The Glory of Small Things: Ian Bogost on How To Be Enchanted by Diet Coke Cans & Plane Tickets

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everyone. It's always nice having old friends back on the show. Ian Bogost is a very well known Atlantic columnist, professor, author. He was back on the show in June 2020, six years more than six years ago, talking about how the tech industry might be able to change for the better. Back then, he had a new book out called Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games. [Play Anything was published in 2016] He has a new book out right now. It's called The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life. So maybe in contrast to the tech industry changing for the better, this is a book about how we can all change for the better. Ian is joining us from his home office in Saint Louis, Missouri. He's moved, over this last six years. Last time he was on the show, he was in Atlanta. Ian, congratulations on the new book. It's getting huge amount of visibility. Everywhere I go, I bump into the small stuff, New Yorker, Guardian.

00:01:38 Ian Bogost: That's great. I'm glad to hear that.

00:01:39 Andrew Keen: Of course. Well, is would it be fair to say that this is a book not about, improving the tech industry or changing it for the better, but changing ourselves for the better? Yeah.

00:01:53 Ian Bogost: That's right. I think one of the I've been covering the tech industry for a really long time, and I've been a part of the technology industry since early in my career. And I realized over the last ten years or so that maybe we were a little too obsessed with how technology and the tech industry was making our lives worse or better. And I became much more interested in, I guess, the bigger picture of everything that we encounter as human beings that live in physical bodies. So, yeah, it's about technology. The book discusses technology and, you know, admits to some of the benefits and also some of the downsides of smartphone life and AI and all that, but it's really about our lives as human beings in the world.

00:02:41 Andrew Keen: The h word, humans. You write about reclaiming the sensory enchantment of everyday life. Is there a religious quality to this book? Enchantment is, of course, a word that was traditionally associated with religion. Max Weber, the great German turn of the century turn of the twentieth century sociologist wrote about the defining quality of modernity being disenchantment.

00:03:11 Ian Bogost: If you

00:03:13 Andrew Keen: what is, is enchantment a religious idea for you?

00:03:17 Ian Bogost: I think it's a I think it's a spiritual idea, for sure. And I think that, you know, living in the secular age that we do, we have all been seeking some kind of replacement for religion. It could be religion itself, or it could be a proxy for it. You know, some would say that technology itself became, religious or its own kind of religion. I think that people are looking for meaning, and I think enchantment is one path to meaning. But it is a spiritual idea and a I don't know. I mean, maybe for me, a sort of for those who know my work, maybe a surprisingly optimistic and even spiritual book. The difference here for me is that everyday life business, that the place where I locate, the kind of meaning I'm interested in here anyway, is through the ordinary experiences that we have every single day, every single moment even, rather than in those big stuff moments that only happen once in a while. And I do think it's a spiritual book, though.

00:04:26 Andrew Keen: Another word you use, and this was associated with a piece you wrote for The Atlantic around the book, is the wonder of everyday life. Yeah. That to some people, that might, Ian, sound rather contradictory because everyday life sounds lacking in wonder. We get up. We have our breakfast. We go on the Internet. We have our lunch. We watch a bit of TV, and we go to bed. And, of course, we do our work as well. What does the word wonder mean?

00:04:55 Ian Bogost: I think wonder is an investment in interest and curiosity. It's, an openness to the idea that meaning and power and some kind of form of liveliness, of vividness can come from almost anywhere. And I think what turned me I I've been working on this idea of wonder for some time. I wrote a kind of straight up philosophy book, in the early twenty tens, and that was one of the first places I explored the idea of wonder. It was a book called Alien Phenomenology, which, you know, is, as I said, a kind of straight up philosophy book. And I realized

00:05:38 Andrew Keen: did rather well. I think It was,

00:05:40 Ian Bogost: you know, for a philosophy book, oh, that's like citing Immanuel Kant and stuff like that.

