#328 - Humans Still Beat The Bots. A conversation with Dave Erasmus

You can feel how close we are to a world where your “digital agent” can take the meeting for you. The unsettling part is not the tech, it is the question it forces: what is left for humans when a bot can summarise, persuade, and perform?

Sitting face to face with Dave Erasmus, we dig into the piece that still resists automation: the messy, emergent creativity that happens when two people actually share time, pay attention, and build trust.

Dave’s story is a masterclass in interdisciplinary learning. He has ridden major technology waves, stepped away to live off-grid in the woods, built global community through online video, and now finds his purpose reshaped by his daughter Mila’s life on dialysis and her upcoming kidney removal. That personal reality grounds our conversation about AI, thought leadership, and what “good work” looks like when the future feels less predictable.

We unpack Dave’s three paradigms of knowledge: Britannica as gatekept knowledge, Wikipedia as crowdsourced knowledge, and a new AI-generated layer where machine-written pages like “Grocopedia” can end up cited as sources. From there we tackle trust, polarisation, and why we may all need a cognitive gym to protect our thinking. We also bring it back to the future of print technology, manufacturing innovation, and how “stumble-along” breakthroughs can jump fields when the right people share stories.

Subscribe, share this with someone building in tech or print, and leave a review if it sparks a new way of thinking about learning, trust, and the AI era.

Listen on:

Apple Podcast
Google Podcast
Spotify

What is FuturePrint?

FuturePrint is a digital and in person platform and community dedicated to future print technology. Over 20,000 people per month read our articles, listen to our podcasts, view our TV features, click on our e-newsletters and attend our in-person and virtual events. 

We hope to see you at one of our future in-person events:

FuturePrint Packaging, Labels & DTS, 29-30 September '26, Valencia, Spain

FuturePrint Leaders Summit, 29 September '26, Valencia, Spain

FuturePrint Industrial Print, 14-15 April '27, Munich, Germany

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to the Future Print Podcast, celebrating print technology and the people behind it.

SPEAKER_02 0:10

Well, hi there, and welcome to this week's very special Future Print podcast. Because this is special in a way, because we're going to talk a little bit more about thought leadership. And I'm really pleased to have a guest with me who I'll introduce to you as someone that I met in a coffee shop. It's crazy, isn't it? You just in your local coffee shop, I met this guy, Dave Erasmus. He's a really interesting person. He's got so many different topics that he loves to talk about. He's spoken at TED.com sessions. He's done speaking at the UN about listening to oceans. He's looked at the topic of morality for finance. He's involved in social entrepreneurship. He's had his own farm. He walks in woods and he's talking a little bit about networks and knowledge today and his learning journey. And I just thought it'd be really exciting to have that kind of conversation with someone very different from the normal future prints speaker. So, Dave, hi. Fraser, great to have you here. Thank you very much for joining me. Um, I probably haven't given you the best intro, so just give us a little bit of clarity over who you are, what you've done, and what you're doing.

SPEAKER_01 1:26

Thank you. I mean, it's exhausting actually hearing all of that back in one go. Yeah. And I just had my 40th birthday in the very coffee shop that we met in. And so this is 20 years of doing different things. And so I think, you know, I've enjoyed going on journeys of learning journeys where I go deep into new stuff I didn't know anything about and try and create something with it. And obviously, as time's gone on, that's been businesses, YouTube channels, it's partnerships with big organizations, and it's been thinking about the future and never doing more than one or two things at a time, though. I think that's why it sounds overwhelming when you put them all together in one go. Um, you know, 10 years in technology, I ended up then going off-grid to live in the woods for a year or two, make some YouTube videos where everything slowed down a little bit. But I must say that right now, with everything that's going on with AI and you know, systemic changes in in technology and how we relate to intelligence more broadly, a bit vague to say that, but I think people get it now with AI. It's never been more interesting to try to think about the future. And because we can't be as certain as we've been able to be in the past about it, but we can still make predictions, we can still figure things out and do stuff, but it needs a different approach. And um maybe we'll come on to these thoughts about how the very nature of knowledge and the structure of knowledge is changing, which I think then goes on to affect everything, including the future of print and and how we hold all of that and how we build our organizations.

