VIRGINIA POSTREL: Staying Hopeful in a Changing World

0:00Human beings don't just value function. they value pleasure and they value meaning. And pleasure and meaning are things that are very much conveyed through the look and feel of objects of places. Hi, I'm Michael Hyatt. And I'm Megan Hyatt Miller. And you're listening to The Double Win Show. Megan, unfortunately, is not with me for this episode. She's tending to some family issues, but we're excited to share with you our recent conversation with Virginia Postrel. So Virginia is the author of four influential books, including The Future and Its Enemies, The Substance of Style, The Power of Glamour, and The Fabric of Civilization.

0:45She's the former editor-in-chief of Reason Magazine and a columnist for Bloomberg View and The Atlantic. Her TED Talk and essays explore themes of innovation, aesthetics, and social evolution. She's known for coining and exploring the terms dynamism versus stasis as competing worldviews. And we uncover some of that in our conversation today. But in The Substance of Style, she anticipated the rise of aesthetic awareness in all areas of modern life. And we're seeing that today in the design of everything. And The Fabric of Civilization reframes textiles, yes, textiles, as a core driver of technological and economic history.

1:28Virginia lives in Los Angeles with her husband, economist Stephen Postrell. And with that, let's get to the interview.

1:37Virginia, welcome to The Double Win Show. Thank you. It's great to be with you. So delighted to meet you, and I'm looking forward to this conversation today. So I think recently in a social media post, you noted that in 1960, over a third of North Carolina households lacked full plumbing. So why do we forget to see our own progress so quickly? I mean, it's almost invisible to us, especially now. Well, partly on plumbing specifically and those kinds of routine things that we really take for granted and should be able to take for granted in some sense, There are a couple of reasons. First of all, to me, because I was born in 1960, and that's why I was born in North Carolina.

2:21It doesn't seem that long ago. To somebody who is 30 years old, it seems like ancient history, and they have no memory of 1960. Or I mean, I have no memory of 1960 either. So it has to come from somewhere. So if you don't hear stories in your family and you don't read old books, you don't realize these things. And then the other thing is in the US, and we see this a lot today, there is a skewed picture of what the world was like in the 50s and 60s. And it is skewed geographically. It is true that that period was a period of tremendous increase in optimism and standard of living and increased rights for black Americans in particular.

3:13All of these sorts of things were going on. But the idea that everybody in 1960 had a great union factory job and the mom could stay home with no financial troubles and they had a bunch of kids and a house in the suburbs and two cars. I mean, that is a completely skewed view of what the world was like. It is skewed geographically. It is skewed ethnically. And in this case, it's very skewed geographically, because if you look in 1960, those figures for North Carolina were typical of the South. 35 % of the state was without full plumbing. And full plumbing is defined by the Census Bureau as hot and cold, piped water, a bathtub or shower, and a flushable toilet.

4:09Probably we're looking at lack of flushable toilets primarily. And the figures would be significantly worse for Mississippi, for example. I think it was almost half. So that we have these skewed pictures that are based on, you know, what things were like in Ohio at some period in time or what things were like in California where I live now. Things were great. Things were good. that most, you know, almost everybody had full plumbing. So there was a lot of skewing. And what we saw in the 50s, 60s, 70s was more harmonization, if you will, across the country, you know, a standard of living that was more shared by Americans.

4:54And in part, people are nostalgic for the hope that was embodied in that shared experience of upward mobility. So that's one reason that people forget. And they, now I have to say, I have no, my family lived in North Carolina. They had interplummy. They had all these things, but a lot of people didn't. And it's worth remembering that. I was about five years old at that time. So I'm a little bit ahead of you, but is the point that things weren't as great as we think, or is the point that progress has happened a lot faster than we just noticed? I think it's that progress happens really fast And people get used to things really fast also.

