Hey, What Do You Think About the Internet (and What We Might Have Lost)?

Nathan Wrigley:
Hey.

BobWP:
Hey.

Nathan Wrigley:
How’s it going?

BobWP:
Good.

Nathan Wrigley:
What do you think about the internet, Bob?

BobWP:
Well, I can think about when it wasn’t around. Oh. It seemed much quieter.

Nathan Wrigley:
Oh, I’m so glad you went there first. You could have gone off in any direction, but that’s where I was hoping to guide you. Wasn’t it quiet?

BobWP:
Yeah, it was. It was just— sometimes I think about it. I think I even wrote a post sometime about a little something, just thinking back before, you know, everything that we did and now how we do it and stuff. And I have an interesting example. So I love playing the game Solitaire, the card game. Oh yeah, I’ve always played. I’ve played it since I was a teenager, and it just was always a game. I just enjoyed playing it. And then, you know, along came actually being able to play it online. And when I was playing it the other day on my— I think it was on my Kindle or something— I was thinking, it’s so weird because I do it so much differently. You know, I kind of push that deal button all the time. I don’t even think about it. Oh, deal. Oh yeah, there’s something here. That works or do push a button that suddenly makes something happen where back when I had my cards laid out, I’d have to think and actually take the point to pick up the card and place it somewhere. And I had to make sure, yeah, this fits there. But other times now it’s like you get this lazy where it almost guesses for you and completes everything.

Nathan Wrigley:
And so you, you, you interact with just that one aspect, but you’ve got a different, a different approach to that one activity. Then you would do if you were playing it physically. That’s fascinating.

BobWP:
Yeah. And it’s really weird because I think I used to kind of just enjoy the slowness of it. And now they give you awards, best time. They want you to just go crazy and try to do this quickly. And that was never the point of it.

Nathan Wrigley:
There’s always data. There’s always data.

BobWP:
Yeah.

Nathan Wrigley:
So that quiet thing, like I said, I think I’m old enough, you are old enough. We both have a memory of growing up where the internet didn’t exist. And honestly, I’m going to sound like a Luddite and I’m going to sound like a bit of a curmudgeon, but I’m so glad that it wasn’t around when I grew up. I’m so glad equally that I’m around when it happened because, oh, I’m so conflicted, Bob, basically. On the one hand, there’s this whole horizon of amazing possibility that the internet presents, and then you look in the other direction and there’s this whole black hole of horror and morass and argumentation and fighting and disinformation and all of that. It’s like flip a coin on any given day whether you think the internet’s great or really bad.

