fold those in a machine that if you missed it would cut your hands off.

And I did that for weeks on end in a small windowless room. I came home reeking of toner every day. My eyes were red and, and it was basically office space. There was a secretary upstairs who was this very cherubic, chirpy woman. And she would play FM radio, the hit station on her speakerphone all day.

And it was the summer of living La Vida Loca. And whenever that song came on, she'd go, Ooh, I love that Ricky Martin. There was the guy who was basically Bill Lumberd from office space who was the manager. He had suspenders and pinstripe suits and had a yellow Porsche outside. Like it was. It was the worst, and yet there was something great about being in that environment.

I made friends. I had conversations. I would go out for lunch. I would get a muffin. I would be out in the city, the downtown of Toronto, like the big town. And it's the thing that I still love about going for meetings. It's when I go. Into New York to meet with editors, like there is still an energy and a camaraderie and human relationships to it.

And I know that if I stay at home too long writing or doing research or whatever, I need to go out and find other stimulation. And I think that's the thing that people didn't realize how much some aspects of they would miss. It doesn't mean it's better or worse, but it had a value and that value went beyond just the personal, like there's actually long term.

Value to a company or an organization or an individual's work that comes out of that interaction with other humans in physical space, right? We call it the office. Embodied cognition is one of them where if you and I are in an office and we're talking about a project, there's probably things about the project that are printed out or put up on a wall or on someone's desk.

Maybe there's models. Maybe there's. Posters or things that we're seeing and all of that builds an understanding as we walk through the space on our day to day thing to go get water, to go take a piss, to go for lunch, whatever. We're not only seeing these things, but we're bumping into people. We might be saying, Oh yeah.

Hey, sweet. How's that project going? Oh yeah. I'm working on this. And that builds sort of a body of knowledge, which is very difficult, if not impossible, to get across passively online. Online. Knowledge is a specific thing. It's data. It's a PDF document. It's a slideshow. It's a PowerPoint. It's a website.

It's a thing that I have to send to you and you have to consciously open and look at and read or view or listen to or whatever. It doesn't just happen naturally, right? That's the same with something like culture. It's that it's the same with Business relationships, work relationships that are built as human relationships, not just talking about the task we have to do, or today's deliverables, or whatever it is people talk about in offices grownups, adults, real people men who don't skateboard in their 40s, this is the thing that, that builds the understanding and the growing that leads to ideas, innovations whatever whatever it is that the business sort of is there was a study that was done that was commissioned or paid for by Microsoft, but it was 20 or 30 really very.

Accomplished academics who did it midway through the pandemic, and they looked at what happened to all of Microsoft's employees across the entire organization. So 60, 000, some people at Microsoft, at LinkedIn, at Xbox, whatever else Microsoft owns, and they looked at what happened to their collaboration as the entire company went.

And they said that over time the amount of work that was done fine, but like over time, what really suffered and they saw the decline of was communication. Communication became siloed, which is that you and I were on the same team. We talked more often than we'd ever had before because we were constantly on slack or whatever.

Ms. Teams is version of slack is chatting and sharing things, but we didn't talk to people outside of our team. We didn't talk about people outside of our group. And so everything just became narrowed narrowed and reinforced. Like in the pandemic, when you're just talking to your roommates, you're just talking to your family in your house day in and day out.

And so you lose information and ideas that become relevant to you. And what they predicted was happen is that creativity and innovation. Which are the currency of the modern economy more than anything were the things that we're going to suffer over the long term because that human connection that happens when people are working together in a shared space was severed and because everything was just being directed to the task at hand, which is what digital work.

Collaboration technology does best.

Srini Rao: I think that there are a couple of things that really struck me when you talked about work you say that work is not just a series of tasks we take off each day faster and more efficiently to make a dollar. It's a central part of our human experience and something that takes that most of us take tremendous pride in doing well.

And as you were saying that, it reminded me of this, one of the rare few things I listened to on a podcast only because it wasn't originally a podcast. Sam Altman at Y Combinator did this entire class at Stanford that he made available online called how to start a startup. And he actually said one of the things they found pretty consistently was that remote teams had a higher rate of failure and they recommended against it particularly in the early stages of starting a company, they're like, we don't recommend this.

And I was just like, wow. Yeah and there's you can have the sort of outlier Jason Freed might be like, yeah, that's BS. He was like, base camp doesn't have a requirement, but I. But they do actually meet in person. So I think that there is something to be said for that. But you also reference this idea of working slowly and going deep in your work to reference our mutual friend, Cal Newport where he talks about this idea.

Yeah, that it takes time to develop ideas of depth and it's not the goal in certain cases actually shouldn't be more efficiency because I'm telling you, like

,

somebody spends a lot of time writing about productivity, thinking about it that kind of forced me to think, okay, you know what, where do I need to slow down?

Like, where do I need less efficiency and more friction? And my thought was, I'm like where I need friction is where people are trying to reach me. I need to increase the friction there. Yeah.

David Sax: Yeah, I think it was Cal and a couple of other people I interviewed for the book really framed it to be best.

