46. VIRGINIA POSTREL: Staying Hopeful in a Changing World

Episode Transcript

Note: Transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. Please refer to the episode audio or video for exact quotes.

[00:00:00] Virginia: Human beings don’t just value function. They value pleasure, and they value, meaning, and pleasure and meaning are things that are very much conveyed through the look and feel of objects of places.

[00:00:21] Michael: Hi, I am Michael Hyatt.

[00:00:22] Megan: And I’m Megan Hyatt Miller,

[00:00:23] Michael: and you’re listening to the Double Wind Show. Megan, unfortunately, is not with me for this episode.

[00:00:28] She’s tending to some family issues, but we’re excited to share with you our recent conversation with Virginia Postrel. So Virginia is the author of four influential books, including The Future in Its Enemies, the Substance of Style, the Power of Glamor, and The Fabric of Civilization. She’s the former editor-in-Chief of Reason Magazine and a columnist for Bloomberg View and The Atlantic.

[00:00:52] Her Ted Talk and essays explore themes of innovation. Aesthetics and social evolution. She’s known for coining and exploring the terms dynamism versus stasis as competing worldviews, and we uncover some of that in our conversation today. But in the substance of style, she anticipated the rise of aesthetic awareness in all areas of modern life, and we’re seeing that today in the design of everything.

[00:01:19] And the fabric of civilization. Reframes, textiles. Yes, textiles. As a core driver of technological and economic history. Virginia lives in Los Angeles with her husband, economist, Steven Pore. And with that, let’s get to the interview.

[00:01:40] Virginia, welcome to the Double Win Show.

[00:01:42] Virginia: Thank you. It’s great to be with you.

[00:01:44] Michael: So delighted to meet you, and I’m looking forward to this conversation today. So I think recently in a social media post, you noted that in 1960, over a third of North Carolina households lacked full plumbing. So why do we forget to see our own progress?

[00:02:03] So quickly. I mean, it’s al almost invisible to us, especially now.

[00:02:05] Virginia: Well, partly on plumbing specifically and and those kinds of routine things that we really take for granted and should be able to take for granted in some sense. There are a couple of reasons. First of all, to me, because I was born in 1960 and that’s why, and I don’t know, I was born in North Carolina, it doesn’t seem that long ago to somebody who is 30 years old, it seems like ancient history and they have no memory of.

[00:02:31] 1960 or, I mean, I have no memory of 1960 either, but so it has to come from somewhere. So if you don’t hear stories in your family and you don’t read old books, you don’t realize these things. And then the other thing is in the us, and we see this a lot today, there is a skewed picture. What the world was like in the fifties and sixties, and it is skewed geographically.

[00:03:03] It is true that that period was a period of tremendous increase in optimism and standard of living and increased rights for black Americans in particular. All of these sorts of things were going on, but. The idea that everybody in 1960 had a great union factory job and the mom could stay home with no financial troubles, and they had a bunch of kids in a house in the suburbs and two cars.

[00:03:37] I mean, that is a completely skewed view of what the world was like. It is skewed geographically. It’s skewed ethnically, and in this case, it’s very skewed geographically because if you look. In 1960, those figures for North Carolina were typical of the South, right? 35% of the state was without full plumbing, and full plumbing is defined by the Census Bureau as hot and cold piped water, a bathtub or shower, and a flushable toilet.

[00:04:11] Probably we’re looking at lack of flushable toilets primarily, and the figures would be significantly worse. For Mississippi, for example, I think it was almost half. Um, so that we have these skewed pictures that are based on, you know, what things were like. Ohio at some period in time or what things were like in California where I live now, things were great.

[00:04:37] I mean, things were good the most, you know, almost everybody had full plumbing, so there was a lot of skewing and what we saw in the fifties, sixties, seventies, was. More harmonization, if you will, across the country. You know, a standard of living that was more shared by Americans. And in part, people are nostalgic for the hope that was embodied in that, that shared experience of upward mobility.

[00:05:06] Uh, so that’s one reason that people, people forget and. Now I have to say I have no ma. My family lived in North Carolina. They had inter, I mean they had all these things, but a lot of people didn’t. And it’s worth remembering that

[00:05:19] Michael: I was about five years old at that time. So I’m a little bit ahead of you, but is the point that things weren’t as great as we think, or is the point that progress has happened a lot faster?

[00:05:29] Then we just noticed,

[00:05:32] Virginia: I think it’s that progress happens really fast and people get used to things really fast. Also,

[00:05:39] Michael: is my perception that it’s happening even faster now. True. Or is that some kind of time dilation effect?

[00:05:46] Virginia: Well, certain things are happening faster and certain things are happening more slowly.

[00:05:51] Obviously we have tremendous rapid progress in anything that involves computers and chips and software and all of those things. And that filters into lots of things that we don’t think about. So I’ve been doing research recently on the history of eyeglasses. When I say the history of eyeglasses, I mean going back to the late 13th century, but one thing that computerized things, computerized equipment has made possible is very precise customization of like progressive lenses.

[00:06:27] So I have progressive lenses. I don’t use ’em for the computer ’cause the computer is the perfect distance from my eyes and everything is clear. But I have these glasses and they have correct astigmatism at the top and therefore reading at the bottom and they’re thin and they’re perfectly, you can’t tell there’s no, there’s no line.

[00:06:47] There’s certainly not like bifocals. That is a very recent. Capability. Uh, progressive lenses were first developed in the 1970s, and I talked to a guy who was an optometrist or optician in that period, you know, uh, and he was like, they were terrible. You could hardly see out of them, but some people were so vain they would only use them, you know?