00:05:44 Andrew Keen: With a title like alien phenomenology or what it's like to be a thing. I mean, the fact that anyone picked it up is an interesting

00:05:50 Ian Bogost: I know. I know. It's so this new book is really you know, it it's philosophical, but it doesn't require any background in philosophy. And the idea I realized the idea that anything whatsoever might be deeply interesting, might be worthy of wonder, that's that was something I had been exploring for quite some time. You know, with The Atlantic, I've written about slushies and toasters and kitchens and slippers and all manner of topics well beyond, you know, whether Google or Meta or whatever is, is doing good or evil. And that sense that ordinary life, everyday life, the getting up and having the coffee, that stuff better deliver meaning. Because if it doesn't, then what are you doing with all that time that you're spending pouring your coffee and moving your cup around and emptying the dishwasher and strolling from place to place and going up and down the stairs and driving your car to work and all of the rest of it. And once I started thinking about it, it just seemed obvious. Like, of course, I want those experiences to be as meaningful as possible, not just to be kind of distractions or, like, slogs, things I have to get through in order to get to the good stuff.

00:07:04 Andrew Keen: You brought up your book Alien Phenomenology or What It's Like to be a Thing. There are certainly, Heideggerian implications in that title. Is, is this new book, The Small Stuff, kind of Heidegger for idiots?

00:07:21 Ian Bogost: I think that I have a friend. I have a couple of friends who are Heideggerians, like, real Heideggerians. And, I told them before the book was published, I said, look. You're gonna tell me it's just Heidegger, and it's fine. You can you know? So you Which isn't bad. It's not bad. I'll take it. You know? I don't mention Heidegger even once, in this book, and I did in the Play Anything book and certainly did in the Alien Phenomenology book. But this idea of, you know, being thrown into a world and having to contend with it, which is very Heideggerian, but then also the relationship that we have with other people and other things, which is really where the alien phenomenology work took a turn, not just with other human beings or other animals or other living creatures, but that, you know, garbage trucks and trash cans and diet Cokes and all the rest of it are like, that's a part of our lives. Like and I think we really have to get away from this sense that the world is either natural or artificial and that, you know, like, going back to nature is the answer to our sense of dissatisfaction. That that's an idea I've been exploring for a very long time, certainly not, you know, not unique in having explored. It's been around, you know, really since Bruno Latour and even beyond that as a way of thinking about the world as being hybridized, as being both cultural and natural. And so you'll find in the small stuff a lot of examples that are about the designed and built and manufactured world as well as the natural, the natural world. And I think those things bet they better bear meaning. You know? Like, I have a whole chapter about Diet Coke cans in the book. And Oh, yeah.

00:08:58 Andrew Keen: I got a problem. A diet. So Yeah. So tell me so we're both Diet Coke guys. Uh-huh. Why should the a Diet Coke can instill a sense of wonder? What's enchanting about Diet Coke?

00:09:16 Ian Bogost: The, I mean, Diet Coke itself isn't the point so much as things like I like Diet Coke, and I drink, you know, a number of Diet Cokes, every day, and so it's a part of my life. And I could think of it as just a compulsion. I could think of it as something that, doesn't define me, but is sort of a distraction from all the other things I might do. Or I could embrace the fact that, you know, once or twice or several times a day, I engage with this object, and I crack the tab open, and I feel the cold metal as it begins to become warmer as I keep it in the room instead of the refrigerator. And I hear the, like, tink and give of the aluminum, that makes up the can. And maybe when I'm done, I crush it into a small patty before tossing it into the recycling bin. And all of those kinds of sensory experiences, it's really what the book is about, is sensory enchant and as you said, those aren't, like, gonna change my life. That's not the place where I derive purpose and deep long term meaning. It's not what my life is about, but it is a part of my life, and it's a part of my life that recurs every day or maybe multiple times a day. And so by inviting yourself to kind of accept that experience as meaningful, it's not just a distraction or not just something to get through or not a diversion or not, just kind of noise that's in the way, but rather that those small moments over time deliver a surprising payload of engagement and enchantment, that our lives overall can become better for so doing. So, you know, for some people, it's gonna be diet Coke. For others, it's, you know, woodworking or walking or tending to their garden or, feeling the steering wheel and gear shift of their automobile or folding their laundry or whatever it might be. We're surrounded by this rich tapestry of things and experiences that are capable of delivering deep meaning.