And this is the way, this is the takeaway I have of it, right? The pandemic and the dislocation we could talk about the other parts about life after, but work is the one that still preoccupies most people. And the question is from organizations, from managers, from owners, whatever, from employees, is do I have to go back to the office five days a week or do I not?

How many days do I have to go in? How many days are remote? How many days are not? And that is the main conversation people are having about the future of work, but it's the wrong conversation. The right conversation is what that should have revealed. And the bigger sort of debate that we should be having with, which is what does it mean?

To be productive with work and how do we structure it to make that make sense for most people in a way that isn't tied to this 19th century model of time equals money productivity, right? And I think if you can start moving beyond that, then that frees up a lot of these things.

To have people say, like, where do you actually do the best work, right? How do you work in a way that's, that makes sense to you? I'm a writer, you're a writer I work fairly regular business hours. I tend to research and write from 10 till four. And maybe that's because of the hours of my kids school.

Someone had got to pick them up and drop them off on on most days. And I don't work on weekends and I don't work on the holidays and other people I know are like they wake up at four in the morning and they write like at five to seven and they like nap. And it's they live this like Hemingway, like romantic lifestyle around it.

And both work because both are productive at the end of the day, it makes sense, but in a company. There's this sort of expectation that you will be present and and you will be present at this place and for this amount of time and you'll be rewarded. And the most, the more work you can get, the more we can get you working in this place at this time you will be rewarded for that or your reward is contingent on that.

And what happened was we decoupled the place from the people, but we just transferred that online. There are companies now that have installed. Keystroke monitoring technology to say we noticed that your keystrokes are down 30 percent between the hours of two 30 and four o'clock three what's going on there we're sending a thing up to upper management to have a fucking drone fly to your house.

It's like what? Like horrible Chinese communist parties, Xi Jinping fever dreams. Surveillance technology is this where it's like, Hey I did the assignment. If we can't move beyond that in the future and that antiquated notion of what productivity is in a knowledge economy, right?

We're not building Model Ts here. We're creating. Software and branding campaigns and legal documents and all these things that like time is one element of that, but it's a very flexible element. Then we're not getting at this question of the future work. Let's talk about the future of education because one of the things you say is digital remote learning had promised to flatten the divide between wealthy and poor students and schools and but it actually triggered the opposite.

Srini Rao: And I had a friend who was an attorney. And she said that they were really fortunate. She said, look, she's I get to work from home. She said, but I have my kids have classmates whose parents are not well off enough to afford childcare. They're out of the house. These kids are left to fend for themselves.

And a lot of them didn't even have access to high speed internet that made it possible to access the material they need.

David Sax: Okay. So I am in Toronto. We're speaking today on Monday, the 7th of November the Ontario schools are currently. closed because there's a labor action with the union that does early childhood educators and custodians.

So my kids were off on Friday, they're off today. Today, my wife is downstairs like 20 feet lower than me right now with my two kids who are nine and six in fourth grade and first grade. On a computer, helping them do assignments for the 1st day of virtual school. We're having every single parent in this entire province of whatever 5Million families with kids is crapping themselves right now and freaking out at the hell that we've suddenly been plunged back into by the city audit government and their labor negotiations or whatever.

And in the sort of WhatsApp chat for my kids classes it's the parents who have the least resources, who are the ones whose anger and desperation is coming most out, I have to go to work. What do I do with my child? The data long term, short term over the course of the pandemic around the world was very clear the poorest.

Kids in the poorest schools in the poorest areas were the ones who suffered the most, not just learning loss, this idea that they lost out on some amount of information they would learn because the learning loss really happened across the board. And if everybody in the world has learning loss, it's not like there's catching up.

It's not like we're all like, awesome thing. We can people will learn at their own pace. That's okay. It was all the other things, right? It was, yeah. Kids who were left unsupervised, kids who were left without their caretakers, kids who were robbed of this environment that for many of them is the environment that's the most safe and supportive that they have in the world, right?

Which is school and the relationships with the teachers. And I think the promise of the digital future of education is so off and so wrong for that. Huge misunderstanding of what education is. The belief in that world of ed tech and someone who's saying the future of school is going to be virtual or the building of the metaverse private school of the future is that education is the delivery of information it's teaching you about math.

It's teaching you about science. It's teaching you about English. It's teaching you about foreign languages, teaching you about sociology, teaching you about whatever it is you're studying. If you're like, In your post grad degree of whatever it is you're learning, that's maybe a result of it.

But the process of education is a human relationship with a group of people and and an institution and the authority figures, teachers, professors, daycare teachers. In that institution who enable the building of knowledge through that relationship through trust, through understanding, through individualized learning.

That's not some AI derived thing that will customize what your kids should learn, but by the real human understanding of knowing that kid. And understanding what they're like, right? It's like why every report card my kids have is the same report card that I had as a kid. It's really smart, really clever needs to shut up and maybe talk a little less in control.

They're talking right. And it's like that teacher has seen that student. A thousand times, and they know how to deal with them, and they know how to deal with the quiet, shy student, and they know what to deal with the student who maybe grows up in a house where violence is a thing, and they're all of a sudden acting out in the kindergarten room.

