The Vergecast - The life-changing magic of touching stuff

Episode Date: July 7, 2026

We have all become desensitized. Every place is like every other place, every experience is happening at a remove and on a screen. And Ian Bogost, a Washington University professor and a writer at The Atlantic, argues that this "dematerialization" is making our life worse. Ian joins David to explain how to once again commune with the world. He tells us of the magic of paper tickets, why he's kind of obsessed with the rubber on his water bottle, and why you don't need to throw phone into the ocean — but you should probably watch more ASMR videos. The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life The Cult of Delayed Gratification Is a Lie Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of friction maxing. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show, we're talking about The Small Stuff. I'm talking to Ian Bogost, who is a writer at the Atlantic and a professor at Washington University, about a book he just wrote called The Small Stuff. And this book, which you don't have to have read to enjoy this conversation, I promise, the book essentially argues that we as people have lost sensory contact with the world and that one important way to go about being happier and to use Ian's word, which you'll hear a bunch in this conversation,

gratified, is to get back in touch with the world around us. Let me just read you a short section of it, which I think explains what he's talking about fairly well. This is from early in the book. He says, we once had to, we once got to, take direct control over all sorts of objects. We had to engage physically with the apparatuses

of ordinary life to get things done. Those devices were varied in nature, offering diverse encounters, and of course, people also had greater and more sundry contact with the natural world and the built environment. Half the book is basically about how we lost that and how everything from the way that we open doors to the way that we use faucets to what we do on our phones has changed the way that we engage with the world. And then a big part of the book is

how we can go about getting some of that stuff back. I wanted to have Eon to talk about what we've lost and particularly how technology has played a role in taking some of that stuff away from us and whether technology has a role in giving some of it back. He makes some surprising arguments about the fact that we can get that kind of sensory contact from digital devices. This is not fundamentally a book about throwing your phone into the ocean and going and living in the woods. There's a little bit of that, but there's not a lot of that. And so Ian and I are going to talk through how to bring back your materialization in the world without having to get rid of your phone, which frankly seems like the best of both worlds. That's coming up in just a sec, but first,

here's everything else happening on The Verge today. This is 90 seconds on the Verge for Tuesday, July 7, 2026. Microsoft announced yesterday that it's laying off 4,800 employees, and more than 30% of those are in the Xbox division. Microsoft is also spinning off four of its game studios, and there are apparently even more cuts still to come. At the same time as making all of these huge cuts, Xbox's CEO Asha Sharma is also trying to argue that the Xbox's brightest days are still coming.

She wrote that I want Xbox to be one of the few companies that entertains more than a billion people each day and gives everyone the opportunity to create and connect. That is vague, and it's the sort of vague that led Xbox into a lot of this trouble. now this suddenly much smaller team has some big, vague work ahead of it. Meanwhile, Nothing released a new set of earbuds called the Nothing Ear 3A, which are interesting, frankly, for a few reasons.

One, Nothing's headphones have historically been pretty good, especially for $99.9. Two, these come in pink, and they look awesome. And three, they have a feature called Audio Snapshot that lets you record what you're listening to on the buds themselves, then sync it back to your phone. I think of it is kind of like taking a screenshot but of audio. And I think this is the kind of AI feature you're going to start to see on headphones

everywhere. And finally, the FCC is going to vote later this month to make it easier for broadband providers to hide the fees that they charge you. And going forward, the ISPs might not even have to show you the so-called nutrition labels for pricing. They can just link to them. Because, you know, who really wants to know what you're actually paying on your internet bill?

You can read more about all of this at the verge.com. That is 90 seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, July 7th. From the producers of the horror classic Evil Dead. Our grandfather believed the devil would return if anyone read from the book of the dead. Kundal. We found you. On July 10th. What do we do to deserve this?

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with up to 444 kilometers on a full charge and DC fast charging from 10 to 80% in about 30 minutes in ideal conditions. Plus, ample ground clearance and symmetrical all-wheel drive make the 2026 Trail Seeker the most capable EV Subaru has ever built. Test drive it at your local Subaru dealer or visit Subaru.ca. Ian Bogus, welcome to the Vergecast. Thanks so much for having me. I was looking for sort of what is the perfect example that I think kind of lays out all of the complicated things you try to get into.