BobWP:
Yeah, it’s crazy because I think of, well, you know, doing research on the internet and I’ve always thought about this because I always go back to the days when I was in school and we would have to do a report and we would be driven to the public library and you would go to the card catalog and you’d make notes and, you know, there was, there’s, yeah, and I don’t want to sound like, oh yeah, you know, get off my lawn type of thing, but it’s, it’s, It’s, there’s something about the, yeah, it’s just everything’s so quick and yeah, we want to save time and there’s amazing things, you know, we can pull out easily, but there’s some things that I think back on and I just think, wow, you know, some, and I even think of, you know, the thinking process, how much that has changed.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah. So I’ll regale you with a story. Now this story is not meant to sound like doom, and it’s equally not meant to sound like unicorns either. It’s just, I’ll tell you the story. So when I was a kid, so no internet, there was telly, but the telly came through the air. You had to have an aerial on the top of your house. There was no internet aspect to it. And so you would get whatever was broadcast at that moment. You could change channel, but you couldn’t sort of say, okay, pause this. Restart that in a minute. You just got what you got. And I used to watch this program on Saturday when I was a kid. It was a kids’ TV show and they did this competition over several weeks and each week they would ask you another question. And if you got to the end of these 4 questions, so 4 weeks, you could then submit all your answers and win this really nice prize. I’ve completely forgotten what the prize was, but I was absolutely captured. By what that prize was. I wanted it so bad. And on the last of the 4 questions was a picture of a butterfly. And the simple question was, identify this butterfly. That was all you had to do. You had to write down the name of that butterfly. Okay. So I didn’t know what that butterfly was. And so here’s where the story actually begins. I then thought, how am I going to find out? What that butterfly is. So, okay, as soon as the program finished, I got on my bike, did the 25-minute cycle into the local library, asked the librarian in the local library if they’ve got any books containing butterfly. You know, you lose an hour getting all the books off the shelves and plonking them on the table and going through them all. Could not find that butterfly. So I asked the lady, have you got any more books? She said, no, this is all we’ve got, but we can order more books in. I said, yeah, let’s order more books in. Does that cost me anything? No, no, it’s completely free. That’s just how the system works, but we’ll have to order them in, but it’ll be 2 weeks. You have to wait for 2 weeks. So I waited 2 weeks, went back, and this whole new cavalcade of books had arrived. Searched through them all. Nope, it wasn’t there. So, okay, it’s not here anymore. Are there any more? Yeah, there’s a few more books. It’ll be another 2 weeks. And eventually found a picture of that butterfly, and it was a fairly quirky butterfly. If you knew butterflies, you’d probably get it in a heartbeat. But if you were me, no, I didn’t get it. But eventually found it, submitted my entry into the competition, got the answer right, but I didn’t win, which was fine. I got over that. It took me a couple of years, but I got over it. But the point was that picture of a butterfly, I can now point my phone at that butterfly, and in the time it takes for my finger to come off the camera shutter button, I will have that information in front of me. The camera will somehow send that signal to, in this case, let’s say Google. Google will then figure it out, give me the answer back. Okay, so all of that on the face of it seems brilliant. Look at that. Look at what you got instantly. But look at what I missed. Look at the application that I had to apply. Look at the things that I had to do, the conversations that I had to go through, the patience that I had to exercise, the physical exercise that I got on my bike backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, the hunger for that thing because it was constantly out of reach for me. All of those little, very human things I, I don’t know if you’re picking up what I’m putting down here, but— Oh yeah, exactly. Something there. Yep.

BobWP:
Yeah, yeah. And that’s it. It’s, it’s lost. There’s so many things besides just speed that you lose through the speed of thinking, I need to know this, typing it in and learning about it right there.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah.

BobWP:
You know, in a matter of a few seconds, it’s not just you taking a bit more brain work, but you’re, you know, the physical activity, the social skills of communicating back and forth with the librarian and stuff. And now it’s just, um, yeah, those things.

Nathan Wrigley:
Immediate. Yeah, immediate. And also, um, I don’t know, there’s just something about that sort of patience to it, that sort of contemplative in for the long game, figuring out your place in the world kind of thing. I’m not really encapsulating that very well, but I hope you can sort of understand it. And I think there are bits of that that I miss. And I think that my brain got wired in a certain way because of those things. And I do wonder, and again, this is going to sound really weird, I do wonder what the neurology of a brain an infant brain growing up in the last 5, 10 years, I wonder how it differs. I wonder what the capacity for patience is. I wonder what the, well, I don’t really know, but I just wonder how we are evolving because of the internet, how we differ. I don’t really have an axe to grind there, but it’s curious.

BobWP:
I have kind of a similar, I mean, this just came to my mind is, and in the United States they would, during the time I was in school and stuff, they would always have this project where you would take a state in the US and you would write a letter and ask for information about the state. At you, I think we’d send it to like the Chamber of Commerce or something or somewhere.

Nathan Wrigley:
Oh, nice. Yeah.

BobWP:
Yeah. And then, you get all this information back and then you had to write reports or give an oral report or something like that. But again, like you said, there was this whole thing of, okay, you— it was kind of exciting. You’re writing this letter and actually putting it in the mail, you know, feel really grown up doing that. And then there’d be this huge manila envelope that come back packed with brochures, you know, and it was basically a lot of tourism stuff, but It was just like, wow, look at all this stuff. So you pull it all out, everybody’s looking at each other’s and stuff, and then you would actually start going through it and write a report about that state. But you would really have to scour through all these different things they sent you. And that was, you know, a single project. And it took a while because, you know, between sending and receiving, we were all anticipating and they’d slowly come in. That stuff. And it was like, yeah, there was so much, even the excitement of showing your friends, oh wow, look what I got.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah.

BobWP:
This book, this is really a thick one or something.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My book’s thicker than yours.

BobWP:
Look.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah.