SPEAKER_02 3:10

Yeah, exactly. And obviously, thinking a little bit about the the marketplace that we're in, you know, at the future print events, the future print community is very much facing the sort of manufacturing world, uh, businesses, entrepreneurial. Um, and so I was kind of interested to hear a little bit more about your vision, thoughts on the kind of uh approach to learning, approach to uh relationship building. Because, you know, we joking apart, we said, should we do this podcast on Zoom or should we sit face to face in a studio and do it? And you know, why why wouldn't we sit face to face? It's kind of getting us back to the reality of business and and and and and in relationships. So talking to each other face to face is a massive uh, you know, it's it's it's really nice to do. So so tell us a bit about kind of your thinking about how important that kind of aspect is about, you know, the way the world it might be in the future.

AI Agents Versus Human Presence

SPEAKER_01 4:09

Well, well, let's take exactly what you said to start with. We're not far away from where you will build a Fraser agent and I will build a Dave agent. And if we don't really believe in the emergent creative possibilities of humans being together, we could just set those two agents off to have this conversation and probably get 80% of the way there. Yeah. The question is, do you think they can get 100% of the way there, or do you think there's still this emergent human bit that happens? Plus, so that's for the observer, the somebody listening to this right now might get the gist of it just from our digital agents. Um, but we might just say something new. We might just come up with a new idea, we might just still be humans, after all, who can do new things, and that's the part that excites me. And the other part, as you touched on, is I'm still getting to know you, you're still getting to know me. By sitting here for an hour and respecting each other's thoughts and ideas and industries, we get to know each other better. And that knowledge, whatever ideas and experience we speak about, is held in the structure of one person talking to another, spending time together rather than with anybody else this morning. And so I appreciate that, and I'm really glad that we're that we're doing it. But I think that that sort of touches on what we get what we'll get into about the structure of knowledge.

SPEAKER_02 5:29

Yeah, so we'll we'll look at that. Um, I think for for people listening, it'd be useful for them just to know a bit about you and a bit of your path, if you like, because it is quite interesting, and as you said yourselves, 20 years, but but not all in the same place. We often we often work in one place for 20 years or in one you know, one kind of industry for 20 years. So tell us a bit about your 20-year experience and and then how you've come to to share some of that with people.