5:36Is my perception that it's happening even faster now true? Or is that some kind of time dilation effect? Well, certain things are happening faster and certain things are happening more slowly. Obviously, we have tremendous rapid progress in anything that involves computers and chips and software and all of those things. And that filters into lots of things that we don't think about. So I've been doing research recently on the history of eyeglasses. And when I say the history of eyeglasses, I mean going back to the late 13th century. But one thing that computerized things, computerized equipment has made possible is very precise customization of like progressive lenses.

6:24So I have progressive lenses. I don't use them for the computer because the computer is the perfect distance from my eyes and everything is clear. But I have these glasses and they have correct astigmatism at the top and therefore reading at the bottom. And they're thin and they're perfectly, you can't tell there's no line. They're certainly not like bifocals. That is a very recent capability. Progressive lenses were first developed in the 1970s. And I talked to a guy who was an optometrist or optician in that period, you know, and he was like, they were terrible. You can hardly see out of them, but some people were so vain that would only use them, you know, and over time that's gotten better and better and better.

7:10And that's driven by, to a large degree, by IT, because in order to make lenses with that level of precision. You have to do lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of calculations, complex calculations, and then you have to drive machines to produce those lenses. And that's just, that's the kind of thing we take for granted. We don't see, but that said, progress in the last maybe three decades or really since the early seventies has been much faster in the world of bits, as they say, than in the world of atoms. We've made it more difficult to do things in the world of atoms. Partly that was because people were raising environmental concerns, but also it was things like, for example, take that house in the suburbs.

7:59I'm going to get this wrong, but when Kamala Harris was running for president, she said one goal of her administration would be to built 3 million new homes in America in her four-year term. Well, it turns out that if you go back to the post-World War II period, Americans were routinely building a million homes a year, a million homes a year in a country that was much smaller and much poorer. So we've made certain things like building housing very difficult. And so when people and cars have a lot of safety equipment on them. They're much better. They last much longer than they used to, but they're also much more expensive to buy a new car.

8:46And there's been a lot of inflation in that in the last 10 or so years as well. So it's uneven. And some of the things, clothes are practically free compared to what they were when you or I were teenagers or in early in our, say, in our 20s. But people who are young now take clothes are practically free for granted and worry about other things. So interesting. Well, obviously, material improvements like plumbing or safer childbirth improve our well-being, but flourishing isn't just about physical comfort. So where do material and non-material progress reinforce each other? Well, one thing that we tend to forget is how much drudgery there used to be.

9:34And when you are engaged in real drudgery, different people have different ideas of what constitutes drudgery. Some people really like cleaning floors, I guess, or whatever, or ironing lots and lots of clothes. But it takes away from other more elevating things you could be doing, whether that's playing with your children or reading a book or taking a run, depending on the particular person. But the other thing is that in a world where we have a lot of material want, a lot of our thinking is engaged with dealing with our material want. How am I going to feed my family? How am I going to get my kids new shoes?

10:24And when you remove those things, when it becomes easier, a lot of people fall into the trap of frittering away the day and not realizing. I mean, there are lots of time studies that show that when Americans get extra time in their day from whatever labor-saving devices or whatever, what do they do? They watch television. Now, I watch television. I'm not against television. But as a default, it may not be the thing that gives you the most satisfaction. So that if you're watching television in the moment, it's an easy thing to do and you enjoy it. But you might get more satisfaction if you were working in your garden or if you were reading a book, that sort of thing.

11:15So it puts more responsibility on us to think about where does that sort of psychological or spiritual, if you want to use that term, aspect of our lives find its satisfactions. It seems to me like with all this material progress and progress that's at least perceived as progress in productivity, we're more productive because of technology today than we've probably ever been before. But what I hear you say that doesn't necessarily correlate with personal progress where we feel a higher level of satisfaction. That's a choice. You know, all the gadgets and tech can make the possibility, but we've got to take advantage of it.