It's a human thing, and they do it with empathy. It's incredible what teachers do. And I'm talking about kindergarten to university professors, right? It's an incredible, magical thing. And the idea that we could just reduce that and deliver it Through a video on Google Classroom is to me, astounding, like an astounding assumption that we ever even thought that was a possibility that we ever even considered that would be something that would be a desirable yet, let alone achievable goal, and it's crashed on the rocks of reality.

Every student in the world did this right now for at least half a year and no one. Find me a school, find me at a primary school, find me a private school, find me a public school, find me a university, find me a college, who's you know what some companies did with their offices.

They're like, you know what, this is the future. This school is staying virtual forever. Find me one. Yeah I remember people do particularly at some of these elite universities like Harvard and the Ivy League, like what the hell we're paying 50 grand for an education. We can go watch for free on zoom.

Srini Rao: This is ridiculous. Like you say that learning happens in residence halls and dormitories, the campus bars and parties, the hockey rinks and the swim team change rooms on the field and the stands behind the stage. It happens. in the classroom up front at the blackboard, but also in the back as notes pass between desks and idle scribbles lead to deeper understanding of life.

I can tell you like, there's no comparison to what you're talking about as a Berkeley undergrad. If I had that experience virtually, and I can tell you this from people, my first girlfriend lived at home because her parents lived close to Berkeley. And the way we described our experiences, it was like she'd gone to a different college.

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Yeah, her hacky sack game was subpar to be fair. Yeah that's a Berkeley dig or from what I understand at Berkeley. But it's true, right? Think back to your time at Berkeley. I think back to my time and I went to McGill University, Montreal. Think about wherever you went to college, or if you can go to college, high school or whatever tell me something you learned, right?

Tell me the most impactful thing you learned. It was not, Oh, actually in Trevor Pondich's film is art. He told me about mise en scene. Like it wasn't a fact. The facts were there. You absorb the ones that mattered. You did what you had to, but it was the human learning of how to be another human being in a society full of human beings at different stages of your life and the knowledge that comes from building relationships, dealing with challenges, dealing with facts, work, learning to work in a group, learning to deal with other people, dealing with physical changes around the world and physical changes to your body.

That's the heart of education. And the facts and figures are. the set piece that allows that to happen. That's that sort of deeper reality, right? When you think back to your memories of school and the deep memories that had the most impact or the teachers that you loved and the ones that made the biggest impact it wasn't the facts they taught, right?

It wasn't what they taught. It was how they taught and who they were. And that inspired you to actually care about history, math. Drama, gym, whatever, right?

Srini Rao: Let's talk about two things, shopping and culture. Personally, I fucking hate shopping. Oh,

David Sax: M G.

Srini Rao: Even though you say that they call it retail therapy for a reason.

I think there were two things that really,

David Sax: I'm sure there is. Hold on now. I, now to be fair, you hate shopping as defined as in the California mall, rat sense the word. But if I was like. Three, I'm coming to, I'm coming to Southern California, which I am in a few weeks to LA. Let's go to Greg Knowles surf shop in what is it?

Santa San Clemente, probably. San Clemente. We'll go to the riders club next door, have a cheeseburger and a pudding. And then we'll go check out surf boards. You'd be,

Srini Rao: I would definitely be. Let's do that. If you have time. Gear, gear it up. Yeah. Let's do that if you have time the thing that you say specifically when it comes to shopping is that a cost measured in human lives and health, but also in the greater economic role that commerce was supposed to play for consumers and the entrepreneurs selling to them for chefs and their diners, grocers and weekly shoppers, clothing designers, and the people who were their creations, bike shop owners and bike riders.

And I think that. When I think back to it, I lived in Boulder during this time and I had a local restaurant that was my favorite place and I'd be there every Friday and there were nights when we're like, all right, break open the door dash like, guys, don't you think we should order from somewhere local instead of?

One of the big chains, even though that would be easy, like we should support our small businesses like I became really mindful of the fact that, wait a minute, because these businesses are basically the backbone of our economy here on our little town and I walked down Pearl Street and I just remember thinking to myself like, wait a minute, these are all the places I love and every one of them is one by one shutting their doors.

David Sax: Yeah. You quoted the individual before speaking about monocultures, right? And the economy of e commerce, the architecture of it has been built around this notion of monocultures, that sort of winner takes all where Amazon will be the place where you go and order everything.

And it's the one click thing and it's going to be the same for the delivery apps. The delivery apps really. Absolutely. Skew their, the food delivery apps they're really skew their offering toward corporate owned brands and even have created these ghost kitchens to white label and replicate popular independent restaurants.

They'll be like, oh, this taco place is doing well. Let's copy their menu. We might even hire their chef away. And do it under our own Uber Eats brand we'll call it ghost taco or something like that. And it doesn't have an independent restaurant, but the more money goes to us and people get their tacos.

And I think there was this real awakening because before it was like, oh, yeah, independent businesses, okay whatever. But like, when you walk down. The streets of cities and towns in those early days of the pandemic, and you saw the restaurants and stores with the brown butcher paper on them that had gone out of business because of this.

It really showed you this sort of. Truly horrific vision of a future where it's like demolition man, the movie from 1993, where Taco Bell is the only place to survive the fast food wars. Right and, and I think it's something that people don't want they may value buying their Tide pods from like the cheapest, quickest place.

