The life-changing magic of touching stuff

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of friction maxing. I'm your friend David Pearce and today on the show, we're talking about the small stuff. I'm talking to Ian Bogos 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 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 gonna 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 ninety seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, 07/07/2026. 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 …