[00:07:10] And over time, that’s gotten better and better and better. And that’s driven by, to a large degree. By it, because in order to make lenses with that level of precision, you have to do lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of calculations, complex calculations, and then you have to drive machines to produce those lenses.

[00:07:30] And that’s just, that’s the kind of thing we take for granted. We don’t see. But that said, progress in the last maybe three decades, or really since the early seventies. Has been much faster in the world of bits, as they say, than in the world of atoms. We’ve made it more difficult to do things in the world of atoms.

[00:07:53] Partly that was because people’s raising environmental concerns, but also it was things like, for example, take that house in the suburbs. I’m gonna get this wrong. When Kamala Harris was running for president, she said, you know, one goal of her administration would be to build 3 million new homes in America in her four year term.

[00:08:18] Well, it turns out that if you go back to the post World War II period. Americans were routinely building a million homes a year, a million homes a year in a country that was much smaller and much poorer. So we’ve made certain things like building housing very difficult. And so when people. And cars. I have a lot of safety equipment on them.

[00:08:43] They’re much better. They last much longer than they used to, but they’re also much more expensive to buy a new car and there’s been a lot of inflation in that in the last 10 or so years as well. So it’s uneven and some of the things close are practically free compared to what they were when you or I were teenagers or in early in our, say in our twenties.

[00:09:08] But. People who are young now take clothes are practically free for granted and worry about other things.

[00:09:15] Michael: So interesting. Well, obviously material improvements like plumbing or safer childbirth improve our wellbeing, right? But flourishing isn’t just about physical comfort. So where do material and non-material progress reinforce each other?

[00:09:30] Virginia: Well, and one thing that. We tend to forget is how much drudgery there used to be. And when you are engaged in real drudgery, really, and people, different people have different ideas of what constitutes a drudgery. Some people really like cleaning floors, I guess, or whatever, or ironing lots and lots of clothes, but it takes away from other.

[00:09:57] More elevating things you could be doing, whether that’s playing with your children or reading a book or taking a run depending on the particular person. But the other thing is that. In a world where we have a lot of material want, a lot of our thinking is engaged with dealing with our material want.

[00:10:21] How am I going to feed my family? How am I going to get my kids new shoes? And when you remove those things, when it becomes easier, a lot of people fall into the trap of. Frittering away the the day and not realizing, I mean, when, there are lots of time studies that show that when Americans get extra time in their day from whatever labor saving devices or whatever, what do they do?

[00:10:53] They watch television. Now I watch television. I’m not against television, but as a default, it may not be the thing that gives you the most satisfaction, so that if you’re watching television in the moment. It’s an easy thing to do and you, and you enjoy it, but you might get more satisfaction if you were working in your garden or if you were reading a book, that sort of thing.

[00:11:18] So it puts more responsibility on us to think about where does that sort of psychological or spiritual, if you, if you wanna use that term aspect of our lives, find its satisfaction.

[00:11:35] Michael: It seems to me like with all this material progress and progress, that’s at least perceived as progress and productivity or more productive because of technology today than we’ve probably ever been before.

[00:11:49] But what I hear you say that that doesn’t necessarily correlate with personal progress, where we feel feel a higher level of satisfaction. That’s a choice. Gadgets and tech could make the possibility, but we gotta take advantage of it.

[00:12:05] Virginia: The issues of character never go away. They are eternal human.

[00:12:10] Questions and we forget because we have, we have, again, we have sort of nostalgic views of the past. There was a lot of enemy, there was a lot of getting drunk. There was a lot of, you know, stuff that. People have alway. There’ve always been a lot of people who didn’t know what to do with their lives, and maybe they had to work to keep bread on the table, and they did that.

[00:12:34] But then when they got their paycheck, they drank half it up of, of it up. And then there, this is a stereotypical 19th century problem, uh, like 19th century problem. This is how, this is how we got prohibition basically was men had jobs that paid them. Well, women could not get. Jobs that paid enough to support themselves and their families.

[00:12:59] They were their children. They were dependent on their husbands. Their husbands would often drink up a big portion of their wages, maybe also abuse their children and their wives, but even if they didn’t, even if they weren’t violent, even just the financial pressure. And this led to the suffrage move, I mean, not to the s.

[00:13:18] Coincident with the suffrage movement. This led to the Temperance Movement because those character issues, they don’t go away. And so now the good news is probably not drinking away the paycheck, but he might be spending all night playing video games or whatever, and maybe he never even got married or that sort of thing.

[00:13:36] So we’re dealing with other questions.

[00:13:38] Michael: This could be a big question for our time because AI from all, and I’m, I’m deep into it myself, but from all indications. It’s gonna give us even more freedom. It’s gonna give some people total freedom ’cause they’re not gonna have a job. And you know, the whole conversation about, you know, universal basic income and all that kind of stuff.

[00:13:58] I have such mixed emotions about it. But what I think it does, you know, basically indicate is that we’re gonna have a lot more free time in the future and we better figure out what we’re gonna do it, or we’re gonna be less happy than we’ve ever been.

[00:14:10] Virginia: Right, right.

[00:14:11] Michael: Isn’t that true?

[00:14:12] Virginia: Yeah, I, I think it could be true.

[00:14:14] I mean, we don’t know, but I think it’s quite possible. And I think in the AI conversation, one of the books that often comes up is Neil Stevenson’s, the Diamond Age, and it comes up because in the book, the sort of central idea, the McGuffin or whatever, is this AI driven. Manual that RA that will sort of educate a child.

[00:14:39] And so a lot of people see that. But the thing that I think is really astute about that book is the idea that in a world of absolute plenty where no one needs to work to survive, and there are other backstory things, but you get this fracturing of society into tribes that. Take different approaches and there’s this whole sort of underclass called FETs, um, who basically live on the equivalent of a universal basic income.

