it was a bright beautiful autumn day in
the mid-1980s not unlike today and I was
probably about 13 years old and it was a
Saturday and there was absolutely
nothing in my world going on that day
and I remember waking up at the
god-awful hour of probably 10 a.m. and
reaching over to the phone
located next to my bed and picking it up
and making a phone call and I called a
young girl I knew from school I remember
the conversation very well actually her
mom answered the phone handed it to her
I said hello she said hello what are you
doing just woke up me too what are you
this conversation in about the same
meter and depth went on for about an
hour
[Laughter]
and about an hour and a half into this
moving life-changing conversation I got
this idea I said how long have you ever
been on the phone with a boy before she
said I think this is close to my limit
and I go you want to see how long we can
stay on the phone she said yeah my
friends are skiing today and I said mine
too and she said well then let’s do this
and for the next 12 hours I tied up my
parents telephone line and I look back
on that at this point in my life and
I’ve asked myself on many occasions why
in the world with a 13 year old boy
spend 12 hours on the phone with a girl
he’s really not even that interested in
and part of its because we as a species
have been designed and we have become a
verbal first species from the history of
our species until today we have
traditionally been verbal first in our
communications the earliest writings
that we have on record are from about
the 26th century BC from both Egypt and
Sumeria before that we have no evidence
of writing yet
somehow we communicated even to this day
half of the world’s known languages have
no written text they’re just verbal and
we as a society communicate first
verbally all the time everything that we
do in our society has been geared
towards verbal first communications but
technology is changing all of that
trying to illustrate that we need to
take a trip down memory lane if you go
back 25 years or so when personal
communications started to change through
computers we were able for the first
time to talk to people around the world
for free via a computer and at first it
was all via text
remember AOL Instant Messenger
got mail text fast forward a few years
and people started actually doing things
online I was a part of a generation who
started using text-based communications
online well before the internet when you
dial into another computer locally in
your community and you would jump on
what’s called a bulletin board that
makes me really ancient right now if
you’re a tech nerd fast forward a few
years and things like tumblr myspace
Facebook come into the picture and even
predating those teenagers started
texting one another remember the stories
about parents getting a 2,000 dollar
bill because their kid was texting
it seems ludicrous today but if you fast
forward a few years even after that you
find technologies like facebook
Messenger snapchat WeChat line SMS text
base communications are changing the way
that our society communicates my son is
19 years old and that makes him a part
of the very first generation ever the
year that he was born is the first
generation ever who will never remember
the world without the Internet
why is that important because as we grow
like I am when I was a young man and we
start to communicate with people outside
of our media families it typically has
been done via verbal communications
those times where we learned to express
ourselves and communicate and share
ideas hopes dreams that stuff has
traditionally all happened to verbally
our grandparents went to sock hops they
went to community dances they went to
school functions our parents went to
other events things like cruising the
strip in fact as I was preparing for
this I was reminded of a great
commercial from the 1970s for a product
called mr. microphone it was this great
cordless microphone that played through
any radio and the tagline of the whole
thing was hey good-looking we’ll be back
it’s an example of verbal first
communications young people learning to
express and be who they are as
individuals through verbal first
communications about 15 to 16 years ago
when text messaging became popular that
started to change the rise of AOL
Instant Messenger and Facebook those
things all change the way that young
people are developing because it stopped
being verbal first and it started to be
text first for the first time in the
history of our society people are
learning to communicate from a very
young age outside of their immediate
family in the most formative years of
their lives in a text-based manner and I
really think that there are gonna be
four major changes that we as a society
are not very prepared for but I think
after today
maybe you’ll be a little more prepared
for them the first one is that this
device right here this always on always
tethered device that constantly gives us
access of the Internet is going to
actually cause some problems for our
society because of text-based
communications there’s going to be a
technology and a communications gap
unlike anything we have ever seen see
traditionally a communications gap was
between different generations parents
didn’t know how to talk to their kids
kids didn’t know how to talk to their
parents but most of it was based on
vernacular here’s the problem vernacular
can be easily taught and all of us are
familiar with the memes on the internet
that show grandpa trying to send a text
message to his grandkids or the horrific