00:11:12 Andrew Keen: Before we went live, we talked about, a mutual friend, Matthew Crawford. He's written a number of books on these sorts of themes Yeah. Why We Drive, and his best known book was Shop Class as Soulcraft back in 2009, almost twenty years ago. Gosh. Yeah. Does it require is for Ian for your is all the small stuff physical? Are we talking about an analog world, or can there be, is there small stuff in digital which can create enchantment and meaning?

00:11:46 Ian Bogost: I'm glad you asked this because, it's sensory. It's not physical. I refer to the physical world just for convenience sake because it's a nice way of talking about the world outside our head, which is the title of another Matthew Crawford book, actually. [Crawford's book is titled The World Beyond Your Head] The I am very much against the idea that we live in opposition to our technology, especially to our computer technology and our smartphones. It we it's become a little too easy to say that, well, my smartphone is the problem, and if only I could put it away and stop using it and go touch grass, then my life would be better. But one of the reasons that these things are so compelling is because they're so delightful to use, and they're delightful as physical objects. You know? The reason you're so compelled to touch it is because it's delightful to touch. Right?

00:12:33 Andrew Keen: Moving mind too. Yeah. And then I got the tuxed

00:12:37 Ian Bogost: case on it, and it it's got this smooth glass surface. And, you know, when these things first came out, they just demanded that we touch them. They were so inviting. And when you use, either a touchscreen device like this or a computer or the screen in your car, whatever it might be, the elevator, you are always dealing with a combination of, you know, physical and digital systems. Like, almost everything is hybridized like that this way. And when I go to, I don't know, check the weather and I see a little animation of a thunderstorm icon or something like that, that's sensory too, and that's delightful. So we absolutely need to accept and allow ourselves to accept how technology has improved our lives materially, but also we don't have to fight the fact that those sensations are also small stuff opportunities. They're also opportunities for feeling enchanted by the sensory world. It would just be a terrible mistake to think that this kind of thing only exists when we put our technologies down. Because, you know, when you think about it, everything whatsoever is kind of technological. Like, the clothing on my body is technological that I have a, like, a telephone handset next to me on the desk, and I love holding, like, the real telephone in my hand and feeling it against my ear and the kind of intimacy of speaking and hearing someone that way. But that's certainly a technology. We've always been negotiating between different forms of technologies that we use to kind of extend our bodies and to live in different ways in the world. The smartphone's just, you know, one of the latest and one of the more powerful contemporary examples of that.

00:14:15 Andrew Keen: Even language. What we're using

00:14:16 Ian Bogost: Language. Right.

00:14:17 Andrew Keen: To talk with one another is technology. And I was actually pleased that you you're in allowing me to be enchanted with, technology because I recently got a very nice new Apple smartwatch

00:14:30 Ian Bogost: Uh-huh.

00:14:31 Andrew Keen: Which enchants me from time to time, excuse the pun. And you note that kids are we should in one of your Atlantic pieces Yeah. That we should allow kids, for example, to have watches because they themselves are enchanting. But what advice then would a parent get from the small stuff, Ian? As you know, you teach college and Yeah. Parents these days are obsessed with what their kids can and can't do online. There are people Oh, it's interesting. Wanna ban not just, social media, but even phones. How do you can you always I mean, you waived your iPhone. I've got one. We talked about watches. Is there stuff that we should be careful about? Is there technology that actually undermines the gratifying life that you write about in the small stuff?

00:15:23 Ian Bogost: I have this idea that I explore in the book in some depth that I call dematerialization, and it's just my name for this notion that we have been kind of slowly disconnected from the physical world over years and decades. And, certainly, computer technology offers the most maybe the most familiar examples of that phenomenon. I'm thinking here's a really simple example. Instead of, getting, like, a physical ticket to go to a concert or a boarding pass to get on a plane, now you've got a QR code in your phone that you scan, and that's really convenient. Super easy. It makes your life better. You don't have to worry about, like, losing your tickets. But that sense of tactile engagement with the ticket that you bought or that you might, like, pin to the bulletin board afterward as a memento after you go to the show. You know, that's kinda gone once you just have the digital scan code that vanishes, immediately when you use it. But that phenomenon, that phenomenon of technological and bureaucratic and economic, there's other forces that have dematerialized us. It's hardly new, and it's hardly limited to just computer technologies. One of my favorite examples that everyone has encountered is when you go to, like, a public restroom and you try to wash your hands and you don't even punch the faucets anymore. You know, you wave them awkwardly.