And maybe that's Amazon, but when it comes to food and restaurants and even shopping for other things like ski goods or surfboards or whatever, like you. You want that local knowledge. You want that local connection. You want the ability to go somewhere and have that experience because it actually brings you more than just the thing you're buying.

It brings you knowledge. It brings you community. It brings you a certain type of joy. And everybody gets that joy in different places. There's some people who love going out. Outland malls and stuff and other people like me who like that is the worst possible outcome for any day of the week, anywhere

Srini Rao: it could be.

Yeah. You and I just, I see you made my count. You made a counter argument for me. I'm with you. Like I wouldn't buy a surfboard online ever. Yeah, and I

David Sax: bought a surfboard online during the pandemic because it was just like the store there's two surfboards surf stores here in Toronto.

Lake surfing is what we do here. And they hadn't really had things set up. And I just I knew I needed a wave storm. They're like, I bought it. I've caught a lot of waves on that board,

Srini Rao: that way, a lot of people do catch a lot of waves on that board.

,

And the funny thing is I could shred on that board because it was the only board I had for six months when I graduated from business school.

But the funny thing is that the wave storm is a universal signal in Southern California that the kooks, yeah, exactly. That is literally, it's Oh God, there's a beginner. Stay away. Oh, they're

David Sax: mucking waves to . I bought it on, I bought it on Amazon, I got it delivered. 'cause there weren't other options.

Now when I went, had to go buy a winter wetsuit, like a seven mil wetsuit. I went to Surf Ontario and I clicked and collected it from the door. But I was, when I was there, I was talking to 'em on the phone. I was emailing back and forth about sizing. I wanted to know what it was. And I also.

Through that met people in the community, met people who I then saw at the surf break, got intel from them about where to go and what days and what apps to check and how to read it. It brought me into that bigger thing. And I think it was the same with the restaurants, right? I I want to be able to order things and have a convenient and whatever, but I also want to live in a neighborhood and a part of a city where I have.

A tremendous option of different types of foods, and I know that if that food is cooked by small, independent restaurants and family businesses, especially in an immigrant, heavy city like Toronto, it's going to be far tastier than something that's cooked up by Darden Corporation or whatever. The section on culture really struck me because I.

Srini Rao: This is something I've thought about a lot. You say when you experience culture in a physical format, you're doing it with all of your analog senses. You see a performance with your eyes and hear it with your ears, but also the smell of the room it's happening in where the sweat of the performers mixes with the scent of the audience and maybe popcorn and spilled beer and the smoke from a burning joint.

And I've thought about experiences that we've tried to replicate digitally things like watching a movie like we have a really nice home theater at my parents house and still doesn't compare to going to the movie theater, but. I, to this day, think that a concert, in particular, is the one experience I feel that there is no way to replicate the experience.

In a digital format of going to say the Hollywood Bowl and watching Dave Matthews there's just literally no way in my mind. And I think that what you actually say about this also is that when you brought a performance online, you instantly lowered its stakes. Stakes are the potential cost artists endure when they bring culture into the analog world.

And I remember you mentioning this about your own keynote speaking engagements and I found the same thing. I remember I got paid to introduce speakers on Zoom for a healthcare company. Turns out pharmaceutical companies print money which I learned because the fee to literally show up for five minutes and introduce people on Zoom was enough for me to live off of for the next six months.

David Sax: That's incredible. Yeah. Get me that game. Yeah. Go to me on the list. Put me in touch with the Merck. Big

Srini Rao: Pharma. Good people at Merck. Yeah. They print money. I did. I, cause I remember seeing the fee. I was like, how the hell can you pay this much for this? And then I did the math in my head. I was like, okay, let's say you manufacture 10 drugs.

Each one costs 200. The patient pays something like 30. You multiply that times a million people who take this drug, multiply that times 10 other drugs with the same math. I'll be like, oh. You literally are printing a million dollars an

David Sax: hour and saving humanity while doing it. Exactly.

Srini Rao: Yeah. But so talk to me about this.

I found the same thing to be true. Like I noticed as a virtual keynote speaker, I didn't have that same sort of intensity that I brought to it when I would stand on a stage in front of an audience.

David Sax: Yeah it was a version of kind of phoning it in you did your best as keynote speaker, you're doing it for the money.

But you still take a pride in it. And if you do it well and enjoy it, there's a, there is a joy that comes of it from hearing an audience laugh from seeing their reaction from people coming up and talking to you about your thing. Your idea after and you don't get any of that online. And the 1st time I realized that I was doing a I'm supposed to do what was it?

The Kansas City chamber of commerce, small business awards. Cause my previous book had been about entrepreneurship and it was booked for like April, 2020. So that was canceled 6 months later. We're going to do a virtual 1 or whatever and I remember dressing up in a jacket and thing and going to my parents house because it was quiet because my kids were still at home doing virtual school and sitting there and they're like, okay, so here's the deal.

David. Great. You got your stuff. You're going to do your 30 minute keynote. And then we're not gonna have time for questions. So it's just, and I was like, cool. And it's can I see people? No. We have 700 people here from across the region, but but the thing is that because of the limitations of the zoom, you can't see the boxes.