Mila’s Kidneys And A New Mission

SPEAKER_01 5:57

Well, I came from a family, six of us in a three-bedroom terrace house, rooted in a community. It wasn't about money, if anything, it was about faith and community and that kind of stuff. I started, I came up just when the internet came up and sold a few golf clubs on eBay, and then Google Ads came along when I was 19, and I built and sold a company from the age of 19 to 21, had 20 staff at the time. Oh, wow. It's called broadplace.com, it's still running now 20 years later, has 500 staff you know, winning all sorts of awards. And so I rode that wave. I rode it well. I was I rode it luckily, but I rode it well, but it was a wave, and and this is where we touch on these waves of technology that changed society. I was lucky to get hold of it and be able to utilize it. But when I sold the company, paid off my house, built a log cabin in the garden, had all my mates living with me, was living the life of Riley, but I got to ask broader questions. So, okay, if I don't have to work, because I'm sort of don't really have any outgoings, I've paid off my mortgage, the mortargage, the death grip that keeps everybody um in their lane. Well, what work is worth doing? Should I adopt a child? Should I run for parliament? Should I, you know, and I was 21, so the world was still my oyster. And and so I started to think about what work is worth doing. Um and so my journey has been marked, I guess, ever more so by asking broader and broader questions that have led me down these not random but quite different rabbit holes that don't look like a normal career. Or if you think about an academic journey, even you go from 10 subjects to three subjects, you pick a major, and then you go even narrower into your PhD and end up with an extreme expertise in a very, very narrow field. My life has become more and more of a generalist. And I've really connected with a my great mentor who's in the series that I've just completed, my last learning journey called Networks of Knowledge. One of the one of the uh people I talked with was Carl Gombrich, who started the London Interdisciplinary School after he left UCL, which basically doesn't teach any subjects, only teaches problems, real-world problems, knife crime, environmental collapse, and methods that come from disciplines like maths, quantitative analysis, things like that, to try and get at these problems. But you don't need to learn all of maths, you just need to know that one method, and you need that method from psychology, and you need so it's a it's a breadth over depth, and you need both. And so I tend to work really well with people like yourself who are in experts in one domain, you spend your whole time thinking about print, and I find it fascinating to learn about that area because I lurk between areas and attempt to make connections and and try to make a difference to the overall picture, and just to bring it up to date, you know, for the last five years since I lived in the woods, I as you can imagine, I gained a passion for the environment. And that took a couple of chapters, a couple of journeys, which led to the UN in the end. But a year ago, well, 13 months ago, my daughter Mila was born and she's changed our lives in the most amazing ways. She's the best thing that's ever happened to us. But at birth, her kidneys don't work. And and in fact, on Tuesday next week, her kidneys will be taken out entirely, and for a number of months, she will be living with no kidneys at all, surviving only, as she has been, on dialysis, which is a machine that that helps her to filter your blood and do all the jobs that the kidney does. Kidney is a miraculous organ, by the way. But I guess I'm telling you that because I can feel, although it's not a good inadverted commas career move, I feel myself, because of my passion and my love for my daughter and everything we've learned by living in hospital this year, I can see myself moving now into the field of the medical realm. Yeah. Um, I don't know, I don't have a plan. I don't know how that's going to work out, but I can't help myself. It's the only way I know how to operate.

SPEAKER_02 10:08

So there's a problem and you're learning how to solve it.

SPEAKER_01 10:11

I have to because there's and there's no other problem that's been more meaningful. And and actually sitting with a doctor yesterday who I'm trying to convince to help me on something with her, I said to him, When my daughter's 20 and we look back at her growing years, if I if she can see through my digital breadcrumbs, through my videos and such, that I worked really hard on the environment, worked really hard on protecting the oceans, and then I didn't really apply myself to trying to create the best outcomes for her. Yeah. She'll be confused by To somebody else, it might be acceptable. But for me, it's unacceptable. So if I'm ever going to go on a deep learning journey, now's the time to do it. And not the most helpful when you're 40 and trying to protect, protect and provide your household, but I don't know another way to operate. So yes, I find myself falling over the precipice of another learning journey indeed.

SPEAKER_02 11:06

Yeah, but that's but that's okay, isn't it? You know, we we inevitably within life and business, you are facing problems as you go. It's n you know, it's never smooth, is it? So so this idea of kind of how to tackle the problem and how to learn from it is is quite you know, it's quite valuable, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 11:26

And and frankly, when you're approaching a new challenge of any kind, in as you say, in life or business, you first have to gather the information. Who are the thought leaders, who knows something about this? Yeah, yeah. And there's nothing that helps with that process more than uh recording digital products, videos, podcasts. And so I absolutely love talking with people like yourself who know things about stuff that I don't know about, and through our interaction we both get to sort of hopefully get enriched. Yeah. And I just I frankly wouldn't have it any other way. And and it couldn't be more meaningful than this learning journey.

Three Knowledge Paradigms In AI Age

SPEAKER_02 12:03

Yeah, it's certainly, certainly going to be important to you. Um, you talked about three paradigms of knowledge, something you're working on. Explain a bit more about that to me.