BobWP:
But that, that kind of, that came to mind.

Nathan Wrigley:
The, the curious thing about that is I, I I can, can well remember that same thing, that anticipation of stuff dropping in the mail. You get a thing and because you were a child and you didn’t get much mail, you pretty much knew that that was the thing from the— well, in your case, that the state, in my case, it may have been something for a competition I entered or something like that. But ripping it open, that expectation, I mean, it certainly beats an email dropping into your inbox with a PDF of the brochure that they actually sent you in person. But then also, I think just pivoting a little bit, the internet back when it was invented. So you’ve got CERN and Tim Berners-Lee and all the other people that were associated with the dawn of the internet. It felt like it was this information exchange. It was just going to be like, oh, we’ve invented hyperlinks so we can link from one document to another. And that felt like that was it. It was just, let’s connect the world’s information so that people can find it out. Certainly no expectation at that point that it was going to end up being I don’t know, social networks, Zoom calls, work done via an open communication system like email or social networks with their messaging and all that kind of stuff. And it’s all just sort of crept up on us and got into our lives and prized open our addiction responses, if you like. And now more or less everybody seems to be on the internet all the time.

BobWP:
And I’m sure you’ve experienced this where, you know, how rapidly things have changed once the internet and being able to do things online, you know, you think back like one of the examples I was telling somebody one time is when I was doing print design, I would do the design, you know, I’d pretty much create the file online and stuff. And upload all the photography. And some of the times there was, you know, you’d always have to do very high resolution photography to have it go out on print and you’d send all these files. And we lived in a— we lived on an island that was— had really crappy internet and they weren’t going to speed it up. And it was like 5 megabytes or something. It just— it was just unreal.

Nathan Wrigley:
Watch the images loading line by line.

BobWP:
So I— so the printer was trip off the ferry and then like about an hour drive, the printer I use. So when I started sending them files online, I would literally zip the entire thing at night. I would push it to send, upload FTP, you know, that was how you would upload it to them and wake up in the morning and hope it made it. And 50 times, 50% of the time it. 50% of the did time it said not. Interruption, timed out, whatever. And I’d have to get and spend like a 90-minute one-way, you know, 3 hours round trip to go to the printer and actually drop off the files and stuff. And, and now it’s like, you know, boom, things are done immediately. But, you know, that in a way that was amazing because even back then there was better internet if I lived somewhere else, of course. But you dealt with it and it was, yeah, it was kind of the way it was and it just ended up getting better and better. But yeah, you know, we, we, you know, it’s just so funny when people complain about, you know, oh man, this has taken so long to upload or my site is taking 5 seconds to load. Yeah.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah. Oh, oh, so that’s really curious. So, you know, when you go on to like, Imagine that you’re on the internet somewhere, you’re browsing social media and you’re into WordPress or something like that, and you stumble across a load of posts which are about speed optimization and stuff like that. And I know that this all— this wisdom is true. know, You the longer it takes for your site to load, the less likely you are to get seen and for the search engines to raise the profile of your website, but also for the people to actually spend time waiting for your website to load. But in many cases, We’re measuring this stuff in milliseconds. And honestly, it’s like, hold on, wait, this is the length of time it takes me to sneeze and we can’t tolerate it. This is unacceptable. It cannot pass. This is not allowed. And it’s all true. All of that is true.

BobWP:
You. Google will penalize.

Nathan Wrigley:
The people will penalize you. But at the same time, it’s like, wait, I can sneeze and that’s the length of time we’re talking about. But the entire population is completely, they’re unaccepting of that. No, no, no, no, no, no. We haven’t got milliseconds. No, no. We’ve all been rewired, haven’t we?

BobWP:
We definitely lost our patience.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah.

BobWP:
Everything has to be, I mean, that’s how it’s like if this doesn’t happen, amount of time. And yeah, it’s all understandable. And that’s how it’s, over time, it’s grown to where we expect it more and more. And, you know, it’s not that it’s— but when you compare it to the, you know, back whenever, it’s, it’s really kind of incomparable. You know, it’s not a fair comparison, but it’s also, you see where we have as even humans, just because of how we interact with the computer and stuff, our expectations, how incredible they’ve changed. And, you know, for a lot of people, like you said, I’m glad I lived and grew up in a time of non-internet because of experiencing that, the internet suddenly being there for the public and all the things that have happened since have been amazing and stuff. But that time before was, um, you think back on some of that stuff and, you know, that, and it kind of goes to the same old thing when you were a kid, you know, you didn’t sit on a computer, you didn’t, I mean, you’d watch maybe TV, but I swear we were outside doing stuff 90% of the time or doing something inside. You didn’t just look at something, you know.