So you're just going to see a reflection of yourself. I'm like, okay, so I'm going to be speaking to a mirror image. of myself with no outside feedback for 45 minutes. Yeah. Great. And it's and that is the definition of insanity. You're like, Oh, we have this guy in the asylum. He does keynote speeches to a mirror all day.

Thank you for coming out to my talk to Merck Pharmaceutical. Oh, that guy. He's been in here for 40 years. Used to be a keynote speaker until the pandemic broke him. And the one that I really noticed it doing, I gave a talk to folks from Microsoft and I was. Sitting at my parents' weekend house, it was middle of summer, first of all who schedules these things to the end of August?

God help the corporate world, but fine. Great. Happy to do it. And the people are really nice and and so it's on Microsoft Teams, they're their app of whatever and And I go on and all of a sudden I'm giving my talk I've done my whole thing. And I'm like 15 minutes in and I'm like, I just see the chat window start popping.

I was like, Hey, what's the deal with this? Hey, is this started yet? Hey, what's going on with this? And then I was like, talk to the guys can anyone hear me out there? And the guy's Oh gosh, Oh, I'm sorry. We didn't start the thing. Like the team at Microsoft teams even had trouble using teams.

And I was just, they're like, do you mind starting this again? No, not a problem. I got time. It's fine. I know what I was going to say. I'll just start from the beginning. But it's that's as low stakes as it gets where you're giving the talk and you don't even it doesn't even matter if the audience is there or not.

And I think that goes this is not performance, it's not culture, but it was like, it was the same thing. It was like, I went on that 1st week and Bruce Springsteen's Broadway show had just been put on Netflix. My brother had gone, brother in law had gone down, flown to New York like earlier in 2020.

Bought tickets off StubHub for I don't know, 600 bucks and went and saw the Springsteen show and said it was amazing the best, one of the best musical and Broadway experiences he's ever had, and he's someone who's seen a ton of shows used to be an actor in theater school and everything.

He's it was incredible. So I turned it on Netflix, one of the April early April 2020 and he's Hey, here's a song about growing up in Nebraska or damn, but I was like, ah, that's boring off. What's next? It was just. Couldn't even care. And I love Springsteen.

But it's that idea of that the stakes are lowered. It doesn't matter. And since I've gone back to seeing concerts and shows, I went to see a fabulous play the other night called the shark is broken, which is about the making of jaws. And it's written and performed by the son of Robert Shaw, Ian Shaw, who was Quint the salty.

Captain Fisherman in the play, like it was so great. You didn't have to think about anything other than the fact that you were there and what was happening on the stage. And it was just so perfect in the way that this is the way that the art was designed to be, right? This is how the music is meant to be seen live.

Yeah, you can listen to it. You can record it. It's great, but nothing compares to the real deal. Let's talk about communication. And I thought I would bring back a clip from an episode with our mutual friend, Cal Newport about analog communication. Take a listen. I think the key

observation is that our social brain doesn't know what to make of, you ASCII characters on a glowing glass screen.

It doesn't associate that with social connection. It's a completely different part of your brain that's reading, let's say a comment on a social media post or a text message that's going through the networks of your brain that

Srini Rao: do reading and abstract comprehension. And it's almost

David Sax: completely unrelated to this highly evolved social network.

That social network in our brain, what that requires

Srini Rao: is the RIT stream you get in analog communication, the pacing of voice.

David Sax: The timber is their limbic consonant. So if you're in person, little things about your body movements, how you're actually framing yourself vis a vis the other person, it's incredibly rich, high bandwidth stream that we

Srini Rao: have this powerful computer behind our ears

David Sax: that does nothing but thrive

Srini Rao: on

David Sax: that.

Take that in, process it, figure it out, integrate that

Srini Rao: into your standing in the world and your community is very important. And that huge, important social computer doesn't know anything about. Computer characters.

David Sax: And so once you have

Srini Rao: that recognition, it doesn't mean that like looking at text,

David Sax: what they would call purely linguistic interaction, there's nothing wrong with it.

Srini Rao: But it's not scratching the itch. It's like looking at pictures of food versus eating food. It's fine to watch the cooking shows, but you're going to get hungry if you actually don't go out there and eat food. And

David Sax: then once you have that realization Oh, what I need to thrive socially is I need to make non trivial sacrifices with close friends, family, and

Srini Rao: community with analog interaction.

I thought that would be a perfect way to tee up the things that you wrote about analog interaction. Preach, Cal.

David Sax: Preach. Yeah. Yeah, mutual friend of ours who we both admire a lot, but that really struck me. So I'll tell you what really, and I don't know if you found this to be, this observation to be true.

Srini Rao: So we're close enough in age that We probably watched back to the future around the same time. And you remember when we were kids, the idea that you could see somebody on the other end of the phone was revolutionary. Like that in our minds was the indication that was

David Sax: the future. That was the future.

That was the future, right? Telephone, video phone.

Srini Rao: Yeah. Future. And the funny thing is that we've had that capability. For probably 20 years, and there's this hilarious line in the TV show, One Tree Hill, where one of the guys like, can you imagine if texting had been invented after voice people would say, holy shit, you can hear the other person on the other end of the phone.