SPEAKER_01 12:13

Well, this last learning journey I did was about AI. Yeah. We're finally there. Yep. On a ten years ago, I did some guest lectures at UCL, which we can link in below if you'll have them. Yeah. Um, if people are interested, about looking at intelligence, not just AI, but what is intelligence? Psychologists say something about it, machine learning people say something about it, biologists say something about it. But do they all agree? Can they are they speaking the same language? So I did some work to try and build an overall architecture of intelligence that all different departments in a university could sort of agree with. Then it went quiet for 10 years because nothing was really going on, and it was but now we're here, aren't we? It's changing the way we work, it's changing the way we think, it's actually degrading our cognitive capacities, and we've got real challenges. So I went on a learning journey. I spoke to five people, most amazing, different minds, thinking about interaction, how we talk to each other, how we talk to machines. One of the guests is Jamie Bartlett, whose amazing podcast is called The Missing Crypto Queen on BBC. Yep. Fantastic, interesting story about a crypto scam and the missing founder of it. Yep. Um, he's recently written a book called How to Talk to AI and How Not To. Fascinating conversation. But what this leads me back to is conversation with Carl Gombrich that we talked about about what is happening to the structure of knowledge. Yep. And it's very that sounds like a hard, vague thing to say, but I'd like to give you three examples of how I think the paradigm has shifted in modern times. Yep. We started with the Britannia Encyclopedia Britannia. Yep. The knowledge was on pieces of paper bound in a book, in the library of the university or in your local library. And the structure was I have to travel there, pay the price of moving, walking, travelling, whatever, to get to that library to understand that knowledge and take it on board and take it away and produce it into my work or my life.

SPEAKER_02 14:15

And it was also kind of you could only go and look at it if you were of a social standing that would particularly be allowed to go and look at it. It was it was b you know, it was something above you if you were a normal man or a woman in the internet. Indeed, access was limited. Access was limited.

SPEAKER_01 14:30

And the role of physical universities or the academies.

SPEAKER_02 14:34

It was hardly more elite, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_01 14:36

It it mattered more because you had to go there to get the information, or you had to know that person to learn it across the dinner table once they had got it. But there wasn't the social power we have now on Instagram or YouTube to sort of disseminate that globally. When I was making videos in the woods, I had 20,000 people a week watching, but from over a hundred countries. So there was a few people in most countries in the world watching my videos. It's completely different landscape. So that leads me on to the second paradigm, which is the Wikipedia paradigm. And I was lucky enough to uh interview Larry Sanger a couple of times, who was one of the co-founders, the technical co-founder. And something shifted with the structure then. Okay, it's now being crowdsourced by lots of lots of contributors from around the world. It changed some of the validity because anybody could write anything, but yet the Britannia encyclopedia had its own bias. You know, the the winners of the wars, as you mentioned, get to write the story to some extent. Yep. So it's not without bias, but a different kind of bias. So it's changing the structure of it. And anybody with a device could get hold of it. Back then it was laptop, so there was still, or desktop, there was still a an economic barrier, but probably much lower than the barrier of the encyclopedia. And that's really the paradigm for the last 20 years that we've been living in, growing businesses from, and benefiting from, I think. I do think it's been a good. And now, right now, and it came up in the fourth conversation, uh, the final fifth conversation, my final conversation on the learning journey, actually, with uh a real practical innovator in AI called Chris. Um, and he basically said he he pointed me towards Grokopedia. And and I I don't know if you've heard of Grokopedia. Nope. I hadn't either until a few weeks ago. But I think this marks a new paradigm. So Grok is the AI engine for Elon Musk's X.com. Right, okay. And what he did with this model is they went and scraped 800,000 pages from Wikipedia, dumped it into Grocopedia as the base knowledge, and then produced agents that go out and write loads more pages. So there are now more than six million pages in Grocopedia. But where this comes full circle is Grocopedia links are now being cited in other people's writing and other people's research. So this is now forming part of our landscape of knowledge and it's not even written by layman humans, it's been written. 80% of it has now been written by machine with whatever bias is laced in to the the philosophy and architecture of that machine. So is that good or bad? Well uh and and it's always tempting, isn't it? You know, if you grew up listening to the wireless or or just one programme on a weekend and you always think it was the peak, you know. And I am tempted to think that YouTube, the YouTube paradigm, or the early Wikipedia paradigm, I'm tempted to think that was a peak because access became almost ubiquitous now that mobile phones are almost everywhere. Yep. Yet the sort of m algorithmic intent.