And I think for me it's tickets. I think the cleanest, what have we lost by losing physical objects? Yeah. Is tickets. And in a fun way, I think what have we gained by losing physical objects is also tickets. So just sort of real quick, give me the story of tickets a little bit and why it fits into the way. that you're thinking about the world.

So imagine you're going to a show, you're going to the theater, you're going to a concert, something where you have to go. You spent maybe a couple hundred bucks on Ticketmaster and you paid all the fees and you got these physical tickets, or at least you used to get the physical tickets.

You'd go to like, we'll call and you'd pick them up and then you'd have the tickets. And you'd be like, oh my gosh, I can't lose these tickets. I spent a bunch of money on it. I'm really looking forward to the show. And you had these physical tickets and maybe you like taped them

to the back of the kitchen cabinet so you wouldn't lose them. or you put them in an envelope and then you forgot where it was. And you had to look for the envelope and rummage to the drawer. And then on the day of the show, you remember where the tickets are. They're on the back of the cabinet. And they have like a sort of give to them. They're like made of cardboard, but they're still weaker than it feels like they should be to be so valuable.

And you kind of hold them and you feel them moving between one another. You know, there's like a kind of friction between them and you put them in your jacket pocket or you put them in your purse. And then you go out to the car and then you're like, wait, do I have the tickets? you check your pocket or your purse. Yes, I've got the tickets. And then you do that like 50 times before you actually get to the theater or the venue. And then you hand over of the tickets and they get punched or they get scanned or whatever it is that happens to them. And they give them back to you. And it says where you were supposed to sit. And now there's something different. There's something you don't mind if you lose, but you kind of don't want to because they're a token of having gone

to the show. And maybe you keep them and pin them up on your wall or you put them in a scrapbook or you just store them in your wallet and you remember them later. So all of that kind of like, sensory texture that you experience with the tickets, you don't really need that anymore. Now what you get is a QR code on your smartphone. And it's, as you said, now you don't have to worry about losing your tickets, but you don't get all the rest of that.

And you go to the show and you kind of hold up your phone, and it's always kind of weird to hold up your phone when you feel like you should be doing something different. They shouldn't be looking at your phone, and they scan it and it's on the wrong screen or something like that. And then you don't remember what the seat was and you have to pull it up and you don't have all that, you know, kind of like memento of the show anymore

to take with you. So that's like one example of this phenomenon that I call dematerialization where like the physical world that we used to inhabit without thinking about it at all, just kind of went away. And on the whole, it's like definitely more convenient, but then there was a loss associated with that convenience. And I think to me, one of the most interesting parts of reading the book was kind of watching you try to articulate what that loss is. because I think it is really hard to explain, right? That not only is it about the fact that, yes, having things that exist outside of my phone is helpful because I can, like, know where they are and I don't have to open my phone to go to them.

And we talk a lot about sort of the advantages of like using a digital camera instead of using your phone. Right. But your argument is kind of finer than that, right? That it's like there's actually something about the feeling of holding the tickets in your hand and moving them in your fingers that is important. And I think it's very hard to articulate. why it's important. Right. But that it is important. The thing that people might think of first with the tickets is that idea of a memory that they can hold and store. And that's valuable. And you don't have that anymore. Totally. But I am talking about that plus other things. And for me,

that sense of, like you have two tickets because you're going with your spouse or your kid or whatever it is. And just feeling the move between one another, holding two pieces of cardstock and kind of feeling their texture against one another as you kind of rub them together in your hand. First of all, it just kind of gives you something to do with your hand while you're waiting in line. But it's delightful to do that. But I just started to realize, as I thought more and more, about this phenomenon of dematerialization and that sense of delight, which I call gratification, I felt like, wow, what if that is actually much more important than we've given it credit for?