00:16:44 Andrew Keen: Yeah. That's funny you bring that up. That's one of my biggest pet peeves. Yeah.

00:16:48 Ian Bogost: Everyone so

00:16:49 Andrew Keen: annoying because it never works.

00:16:50 Ian Bogost: It never works, and it doesn't really save water or other kinds of resources, either. It's done because it makes things, it makes those kind of spaces easier to manage, for the operators of the, of the building. So, like, to kind of take that idea and connect it back to parents and kids, I think what we have to realize is that, first, our lives are by and large good, and they're better than they used to be at historical scale. We're living very well collectively even if there are problems. But second, we must live in the present and into the future. We can't go back again, and we can't sort of, as much as we might not have chosen some of the ways that we live today, maybe we don't wanna have this kind of strong relationship with our phones or with QR codes instead of menus at a restaurant or whatever it might be. We are living in the present, and that goes for kids too. You cannot deny them this ability to live a contemporary life. They will work it out, and they need to in order to become adults who will then invent the future for all of us again. So we need to engage with the world that we were given. And that doesn't mean accepting all of its problems. That doesn't mean that we can't change it. But day to day, moment to moment, there's not a lot that a normal person, an ordinary person can do to make sort of, you know, big picture complex system change. Instead, they should focus on the fact that they're living a pretty good life and also how to negotiate with it, how to live together in that life. I think one of the big mistakes parents have made in relation to their kids and their teenagers is that we don't think that we don't live in the same world together in a way. You know, we've sort of we've always divided ages up arbitrarily. Oh, now you're 18 and so you can vote or you're 21 and so you can drink and you're 13 so you can get on social media. Like, it doesn't make any natural sense. Like anything, parenting involves living together with your kids and figuring out exactly what they need at what times. One of the reasons why the smartwatch was so compelling to me was that it offered for, for my 12 year old, now 12 year old, an opportunity to engage with the technological world that I felt comfortable with, that she felt ready with, that abstracted away some of the social media ills that smartphones don't necessarily deliver, but that they suggest, and gave her the ability to, like, text and, you know, call people and, interact with her older siblings and with her family, and that was important. You know, that's a way that we derive meaning, not just from the communication, but even just from the act of touching that screen on your phone or feeling it buzz on your wrist, which are those kind of gratification examples like I discussed in the book.

00:19:40 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I wonder whether some of this parental obsession with controlling our kids' tech and allowing them to get a smartphone or be on social media or have a watch, is that the parents themselves are somehow pouring their lack of gratification, if that's the right way of putting it, into their kids and making them suffer like they do.

00:20:02 Ian Bogost: Well, we're living these kind of just very sensorily depleted lives, you know, now.

00:20:08 Andrew Keen: Impoverished Yeah. In some way.

00:20:10 Ian Bogost: We are obsessed with outcomes and goals and the future, and everything has become, like, highly hyper optimized, and everything worth doing is deemed worth doing because of some future payoff. It's gonna help you advance in your career or help you make more money or get a better house or get your kids into a better school or improve the status of your neighborhood or, you know, allow you to advance your side hustle on social media or whatever it is. And we just don't live in the present moment nearly as much as we should. I was about to say as we used to, but the truth is that we live equally as much in the present moment as we always have because we can't change that. Time is the way time is, but we're sort of trying to pass it by or to pretend like it doesn't matter. And when you're with your kids, especially when you're, like, together with your kids doing different things, sometimes it's just that sense of physical presence, of co presence that's meaningful. Like, even if you're silent together or working on totally different things, one of you is cooking in the kitchen and your child is, you know, watching their show on the iPad or coloring or thumbing through a magazine, at the kitchen table or island or in the living room, that sense of their presence of hearing them, of smelling their scents or seeing their shadows pass by, those are, like, the things you miss when it's over, when they grow up. You don't miss, like, you know, picking them up from swim practice or even, like, working on a big project together. So those, like, small scale, just moment to moment interactions with the world, there's they're magical to me. They're like miracles every time, and they happen all the time. There's a surplus of them. We don't have to save up for them or wait for them. If I can add something here too, I think that adults over the last well, since I was a kid anyway, we erase opportunities for kids and especially teenagers to live in the physical world, in the sensory world. I went to the shopping mall the other day because I had to run an errand. And there's, like, a big sign when you walk into the mall that says, if you're a kid, you can't be here alone. You have to be with an adult, which is bananas. Right? Like, that's what we would do as kids. We'd go places. We'd ride our bikes or we'd take the bus or, eventually, we'd drive to the corner store or the mall or whatever. We just hang out in physical space together. And so on the one hand, you have people saying, we gotta get these kids off their phones. But on the other hand, you have foe the same people saying, well, they better not go in public, though. That would be inappropriate.