SPEAKER_02 18:08

Yeah, the control of the the data, the control of the information was not so prevalent.

SPEAKER_01 18:13

Yeah. Yes, you were still in the walled garden of Facebook or um wherever else it might be, but it that it you weren't being addicted in the same way that you are now, and then further still, we're yet to understand. And this is coming back to thought leadership, this is what I find fascinating. Anybody who claims to know where we're headed with AI is a fool. But what you can do is pay close attention to what is going on and notice when the paradigm is shifting and be aware that, okay, when paradigms shift, power shifts. And can I see any evidence around me of where something used to be easy and is now hard, where something was hard and is now easy, where it used to be this person who was 50 doing it, and now it's that person who's 20 doing it. And I think it was helpful for me to understand about Grocopedia because it's almost a meme or a or a metaphor or a sort of example of this new emerging paradigm where our children, and it's comes back to Mila, and ultimately what kind of relationship do I want to allow her to have with these now, let's call them aggressive technologies, not just benign open access infrastructure, but active agents with with commercial intent. But should we be worried about that? I think I think it's really appropriate to be thinking about that right now and to being thoughtful about it because there's it's so addictive the pathways that it might be hard to roll them back once you get used to them. And it is it is eating into our cognitive capacities as well. So we might not be as capable as we were. Um, you know, we've we found face that with modern transport, that we're more sedentary than we used to be as we've moved from the physical labour, yeah, we've moved behind a desk and we become more sedentary, and then you have to work harder on maintaining your body and not becoming overweight. Exactly. So that flips. And and so we will find that we have to go to the cognitive gym, we have to spend dedicated time each day. And I think this is part of the cognitive gym. Yeah. You and I having this discussion.

SPEAKER_02 20:28

You can see, can't you, with people's um behaviour. Increasingly, you know, we used to be when we were younger, you know, people maybe did crosswords to to kind of stimulate their mental ability. But now there's, you know, the New York Times and Squirtle and Wordle and this and that. And everyone, you know, you sit on the train and people are doing these little quizzes and things like that. So you're you're right in what you're saying. It's kind of the link between technology and your cognitive brain working. So that maybe maybe we as humans always adapt to the problem if it's a problem, or always adapt to the shift, the evolution.

SPEAKER_01 21:04

We yes Yeah, do you know what I mean?

Trust Polarisation And Cognitive Fitness

SPEAKER_02 21:06

We kind of we'll we'll solve we'll keep going because we don't want to stop, do we? That's our kind of innate behavioural trait. Um, I'm really interested in what we started with, which was you started by we started by talking about face-to-face and how important that was. And I think you've also talked to me before about trust. Um where does that fit in in the modern world, you know, with AI and you know, should we say, the politics that we see at the moment of the globe? Where does trust fit?

SPEAKER_01 21:35

Well, I mean, the first thing I think about is the very first university talk I ever got asked to do was at Imperial. And I titled it, Do You Trust Me? Um, and I do I do think that at the heart of society is a question about trust. And some technologies can improve trust and some technologies erode trust. And before I get into where I think we are today, it reminds me of the Medici. In the Renaissance, who basically came up with double entry accounting. And double entry accounting helped us to extend commerce to people that we didn't know because we could keep a proper account of things. And in some some would say obviously that Jamie's uh, as I mentioned, done a series on where crypto goes wrong, but crypto is really triple entry accounting, it's a whole new decentralized ledger for extending trust even further. Um so there are examples I think where it but that may or may not be a good thing, you know, being able to do transactions with less trust. And yeah. So in society, if it lets let's mood board a couple of things. So there's that thought there. If you look at the social progress index, which doesn't look at GDP or or economic output, but education, healthcare, opportunities of societies. Yep. By the way, the most effective in the world is Swiss. Yeah, the the Scandies and Swiss are up there. Um but the most cost-effective in the world is Costa Rica. Oh really? Because they only have sort of$14,000,$15,000 a year of GDP per capita. But the amount of progress, the amount of opportunity, healthcare, education, and and flourishing that they are able to get from that amount of money is greater than a more westernized type. Exactly. Not as high as the Scandies, but pound for pound it is. Healthcare. Healthcare. Medical. Where we are going backwards rapidly is in social justice and inclusivity. So we are basically understanding each other less and trusting each other less and cohabiting less. And and that is, I think, in no small part linked to the technological algorithms that are now colonizing our minds. Okay. And because what works, if you saw the Louis Through Manosphere thing, is drama. What works is polarizing views. That's what gets somewhere in the algorithm and and speaks to our primal nature, not to our highest selves. It doesn't, it doesn't help bring us along.