Nathan Wrigley:
Well, that’s, that’s a curious thing. So, um, so I have a brother, he’s very different from me. He, I was into going out every minute of day. every So, okay, I’ll lay some groundwork. The TV that was provided in the UK was very different to the diet that you had in America in that we only had, I think when I was growing up, 3 channels and that was literally it. There was no 4th channel, which subsequently there was. And now we have hundreds of channels.

BobWP:
Yeah. In the US, when I grew up, there was 3 channels.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Right. And also those where they would have a little tiny slot of, I don’t know, 40 minutes, 50 minutes, an hour, something like that of kids programming each day. And as a child, that was the only bit of the telly I was interested in. So if I was going to sit down and watch telly, it would be between 4 and 5, and then that bit was over and we were back to adult programming, which was of no interest to me, news, whatever it was. So I spent more or less all my time outdoors, like completely outdoors, out on my bike, hanging out with my friends, doing the typical thing, getting mucky, throwing mud at each other, being in rivers, all of that.

BobWP:
Yeah, whatever.

Nathan Wrigley:
My brother though was very different. He was much more insular. He wasn’t really that interested in going out. He was in his own head a lot more, but he was still, because you can’t just sit staring at a screen because there was nothing on the screen of interest. He developed so many hobbies. So even though he was inside all the time, He was always doing stuff because it was either that or, okay, let’s stare at a wall because that’s fun. So I think we’ve lost that now. No, just to paint the other side, obviously the internet’s miraculous. You’ve got, here’s me and you, you are in a completely different part of the continent than I am. We’re talking to each other like we’re down the road, like we’re stood next to each other more or less.

BobWP:
Yeah, exactly.

Nathan Wrigley:
We can communicate in real time with everybody. We can get access to the world’s information. But I think that the sort of thing, and the reason that I raised this as a topic is because I very much get the impression that most people think you need to be binary about this topic. You either love the internet or you hate it. You love technology or you hate it. You’re a Luddite or you’re not. And I don’t think that’s true. I think you can be both. I think you can love bits of technology and still think of the days when I wish that wasn’t around. I wish that bit of technology had never come across because we can all see it’s a disaster. And so that’s my approach to the internet. And I think that’s growing on me as I get older. I think I’m becoming much more introspective about it and thinking, which bits of technology do I want to pick up and which bits do I want to put down? Which bits do I never want to be in my life? Questions around, I don’t know, things like social media and stuff like that. And so I’m not binary about the internet. I think it’s got good bits and it’s got diabolically bad bits. And we’re allowed to be swings and roundabouts. We’re allowed to not just be, it’s all perfect or it’s all doom. It’s somewhere in the middle and you can pick what you like and eschew what you like as well.

BobWP:
How I am too. I mean, you know, there’s things I love about, there’s things sometimes that just drive me nuts about, or things I don’t want to do, or I just, you know, like you said, things I’d stay away from as much as I could. You know, I mean, when I’m at home, you know, half the time when I need to go to my phone, which is not very often because there’s really no reason to go to my phone much, and You know, when it does, it’s like I’m thinking, where is it? You know, because I don’t carry it around on my, you know, it doesn’t live on me or attached to me or something. So it’s sometimes I’m thinking, oh, you know, oh, it’s ringing. Where in the heck is it?

Nathan Wrigley:
I to got go find it. It’s a noise somewhere.

BobWP:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s like, oh, that’s annoying. And then what got me thinking about when you were talking about hobbies, which is now a whole thing, is the online shopping. And, you know, nobody wants to go to the mall anymore. And, you know, it’s like, oh, you go to the mall. But as a kid, man, we would take a Saturday and ride our bikes to this one. And it wasn’t a very big mall, but, you know, yeah. Go to it and you’d walk. It was just incredible. And I was also thinking, I was really into, um, model car, car models when I was small, putting them together.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah.