postings we’ve all had from our grandma
on Facebook those are the kind of gaps
that we are going to see in
communication but I would pose to you
that it’s going to be even worse than
that see some of us grew up in a family
where we were f-1 enough to be able to
afford a device like this and our
friends did too and so as text first
communications become more and more
prevalent if I have one of these devices
in my hands at all times it becomes easy
for me to keep up with my peers it
becomes easy for me to develop the way
that the vast majority
people are but what happens to cultures
and societies and neighborhoods where
you can’t afford a device like this
imagine a radical shift in a language in
a nation and you not being able to
afford the lessons for it I really
believe the text first communications
are going to be the equivalent of a
state-sponsored shift in languages that
no one ever actually sponsored so
imagine that you grow up as a young
person and do not have the ability to
communicate in a text first manner the
way that everyone else in your
generation does imagine that you’re now
a part of a different generation who
have to go back into the workforce later
in life and text first Communications is
going to be the way that the majority of
people expect you to be able to
communicate ask yourself right now
how would you fare in a job interview
that was conducted entirely via text
message how would you communicate with
somebody via text message sarcasm irony
subtle flirting one of the first
problems our society is going to see
that we are not prepared for is a giant
giant gap in communications that we have
never experienced in the history of our
society I think the second thing that
we’re going to see has a societal shift
is going to be a change in brain
development and brain chemistry the
research behind what goes on in a
forming brain is fascinating and in fact
most of the conventional education that
we have is a verbal first communication
method we have been brought up in this
we understand that and we’ve developed
styles around verbal first
communications but what happens when
your primary mode of communication is
text first but your teachers is verbal
first can you imagine having never heard
someone talk outside of your mom for
more than five minutes and having to sit
in a classroom and listen to a lecture
drone on and on and on you be texting
your friends this is the board’s boring
thing ever
and what happens to young people’s
brains as they begin to develop in a
society where everything is expected to
be verbal yet they’re constantly being
bombarded with text
or over add to that all the stimuli of
what happens when you are constantly
bombarded with notifications text
messages buzzes sounds our brain
actually goes into a fight-or-flight
mode every time we are notified by our
phone what happens to the chemistry of a
young person’s brain who are being
stimulated in a way they’ve never been
stimulated before whose fight-or-flight
responses are being stimulated in a way
never before and on top of that their
brain is developing under a text first
scenario we don’t know we won’t know for
quite some time
I think the third thing that we will see
has a shift in our society is a new rise
of rock stars now I know this sounds
kind of crazy and who cares but hear me
out on this we are going to see a new
celebrity unlike anything we’ve seen in
the history of our world see
traditionally the great people of our
time that we think of as communicators
are the great orators the winston
churchill’s of this world the john f
kennedy’s the Martin Luther King Jr’s
the Steve Jobs we are going to see the
rise of a new rock star that is a text
first communicator and in fact we’re
already starting to see glimpses of this
put your politics aside for 10 seconds
and think about this
our current president arguably would
never been elected without Twitter the
American people hold more sway in what
he says and via a text on Twitter a
hundred and forty characters oftentimes
than what he says verbally that’s just a
glimpse because the new rock stars of
our society aren’t just people who can
play instruments or act on a stage or
have a beautiful face they’re the people
who can code oh that’s a text-based as
well they’re the people who actually
have built empires on a text-based
platform think about the Mark Zuckerberg
of this world
think about Steve Jobs Elon Musk all of
them built an empire on a text first
platform the fourth thing I think that
we’re going to see through a device like
this is the business of text is going to
change the way that we function as AI
this week I decided it was time for me
I’m a runner an avid runner and I love
running but my I’m also getting old and
I decided that I would save my knees
some trouble and I decided to order a
bike this week so I went on Amazon
thinking how hard is it to order a bike
I have a budget and I clicked on Amazon
and I saw that I needed to find out what
size of bike I needed I didn’t know
there were bike sizes so I clicked a few
more things and I went to a website that
said here’s a size chart and I picked
out the size and I picked out the color
and I went click click click and three
days later it was at my house and I got
home that day and I pulled in my garage
in my garage is this box and I got so
excited my bike and I walk in and it hit
me this bike now has to be put together
I don’t have the skills to do that I
have to call somebody really and I had
to call a local bike shop and like talk
with some random person and make an