And it's amazing. Like we defaulted to using text. It took a pandemic for us to say, you know what, I want to actually see this person's face.

David Sax: Yeah I, I think I think so. There wasn't. Orgy of video that, that, that was the initial first pandemic wave of kind of digital was just an orgy of video.

Zoom became a verb and an adjective all of a sudden, but zoom are resuming, are we doing a zoom thing? It's zoom. And nobody loved the zoom more than the baby boomers. They were like, Oh, we'll do a zoom. It's there's two of us. We can just do a phone call. It's okay. We don't have to, but it was this thing.

It's this is great. We can now see people's faces. But very quickly, we all realized the limitation of that, that was insufficient. For so many different things in our life, and when we're when I talk about this sort of overarching, it fucking sucked of this dive into the digital future, the unifying element of all these different things that we're talking about was video and video conversation, right work school.

Your social life, your religious life, your cultural life. All these things were really linked by that talking head on a screen. And the conversations between them and what. Suddenly, that revealed about what was lacking about them, which is everything that Cal Newport said in that clip, which is you and I can have a great video conversation, but it is operating at a fraction of the fidelity, the analog fidelity of a face to face conversation, and that conversation is a very different thing that even if the same words are said context.

Of speaking to another human as we've evolved to speak as humans changes the meaning of the conversation changes the way we interpret those words, right? I got an email from someone who I'm doing work with in a project the other day and we're just figuring out a relationship. And the text of the email was like, Hey, did you get this thing?

And I spent the weekend mulling over the. Nerve and this and that. And it's oh, if I were to just speak to that person face to face, and there's a hit, you get that thing. I would understand. I would understand the tone. I would understand the body language. But when we take things into text, or even into video, we rob a lot of that context.

What Cal was saying, right? The body language the imperceptible signals, even sent the context that's happening in the environment that we're in. Is this happening in a courtroom? Is this happening in a protest? Is this happening in a bar? Is it happening in the street? Is it happening in good weather?

It's happening in bad weather. Like, all of that feeds into what's happening. But the 1 thing for certain is that this is something that we actually Need and the research took me a little bit into what we're talking about is the sort of great health crisis of the 21st century, which is loneliness, the epidemic of loneliness, which is a scourge in the developed world and increasingly in the developing world and has been shown to be one of the leading indicators of premature death for all sorts of groups all over the world.

And what's loneliness? Loneliness is a lack of conversation with other human beings face to face. It's you think of the people who are lonely and they might be having conversations in chat forums or online or in video games or maybe in video calls with people for work, but they're fundamentally isolated from the world and that isolation kills them.

And what was interesting was I ended up speaking to people who work. In the social and health organizations to create opportunities for lonely individuals and isolated individuals to have face to face conversations. There's something called social prescribing, which was pioneered by the National Health Service in the UK.

And it's essentially doctor's offices and clinics who are seeing individuals with health problems that were not addressed by doctors or drugs. And what they really needed was social connection and communication. And so they build these support outreach workers who go and help these people connect to the people through.

groups that meet once a week and talk about, I don't know, sports or gardening groups that go and plant a community garden together. It's what is the excuse? Oh, here's a surfboard repair workshop for these dudes in Southern California or car repair, whatever it is. And it's get these people together.

In the same space, they will inevitably have to talk to each other because we've built some sort of thing. They can't sit there in silence in the same room and out of that will come the necessary health and healing that they need. That is a,

,

we need it as much as we need air. Like Newport said we need it.

We need food. We do. We actually need conversation face to face in the way that we need nutrition. And I think. Yeah. You could probably reflect on this from your own experience during those days of lockdowns and whatever, like the lengths we went to as human beings to have a real face to face conversation with people that matter to us.

Driving to a park. And talking to someone from the opposite end of a field or going for walks in snow storms, or people even parking their cars and opening their windows and chatting. It's a very American thing. It's just get out of your car. No,

Srini Rao: please.

Let's we don't need to. Yeah. I I was really fortunate that I happened to move in with two good friends right before the pandemic started. And we all agreed we would not have gotten through it without each other. Like it was actually because we had each other, it actually ended up being okay.

But if we didn't, God, I can't imagine how miserable I would have been. No the two worst groups of people for that, that lived through lockdown that the people who suffered the most other than people who got sick or immunocompromised, like I'm leaving that aside, right? Non medical suffering, social suffering, the two.

David Sax: Most pitiable groups of people where people like me with young Children at home who had to do virtual school or just had young Children at home and like their life just became a horrendous circus. And people who are single and completely alone. And I remember talking to people like that friends of mine, or my brother at one point was living by himself and it was just like, so isolating.

When you think about our greatest punishment as a society outside of death and my country doesn't have capital punishment among their wonderful rights. Our greatest, what's our greatest punishment as a society, we will remove you. from other human beings and even within the context of a prison, your greatest punishment as a context within a prison, you will be removed from other prisoners.

We will put you in your own cell and you will not be able to talk to anyone else, right? That is the greatest single punishment we have as a society or in the world outside of physical harm and killing people. And the world of sort of social media, the world of online conversation, it does that as a default.