And the fact that it feels so small is both the reason that we haven't given it credit for feeling good, but also the power of it, these like this collection. of little tiny sensory experiences that you've accrued or you used to accrue more over your day that were contributing to your overall sense of contentment

and then as they fell away you didn't feel like you were missing anything like who cares about not having a paper ticket but then that happened everywhere like everywhere to everything and then it was like oh wow I don't feel like I'm a real human being in the world anymore

yeah I feel like you use the word commune a few times particularly at the beginning of the book and I feel like that was the word that really stuck in my head had throughout the whole thing. And it's a thing I've been thinking a lot about ever since, really, this idea that what we're doing is right now it's so sort of disconnected. We're disconnected from each other. We're disconnected from our surroundings. We're disconnected from literally the place that we are, which I also want to talk about. But your point is, it seems like

overreachingly just that like the best thing you can do is just like get back in touch with your senses and the things around you. And like this idea that you are constantly communing with the world around you, and that we don't do that anymore, strikes me as like, I don't know, I've just been, I've been thinking about that word a lot. I'm glad you picked up on that

because I, there's a moment in the book toward the end when I, I encourage the reader to think of their sensory life, the objects of their senses, as friends, as like, as characters. And I, I really mean it.

That it's like having a relationship with everything that you encounter in the world. And we're used to thinking, like, you can't have a relationship with, like, an inanimate object. You can't have a relationship with it. And if you have a relationship with, like, a natural object, maybe that's sort of reasonable because it's alive or at least potentially alive, like an oak tree. But who has a relationship with the garbage truck or the tickets in their pocket? Like a human-style relationship.

But I think that's a really useful way of thinking about both the loss and the continued opportunity, because this happens all the time. Even though we've lost the tickets, there's other things that take its place. and that sense of just having like respect and interest and curiosity and most of all acceptance of just accepting that you are in the world with other things, other people to other entities, and that that's an enormous miracle. That is something that's available to us no matter how much we've lost because we're still surrounded by so many sensory encounters all the time. Yeah. You don't quite go all the way to the end of the, how did we become disconnected from this world?

And again, to use your word, dematerialized. You don't get all the way to the end of the road and say it's the iPhone's fault, which I think is what a lot of people say. It is what a lot of people think. Do you think that's the truth? Like, is the iPhone kind of problem number one, or smartphones in general, obviously kind of problem number one here? I think we've mistaken smartphones for a bigger problem than maybe they are. And it's certainly a problem. Like the reason that you can get the QR code ticket

is because of the smartphone and the app ecosystem. Sure. But think about what you're doing in line with your phone instead of with your tickets. You're still touching it. It's got a smooth glass front. Mine has one of those textured cases that I like to rub and touch.

Even if the phone is off, it's still a delightful sensory object that's gratifying to engage with. I have a pop socket on mine that I just spin around in my hands. Oh, you got the spinner. Like hours and hours a day. Exactly.

Yeah. The heft of it in my pocket is both bothersome and comforting. The idea that you can pull it out isn't just about being like lured into the infosystem or whatever. It's also about rummaging for it or trying to find it again or is it still there in the same way that you're asking of the tickets still there. And if you look at the dematerial, the forces of dematerialization, I give a lot of examples of them that are not just the iPhone or just computers. This has been going on for a long time. long before the smartphone. Like, one of the other common examples that people relate to really well is the public restroom with all the sensors. And instead of turning on the faucet, you, like, wave your hands under it

and hope it works, and then you do that with the soap and the toilet and the towel dispenser and maybe the door or two. And that's, I mean, those are like systems that have digital components in them, but they're not computers or smartphones.

Another example I talk about, is just economic. It's about the incentives to own things and the fact that if you're able to own a home or even an automobile, that you have incentives and inspiration and rationales to connect with it physically. And that's not really about the phone either. So I tried really hard in the book to be honest about where I think the problems lie. And they are partly computational and they're partly related to the whole internet thing. But yeah, I think we've overestimated the degree to which smartphones have have ruined our lives. Interesting. Okay. I find that sort of hopeful in a weird way. Yeah. Well, you know, as I've been living this whole life of trying to make sense of this thing that I call gratification, and I like truly and earnestly believe in this, I started realizing that that sense of like addiction or compulsion or whatever you want to call it, I mean, I'm just as guilty of it as anyone. I'm drawn to the phone and the apps, but that it was kind of just like my attention system or the Things in my life I was accepting as interesting were narrower than they could be.