appointment to come in and I found
myself frustrated because I didn’t want
the human interaction why couldn’t I go
on my phone and click click click and
see there’s an issue in our country and
you could call it an issue or you could
call it an opportunity depending on if
you’re an optimist or a pessimist but
there’s a law in our country the
corporations are required to maximize
the amounts of profits that they
generate for their shareholders and in
doing so oftentimes companies will make
decisions on business based on that
premise so the less interaction that I
have to give my customers with another
human being the more money I can make
because I have to hire less employees
and so my profit margins rise and we are
actually going to see I believe in our
society a movement to eliminate human
interaction from commerce you’re seeing
this even now my episode with Amazon is
a great example of this we see around us
a peeling back of the interaction that
we have with other human beings and it’s
moving towards a text first system and
as a society we aren’t prepared for the
ramifications of that because we’ve
never been here before
so when it comes to things like
communication gaps brain changes and
that’s pretty important text based stars
and text based commerce why does that
matter to any of us is it good it’s a
bad well I would wage to you that it’s
neither good nor bad it’s a moral it
just is in fact I think the people who
fight against it those hippies running
around yellow poor need to sit down and
sing Kumbaya are probably going to be
the outcasts because it just is going to
happen our children are going to grow up
doing it young people are going to be
more text-based and they’ve ever been
before and there’s no point in fighting
it but I do think that it deserves some
attention from us as a society it
deserves some intentionality around our
thinking and I think more importantly it
deserves us deciding in advance what it
is that we value because at the end of
the day all verbal communications or
text-based communications or young men
laying in bed on a
Saturday morning reaching for the phone
comes down to one thing human
connectedness people need and want and
desire to be connected with their peers
people need and want and desire to
become one with the community and
regardless of the technology that you
use or how important you think it is at
the end of the day that’s what’s most
important is that we as a society decide
it doesn’t matter what technology
happens it doesn’t matter what rules
happen we will at the end of the day
hold our peers our friends our
communities more important than any
single technological revolution and
that’s one of the things that I think as
a society we are prepared for thank you very much
the mid-1980s not unlike today and I was
probably about 13 years old and it was a
Saturday and there was absolutely
nothing in my world going on that day
and I remember waking up at the
god-awful hour of probably 10 a.m. and
reaching over to the phone
located next to my bed and picking it up
and making a phone call and I called a
young girl I knew from school I remember
the conversation very well actually her
mom answered the phone handed it to her
I said hello she said hello what are you
doing just woke up me too what are you
this conversation in about the same
meter and depth went on for about an
hour
[Laughter]
and about an hour and a half into this
moving life-changing conversation I got
this idea I said how long have you ever
been on the phone with a boy before she
said I think this is close to my limit
and I go you want to see how long we can
stay on the phone she said yeah my
friends are skiing today and I said mine
too and she said well then let’s do this
and for the next 12 hours I tied up my
parents telephone line and I look back
on that at this point in my life and
I’ve asked myself on many occasions why
in the world with a 13 year old boy
spend 12 hours on the phone with a girl
he’s really not even that interested in
and part of its because we as a species
have been designed and we have become a
verbal first species from the history of
our species until today we have
traditionally been verbal first in our
communications the earliest writings
that we have on record are from about
the 26th century BC from both Egypt and
Sumeria before that we have no evidence
of writing yet
somehow we communicated even to this day
half of the world’s known languages have
no written text they’re just verbal and
we as a society communicate first
verbally all the time everything that we
do in our society has been geared
towards verbal first communications but
technology is changing all of that
trying to illustrate that we need to
take a trip down memory lane if you go
back 25 years or so when personal
communications started to change through
computers we were able for the first
time to talk to people around the world
for free via a computer and at first it
was all via text
remember AOL Instant Messenger
got mail text fast forward a few years
and people started actually doing things
online I was a part of a generation who
started using text-based communications
online well before the internet when you
dial into another computer locally in
your community and you would jump on
what’s called a bulletin board that
makes me really ancient right now if
you’re a tech nerd fast forward a few
years and things like tumblr myspace
Facebook come into the picture and even
predating those teenagers started
texting one another remember the stories