BobWP:
You know, I think of, okay, you go to Amazon, you go to your wherever you go and you look at them online. I remember standing, there was a store, Sears and Roebuck, and in the basement they had this corner with just walls of You know, models, box the boxes for the car models. And you would just, I’d go down there an hour going through because I was going to buy one, but you could pull each one up and turn it and around hold it.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah.

BobWP:
This looks pretty cool. And everything in that, that whole thing of holding and, you know, there’s still certain things when I shop, I think, ah, Do I really want to get this? I mean, there’s some things that are just no-brainers, but there still are things that, yeah, I still want to see and touch and feel.

Nathan Wrigley:
To still hold it, to experience it, dare I say it, to smell it. You just kind of that new book thing, the cardboard box, the plastic that you smell when you open up the car that you’ve got to assemble. And the glue. Let’s not get into that.

BobWP:
The glue is.

Nathan Wrigley:
The best. Okay, so here’s a perfect way in my life why the internet is binary. So go back again, a bit like you with your model car shop, record shops. So music shops. So you’d go into the record shop. I don’t even know if these things exist in many places anymore, but basically going back, every high street would have multiple record shops. You’d have the sort of chain ones, but then you’d have the guy who would own his own little independent record shop and stock different music. So you’d go into that thing and you would just pick up all the albums, the tapes, the cassettes, the CDs, which came along later. You’d pick up them all and you’d be looking at them and the album art would really, you know, it would convert you or it wouldn’t. And you’d think, okay, I’ll keep hold of this one. And then you’d go to the listening station and you’d ask the person, can I listen to this? And they’d give you like a 10-minute slot and you’d put it on and listen to a few tracks and you’re, oh yeah, don’t I like this one. No, move on, do the next one. The point of all of this is I had a paper round and paper rounds, as you are well aware, don’t pay you very much money. So it would take me like a full month, maybe 6 weeks to save up the cost of one thing, like a record. And so I was really keen not to get the wrong record. So I would spend hours at the record shop listening to snippets in the 10-minute window where I was allowed, and then finally make the decision. And I don’t know how many times I walked up to the counter with like 3, and it was like, I don’t know, I still don’t know which one. And then eventually it’s like, that one, I’m going to go for that one.

BobWP:
Yeah, that one. Yeah.

Nathan Wrigley:
And then you buy it and you take it home and you listen to that thing the whole way through 100 times.

BobWP:
Oh, yeah.

Nathan Wrigley:
And you know every beat, you know every cymbal, you know every guitar lick, you know the lyrics inside out. If somebody played a 4-second portion of any one of those songs from any of those albums that I bought, I can finish the whole thing. I could tell you what’s coming next and all of that. And so I was invested in it. Now, I got Spotify. I can’t even get through the first 12 seconds of a song. It’s like, that doesn’t sound— no, next. No, next. Next. Oh, that sounds good. And then 5 seconds and you’re like, no, next. And so it’s really wired me differently to music, which is a shame. And I’m addressing that. I’m getting to the point now where I’ve made an agreement with myself and I’m sticking to it. I’ve done this for about a couple of months now. I refuse to allow myself to listen to a song that if I start it, I have to finish it. I have to get to the end, whether I like it or not. I’m just going to force myself to go through it. But it’s still a different thing. The internet brought this kind of inattention. And although I didn’t know it at the time, there was something so beautiful about that experience of being in the shop, listening to it, buying it, reveling in it, swapping it with your mates, and then kicking them in the ass when they brought it back with a big scratch on it.

BobWP:
Yeah, scratched. And the tactile, you know, I mean, just being able— and how many times did you buy an album because of.

Nathan Wrigley:
The COVID Uh, quite a lot of times.

BobWP:
Yeah, because that’s what was so— I mean, the covers were like as important as the album themselves. And sometimes, you know, you’d open it and you’d have a few pages. Either they’d have the lyrics in there or they’d have some pictures or some history of if it was a concert or something like that. Um, but yeah, I just— albums are like, you know, I think at one point when I was in high school, I think I had a collection of about 700 albums. And oh, it was just— yeah, it.