[00:15:13] This is a nanotechnology kind of science fiction world, so it’s basically they get the stuff they need out of these machines. You know, they get food and clothing and housing and all these sort of things in a basic way, but they don’t have anything that elevates them and they tend to be dysfunctional families and stuff.

[00:15:33] But there are other groups that take other approaches. They’re neo Victorians who quite literally model themselves on the Victorians. There’s another group, I forget what they’re called, but who like to make things. In difficult ways by hand, even though you can get anything from these machines. So they make furniture, they make paper, all this sort of craft.

[00:15:55] And I think we have that going on now. I mean, I wrote a book mm-hmm. About textiles called The Fabric of Civilization. I learned to weave and I can do hand weaving. I was talking to a weaver friend the other day about how we’re, we love to weave, but we’re so glad we don’t have to do it to make our clothes, you know?

[00:16:13] But there are kinds of satisfactions in. Creating things. I think that we’re gonna see more and more of that as well as from just a labor market point of view. Some of those things may be the ones that are the good paying jobs in the future, as when AI can do a lot of routine brain work. My nephew is a very fine woodworker and carpenter, and I have no concerns over his future

[00:16:40] Michael: employment.

[00:16:41] No, I don’t either. And you know, even our company. We said we’re, we’re definitely AI enabled, but we’re also analog first,

[00:16:50] Virginia: right?

[00:16:50] Michael: Because in a world where everything becomes digitized and dematerialized, we think there’s gonna be a huge market for real things, real artifacts. All of that.

[00:17:03] Virginia: And one interesting thing is at Thanksgiving, which my nephew and his girlfriend were there and, and my, his sister, my niece, and both my nephew and niece are running small companies.

[00:17:15] My nephew actually has employees. My niece is doing her, you know, it’s a one person shop doing the fashion design and stuff, and the girlfriend works for an interior designer and all three of them. Are using AI a lot to learn how to run their businesses to, yeah, know what fabric will look like on a chair, all these kinds of things.

[00:17:37] So it’s certainly enabling, but all three of them are ultimately. In businesses where there is a thing you touch. Yeah. Whether it’s a garment, whether it’s your living room and the things in it, whether it’s the actual physical, uh, furniture or, or the door or that sort of thing. So, you know, these are very complimentary technologies or ways of life, if you will,

[00:18:05] Michael: and the scarcity of them may make it more valuable.

[00:18:08] One of the things in your books that you highlight. Is that progress doesn’t come from the top down. It’s the tinkers. It’s the craftsmen that are experimenting. And why does that kind of decentralized evolution teach us about societies, how societies prosper?

[00:18:26] Virginia: I think that the fundamental truth that we have trouble grasping is that nobody knows anything.

[00:18:34] Like we all know a lot about our little world. And it’s, nobody can know everything. Even the smartest AI, whatever, can’t figure out what people want, what people are dissatisfied with. And a lot of innovation comes from that. And we tend to focus on big technologies. And even big technologies come from a lot of incremental.

[00:19:04] Improvements. I mean, we didn’t, what is Moore’s law about? It’s all about the incremental improvements. If you started with the original chips and showed people what they’re like today, people would say to them like impossible, because it’s built little by little. But a lot of improvements come from people saying, I’m dissatisfied with this, or Here’s something I figured out.

[00:19:30] How could I. Roll it out into the world. And that could be a business. It doesn’t have to be a business. I mean, it could be a recipe, you know, it could be a child rearing practice. And the result is that we get a lot of surprises. And one of the examples I like to use when I give talks is I showed this picture.

[00:19:46] It’s super, super generic stock art, you know? Photograph of three young business women who are traveling and they got their suitcases, they’re pulling along, one is holding a cup of coffee, one’s got her cell phone. And I was like, okay, where is progress in this picture? This is like, um, and everybody, of course, it’s a smartphone.

[00:20:06] That’s, and of course that’s true. That’s a big, but, um, when I went on my book tour for the Future in a Enemies, my first book in 19 late. Like 1999, I didn’t have rolling luggage. It had been invented, but it hadn’t been rolled out yet. No pun intended. You know, you had to come as recent as the turn of the century.

[00:20:26] If you went in an airport. Most people who were not flight crews. Were lugging their luggage on their shoulders or in their hands. And then of course there’s the coffee and Starbucks started rolling out across the country in 1991 and Starbucks came from, uh, Howard Schultz Seeing. The coffee culture in Italy and saying, why can’t we have that, you know, really nice coffee in these nicely designed places.

[00:20:56] And, and then later he had the idea of which he got from book The Great Good Place of third places, the idea that Americans lacked places that were neither home nor work where they could. Be with other people. And so then Starbucks adopted that. So when Starbucks started rolling out in 1991, there were about 1,650 coffee houses in the entire country.

[00:21:24] And 165 of those were Starbucks. And now it’s like 15,000 coffee houses. I believe it. And fewer than half of those are Starbucks. And even though it seems like there’s a Starbucks on every corner, and that’s because once people saw Starbucks, people liked the idea, but some people didn’t like Starbucks.

[00:21:46] They thought it was too corporate or they wanted something more local or whatever. But people started having this idea of opening these things, and that’s the kind of. Surprise that no one would’ve pictured. And you can look at, you know, number of employees. You can look at the market capital of the company and you can see sort of some economic statistics showing that that’s, you know, made a big contribution to the economy.

[00:22:10] But the main thing it’s done is it’s changed. A big part of our everyday lives. You know, my husband goes almost every day to a local coffee house. Sometimes it’s Starbucks, sometimes it’s someplace else, and, you know, hangs out and works and chats to people and, you know, it’s a, it’s a new part of American Life that wasn’t there 25 years ago.