12:02The issues of character never go away. They are eternal human questions. And we forget because we have, again, we have sort of nostalgic views of the past. There was a lot of anime. There was a lot of getting drunk. There was a lot of stuff that people have always, there have always been a lot of people who didn't know what to do with their lives. And maybe they had to work to keep bread on the table and they did that. But then when they got their paycheck, they drank half of it up. And then there was a stereotypical 19th century problem, like 19th century problem. This is how we got prohibition, basically.

12:45was men had jobs that paid them well. Women could not get jobs that paid enough to support themselves and their families. Their children, they were dependent on their husbands. Their husbands would often drink up a big portion of their wages, maybe also abuse their children and their wives. But even if they didn't, even if they weren't violent, just the financial pressure. And this led to the suffrage movement. I mean, it was coincident with the suffrage movement. This led to the temperance movement because those character issues, they don't go away. And so now the good news is probably not drinking away the paycheck, but he might be spending all night playing video games or whatever.

13:30And maybe he never even got married or that sort of thing. So we're dealing with other questions. This could be a big question for our time because AI from all, and I'm deep into it myself, but from all indications is going to give us even more freedom. It's going to give some people total freedom because they're not going to have a job. And, you know, the whole conversation about, you know, universal basic income and all that kind of stuff. I have such mixed emotions about it. But what I think it does basically indicate is that we're going to have a lot more free time in the future, and we better figure out what we're going to do it, or we're going to be less happy than we've ever been.

14:08Right, right. Is this true? I think it could be true. I mean, we don't know, but I think it's quite possible. And I think in the AI conversation, one of the books that often comes up is Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. And it comes up because in the book, the sort of central idea, the MacGuffin or whatever, is this AI-driven manual that will sort of educate a child. And so a lot of people see that. But the thing that I think is really astute about that book is the idea that in a world of absolute plenty, where no one needs to work to survive. And there are other backstory things, but you get this fracturing of society into tribes that take different approaches.

15:01And there's this whole sort of underclass called theets who basically live on the equivalent of a universal basic income. This is a nanotechnology kind of science fiction world. So it's basically they get the stuff they need out of these machines. And, you know, they get food and clothing and housing and all these sort of things in a basic way. But they don't have anything that elevates them. And they tend to be dysfunctional families and stuff. But there are other groups that take other approaches. There are neo-Victorians who quite literally model themselves on the Victorians. There's another group, forget what they're called, but who like to make things in difficult ways by hand, even though you can get anything from these machines.

15:48So they make furniture, they make paper or all this sort of craft. And I think we have that going on now. I mean, I wrote a book about textiles called The Fabric of Civilization. I learned to weave and I do hand weaving. I was talking to a weaver friend the other day about how we love to weave, but we're so glad we don't have to do it to make our clothes. But there are kinds of satisfactions in creating things. I think that we're going to see more and more of that, as well as from just a labor market point of view, some of those things may be the ones that are the good paying jobs in the future as when AI can do a lot of routine brain work.

16:31My nephew is a very fine woodworker and carpenter, and I have no concerns over his future employment. No, I don't either. And, you know, even our company, we've said we're definitely AI enabled, but we're also analog first. Right. Because in a world where everything becomes digitized and dematerialized, we think there's going to be a huge market for real things, real artifacts, you know, all of that. And one interesting thing is at Thanksgiving, which my nephew and his girlfriend were there and his sister, my niece, and both my nephew and niece are running small companies. My nephew actually has employees.

17:13My niece is doing her, you know, it's a one-person shop doing fashion design and stuff. And the girlfriend works for an interior designer. And all three of them are using AI a lot to learn how to run their businesses, to know what fabric will look like on a chair, all these kinds of things. So it's certainly enabling, but all three of them are ultimately in businesses where there is a thing you touch. Whether it's a garment, whether it's your living room and the things in it, whether it's the actual physical furniture or the door, that sort of thing. So these are very complementary technologies or ways of life, if you will.