Nathan Wrigley:
Was more than I did. You obviously had a little bit more disposable income.

BobWP:
It was— I eventually, you know, and sometimes I think back, I mean, I had— oh, and I would— you— and you could actually sit down and listen to the music, pick up the COVID and sometimes just, you know, just look at it and kind of check, because a lot of the artwork was very intricate. And of course, if you had anything to inspire your brain and get it off into another ozone area, you could stare at that cover for the our album.

Nathan Wrigley:
There’s a whole 8 hours goes right there.

BobWP:
It’s like, oh, the music stopped.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah, really? Bob, that stopped several hours ago, but the COVID looks good.

BobWP:
Yeah.

Nathan Wrigley:
I always used to get together with my mates as well, and we’d all bring the latest thing that we bought. So we’d go around to my friend’s house, and that would be the evening. The evening’s entertainment was, let’s listen to our latest collection of records, and then we’d swap them, and we’d all leave with somebody else’s record. And then a couple of weeks later, we’d all combine again. There was always that one curious character, that one friend who always managed to not bring the record back and you’re kind of like, okay, how many have you now got? Really? We’re friends and all, but just give me the record back. But so that’s another aspect where on the face of it, we have abundance. The internet brought us abundance. Sounds great, but not all great. Turns out we lost something. And if you’ve never been a record owner, you’ll just think, shut up, Wrigley, we’ve got all the records in the world. This is better. Well, it is, but also it’s not.

BobWP:
Yeah, I agree. And you know, one of the things I used to do too around music is, and records was, and people would go, oh my God, you actually did this. I had this and it was when I was it wasn’t like later in high school, but I had this small reel-to-reel recorder.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah.

BobWP:
And I would actually play the album. I would record it on that. And then I would go through and stop and start and write down all the lyrics myself because I was just— so I had this little notebook that had lined paper in it with pencil-written lyrics. But I could go in there sometime and just read the lyrics because, and those lyrics really stuck in my head. And what was really strange is sometimes you’d get to a, you know, like, what was that word? And you’d have to play it back.

Nathan Wrigley:
Over and over and then write down the best.

BobWP:
I.

Nathan Wrigley:
Approximation.

BobWP:
Don’T quite get it.

Nathan Wrigley:
So when I, when I don’t know what year, let’s say when I was 10 or something like that, I received a cassette player for a birthday or Christmas or something. And so I could play cassettes and record cassettes. And so this little cassette player was like, it was the sort of width and length of a shoebox, but about, I don’t know, 5 centimeters. So 2 inches high, something like that. And you could play cassettes in it. And also in the corner was a little microphone, little tinny microphone, the quality of which was so Terribly bad. But my brother had a radio, so another separate unit, similar size, similar shape, but it would play the radio and you had to turn the dial and get the radio. And every Sunday on this radio station, which still survives in the UK called Radio 1, they would do the charts and it was called the Top 40 and they’d play the entire song of the Top 40 and then they’d move to 39 and 38 and eventually they’d get to number 1. I used to record that Every single week.

BobWP:
But I think I did something similar.

Nathan Wrigley:
But there was no cable, so you had to put the cassette player next to the radio and then press record, wait for the show to come on. And I would sit there for like 3 hours pausing it when the DJ started to speak. So I didn’t want any of that. And then, but if somebody coughed, yeah, or if my mum walked in and said something like Top 40, recording the Top 40. And then when it would finish, I’d write on it with my biro. And then do you remember on cassettes there was that little thing on the edge where if you broke it, you could no longer on record it? If you broke that little thing, that.

BobWP:
Little tab, kind of.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah, the little tab. And then I would do that and I’d stack them up and I would never, ever, ever, ever listen to them. But I enjoyed doing it. It was so much fun. And I think, again, but it’s not binary, the stuff that we lost, nobody’s doing that anymore, I would doubt. But it’s little aspects of life which are inspired, dare I say it, by boredom. There was probably a lot of, there’s not much else to do. And so swings and roundabouts.