[00:22:33] Really.

[00:22:42] Michael: This is part of why I love entrepreneurialism so much, because basically, in fact, I wrote a book, why Entrepreneurs Will Save the World. But in it, I said that basically being an entrepreneur means you’re solving problems at a profit. Exactly. And because you’re doing that, you’re having to increment very quickly in order to stay relevant to the markets you’re serving.

[00:23:03] And as competition increases, it creates even more innovation because you have to now stay at. Ahead of your competitors, but I love what happens, but it’s definitely not a top down approach, even in the AI world today. Yes, there’s a lot of amazing things happening, you know, among these big LLMs and the companies that support them.

[00:23:23] But what’s really interesting to me is how, uh, the entrepreneurs that I serve are taking that technology and using it to solve real world problems. That’s. Where my fascination goes today to

[00:23:36] Virginia: see that. Yeah. That was our Thanksgiving conversation. I mean, these are really small businesses. These are young people.

[00:23:41] They’re not tech people. They’re, you know, but they’re, they’re just using it to solve entrepreneurial problems. I, I was just reading an article in the New York Times yesterday about Rodney Brooks, who. Been a roboticist and an AI person going way back and, and he actually started iRobot that, which developed the Roomba.

[00:24:04] There was this quote where he was saying like, suppose you have a piece of graph paper and I have all these little squares and color in one. That’s your dissertation. That is to say that’s the. Technological thing, all those other squares are what you have to fill in to get a company to work. Yeah.

[00:24:21] You know,

[00:24:22] it’s, it’s all the, you’ve got the tech idea, but how do you implement it in terms of, you know, manufacturability and all this stuff, and then how do you do the distribution and how do you do the sales and all of those things.

[00:24:39] How to get the organization to work. All of that stuff is, is very, very difficult. Another thing we don’t, that we take for granted now that it’s been a revolution is, is our distribution. And we, it comes up in the context of international supply chains, but even just within the us, the way things get from one part of the country to another, the, the supplies that small businesses have access to or much improved from what they would’ve been 20, 25 years ago.

[00:25:10] Michael: Well now with 3D printing,

[00:25:12] Virginia: yeah, right.

[00:25:12] Michael: There’s that individuals can become manufacturing plants all into themselves. One of the things that you write about that I think is included in all of this is we now expect more beauty in everyday objects and space and the products we design. And from my, you know, perch, I think that Steve Jobs drove a lot of that by bringing a deep design aesthetic.

[00:25:37] To something as simple as a telephone that’s now, of course, ubiquitous. But how does this rising aesthetic baseline. Reflect something deeper than wealth. Something about dignity and daily joy.

[00:25:49] Virginia: Yeah. Yeah. So you’re, it’s a, you’re referring to, so I wrote a book that came out in 2003. So it was very turn of the entry book called The Substance of Style.

[00:26:00] And Steve Jobs initial influence on the sort of broader world in terms of aesthetics was actually when he came back to Apple. Mm-hmm. And he. Relaunch. You know, he rationalized their product line and he relaunched the Mac with these candy colored plastic shells. If you weren’t around, then you won’t remember them, but they, and the idea was that a computer didn’t have to be a.

[00:26:26] Putty colors, which is what most computers were even max at that time. It didn’t. It could be something delightful, it could be something beautiful. And then the next thing you knew when I was researching the book, which a few years, a couple years after this had come out, everything in the world was those candy color plastics irons were those candy color plastics.

[00:26:50] But human beings don’t just value function. They value, pleasure, and they value, meaning, and pleasure and meaning are things that are very much conveyed through the look and feel of objects of places. Mm-hmm. In the fabric of civilization. My textile book is, my most recent book I talk about textiles are, there’s only so many truly ancient textiles, because textiles tend to rot, but there are these scraps of cloth that are found in a.

[00:27:24] Uh, site in Peru that are very, very old, 6,200 years old, and there’s this little piece of cloth that has indigo stripes. White highlights that are made from a, uh, most of the cloth is cotton, but the white is made from a, a milkweed plant, I believe it is, and sort of beige cotton now, 6,200 years ago by.

[00:27:50] Any standard of 2025 people were really poor, and so you might say, well, they’re so poor. Why are they worrying about, you know, why are they making stripe? I mean making indigo, which is something that people figured out all around the world, using different plants is an incredibly difficult process. It’s very chemically complicated, but people figured it out just using trial and error.

[00:28:15] Beautiful, and it really lasts. So we have beautiful blues from thousands and thousands of years ago. So why? Why did they do that? We don’t know. Because there are no written records about this society. This appears to have been some type of religious place where people, ’cause the fabrics are torn and then soaked in salt water.

[00:28:34] So people think it might’ve been some kind of sacrifice or ritual. So maybe the Stripes had some sort of spiritual meaning or they referred to a particular group, or maybe it was just somebody’s, you know, favorite outfit that they were no longer using or, or we don’t know, but we can be pretty sure as human beings that they like us, valued the way things looked in terms of beauty, and also said things about what was meaningful to them with.

[00:29:07] The way they designed the objects around them.

[00:29:10] Michael: It makes me wonder if design is so much a part of the human experience that we almost use it to regulate our interior environment. So for example, with one of the things I think Apple did in the later years of Steve Jobs was they’re kind of distinguishing design aesthetic.

[00:29:32] Was simplicity. Yeah. And so I think in a complicated world where you, you can’t figure it out or you don’t feel like you can figure it out, at least you want your devices feeling like they’re simple.