00:22:50 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And you wrote about this, in an excellent Atlantic piece about the cult of delayed gratification being a lie. But does that require you, and in a sense I come back to this issue of enchantment and faith and soulfulness Does this require us to reject the idea of an afterlife? Because the cult of delayed gratification, certainly in religious terms, was something that Max Weber wrote about in The Protestant Ethic and The Origins of Capitalism [as spoken — Weber's title is The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism], the idea of hard work somehow, even if we couldn't be sure, would guarantee some sort of salvation. Yeah. Do we need to get rid of the afterlife if we're gonna really, in this life, be enchanted?

00:23:35 Ian Bogost: I think one of the I mean, one of the struggles here is that, you know, as I mentioned already, our culture has secularized so much that, you know, more or less, on average, we already got rid of God and the afterlife. And those things, they that was where meaning lived. Right? You did good works whether it was Weber or whether it was a sort of, you know, like Calvinist or Lutheran tradition driving you to future outcomes, future work as having justified your time on earth because you were gonna get an infinite time in heaven close to God. Like, that idea already fell away, like, long before smartphones came on the scene, and it's only accelerated over the last couple decades. Americans generally, don't go to church not nearly as much as they used to, and their spiritual lives have been replaced by kind of materialist lives in a way. Right? The thing that you pass out now if you're lucky enough is, like, generational wealth rather than, a place in heaven. So I actually think that the secularization I'm not gonna call it a problem. The process of secularization, has only amplified our future orientation, partly because, like, our lives got so easy and so good. You used to have to, like, do more things for yourself day to day in order to achieve those good works. And now you can, you know, you can just outsource it. Right? Or, you know, I'll just have someone. I'll just, like, TaskRabbit this away. I'll DoorDash my dinner instead of making it. And so the dematerialization process is like I don't really talk about secularization in the book, but it's in there in terms of the way that culture has changed, the way that we don't have communities together in the same way. It's been parallel, I think, to that process of being disconnected, from the physical world. And then what you've emptied out of that secularized life is some kind of meaning at the end. Instead, that got replaced by, like, happiness or purpose or fulfillment. Or, again, sometimes it's just wealth as the proxy for it.

00:25:34 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And, of course, wealth is easy to quantify for better or worse.

00:25:38 Ian Bogost: And we love measuring stuff. I mean, measuring stuff is

00:25:40 Andrew Keen: But that's

00:25:40 Ian Bogost: one of the

00:25:41 Andrew Keen: problems, though. I mean, I take your point on the watch, but one of the problems with the watch is it tends to quantify everything, health, distance. Yeah.

00:25:49 Ian Bogost: Yeah. I mean, I've been struggling, this, Andrew, with myself. Like, I got you know, I have the watch. I've got this health wearable thing. I I've gotten in a lot better shape over the last, you know, year, year and a half. And just in the last week, you know, as I was leading up to publication of the book, I was thinking about this. I was thinking, like, wait. Are all of these metrics, all of these sort of optimization strategies, which I'm, you know, kind of explicitly critiquing in this book and in my other work, are they making me less connected to my own physical body, which I've just written an entire book about? And I had to conclude that, yeah, they kind of are. And so I struggle with this problem as much as anyone because it's a very contemporary problem. We have just been we've been put in a world that's quantified and datafied and measured and given feedback loops to everything. And so it simply becomes harder to engage, like, qualitatively or abstractly or in terms of meaning instead of in terms of numbers with many different things, almost anything. What I like when I go for a walk in the morning, which I do most mornings, isn't the steps that my watch counts. It's the experience of moving in my physical body, of encountering the weather, of seeing my street again on another day, of crunching twigs or rocks underfoot of being in the world, and yet even I am still drawn to those numbers as a so called measure of my performance.