And once I was like, you know, like my water bottle, though, right, with its like rubber base that sits down against the counter, that's kind of, that's super interesting. You know, the feel of my desk in front of me, the gravel on the street, on the neighboring street when I walk down and it crunches underfoot. It's kind of as interesting as my iPhone in a certain way. And they're much more plentiful. So I started missing my phone a lot less. I didn't have to like lock it up. I asked this question in the nicest possible way. Do you feel sort of insane explaining this thing that you've gone through?

Just being like, I don't need my phone that much because of the rubber on the bottom of my water bottle. It's like beautiful and sort of insane. And I try to address this in the book too, that that feeling of oddity, of like embarrassment, of strangeness, that's both something to, overcome to learn to overcome. Sure. But it's also a tell. It's like when you start feeling, is it kind of weird to like be so delighted in this rubber bumper on my, on my water bottle? You're like, ah, I'm living in gratification land here. Like, that's a sign that you're on the right track. One of the things that I've discovered about it is that when you talk about these experiences with other people, they're usually like right there with you very quickly. And it's sort of like,

you go first kind of a thing that we've been in. There's an example I talk about where my, uh, wife and I are peeling off a plastic protective film from the name label on a new knife block we bought. And if you bring that example up of the plastic protective film with like anyone on earth who's ever encountered it, they'll be like, oh, I'm so delightful to do that. I can't. Sometimes I just leave it on for a year, so I have something to do later. They're right there with you. But they wouldn't maybe bring it up on their own, you know? And so you're right. There is a folly. It feels unimportant. Like, I called the book The Small Stuff, because the Small Stuff, because the Small Stuff, feels unimportant and it isn't. It's super important. So part of the exercise, and I think it's an

easy exercise, is just learning that it is. And, you know, when it feels good, admitting that it feels good and not worrying so much that, like, someone's going to, like, look at you funny when you do it. Yeah. So talk me through that exercise, actually, a little bit, because it feels like there were parts of the book where it felt like your argument was going to turn into, essentially, do you know this concept of friction maxing? I do. It felt a little like you were pushing towards that, right? The like resist convenience at all costs, resists taking the easy and quick and low touch way out of everything.

Like go do things the hard way because it is worth doing the hard way. I don't actually think that's what you're advocating for. I'm really glad that you said that because it's not what I'm saying. Parse those two things apart for me a little bit. So I think what happened is when you're like, very smartphone kind of internet focused. Everything is so, I mean, everything has been made so easy for us. Our lives are incredible.

And there's a lot of kind of frictionless, smooth, efficient experiences that we now have. Instead of going to the store, like this weekend I was working on a project. I really needed a part from like a home improvement store. And I didn't have to get in my car and go to the store. I could just use one of the delivery apps to get. Like, how easy is that? But now I'm not going to the store and not in my car. and I'm not like rummaging through the shelves,

I'm missing out. Our lives are a lot easier. And so because of that sense of like smoothness or efficiency that we encounter all the time, it's easy to mistake the solution for difficulty. Like I need to mean my life more difficult now. I need to introduce friction. But that's not actually what you want.

Like that's actually kind of a bananas thing to think. Like, what if I made my life harder? Ah, like I'll stick it to technology by making my life harder again. Sure. I think in some ways it's useful as like a provocation. if you're like, well, what would it be like to do this the hard way so I can remind myself of the gap between easy and hard?

But you're probably not going to do that long term. It's not really going to help you live differently. And I don't think you have to live differently anyway. Like, I'm not saying change your life. I'm actually saying, like, you can live the life you're already living. So, yeah, I mean, it's ironic in a way that my book's coming out, right? It kind of like peak friction-vexing discourse, because I think it does feel like, it's the same.