[00:29:44] Virginia: Yeah. Like

[00:29:45] Michael: that. It’s manageable. Right. And I wonder if that will continue to be something as we move into the future, we’re gonna increasingly look, uh, to our environment for things that we struggle to gain.

[00:29:57] At a psychological or emotional level?

[00:29:59] Virginia: It’s an interesting question ’cause I think when you talk about design, you are also talking about function. Yeah. So part of the idea of simplicity and design is that it’s immediately understandable how you should use it. You know, you don’t have to get out the instruction manual and, and it’s intuitive and good design has that quality to it.

[00:30:23] In terms of the aesthetics is a good question. Somebody recently asked me did I think that we were turning away from various, a lot of simplicity. They would’ve said blandness, you know, all white interiors towards something more complicated and rich and baroque, and there are these sort of fashion cycles, if you will.

[00:30:49] Mm-hmm. Where I gets tired. A certain look and want something new. And sometimes that’s, if you think about modern. The early 20th century ideas of the modern that it’s all about simplicity, streamlining, there are different versions of it. There’s our deco is very different from like international style architecture or whatever, but there is a kind of simplification, which is a turn away from the kind of very complicated architectural and interior and fashion kinds of things of the Victorian era, which were in themselves sort of a turn away from.

[00:31:30] More classical inspired architecture. So we have these kinds of things. So I think the simplicity of of design in the functional sense is something that people crave. And I think that aesthetics, many from Japan, that emphasize being able to find beauty in a. And stillness in a contained space. You know, even if all around it is very busy, it is something that is likely to continue to have an appeal.

[00:32:04] But I also think that going back to our discussion about craftsmanship and the hand and making that part of that is. Making things more complicated than they need, they absolutely need to be. Mm-hmm. So that, I mean, one thing you can do if you weave your own cloth is you can make complex patterns that a factory could make those patterns.

[00:32:30] I mean, you in fact, with a programmable loom, they’d be quite easy to make, but they don’t because they have less of a mass market. It’s hard to say.

[00:32:40] Michael: Interesting. Well, let’s talk about the future in the future and its enemies you distinguish people who welcome an open future from those who fear it. Yeah, and I am certainly seeing that in the AI conversation.

[00:32:55] But what’s at stake emotionally in that divide?

[00:32:57] Virginia: Well, I think first of all, I mean, I do divide the world into these categories. I call them dynamo and stasis, but most of us have some of each in us. Mm-hmm. I think there is a lot of how you see the world. Do you see. The technical terms was zero sum or positive sum.

[00:33:19] Do you see any improvement, whether it’s in wealth or education or sports achievement? Do you see one person’s improvement necessarily taking away from other people’s, or is it possible to make everyone better off? Now, there are certain things that are by their nature zero sum. Only one team can win the World Series this year.

[00:33:45] But the pleasure that fans get from baseball in general is a positive something. You know, you can expand that market, you can get, but some people just intrinsically see the world as being one, a win-win kind of. World where you can have win-win and other people see it as in order for me to win, you have to lose.

[00:34:10] Or in order for you to win, I have to, I must be losing. There is a personality difference there, but there’s also a kind of social, almost like a death spiral if your culture and your society gets too far on the win-lose track. Then everybody is grabbing onto their thing and it feeds on itself. So one thing I definitely don’t wanna see in in our society, which is my society, which has traditionally been a very sort of open, win-win society.

[00:34:44] I mean, not that that was universal, but. That’s been the kind of openness of the American culture. Mm-hmm. You know, everybody can move up. Opportunity for all. I mean, some of that may have been a myth, but it was very powerful and good myth, uh, that we sought to live up to. That’s a big concern of mine, and I think that partly what we need to do to cultivate that win-win attitude.

[00:35:11] Is to understand how things have improved in the past, and also cultivate a sense of gratitude to all the people and innovations and work that. Contribute to that. And those are not all guys making ai. Those are also very low paid people for reasons I’ve under, I’ve explained in articles, taking care of the elderly, that one thing I think is very important that we recognize the value of, of work in general.

[00:35:42] But in the AI context, clearly there are people who. See this as something that can make life better off for everybody, even if there are some transitional costs. And you and I are of an age where if your job goes away, when you’re our age, you may not get another job because you’ve invested a lot in.

[00:36:06] Whatever your career was. But for younger people it opens up a lot of opportunities, but there’s disruption in the short term, and that’s, yes, the sort of things we have to navigate both as individuals and families and smaller groups and companies, and also as a society.

[00:36:27] Michael: Well, this conversation is important because it has political ramifications, it has cultural ramifications.

[00:36:35] At an individual level, it determines how resilient we’re gonna be to the changes that are coming. And I think that many people have pointed out that technological advances in the past have actually led to more jobs, to more satisfying and interesting jobs. Yeah. But there are other people that you know that the half empty people, so to speak, who talk about the threats.

[00:36:59] Hype, the fear and all of that. I don’t think that’s helpful. I don’t wanna be a Pollyanna. No, but I also don’t wanna be, you know, a doomsday crier in the streets I’ve lived through in my, in fact, I wrote a piece on this recently, but I’ve lived through a lot of doomsday scenarios. People said where it was gonna all come to the end if we didn’t curb our drinking of water or, yeah.

[00:37:21] Eating of animals or just the sheer, you know, the population explosion, whatever it is. But it turns out we’ve survived all those things and we’ll probably survive the next wave too.

[00:37:32] Virginia: Yeah, the population explosion is a good one to mention because that really was zero sum win-lose. Thinking. The idea was if we had more people, all those people would do is consume resources.