00:27:14 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's interesting you bring up enjoying nature. I mean, your there was a piece about the little the enjoyment in terms of the small stuff of licking trees.

00:27:28 Ian Bogost: Some of

00:27:28 Andrew Keen: this stuff is I guess, can be parroted. But the environmental implications, Ian, particularly in our age of global warming and urbanization or suburbanization are obvious. When I was thinking about your book, I occurred to me the music of someone like Messiaen and his love of birdsong. Yeah. How essential is the environment of physical nature to appreciate the small stuff? It's not all looking inside ourselves.

00:27:59 Ian Bogost: There's not

00:28:00 Andrew Keen: an element of narcissism here. I mean

00:28:02 Ian Bogost: Right.

00:28:02 Andrew Keen: It requires us to enjoy the world itself and nature, doesn't it?

00:28:06 Ian Bogost: It does. It does. I mean, I was just reading an article. Maybe you also read it about how, like, the bird population has been so decimated over the last fifty years that the scent the song like, when you go outside in the morning, you hear fewer birds than you used to, and you would never know. And that's a classic kind of gratification example to me, that idea of waking up in the morning to the birds singing or going outside with your coffee or to pick up the newspaper when we had physical newspapers, and that would be a gratifying experience. You're alive another day and so are the birds, and there you are. And now there's just less of that. There's less of that song in the air, but the air is still there in the clouds. And, you know, we still live in our physical bodies in the nondigital world. And so nature is super important, but I would put it not just in terms of, like as I was saying earlier, not just in terms of nature itself, but the whole just apparatus of being a physical being in all of the varied ways that takes place. And my life over the course of any day involves the natural world. It involves the design world, the built environment. It involves things that I construct myself. It involves, manufactured goods. It construct myself. It involves, manufactured goods. It involves, aspects of the environment that are on the wane or that are at risk and others that are thriving. And so I think having, like, a diverse diet, a diverse a sensor a diverse diet in your sensory life is super important, which is quite a bit different from this sort of, like, go back to nature and you will be cured of your worldly conceits idea that some people have. Like, oh, I'm gonna lock my phone up for the day. I'm gonna go into the forest and, like, reset myself. But when people get into that mindset, they're thinking only in terms of, like, recharging themselves so that they can work another day, I think, rather than the rather than for the opportunity to engage, not just deeply, but at a surface level regularly in the natural world. So a little bit of nature much of the time is much better to me than, like, occasionally going to a national park or taking a vacation to the rainforest and then coming back and holding yourself up in your office writing your app.

00:30:23 Andrew Keen: Coming back, Ian, to Heidegger, of course, he was an incredibly controversial political figure, closely associated with the Nazis, very close also to Hannah Arendt. And some people have accused him or many people have accused him at best of being a quietist when it comes to politics, of not taking a stand against the Nazis. Could one make the same argument about your position in the small stuff on

00:30:54 Ian Bogost: Yeah.

00:30:54 Andrew Keen: Leading a gratifying life? I mean, there's a great fashion these days for, for writings on stoicism.

00:31:02 Ian Bogost: Yeah. That's right. In the

00:31:03 Andrew Keen: age of Trump, could this kind of philosophy be accused of being a form of quietism in the same way as the Roman philosophies of

00:31:13 Ian Bogost: Yeah.

00:31:14 Andrew Keen: Stoicism were a rejection against politics?