BobWP:
I know some people, you know, oh yeah, well that, you know, it sounds all great and everything, but you know, everything is so nice and tidy now and just, you know, and again, all those little pieces that have been lost and yeah, buying records, that was, that was something going through and looking, you know, flipping through those and seeing what was, and then having to make that decision. And, you know, there’s a lot of things that you think of that. You bought that where probably the experience of buying it was a huge part of it too.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah. And then you were wedded to it in a way, you know, you just were. I wonder what, I wonder what would happen if somehow I could click my fingers and I could just switch off the internet. I wonder how bad it would be.

BobWP:
Yeah.

Nathan Wrigley:
How long it would take us to get to get back to the pre-internet days, you know, the commerce would all go, the website browsing would all go, the social media would all go, all the email would all go. I wonder what that life would be like and if it would be on balance better. I don’t know.

BobWP:
Yeah, yeah. It’s especially the social media. So many people just, I mean, that’s how they, not only do they communicate, but they basically update their entire lives on. I mean, I even remember, I, I even in as a kid, I never told everybody as much as most people tell each other. I mean, you know, you’d see somebody, ah, maybe you’d ask them what you had for lunch or something, you know, you didn’t care to see it or have some big impression of, you know, oh, you have this and here’s a picture and that’s really cool, or, or you’ve had it and you’ve got food poisoning, you know, you just kind of moved on in life and, and did the things. And yeah, social media, I think, is the thing that drives me the craziest with— yeah, too much, too much information. I mean, too many things we don’t need to know and stuff. And, and it used to be, you know, you’d sit around with 3 or 4 of your friends and talk about this stuff. Now it’s get online and we’re all having to see it whether we— yeah. Want to see it or not, you know.

Nathan Wrigley:
Like, when was the last time you went on to social media and something came— you came across something which was actually interesting?

BobWP:
You know, the other day I looked at my— I counted 20, um, and it’s probably the people I followed too— the last 20 posts or threads, you know, just I went through it and 18 of them were about AI. And so yeah, I don’t find much.

Nathan Wrigley:
It’s weird, isn’t it? We’ve— yeah, there’s definitely something that— I mean, obviously you and I both involve ourselves with social media because we both have podcasts, we want to promote those, and that’s the, the most affordable, quickest technique to do it. But at the same time, you know, do— uh, I don’t know, I’m not entirely sure we’ll look back on the whole social media thing and go, yeah, that was a great use of everybody’s time. Yeah, um, we all got a lot out of that, nobody got angry, Nobody said anything untrue. It was all wisdom from top to bottom.

BobWP:
Yeah.

Nathan Wrigley:
Don’t—.

BobWP:
It’S to me, it’s a— I don’t know. I, people always hate it when I say it, but how the engagement is overrated, you know, it’s like engage with, you know, I think of, and again, I always like to think of something in real life to compare it to. It’s like if you’re at a restaurant and you’re engaging with the people that you’re sitting with. Yeah, that’s great engagement. But if you take it to the social level, that would mean you’d get up and start wandering around the restaurant and just sitting down at tables randomly.

Nathan Wrigley:
And talking to people.

BobWP:
Oh, how are you? Oh, what were you talking about?

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah, no, but it’s not even that. It’s not even how are you? It’s literally they’re about to put a mouthful of food in their mouth. No, you just shove a postcard right in front of their eyes and say, look at this new thing about AI. Look at that. Just look at it. Look at it right now.

BobWP:
Or you swing your foot up on top of the table and say, look at this cut I got. Yeah. It’s like, okay then.

Nathan Wrigley:
And watch that cat. Yeah. I think I have strong intuitions that the next generation will not be quite so into social media in the same way that we are. I know that That’s certainly not going to be the case that it’ll go away, but I think they have a much more, they have a perspective. They can see from far off what it does. Whereas I think what it does evolved over time for the likes of you and me and the things which it turned out to be bad for, like the time suck and all of that kind of stuff and addiction and what have you. I think all of that just crept up on us. But I think the kids can see, you know, it’s not hard for a child to see their parent constantly on the mobile phone, you know, engaged in social media. And now they can look at that and go, I don’t think that’s good. I can see what it’s done to you, and I don’t want that to be the same for me. You know, that’s what my kids tell me anyway. I don’t want to be you.

BobWP:
Yeah.

Nathan Wrigley:
Good on them, I say.

BobWP:
Yeah, really, I agree that that’s going to be the way it is. So with all that said, then we have AI.