[00:37:48] Julian Simon, who was the great anti population bomb guy, he pointed out that people come into the world with one mouth and two hands, and that was a, you know, the idea is more people bring more possibilities to um, and now of course we’re facing the opposite, which is. Plummeting birth rates, particularly they’re down here, but they’re down all over the world.

[00:38:13] And you know, South Korea is the worst. I mean, they’re just sort of disappearing. Children are disappearing there. And partly that is because there are many, many factors in it. Um, but one thing particularly in this country, I think is that. Decades of indoctrination in the fears of population increase. And this is where we get to the idea that go back to housing, which is a particular concern of mine.

[00:38:40] Uh, people in California in the 1980s didn’t like that people were moving into the state, and so they made it hard to build houses thinking that that would control growth. And it kind of did. But now. Kids who grew up, you know, people who were born in the eighties and nineties in California can’t afford to live here.

[00:39:03] And is that really what you were bargaining for? That you would, that your kids and grandkids would be living in Texas or or wherever? That’s not very wise. And it is, and that was a very sort of zero sum thinking that didn’t. Think it through to what the result of that would be.

[00:39:32] Michael: It seems to me like the fatal calculation in all of this. The algorithm doesn’t consider incremental human innovation. Yeah. So that you know, when we have a looming disaster and we project. From where we are now to where we’re gonna be in 10 years, it assumes that all change stops. And the trends are gonna be the trends.

[00:39:54] Right? Right. But something always intervenes.

[00:39:57] Virginia: One of my philosophies, which the Starbucks story represents, but is, is that any valid social criticism isn’t entrepreneurial opportunity. Yes. So the guy who wrote The Great Good Place, he was very down on suburban America. It was like, oh, it’s so terrible. They have the houses and you have work, and people just go back and forth.

[00:40:19] They have no place to. Form community and what happened to the barbershop and the the corner bar and all these places, blah, blah. And then Howard Schultz comes along and he’s already, it’s star early Starbucks history is complicated, but let’s just say he’s already got Starbucks running along the Italian line, which is not a hangout primarily.

[00:40:41] I mean, primarily Italians go get their coffee and leave. But he reads this book or he hears about it and then he reads this book and he goes. Oh, there’s an unfilled niche. You know, there’s a thing that I think that guy is right, that this is something that doesn’t exist enough in America. Let’s try to make our coffee places.

[00:41:04] That place. I mean, that’s a, that’s a small thing, but that was a sort of common critique. It was adopted and it was seen as, therefore let’s get rid of this. I mean, it was just kind of a gloom and doom, not really thinking, oh, maybe somebody can make a business out of this. And it turns out not just Starbucks, but lots of little.

[00:41:27] Mom and pop coffee houses and small local chains and that, that sort of thing have made businesses outta this, this need.

[00:41:36] Michael: Well, this is why I think, and there are a lot of people listening to us today that don’t consider themselves entrepreneurs, but I think the people that survive and the question in the AI conversation is what jobs are gonna survive?

[00:41:48] I think it’s more of a mindset, and I think the mindset that’s gonna survive is those who believe in an open future and believe in the win-win kind of thing. You described. But who also see themselves as entrepreneurial and whether they are an entrepreneur or not, they’ve gotta be entrepreneurial and see problems as opportunities or they won’t survive.

[00:42:08] Virginia: We have talked about entrepreneurs in the sense of business entrepreneurs, but there’s also what’s sometimes called social entrepreneurs. I mean, these are

[00:42:15] people. Mm-hmm.

[00:42:15] You know, it doesn’t, you don’t have to be addressing the problem with a profit making business. You could address the problem with.

[00:42:25] Creating a social group or deciding that people talk about loneliness and you know, so that once a month you’re going to get people together to watch a movie or to have dinner together at a pizza place or, or whatever. Or it could be. I’m really into this particular craft, and I wanna start a group that does that craft.

[00:42:49] I mean, in, in 1946, there were people in Los Angeles who decided that there should be a hand weaving guild to spread the joy of hand weaving. And now, you know, we’re looking at our 80th anniversary next year, and it’s just partly, it’s, uh. How to thing. Partly it’s social, partly it’s artistic, it’s different, and it’s got a range of things.

[00:43:14] And this is a traditional American, you know, Tocqueville wrote about this, creating groups to solve problems. Entrepreneurship in the business sense is part of that, but there are other forms of it as well.

[00:43:27] Michael: That’s really good. We have talked about this a bit, but people often feel powerless against large systems, whether they’re governmental or corporate, but you remind them that real innovation usually comes from ordinary people solving ordinary problems.

[00:43:44] And how does that restore a sense of personal agency?

[00:43:48] Virginia: Agency sort of is problem solving. It’s you pro solving problems. You know, in your life or whatever that might be, and it’s sort of reversed too, which is that if you assume that it’s someone else’s job to solve your problem. You sort of give up your sense of agency, and I don’t mean to preach because obviously if your problem is you have cancer, you’re not gonna solve your cancer problem by yourself.

[00:44:16] And we do. And we have the benefits of Division of Labor and Division of knowledge and all division of expertise and all that stuff. But I do think that you get rewarded in today’s online culture, in particular for casting aspersions on. The culture or whatever, you know, everything is the fault of the big picture.

[00:44:42] And this comes from truth often, but it gets exaggerated and it gives people a sense that they can’t do anything in in their own lives and. Most of the time they can do things in their own lives. They need to spend, people need to spend less time worrying about the things they can’t do anything about and more time thinking about how can they.

[00:45:07] Affect their own lives. How can they do things about whether it’s financial, whether it’s educational, whether it’s psychological, uh, what it is. And I don’t have like wisdom other than I’ve always been a very ag agentic person as the current

[00:45:23] vice.