about parents getting a 2,000 dollar
bill because their kid was texting
it seems ludicrous today but if you fast
forward a few years even after that you
find technologies like facebook
Messenger snapchat WeChat line SMS text
base communications are changing the way
that our society communicates my son is
19 years old and that makes him a part
of the very first generation ever the
year that he was born is the first
generation ever who will never remember
the world without the Internet
why is that important because as we grow
like I am when I was a young man and we
start to communicate with people outside
of our media families it typically has
been done via verbal communications
those times where we learned to express
ourselves and communicate and share
ideas hopes dreams that stuff has
traditionally all happened to verbally
our grandparents went to sock hops they
went to community dances they went to
school functions our parents went to
other events things like cruising the
strip in fact as I was preparing for
this I was reminded of a great
commercial from the 1970s for a product
called mr. microphone it was this great
cordless microphone that played through
any radio and the tagline of the whole
thing was hey good-looking we’ll be back
it’s an example of verbal first
communications young people learning to
express and be who they are as
individuals through verbal first
communications about 15 to 16 years ago
when text messaging became popular that
started to change the rise of AOL
Instant Messenger and Facebook those
things all change the way that young
people are developing because it stopped
being verbal first and it started to be
text first for the first time in the
history of our society people are
learning to communicate from a very
young age outside of their immediate
family in the most formative years of
their lives in a text-based manner and I
really think that there are gonna be
four major changes that we as a society
are not very prepared for but I think
after today
maybe you’ll be a little more prepared
for them the first one is that this
device right here this always on always
tethered device that constantly gives us
access of the Internet is going to
actually cause some problems for our
society because of text-based
communications there’s going to be a
technology and a communications gap
unlike anything we have ever seen see
traditionally a communications gap was
between different generations parents
didn’t know how to talk to their kids
kids didn’t know how to talk to their
parents but most of it was based on
vernacular here’s the problem vernacular
can be easily taught and all of us are
familiar with the memes on the internet
that show grandpa trying to send a text
message to his grandkids or the horrific
postings we’ve all had from our grandma
on Facebook those are the kind of gaps
that we are going to see in
communication but I would pose to you
that it’s going to be even worse than
that see some of us grew up in a family
where we were f-1 enough to be able to
afford a device like this and our
friends did too and so as text first
communications become more and more
prevalent if I have one of these devices
in my hands at all times it becomes easy
for me to keep up with my peers it
becomes easy for me to develop the way
that the vast majority
people are but what happens to cultures
and societies and neighborhoods where
you can’t afford a device like this
imagine a radical shift in a language in
a nation and you not being able to
afford the lessons for it I really
believe the text first communications
are going to be the equivalent of a
state-sponsored shift in languages that
no one ever actually sponsored so
imagine that you grow up as a young
person and do not have the ability to
communicate in a text first manner the
way that everyone else in your
generation does imagine that you’re now
a part of a different generation who
have to go back into the workforce later
in life and text first Communications is
going to be the way that the majority of
people expect you to be able to
communicate ask yourself right now
how would you fare in a job interview
that was conducted entirely via text
message how would you communicate with
somebody via text message sarcasm irony
subtle flirting one of the first
problems our society is going to see
that we are not prepared for is a giant
giant gap in communications that we have
never experienced in the history of our
society I think the second thing that
we’re going to see has a societal shift
is going to be a change in brain
development and brain chemistry the
research behind what goes on in a
forming brain is fascinating and in fact
most of the conventional education that
we have is a verbal first communication
method we have been brought up in this
we understand that and we’ve developed
styles around verbal first
communications but what happens when
your primary mode of communication is
text first but your teachers is verbal
first can you imagine having never heard
someone talk outside of your mom for
more than five minutes and having to sit
in a classroom and listen to a lecture
drone on and on and on you be texting
your friends this is the board’s boring
thing ever
and what happens to young people’s
brains as they begin to develop in a
society where everything is expected to
be verbal yet they’re constantly being
bombarded with text
or over add to that all the stimuli of
what happens when you are constantly
bombarded with notifications text
messages buzzes sounds our brain
actually goes into a fight-or-flight