18:01And the scarcity of them may make it more valuable. One of the things in your books that you highlight is that progress doesn't come from the top down. It's the tinkers, it's the craftsmen that are experimenting. And why does that kind of decentralized evolution teach us about societies, how societies prosper? I think that the fundamental truth that we have trouble grasping is that nobody knows anything. We all know a lot about our little world. And nobody can know everything. Even the smartest AI, whatever, can't figure out what people want, what people are dissatisfied with. And a lot of innovation comes from that.

18:50And we tend to focus on big technologies. And even big technologies come from a lot of incremental improvements. I mean, what is Moore's Law about? It's all about the incremental improvements. If you started with the original chips and showed people what they're like today, people would say as like impossible because it's built little by little. But a lot of improvements come from people saying, I'm dissatisfied with this or here's something I figured out. How could I roll it out into the world? And that could be a business. It doesn't have to be a business. I mean, it could be a recipe. You know, it could be a child rearing practice.

19:36And the result is that we get a lot of surprises. And one of the examples I like to use when I give talks is I showed this picture. It's super, super generic stock art, you know, photograph of three young businesswomen who are traveling and got their suitcases are pulling along. One is holding a cup of coffee. One's got her cell phone. And I was like, OK, where is progress in this picture? This is, and everybody, of course, it's the smartphone. That's, and of course that's true. That's something. But when I went on my book tour for The Future and It's Enemy, my first book in 19, like 1999, I didn't have rolling luggage.

20:16It had been invented, but it hadn't been rolled out yet. No pun intended. You know, you had to come as recent as the turn of the century. If you went in an airport, most people who were not flight crews were lugging their luggage on their shoulders or in their hands. And then, of course, there's the coffee. And Starbucks started rolling out across the country in 1991. And Starbucks came from Howard Schultz seeing the coffee culture in Italy and saying, why can't we have that? Really nice coffee in these nicely designed places. And then later, he had the idea of what you got from the book, The Great Good Place, of third places.

21:01The idea that Americans lacked places that were neither home nor work where they could just be with other people. And so then Starbucks adopted that. So when Starbucks started rolling out in 1991, there were about 1 ,650 coffeehouses in the entire country. And 165 of those were Starbucks. And now it's like 15 ,000 coffeehouses. I believe it. And fewer than half of those are Starbucks. And even though it seems like there's a Starbucks on every corner. And that's because once people saw Starbucks, people liked the idea, but some people didn't like Starbucks. They thought it was too corporate or they wanted something more local or whatever.

21:47But people started having this idea of opening these things. And that's the kind of surprise that no one would have pictured. And you can look at, you know, number of employees, you can look at the market capital of the company, and you can see sort of some economic statistics showing that that's, you know, made a big contribution to the economy. But the main thing it's done is it's changed a big part of our everyday lives. You know, my husband goes almost every day to a local coffee house. Sometimes it's Starbucks, sometimes it's someplace else. And, you know, hangs out and works and chats to people.

22:25And, you know, it's a new part of American life that wasn't there 25 years ago, really.

22:39This is part of why I love entrepreneurialism so much. Because basically, in fact, I wrote a book, Why Entrepreneurs Will Save the World. But in it, I said that basically being an entrepreneur means you're solving problems at a profit. Exactly. And because you're doing that, you're having to increment very quickly in order to stay relevant to the markets you're serving. And as competition increases, it creates even more innovation because you have to now stay ahead of your competitors. But I love what happens, but it's definitely not a top-down approach. even in the AI world today. Yes, there's a lot of amazing things happening among these big LLMs and the companies that support them.

23:20But what's really interesting to me is how the entrepreneurs that I serve are taking that technology and using it to solve real world problems. That's where my fascination goes today. That was our Thanksgiving conversation. I mean, these are really small businesses. These are young people. They are not tech people. They're, you know, but they're just using it to solve entrepreneurial problems. I was just reading an article in the New York Times yesterday about Rodney Brooks, who been a roboticist and an AI person going way back. And he actually started iRobot, which developed the Roomba. There was this quote where he's saying, like, suppose you have a piece of graph paper and I have all these little squares and color in one.