But to me, they're just like, like polar opposites from one another. Instead of like make your life harder, I'm saying, do what you're already doing, but more so. Support for the show comes from Shopify. Landing on a good idea for a business is basically catching lightning in a bottle. What are the odds that'll happen more than once? You have to jump on every opportunity to make it work. And the last thing you need is to get slowed down by clunky logistics. You want tools that are ready.

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Just head to granola.a.a.ai slash verge. That's granola.a.ai slash verge to get your time back. Get three months free at granola. a.ai slash verge. The timing of your book is really interesting because I think the kind of diagnosis of your book, right, this theory of dematerialization that we are disconnected in these ways, I think more and more people feel that all the time. People feel that.

Your remedy is very different, I think, than what a lot of people are coming out and saying, right? You're not arguing that I should throw my phone into the ocean. Right. You're not arguing that I should go and shake a human's hand instead of going to self-rength checkout every time. You're arguing that, like, I should enjoy self-checkout more, which is such a different way of thinking about it, that it is like, it has kind of blown my mind. And the thing that you argue that I was the most surprised by going through the whole book is that you can have some of these

experiences in digital spaces on digital devices. Yeah. Like, you read a bunch about ASMR, which, can you just actually quickly explain how that fits into this construct? Yeah. So, ASMR are these kind of YouTubers typically who make these videos. They've been around for like 10 or 15 years, and they'll whisper. And there's a sort of like tingly sensation that some people get when they hear someone like kind of, you know, like scratch the windscreen of their microphone or tap against a bottle. And what's interesting to me, and a lot of people use it like a sleep aides or relaxation. But what's interesting to me about ASMR creators is the way that they encourage and model focused earnest attention. to the ordinary world.

So there's a, there's a, there's a, that I, that I, that I talk to for the book who has these videos about bath towels. And she's like, spends 20 minutes, like folding and smoothing the towels. And it's an extreme version of how you might actually pay attention to towels. And the point is not that you're going to go

spend 20 minutes with your towels, but that you have towels. And when you take them out of the, the dryer and they're warm, that warmth, you may put it against your face or feel it or smell it. and it's plush and it has texture. And then as you're folding it, that's not just a chore for you.

That's an opportunity for you to commune with your towels, to use that word. And I think the way that ASMR creators model that kind of openness is really admirable and something that we can learn from. Okay. I like that. And I think that to me was the part where kind of your argument about digital spaces started to really click because it does seem like. all the stuff that you're arguing, right,

which is that we need this different kind of sensory contact with the world around us, runs right in the face of another thing that you describe, which is that everything in every app that we look at is being ruthlessly monetized and selected for us by these unknowable algorithms. And I think, like, even on social media, people are starting to feel like,

I don't know why I'm here, I don't know why I'm seeing this thing, I don't know who these people are. Like, we're being dematerialized even in these digital spaces in this way. That's right. Yeah. And part of me wonders, like, if these two things are just increasingly, like, impossibly at odds, that if actually everybody from, I mean, you talk about Amazon in the book,

you talk about social platforms in the book, like, if all of these things actually have every possible incentive to dematerialize us as much as possible to just turn us into, like, a warm bag of credit cards. Right. And in fact, everything we're doing here is just a losing, battle against the endless forces of dematerialization. And yet again, you seem more optimistic about it at the end than I expected. Yeah, I think that what we have to realize is that as much as these forces are dematerializing, they are also delivering gratification in its own way, or

at least in some way. So just touching your phone is always gratifying, as we already discussed. But if you're scrolling Instagram or TikTok, like often you're seeing, it's like, I call it kind of of vicarious gratification. You're like watching other people do things. And the things that they're doing are increasingly implausible and they're clearly just done for the algorithm. You know, like those, like someone like spreading food out over their marble island in their kitchen or whatever, they're not like going to eat any of that. They're not encouraging you to do the recipe. They're just trying to maximize their algorithmic feed, right? And so if you treat it, though, as like this, oh, well, like there's tomatoes though. I'm reminded that like tomato sauce exists.