mode every time we are notified by our
phone what happens to the chemistry of a
young person’s brain who are being
stimulated in a way they’ve never been
stimulated before whose fight-or-flight
responses are being stimulated in a way
never before and on top of that their
brain is developing under a text first
scenario we don’t know we won’t know for
quite some time
I think the third thing that we will see
has a shift in our society is a new rise
of rock stars now I know this sounds
kind of crazy and who cares but hear me
out on this we are going to see a new
celebrity unlike anything we’ve seen in
the history of our world see
traditionally the great people of our
time that we think of as communicators
are the great orators the winston
churchill’s of this world the john f
kennedy’s the Martin Luther King Jr’s
the Steve Jobs we are going to see the
rise of a new rock star that is a text
first communicator and in fact we’re
already starting to see glimpses of this
put your politics aside for 10 seconds
and think about this
our current president arguably would
never been elected without Twitter the
American people hold more sway in what
he says and via a text on Twitter a
hundred and forty characters oftentimes
than what he says verbally that’s just a
glimpse because the new rock stars of
our society aren’t just people who can
play instruments or act on a stage or
have a beautiful face they’re the people
who can code oh that’s a text-based as
well they’re the people who actually
have built empires on a text-based
platform think about the Mark Zuckerberg
of this world
think about Steve Jobs Elon Musk all of
them built an empire on a text first
platform the fourth thing I think that
we’re going to see through a device like
this is the business of text is going to
change the way that we function as AI
this week I decided it was time for me
I’m a runner an avid runner and I love
running but my I’m also getting old and
I decided that I would save my knees
some trouble and I decided to order a
bike this week so I went on Amazon
thinking how hard is it to order a bike
I have a budget and I clicked on Amazon
and I saw that I needed to find out what
size of bike I needed I didn’t know
there were bike sizes so I clicked a few
more things and I went to a website that
said here’s a size chart and I picked
out the size and I picked out the color
and I went click click click and three
days later it was at my house and I got
home that day and I pulled in my garage
in my garage is this box and I got so
excited my bike and I walk in and it hit
me this bike now has to be put together
I don’t have the skills to do that I
have to call somebody really and I had
to call a local bike shop and like talk
with some random person and make an
appointment to come in and I found
myself frustrated because I didn’t want
the human interaction why couldn’t I go
on my phone and click click click and
see there’s an issue in our country and
you could call it an issue or you could
call it an opportunity depending on if
you’re an optimist or a pessimist but
there’s a law in our country the
corporations are required to maximize
the amounts of profits that they
generate for their shareholders and in
doing so oftentimes companies will make
decisions on business based on that
premise so the less interaction that I
have to give my customers with another
human being the more money I can make
because I have to hire less employees
and so my profit margins rise and we are
actually going to see I believe in our
society a movement to eliminate human
interaction from commerce you’re seeing
this even now my episode with Amazon is
a great example of this we see around us
a peeling back of the interaction that
we have with other human beings and it’s
moving towards a text first system and
as a society we aren’t prepared for the
ramifications of that because we’ve
never been here before
so when it comes to things like
communication gaps brain changes and
that’s pretty important text based stars
and text based commerce why does that
matter to any of us is it good it’s a
bad well I would wage to you that it’s
neither good nor bad it’s a moral it
just is in fact I think the people who
fight against it those hippies running
around yellow poor need to sit down and
sing Kumbaya are probably going to be
the outcasts because it just is going to
happen our children are going to grow up
doing it young people are going to be
more text-based and they’ve ever been
before and there’s no point in fighting
it but I do think that it deserves some
attention from us as a society it
deserves some intentionality around our
thinking and I think more importantly it
deserves us deciding in advance what it
is that we value because at the end of
the day all verbal communications or
text-based communications or young men
laying in bed on a
Saturday morning reaching for the phone
comes down to one thing human
connectedness people need and want and
desire to be connected with their peers
people need and want and desire to
become one with the community and
regardless of the technology that you
use or how important you think it is at
the end of the day that’s what’s most
important is that we as a society decide
it doesn’t matter what technology
happens it doesn’t matter what rules
happen we will at the end of the day
hold our peers our friends our
communities more important than any
single technological revolution and
that’s one of the things that I think as
a society we are prepared for thank you very much
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