24:09That's your dissertation. That is to say, that's the technological thing. All those other squares are what you have to fill in to get a company to work. It's all the, you've got the tech idea, but how do you implement it in terms of, you know, manufacturability and all of this stuff? And then how do you do the distribution and how do you do the sales and all of those things, how to get the organization to work, all of that stuff is very, very difficult. And another thing that we take for granted now that it's been a revolution is our distribution. And it comes up in the context of international supply chains.

24:52But even just within the U.S., the way things get from one part of the country to another, the supplies that small businesses have access to are much improved from what they would have been 20, 25 years ago. Well, now with 3D printing. Yeah, right. There's that. Individuals can become manufacturing plants all into themselves. One of the things that you write about that I think is included in all of this is we now expect more beauty in everyday objects and space and the products we design. And from my, you know, perch, I think that Steve Jobs drove a lot that by bringing a deep design aesthetic to something as simple as a telephone that's now, of course, ubiquitous.

25:37But how does this rising aesthetic baseline reflect something deeper than wealth, something about dignity and daily joy? Yeah. Yeah. So you're referring to, so I read a book that came out in 2003. So it was very turn of the century book called the substance of style. And Steve Jobs' initial influence on the sort of broader world in terms of aesthetics was actually when he came back to Apple and he rationalized their product line and he relaunched the Mac with these candy colored plastic shells. If you weren't around then, you won't remember them. And the idea was that a computer didn't have to be putty colored, which is what most computers were, even Macs at that time.

26:29It could be something delightful. It could be something beautiful. And then the next thing you knew when I was researching the book, which a couple of years after this had come out, everything in the world was those candy colored plastics. Irons were those candy colored plastics. But human beings don't just value function. They value pleasure and they value meaning. And pleasure and meaning are things that are very much conveyed through the look and feel of objects of places. In The Fabric of Civilization, my textile book, which is my most recent book, I talk about textiles. There are not only so many truly ancient textiles because textiles tend to rot, but there are these scraps of cloth that are found in a site in Peru that are very, very old, 6 ,200 years old.

27:26And there's this little piece of cloth that has indigo stripes and white highlights that are made from a, most of the cloth is cotton, but the white is made from a milkweed plant, I believe it is, and sort of beige cotton. Now, 6 ,200 years ago, by any standard of 2025, people were really poor. And so you might say, well, they're so poor. Why are they worrying about, you know, why are they making strife? I mean, making indigo, which is something that people figured out all around the world using different plants, is an incredibly difficult process. It's very chemically complicated, but people figured it out just using trial and error.

28:12And it really lasts. So we have beautiful blues from thousands and thousands of years ago. So why did they do that? We don't know because there are no written records about this society. This appears to have been some type of religious place because the fabric is torn and then soaked in salt water. So people think it might have been some kind of sacrifice or ritual. So maybe the stripes had some sort of spiritual meaning or they referred to a particular group, or maybe it was just somebody's favorite outfit that they were no longer using, or we don't know. But we can be pretty sure as human beings that they, like us, valued the way things looked in terms of beauty and also said things about what was meaningful to them with the way they design the objects around them.

29:07It makes me wonder if design is so much a part of the human experience that we almost use it to regulate our interior environment. So for example, with one of the things I think Apple did in the later years of Steve Jobs was their kind of distinguishing design aesthetic was simplicity. Yeah. And so I think in a complicated world where you can't figure it out or you don't feel like you can figure it out, at least you want your devices feeling like they're simple. Like it's manageable. And I wonder if that will continue to be something as we move into the future. We're going to increasingly look to our environment for things that we struggle to gain at a psychological or emotional level.