And if that does at least a little bit of work of sort of orienting you marginally more toward the experience of pouring the jar of tomato sauce out because you still have to eat and you're going to be cooking or even you're going to be ordering food and then you're scooping it out

or with the spoon that they deliver with it that maybe cracks and breaks, you're never going to be able to escape the fact that you are a physical being living in the physical world. And so all of that pull that the internet has, it was never really pulling us

out of our bodies fully. But also, as you're saying, David, it's like it's not working anymore. Like, it's less satisfying than it once was. Yes. Where do you think AI fits into that? I think it strikes me as, if you want to point at something that is dematerializing everything

and everyone at rapid pace, you can make a pretty strong argument for AI. Definitely. And I think that one of the reasons that, especially people who create stuff as part of their lives, either for a living or as a serious part of their avocation, why they're so worried about or even opposed to AI, is that they know, people know, that the experience of doing something is as important, if not more important than the outcome

or the product that's created at the other end. And sometimes that experience is frustrating. Like, I'm a writer, and I, like all writers, hate writing, right? Like, just no, no, not news to anyone. But the moment to moan experience of pressing keys on my keyboard is delightful. The experience of kind of like feeling ideas move through my fingertips. This is where I feel. That's where I feel like the ideas live, not in my brain, but in my fingertips. Like that's energizing.

And the notion that I would use AI to write for me would take away not just the writing, not the outcome, not the output, but the experience of being who I am in a certain way. And that's true for people who are like ceramicists or fine artists or whatever they do, right? You know, maybe you didn't ever like writing emails or receiving emails.

But at least you got to write them. At least you got to tap them out and you got to hear a little ding when it came in. You got to press the delete button on your keyboard. And now it does kind of feel like, oh, even that, even the work I don't want to do is not going to be taken away from me. Yeah, and I think there's a fascinating thing

coming for all of us where we're going to be asked whether not having to do this stuff we don't want to do is worth not being able to do the stuff we do want to do. Right. And everyone is just going to have to stare down the barrel of that question. And, you know, one thing we know about automation of all kinds, you know, going back as long as we've had automation is we never get that time back. Yeah. We never get the leisure time that we're promised.

Right. Instead, we just get more work. And that, that work that we get that's more is also usually worse. It's usually worse effort. Yeah. And, you know, I'm not saying that we should go wash your clothes by hand, right? This isn't the friction maxing argument. The fact that I have a washing machine, thank goodness.

I am happy with the washing machine. But you still engage with it, right? and you got to load it up, and then it wears, and you can hear it's sort of in the house, and it's reminding you that washing is happening, and then you go out and you fold and get the towels out, like we were talking about. And those processes, like all of that stuff,

we think is just, like, noise. It's like, oh, that's just a chore that I want to get through. So we didn't really mean for our lives to be changed in this way, optimized, you know, on every register, for every variable. And it happened slowly, and now that it happened, I think all of us are looking around going, wait, I didn't ask for that. And when there's an example of something

that's like very clearly doing it aggressively, like AI is, it's easy to point to it. Or smartphones and go, oh, that's the enemy. Let's fight that enemy. But it's really weirder, and it's happened over a much longer period of time, and it's kind of everywhere. Like the faucets in the restroom

have nothing to do with computers and AI, but they're part of the problem. The difficulty you have opening doors in office buildings, which I also talk about, like that doesn't have anything to do with AI, but it's part of the problem. And I think it's a relief, it's been a relief for me not to try to hang, well, not to try to hang the problem on myself, but also not to hang on like one phenomenon in particular, to understand that it's much more systemic. It does seem to me, and I think this is probably particularly true in technology, but maybe true of everything you just described, that it feels a lot like the forces are everybody versus my humanity, right?