And it's tragic. Let's talk about one other thing here that I think to me was really fascinating is your take on VR. You say that it takes profound arrogance and naivete to believe that the metaverse is a future we should collectively aim for. That notion completely ignores everything we experienced and learned over the past two years.

Srini Rao: It doubles down on the horrible antisocial experiences that the pandemic forces into online. As if the solution to our isolation, unease, and disembodied discontent were simply a matter of giving us a better pair of VR glasses to let us see more flying horses, or flying houses, or whatever animated bullshit Zuckerberg is peddling.

And it got me thinking about Ready Player One when you said that, and how there's certain aspects of it when I would watch that, I was like, this is cool I have an Oculus, and... There are some cool things that you can do with it, but I don't find in any way that this is going to replace my ability to physically touch somebody or feel somebody.

There's just that to me is that I'm under no delusions that's what this will provide. But my old roommate, his fear was that this was going to do exactly what you're talking about. It was basically shackle people to these glasses, and they would never leave their houses. That's the goal, right?

David Sax: Met as fortunes are tanking. Because people aren't picking this up and if Zuckerberg's out to build the next great platform that people are going to go on and then assumedly. They can sell all the ads to them. It's the more time that their eyes are strapped to those things, the better it is.

He talks about it. If you've seen him in interviews, listening to interviews, he talks about it as the future of human connection, the future of human connection is going to happen. Because you're going to be a hologram and I'm going to be a hologram. And isn't that going to be great that we're going to be 1000 or 2000 or 5000 miles apart.

And yet you can be this realistic hologram in front of me. And that's going to be just like talking to you in person. And it's such a cynical future. To believe and behold in, right? It's hey, this technology is possible. And therefore we should do this to its fullest extent versus saying there, what does this serve?

What good does this serve? I'm not saying that there are not purposes for virtual reality that are going to be good or even great, right? Entertainment, gaming, fine. That's an easy one. But even In work and design I talked to someone and he was working with virtual reality and aerospace engineers and using the virtual reality technology to get inside a working engine as it's actually firing based on the data that the sensors showing to show where there might be a flaw in a way that you physically couldn't do right.

That's incredible surgery, whatever you want to call it, right? All these sorts of things, it can be this complimentary, interesting experience. But Zuckerberg's proposing that the metaverse and other people like him, and maybe Ray Kurzweil, and the sort of end notion of the singularity is no, this digital world that we're creating is going to be the utopian new world that we're all going to transcend into, that this will be a.

better version of the world we're living in. If only you head over to Dr. Jones over there, who has this wonderful vat of Kool Aid, and take a sip of it, all your problems will be solved. Don't look at the Kool Aid too much and what goes on there. And yes, I'm comparing the metaverse to Jonestown in a horrible and insensitive way, but it's this notion of kind of, Technological utopianism taken to its extreme that actually we don't need to improve the world we live in.

We don't need to reengage with it. We need to build a better escape pod for it. And this will allow us to transcend that and build whatever we want in that world. And and I just think it's 1st of all, it's something that nobody I know is truly deeply interested in. Like people like, yeah, I'll play with it.

I'll do a thing, but no one's yeah, I'm totally 100 percent all in. I never want to leave my house. I just want to strap myself into this thing. And yet that's what's being sold or being pitched or being hoped upon by, by Mr.

Srini Rao: Zuckerberg. I don't remember the name of the place they go to in Ready Player One.

It's not called the Metaverse, but they have a name for it. But the funny thing is so much of the movie takes place in that digital world that you don't really notice how fucked up it is when he takes the glasses off and he's like in this trailer and you look outside and you're like, Whoa, what the hell happened?

David Sax: Exactly. And that's it. It's like we live in a world. Right now, which is literally on fire because of previous future choices we made about technology 100 years ago when people like cars, I don't know, should we build our future around them? And everyone's yep. This is the future. Don't stand in the way.

And now we're choking to death and literally our world is burning. And we're dealing with political polarization that's exacerbated by digital technology. We're dealing with war and conflict. In Ukraine and all over the world, we have real world problems to get to. And the solution to that is actually getting back in touch with humanity and getting real the solution to the future of education is figuring out how to make human beings.

Learn in a way that makes them more creative and more resilient and getting in touch with their humanity. It's not saying, oh now we're going to give every kid a pair of oculus goggles because that's the future, which a friend of mine works in a very fancy private school and some parent donated 300 grand so they could build a metaverse lab and they're like, okay, we have to take your money, but that's not the future of education.

Maybe it can play a role, but that's not it. So what did we learn from this six months, year, two years that we had to live only on what digital technology allowed us to do. If we can't take a step back and have a hard assessment of the pros and cons of that, of what worked for us and made us better as humans and what didn't, then we're going into the future blind and with one hand shackled behind our back.

Srini Rao: I have two last questions for you. One is just out of personal curiosity, because I remember when I contacted you and you asked, do I want a physical version or a digital version of the book? I was like, of course I want a physical version and it didn't show up and it was a pain in the ass until it did.

So when you look at digital media consumption habits I've just always wondered about this. What is the difference? Between reading a physical book versus reading it on a screen, because I for the little bit of research I've done, I know that you tend not to read as much when you read on a screen.