[00:45:25] But, but you know, and partly that’s just how I was raised.

[00:45:29] I was. My parents were problem solvers, my father in particular, and, uh, they were people who were active in the community and, and had an ethos of let’s start where we are and improve what we can.

[00:45:44] Michael: Well, and so much of today, if you listen to, if you get too much of an ingestion of popular media, and I don’t say hide in a foxhole somewhere.

[00:45:54] Virginia: Yeah, right. But if

[00:45:55] Michael: you have too much of that, it really does take away. Your perceived sense of agency, right? ’cause you think everything is happening in a macro level. And my wife and I have remarked on this several times where like we don’t get a chance to watch the news for a couple weeks and we turn it back on and we’re like, it’s the same script.

[00:46:14] Yeah. Maybe a few of the particulars have changed, but it’s pretty much the same thing. And it’s all driven by this. Advertising model of how can we get eyeballs and clicks, and a part of that is there’s an economic necessity on the part of those people that produce those shows. To create the fear.

[00:46:31] Virginia: Yeah,

[00:46:32] Michael: to amplify the fear, because that’s drives more eyeballs and more clicks.

[00:46:35] You can’t look away.

[00:46:36] Virginia: Of course, on the positive note, there’s this guy who, I see him elsewhere, but he is on TikTok and he, his thing is he picks up trash on the street in Los Angeles and he gets other people to do it and he makes videos about it and you know, there’s way too much trash on our streets is absolutely the case, but this is somebody who’s saying, yeah, it might be in some theoretical sense.

[00:46:58] The city’s job, but the, it’s a big city. There’s a lot of sidewalks. The city has limited resources. Let me clean up my neighborhood. I mean, I, I always think I will go pick up trash and I don’t, but I admire that guy for doing that because I think, and, and inspiring other people to do it as well.

[00:47:18] Michael: Well, and you might think that what I do in picking up trash is insignificant.

[00:47:23] I mean, we’re facing an avalanche of trash. So how does what I do matter? And it reminds me of that old story, I’m sure you’ve heard it, of the person who’s picking up starfish on the beach and throwing ’em back into the ocean. And he can counter a person who says, what are you doing? I mean, look at all these starfish.

[00:47:39] There’s no way you’re gonna make a difference. You know, it doesn’t really matter. And he picks up a starfish, throws it into the ocean, and says. It matters to that one.

[00:47:46] Virginia: Yeah. Right, right. Exactly. Exactly,

[00:47:50] Michael: exactly. So leaders often feel pressured to deliver certainty and maybe increasingly so in the world we’re talking about, but that’s probably not that helpful.

[00:48:03] What can they do to cultivate curiosity, experimentation, and play inside of their teams? Which ultimately is gonna have a better effect.

[00:48:11] Virginia: Yeah. Than

[00:48:12] Michael: what? That’s a good

[00:48:13] Virginia: question. That’s a good question. A lot of leadership is figuring out what gifts individuals have and getting them moving in the right direction.

[00:48:24] So, you know, you talk about your team and. This person has this gift and this person has it, and how can you get them to work together? So I think a big part of leadership as problem solving is people problem solving, is getting people in the right roles and thinking about how those roles mesh. I think that thinking and.

[00:48:46] We’ve talked about thinking incrementally, and that is part of it. It’s getting people to think incrementally, but it’s also giving them big challenges. Here’s something that seems impossible, but could we possibly do it? Or, you know, how can we break it into parts? How can we, uh, take advantage? I’ve been writing an article for, uh, works in Progress magazine about the story of disposable diapers, and it starts in 19.

[00:49:15] Disposable diapers existed, but they were hot, very expensive. And they people just used them for, and they weren’t that good and people used them for travel. But 1956, Procter and Gamble had acquired the Sharman Paper Company and obviously making toilet paper was part of that. But there was a guy who was in charge of this and he was thinking, what else could we do with paper?

[00:49:37] He had a new grandchild, didn’t like changing diapers, thought, you know, we’re gonna do disposable diapers, and the story is just a story of one test after another that failed. I mean, they would get the diapers to work, but they’d be too expensive. Then they have to figure out how to manufacture them. You know, at enough scale to get the price down.

[00:49:57] And then they, they test them in Dallas in the summer and the early the design is to gives the baby heat rash and just one problem after another. And so I think partly if people know more about the histories of everyday things that they experience as successes, they might be willing to take more chances with, you know, the things they’re doing themselves and think a little bit of,

[00:50:22] Michael: a little bit of hope there.

[00:50:24] Yeah, it does seem like progress boils down to that exact situation where the first several things you try don’t work. And I think that being successful comes down to more resilience and how we process failure. Yeah. Than having that one big idea that works the first time.

[00:50:43] Virginia: Yeah. I think resilience is a really good term because I think cultivating resilience, which is easier to say than to do, but it, it’s really important both as individuals and as a society comp, you know, or a company or or organization.

[00:51:00] It’s what do you have that makes things. Able to bounce back.

[00:51:05] Mm-hmm.

[00:51:06] There are always going to be unexpected shocks. I mean, look at the pandemic. No one saw that coming or, or even people who saw there was a global risk of a kind of pandemic. Didn’t see the timing of this particulars and whatever you think about specific policies.

[00:51:24] It was definitely going to be a shock. A shock. And people who were able to. Pivot and be resilient, you know, came out of that much better. And I think that’s partly a matter of cultivating a mindset.

[00:51:39] Michael: So you’ve been a student of the history of progress. You’ve written about it, you’ve seen what works, what doesn’t work.

[00:51:46] If you were advising somebody who was overly concerned or maybe legitimately concerned about the future, giving the trajectory of modern technology, whether it’s ai, robotics or whatever, what would you say is gonna be necessary from a mindset standpoint? To survive the next 10 years?