Yeah. Like we as people are desperately trying to hold on to our ability to experience the world, while everybody is, for reasons of, you know, regulation and capitalism, but mostly capitalism, trying to pull it away from me. I think that's right. And then what I would add at top it is that at the same time that that whole thing was happening, which of, you know, of course, since the Industrial Revolution at least, right? We've also been persuaded that the only kind of contentment that's worthwhile is what we call happiness, this sort of like big stuff accomplishments, not necessarily just that you would optimize for, but that you would value as the thing that you're actually after, the thing that gives your life purpose. And that, in fact, all of the, all of the sacrifices between here and there are, worth it. Happiness is some far future thing that I am meant to be working towards at all times. And I guess that's true at a certain level, but then you miss out on that specific experience, which is giving you a sense of pleasure by being directly connected with the world. And we've also kind of without meaning to persuaded ourselves that that connection isn't important. That we don't really need it. We can get by in our heads and we can get by with like one or three or five important

accomplishments over the course of a decade or maybe our whole adult lives. And what a shame that is? You know, for all the talk of like abundance, the surplus that I'm after is the surplus of sensory encounter that's available all the time. And so while it seems weird to like become friends with your water bottle, by doing that, I get like another little drip drip of pleasure into the cup, which is very different than like filling it up full blast with some big life accomplishment. Okay, one last thing, and then I'll let you go. And this is both because it's related and because this is the Vergecast and we like gadget nerd stuff, I need you to explain your doorbell. Just to the people, it is the deepest gadget nerdy stuff in the whole book. And I just need you to

briefly explain what you did with your doorbell. Yeah, it is super nerdy. So I live in a house that was built in 1909 in St. Louis. And, you know, that's a long time, 120 plus years of changes to the house. and there's a wired doorbell, but it was cut at some point. And a lot of people put in like a ring doorbell or something like that that runs on batteries and Wi-Fi. But I kind of like wanted like a doorbell, like a traditional doorbell that matched the house architecturally

and then had a button that you push and it feels like a doorbell button. And then I wanted it to make the sound that my house, I have this ridiculous house that like wants a big, booming doorbell sound, you know? So, I mean, the long and short of it is that I wired up like five different computers, and there's this whole, I have this whole, like, surfer room running my doorbell in the rest of my house, too, but where the doorbell has a button behind it that talks to a Bluetooth device that then sends a message to my Apple home,

that then has a listener on it, that then plays a sound on this speaker that is, like, nice and resonant, and then it connects to the camera that I do have somewhere else hidden in a bush that shows me who's at the door. And it's very nerdy. And I think it's just like an interesting example of how the old world and the new world can live together. Like, it's a very high-tech solution. I do store all of my video feeds, like, on a raid in my basement instead of up in the cloud with a service.

And so that was one, like, moral position that I took. But also now you come to my door and you press the doorbell and you hear the bong-bong that resonates through the house. And it makes me feel like I'm living in the house as it wants to be lived in. and not in some weird Frankenstein version of it, where I taped a contemporary smart doorbell to the door and kind of ruined the whole experience.

Yeah, I loved it. That to me was like both just true, great Vergecast lore and also just like you've done an enormous amount of very modern work to make your house feel like it's supposed to. Yeah. It's just a good way to think about it. Yeah, for sure. All right.

Ian, thank you so much for being here. This is great. I really appreciate it. Oh, thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. All right, that's it for the show. Thank you to Ian for being here. Go by his book.

It's called The Small Stuff, How to Lead a More Gratifying Life. It's out today, Tuesday, as you're listening to this. It's very good. It's pretty short. I highly recommend it. And, of course, thank you, as always, for watching and listening. If you have thoughts, feedback, if you have other examples of this dematerialization and these sorts of sensory things, if there is something that you've experienced

that feels the kind of way Ian is describing, I want to hear all about it. Virgcast to theverse.com is the email. 866, Verge11 is the hot. line, hit us up about it, anything and everything. As always, also, the best thing you can do to support everything the Verge is up to, for Ian, it's, you know, buy his book. For us, it's subscribed to Theverge.com slash subscribe. It gets you all of our podcasts ad-free. It gets you all of our exclusive newsletters. It gets you all of our coverage of other things you can do, then throw your phone in the ocean.

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