You scan. I think Marianne Wolf, if I remember correctly, wrote a book about this where she said it's just like an F pattern. And I've known pretty much all of my really successful friends who are writers who have written really great books, Cal Newport, Ryan Holiday, Danny Shapiro, all of them swear by physical books.

They're a pain in the ass to carry my house has so many books that I literally need a room for my books. But when I was in Brazil, I couldn't get stuff delivered from Amazon, so I defaulted to my iPad and I hated it.

David Sax: Yeah the proof is in the pudding, right? EBooks have been around, let's say the Kindle, since 2007.

So about as long as the iPad or the iPhone or whatever. And there were predictions at the time. This is like my first book came out in 2009. So I'm like, Oh God, I'm screwed. I'm like someone's cranking out CDs and it's Napster time. And the entire industry was freaking out, right? Amazon was going to push the hell out of this.

They it was in their interest to, to do this, right? Bigger profit margins, they would own the sort of means of production, if not the sort of the product itself. And this way they could really screw those bookstores and put them under and the publishers put them on their thumb and everybody was really worried.

And here we are. It's 15 years later eBooks are like 10 percent the market. Audiobooks are another 10%. So for every book that I sell, or every like 10 books I sell, one of them is going to be an ebook. Some people prefer them, right? It's the portability of it is great. The fact that you can just tap and buy it right away is great.

The backlight thing is great. So if you're sleeping with a spouse in the bed and their spouse goes to bed two hours earlier than you do, I'm speaking from. Sheer personal experience you can read at night in bed and have this backlight thing. And it's wonderful. And I had a kindle for a while and I read a bunch of great books on it.

And then when I started researching revenge of analog, I had to read a whole bunch of books. Busted out my library card, went to the Toronto Public Library and. Grabbed a bunch of those books in paper, because the Kindle couldn't accept ebooks from a library, because Amazon didn't allow that.

And as soon as I cracked open one of those books maybe it was Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants I was like, oh, this is so much better. I don't know why, I can't put my finger on it, but this is how my brain and body prefers to read. And I say this in the talks I give, there's no logical reason for anyone to buy a book, right?

If you buy a copy of The Future is Analog in digital your ebook copy from Kobo or Amazon or whatever, you are getting no less information. All the words are the same. You don't get any extra words. When you buy the print copy, you just get like a nice fancy jacket and whatever, right?

You get a bunch of dead tree, but like the information is the same, so it shouldn't matter. And the reality is it does matter context matters, physicality matters, because once again, we are human beings. We are physical creatures. Look down. Stop listening to this podcast and look down at your hands. Those are real.

Touch them to your face. That's real. And we actually get value out of that. Even if we can't put a number on it, even we can't put a dollar sign on it. And I think that's a bigger metaphor. For a bigger lesson for everything that I'm talking about in this book, which is that, yeah, we can take the entirety of quote unquote human existence and somehow digitize the important aspects of that and deliver it through a screen or deliver it through headphones or deliver it over the Internet and you will survive and get by and not die or you will get your tasks done or you could do your job or you can still be a good Hindu or Jew or whatever, because you can attend your service online, but you will Nothing beats the real thing because we are the real thing.

And I think books is just this perfect example of it where this, these predictions of the death of the book, like they didn't, not only do, they didn't come to pass, nobody makes them anymore because it's just now just seen as this ridiculous thing. Like book sales are keep growing and bookstores keep growing and independent bookstores keep opening and it's this sort of great example of the lasting value of analog that.

Goes far beyond any quantitative measure of what we should be doing or what the future should look like it's a very deeply human thing that just feels

Srini Rao: right. I think that makes such a perfect place to wrap up our conversation. So I have 1 final question, which is how we finish all of our interviews at the unmistakable creative.

What do you think it is? That makes something somebody or something unmistakable. I think it's the individuality of everything that's been in their life up to that point. You can have two siblings from the same house. Literally grew up in the same room and they're two totally different people.

David Sax: And that's because of everything that's happened to them day in and day out from every sort of moment. That makes someone individual and unmistakable. I think it's like lived experience is everything.

Srini Rao: Amazing. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom and your insights with our listeners.

Where can people find out more about you, your book and everything else that you're up to?

David Sax: The book is available for sale wherever books are sold. If you decide to buy it online and as an ebook, that's okay. I'm happy. I'm happy. I don't care. I'm not one way or another. If you want to listen to this voice for 11 hours reading the book, you can get it on audiobook.

We're listening to one and a half speed. It'll sound like this. Fine. Totally cool. Otherwise, go to your local independent bookstore because... It's not just a place that sells books. It's a place that has events. It's a place where people take their kids when their school is canceled and the children are on strike.

It's a place that is the intellectual heart of any community, big or small. And I think they need your support, not just with yays on Twitter, but... Actually going in and shopping and talk to the people there. If you like this book, ask them what else they might have. If you don't like this book, ask them what else they might have, right?

Build a relationship. So yeah, that's where you can find out about it. If you want to reach me, I have a website and you can find it saxdavid. com maybe. I'm also on Twitter at saxdavid, but our how long will we be on

Srini Rao: Twitter for? That's a whole other conversation. That's another episode in and of itself.

That's it. Yeah. Amazing. For everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.