Sean Everett explains why people trust physical objects more than digital ones, and how the best products blend both. He uses DNA and self-driving cars as examples of hybrid systems, then frames product design as a multi-course meal where physical and digital elements work together to create emotional resonance.
Chapters
Digital versus physical objects. That's the topic of conversation today. So let's first start off and define each one. Digital objects, as you might imagine, are digital. They're things that run on the internet. So these are things like the apps on your phone, the websites that you visit, and software essentially that can run in the background, in the foreground, It can be enterprise software, it can be games, it can be consumer software, basically anything that lives in a digital space. So that can even be a device that just streams data out like an IoT device, for example, can be a sensor on the front of a car that's recording LiDAR or camera. So digital. Not too hard to understand. If you've ever used a smartphone or the internet, then you understand what a digital object is. And, uh, now there's this newfangled thing called spatial computing and, um, a place in cyberspace that has 3 or 4-dimensional time, uh, almost like Star Trek and the holodeck, where you can interact with seemingly physical objects and things like augmented reality. Mm-hmm. Where you have physical objects that appear in your environment and are overlaid over the top of your vision. Digital objects can also be streaming media. It can be video, can be music, can be a photo, can be text. A book can be digitized. One of the biggest trends that we've seen over the last 20, 30 years, and it's going to continue accelerating into the far future, is the digitization of Essentially everything. Everything is being onboarded into the internet. Okay, that's a digital object. What about a physical object? Physical objects, on the other hand, are physical things you can touch or feel. This jacket, my hands are physical. This environment is physical, at least that we know about. Atoms rather than bits is a classic example. So— atoms, the Starbucks coffee cup that you hold, the stores that you walk into, the cars that you buy, the bed you sleep on, video cameras, uh, AirPods, things you listen to music on, basically anything in the real world. And we won't get into philosophical arguments about what is or is not real at this stage, but, um, physical objects. So Now, what happens when you start to bring those 2 things together and create a hybrid, a remix, a combination of both digital and physical objects? That's where you start to see things like AI devices, things like self-driving cars, things like the iPhone is both physical and digital. It runs digital software on a hardware device. The Apple Watch is another piece, the Oura Ring. So you start to see these physical objects adopt digital features, smart water bottles, for instance, which we have and we use to track our intake. But it also has mechanical systems to filter out bacteria and other negative particulates that may impact our health. Back to pillar zero. And so the real question is like, where is all of this headed and how does this apply to you? when you're making your thing. So a couple principles that we've learned over the years. One is that humans tend to value physical objects more than digital. They believe, they trust, they interact with things that they can touch and feel in their hands, like it's sturdy, right? I, I can only believe what I can see and I can only believe what I can feel. And so cars, physical objects that signal Um, status, luxury, wealth, things like luxury cars, luxury fashion, again Starbucks cup. Um, and so then we're back to sort of the, the digital aspect, right? So the digital aspect, how do humans value it? They don't value it as much because it turns— it's more of an idea, a concept, something that's a bit more vaporous and fluid and moves. This is like data through the air, artificial intelligence, streaming media like text, videos, audio, music, you name it. And so these things are more about attention, right? Because we have to physically get up and move and pick things up, and things that are physical are heavy, they take time to make. Digital things, you could essentially copy them blockchain, Bitcoin notwithstanding, forever an infinite shelf space. And so a lot of our attention on the internet is rapid and allows us to travel very quickly between different digital objects, different digital spaces. The traveling between physical objects and spaces is much harder, very difficult for us to travel off planet. Difficult for us. I mean, we're going to walk down the street, it's going to take us 5 to 10 minutes. That's a lot slower than just clicking a link on a web page and immediately loading another page. In the physical world, we're impatient. So Amazon, like, buy today, get today shipping. Um, in the digital world, it's accelerated even more. Like, if your thing doesn't load in less than 200 milliseconds, like, you're ancient. Back in the day when AOL pages, web pages, used to take Tick, tick, tick to load. Uh, we're now back in that same place with generative AI where like images tick, tick, tick, tick kind of to load. So imagine extrapolating that into the speed at which we navigate the internet today. So eventually, I believe that nature is the most foundational and fundamental technology. I believe that it includes software in itself. We just don't quite understand how to write the program for that software, things like DNA, biologic intelligence, procreation, and it's storing information in its physical object itself. So nature has figured out an elegant way to combine both hardware and software. Call it storing bits and atoms. And now we're into quantum. quantum space where things break down and get a little weird. So as you start to think about like creating your own product service, your own thing, you first have to pick a path because you can't do everything all at once all the time. So, uh, what's more important, software or hardware? I guess the real question is what feeling— back to our prior videos— What feeling are you trying to express in the market and the gap you're trying to fill? If it's a sense of calmness, of release, of relaxation, of stress-free, of the luxury of confidence, of calm, then maybe you are required— if your vision is that, maybe you are required to have both a physical and digital object. In which case it means that we need to, we need to give that vision at every step point in time across the entire thing. And it may be really rough and prototypey at first and not like the full flourish and expression of the end vision, end vision, but it should all be there in order for you to deliver that prototype feeling. into the market, into your customers' hands. So I think the best things in the future will have a full 360-degree view of the storytelling, of the physical, of the digital, of the feeling, of the core values. You've got to bring all of these things together. Like a great chef can deliver an incredible multi-course meal to you. And they do it through different pairings, the environment that's created, the experience of interacting with the staff, the ambiance, the water service, the bread service, the appetizer, the amuse-bouche, if you will, the main and the finishing. And so it's a full 360-degree experience. And then You know, you pay for that at the end. So the merch comes after the experience. That's a little bit on digital versus physical objects. Get clear on everything up until this point and then how you're going to package that. And so the entire experience of this, in order to deliver that emotion, becomes very important. And you can design all these things just like you Can write something down on a piece of paper. All right, that's the the thoughts and intentions for today. Hope you have another great one. Sean signing off. Toodaloo.