00:31:17 Ian Bogost: Right. It could. And I anticipate this critique and talk a little bit about it in the book because I think we got ourselves into a I'm gonna call it a rut, especially in, like, online discourse where we seek the sort of higher order moral position, and the most abstract and highest level moral political position is the one that is sort of the most righteous. And so, yeah, like, someone like me comes along and they're saying, well, what about the twigs that are crunching under your feet, or what about, like, crackling the aluminum side of the Diet Coke can? And that can sound, you know, like, just completely insane. Like, what are you talking about? The world is on fire, and you're worried about my, you know, a Diet Coke can. That's completely wrong headed. So and I think there are absolutely gonna be readers who are gonna have that critique of the book even after reading my, you know, my attempt to address it. And here's the way I attempt to address it. We have to we are and have to be both political creatures, moral creatures, and creatures who live moment to moment, day to day in our bodies in the world. We have to be able to do both because we do both. So I'm not asking anyone to change their values or their beliefs to stop pursuing social or political change of whatever flavor they want. Right? I'm only suggesting that in addition to all that, in addition to those future oriented big stuff, happiness, purpose driven ways of finding contentment, that you also become open to the opportunity to add the particular flavor of contentment that gratification, that moment to moment sensory experience provides. We have to be able to do both. Otherwise, we're missing out. We're missing out.

00:33:07 Andrew Keen: Arendt, of course, famously requotes Aristotle and us being political beings to develop her modern theory of politics. Can one be enchanted and be politically in at the same time, or does that lead to new kinds of dangerous utopianism?

00:33:25 Ian Bogost: It's kind of funny. I mean, I've been thinking about this. I'm gonna say this without knowing what this the antecedent of this is, this sort of problem space that you've identified. This, like, this idea that everything has to be kind of fully formed and it's one thing. And I don't know if that makes sense. It strikes me that what actually happens to human beings over the course of history, not just in the contemporary moment, is that we occupy constantly shifting and changing attentions and interests. And, you know, like, one moment, I will be thinking about abstract concepts or political values or environmental concerns, and the next moment, I will be kind of, like, engaged with some trinket in my hands as I try to open a can of beans to cook dinner with. Right? And I think what interests me is the idea that at some point, we lost the ability to, like, shift between those modes of being naturally or fluently. I don't wanna blame the Internet because in some ways, like, the Internet is, like, completely obsessed with ordinary life. You go online and my Instagram is just full of hot dogs now, you know, or, like, people spreading food on kitchen counters.

00:34:39 Andrew Keen: Oh, that you're not a big fan of looks,

00:34:43 Ian Bogost: ma'am. Oh, right. Yeah. I wrote about that. I mean, I think that what bothers me about that kind of Internet life, that sort of looks maxing or anything maxing Internet life is the extremism of it. Maybe that's what I'm trying to say here, that we have to be aware of the fact that we are kind of extremists all the time about everything. And so the argument that I'm making in the small stuff about sensory experience could be taken to extremes. Oh, you should only have, like, you know, delightful sensory encounters, and that's sort of the mistake that the instant gratification of behavioral scientists of the mid century made in my view. But I'm not saying that. I'm simply saying that as I'm talking to you, I can, like, touch and feel the windscreen on my microphone and the smoothness of the wood desk in front of me, and I can feel the warmth in the air because I turned off the air conditioning so it wouldn't blow while we were speaking? And then I'm gonna turn it back on again, and a cool breeze will reach my forehead and my arms. And those kinds of experience, it's not that that's all of life, but it's some of life. So I think we've just become extremists kind of, about everything. And our critiques begin with the assumption of extremism rather than the idea that our lives are rich and diverse already. And it's like, a lot of stuff is just not a big deal. We're just encountering it. But then somehow it got turned into symbols online, and so it became an opportunity for kind of forward looking obsessionalism.

00:36:08 Andrew Keen: Yeah. In a way, the small stuff is against our current brave new world. And, of course, Huxley's Brave New World was full of soma, of psychedelic drugs Yeah. Which intensified our feelings. Psychedelics are back in fashion even, and you don't need me to tell you that. You go to a tech conference, which you and I do all the time, and half the panel seem to be about the importance and perhaps economic opportunity of psychedelics. How do they play into the small stuff? I mean, psychedelics, of course, intensify both large and small experiences. Are you for or against psychedelics, or is that not part of the argument?