[00:52:02] Virginia: Well, one thing is to expect the unexpected.

[00:52:06] I mean, to, to not assume that the world should stay still or will stay still. It will change. It will change in ways you don’t expect. And part of that, you know, just from a financial point of view, don’t live to the degree you can, don’t live. Paycheck to paycheck, you know, have some cushion. I mean, that’s a very practical kind of thing that makes for resilience.

[00:52:34] Be able think of yourself as somebody who’s able to quit their job. Not to quit working permanently, but you know, if you have a tyrant as a boss or you are asked to do something that violates your conscience, or you are just bored out of your mind. There are people who can quit their jobs and there are people who can’t.

[00:52:55] And unless you really are very, very poor, you should be able to arrange your life so that you have that resilience. Uh, so that’s part of a mindset, you know? Um, but the main thing is to just expect that you’re going to be in a world that changes.

[00:53:15] Yeah. Uh,

[00:53:15] because that’s the world we live in, and it’s the world we’ve been living in for hundreds of years.

[00:53:20] That’s the other thing is understand, this didn’t start with you. Other people have gone through amazing and scary and terrifying changes and you know, our civilization has lived to tell the tale.

[00:53:35] Michael: Well, I think one of the insights that you just shared, I just wanna underscore, and that is, I think to survive change and to be resilient, you’ve got to have margin.

[00:53:46] Yeah. Yeah. Whether it’s emotional, whether it’s financial, whether it’s spiritual, whatever it is. If you can’t absorb the change and take time to get back up and take another run at it. It may get the best of you.

[00:54:00] Virginia: And that is, you know, having a lot of friends, having a community, all of those things make for resilience too, you know, margin.

[00:54:08] I, I like that idea of having margin in all the parts of your life. Yeah.

[00:54:12] Michael: Virginia, thank you so much for joining us today on the Double Wind Show. Where can people find you online? I know you write for a lot of different magazines, but is there a central hub? We can go to find all things, find,

[00:54:23] Virginia: I have a website at v postrel do com and that’s my main website.

[00:54:27] However, I also have a, a newsletter on substack, which is, there you go, V postrel substack.com. And in theory, I’m put all the newsletters on the website, but I’m way, way behind on that. So if you wanna see archives, look at the website, v post trail.com if you wanna see current work. Links to interviews and that sort of thing.

[00:54:52] Go to my substack.

[00:54:53] Michael: If people wanted to start with one of your books, which I think you have four, right?

[00:54:58] Virginia: I have four.

[00:54:59] Michael: Which one would you suggest people start with?

[00:55:01] Virginia: Well, it depends on what you’re interested in, if you’re interested in the theory of progress, and particularly with a little bit of a political overview.

[00:55:09] Although, because the book is old, it’s. A lot of the names are completely different. The future and Its Enemies, which came out in 1998 lays out a theory of how progress happens. I mean, the, the theory starts in chapter three, but if you’re interested in aesthetics and particularly aesthetics as a source of economic value, the substance of style does that.

[00:55:34] And then I have another book called the The Power of Glamor, which is actually about visual persuasion of how. Tap it, you know. Glamorous ideas or images tap into our deeper longings. And then my, my most sort of generally accessible book and, you know, suits all different kinds of people is the most recent one.

[00:55:55] The Fabric of Civilization, which is about how textiles made the world. And it’s a book, it’s about progress, but less in a theoretical sense, but more examples. It’s about the role of textiles in all kinds of things in making the world that. As we understand it, whether that’s the world commercial innovations, whether it’s history of chemistry, all kinds of things.

[00:56:20] And if you’re interested in science and technology and business economics, it’s a good book. Uh, but a lot of people are just interested in cloth too. So, so, uh, if you, you know, if you’re a knitter or a crochet or a sewer or a weaver or any of those things, you’ll like this book too.

[00:56:40] Michael: Fantastic. Okay guys, check out Virginia’s work.

[00:56:43] We’ll link to these in the show notes so you can choose your own adventure and follow her. And again, thank you Virginia. We appreciate your time.

[00:56:51] Virginia: Thank you very much.

[00:56:52] Michael: My pleasure.

[00:57:04] Okay. A lot to take away from that interview. First of all, progress is happening faster than we think sometimes from where we individually sit, it feels like it takes a long time. And we started by talking about how progress often is very rapid, given what’s happened over the last 40 to 50 years. It’s not just that there have been improvements in material realms like plumbing and safer childbirth, but there’s also been a change in kind of the psychological environment and progress there as well.

[00:57:38] And they are definitely related. She talks about that change doesn’t come. From the top down, but comes from people like us. And I think the good news there is that we can affect change. We have agency and sometimes the mass media conspires, and I don’t mean it in a technical sense, but it almost is, is designed to convince us.

[00:58:01] We don’t have individual agency, and I think what her books and what her work proves is that we absolutely do most of the most important innovations and technological advances and societal advances have come from individual tinkering and problem solving. Largely by, by people with an entrepreneurial mindset, and of course, her insight about the importance of resilience and our conversation right at the end about the necessity of margin.

[00:58:30] And I would say to those of you who’ve been listening to the Double Win Show for a while, this issue with margin is really important. The change is not gonna slow down anytime soon. It’s coming faster, it’s coming harder, and it’s imperative that we carve out some time to have some margin so that we can be resilient and absorb the changes.

[00:58:50] So guys, thank you for listening to this episode of The Double Win Show. You could be a big help to us in getting the word out simply by rating the show, and if you’ve got time to review it. So until next week, keep pursuing the double win. Thanks.