00:36:47 Ian Bogost: Personal opinion about psychedelics? What interests me about psychedelics or even about cannabis or any, you know, any kind of, like, once controlled substance that's become kind of normalized is that whereas psychedelics used to be a way of, like, more deeply encountering bodily sensation, now they're a way of sort of, like, escaping back into the mind in a way, like, getting new ideas that can then you can then derive value out of. Like, that's why they're that's one of the reasons, at least, why they're popular, among the tech set. And you also see folks, you know, wealthy people, but also especially folks in the technology industry trying to, like, escape their bodies, you know, whether it's through, like, singularitarian dreams of uploading or through, like, maximizing longevity through, you know, injections or through Yeah. A lot of like, really Wileyism [unclear — possibly “Kurzweilism”]. Right. Right. You've got Kurzweil on the one side, and then you've got, like, Bryan Johnson on the other.

00:37:44 Andrew Keen: It's a Thiel [unclear — likely Peter Thiel], of course, everywhere and nowhere.

00:37:47 Ian Bogost: So I do kinda feel like this new interest in, like, substances that once were meant to intensify the feeling of bodily encounter have now been adopted as a way of maybe avoiding it or moving beyond it, and that feels like a really fascinating inversion.

00:38:02 Andrew Keen: So you're for or against, or you're dodging the question?

00:38:04 Ian Bogost: I guess I'm done. Well, I I'm not against. I just think that everything has a place. You know? And so if you're seeking out, whether it's psychedelics or cannabis or alcohol or smoking or crinkling your diet Coke can I mean, not to be, like, Aristotelian about it, but if that overtakes your whole life, it's probably a problem? If it's one element in, like, a diverse sensory diet, then I think it's good.

00:38:32 Andrew Keen: Well, people are just listening. Ian is wearing a very psychedelic looking shirt. So if you want your psychedelics without take popping the pills, then just look at Ian Bogost. Finally, Ian, in a way, are you preparing us in the small stuff for the AI age? I mean, you're a tech guy. You know what he debates about how AI is gonna do the big stuff, do the heavy lifting. We're not gonna have to work anymore. Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't. But in a way, is it coincidental that this book is coming out on the verge of our AI age where we're scratching our head and thinking, what are we gonna do with ourselves? Because we're not gonna need to work anymore because the smart machines are gonna do all the work.

00:39:18 Ian Bogost: Right. I mean, what we know from history about that is that every time we've been promised a life of full leisure because of automation, we've instead gotten new forms of work. But setting that question aside, because it's not really as you as you've observed, it's not really at the heart of the issue. It's more like in this moment that we're currently living in where AI can do so many things at least somewhat adeptly, I think people are realizing, okay. I maybe got a little too involved with my computational life or with my extrasensory, my non sensory life. I would like to get back to that somehow. And I think it's possible that AI might even push us back into the sensory world that we think that we left when we started using our phones or our computers obsessively. Like, one of the things that I've found in my own use of generative AI, like, LLM kind of services, is I u I ask questions about the things I want to do in the physical world. Like, I was just talking to Chad GPT just the other day about, like, how to fix the thermostat in my range, and it's like, it knows exactly what I've got. It tells me what part to get. It helps me understand where I might have

00:40:26 Andrew Keen: to Does it tell you to lick trees?

00:40:28 Ian Bogost: It doesn't tell me to lick trees, but it you know, it's not that it's right. It's that it's sort of it's not always right. It's that it's pushing me toward right enough approaches to reengagement with the physical world that I think that might be the signal that I'm most personally interested about the AI future. Like, how we can learn to coexist with the extra computational world thanks to AI rather than just have it replace everything that we do.

00:40:54 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it. Ian Bogost's new book, The Small Stuff, is about how to reclaim sensory enchantment. And I think there's something rather enchanting, Ian, about you. You're excellent guest and enchanting guest. So congratulations on the new book.

00:41:10 Ian Bogost: Oh, thanks so much.

00:41:11 Andrew Keen: It'll be great to get you back on the show again to learn more about AI. Thank you so much.

00:41:15 Ian Bogost: Thanks so much.