SPEAKER_02 24:27

So I think trust. So you're worried in a way that trust is going a little bit because of uh you know the the the use of technology on every level. Yeah, on every level. How do we get it back to where it should be? Should people start, you know, being more community focused? Should they be more religious? Should they be more uh you what is kind of the way of dealing with face-to-face?

Off Grid Life And Global Community

SPEAKER_01 24:50

Yeah, well in a way our story, I think, is a natural one. You know, attending a coffee shop where you you make yourself a little bit open to small interactions. Yeah, yeah. And those interactions can grow. And, you know, we're sitting here today and who knows what our next stop on our journey will be. Um, when I lived in the woods, I lived off-grid.

SPEAKER_03 25:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:10

And I was away from uh all kinds of infrastructure of society, but namely the the incessant algorithm. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:21

And I do think that Did you find you did you notice a shift in your thinking and your behaviour?

SPEAKER_01 25:27

Oh, well, yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's no way that you could um not shift. No, it had to to survive to I mean, don't get me wrong, it wasn't a purist thing, and um, you know, I left and I went to Tesco's and all those things, and I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't have any skills in that direction. But yes, I absolutely well, you sort of also realize how small you are basically, and how much is going on in nature itself. And maybe that's for another conversation, but I did make a film about it, a 30-minute film called Once Around the Sun, filmed on four days on each of the seasons. And that was the big thing for me, realising the the world I'm in and what's evolving and changing constantly. Um it was really a rooting for me, having come up in Christianity and then letting go of that theology over time. I found a sense of belonging i in nature itself and in the in the evolution of nature that makes me feel rooted and and and is like does lie beneath modernity and the algorithms and everything else.

SPEAKER_02 26:27

Can I just pick you up on something? You you just said that, which is interesting. So you went and lived in the woods, but you made a video and shared it on YouTube. Yes. So kind of what you what we were just talking about was that yeah, yeah, we're being taken over by kind of you know uh online, YouTube, Instagram, whatever, whatever. But you you went off grid and then you videoed it to communicate. So so what was the we you we talked about it being dangerous that this can, you know, that it technology can overtake, but but how how can you reconcile kind of doing something and going back to absolute nature? Yes, but on the other side, kind of saying, well, actually then I shared this. Yeah. Because I wanted to share it because I thought it would be interesting. What was going on in your mind when you you shared it?

SPEAKER_01 27:16

Well, like any relationship, firstly, if I can only talk to you about business, all I want to talk about is how are we gonna make some money? Yeah, right. You y I'm I'm not keeping it in balance. I'm not keeping our relationship in balance. If we talk about family, we talk about friends, how are you doing, how do you feel today? And sometimes ideas come up about how to make things together. There's a balance there. And in the same way, I was in the woods all week, but on one day I would choose to film that day and go to the pub afterwards down the road.

SPEAKER_02 27:48

So a bit of normality in your mind.

SPEAKER_01 27:50

Yeah, it's just it gave me a rhythm as well, a creative rhythm to feel like I wasn't dying in a hole as well. But as I mentioned earlier, what opened up was this incredible global community. Yeah. So what happened for me was that the idea of nations actually disappeared. My hyper-local life of being in this 25-acre woodland. Became a big breach. A big breach. Became very real. And then I had this tiny, or you know, a few thousand people around the world all tuning in, sending stuff to the to the pub for me, knitting some socks from Australia and sending them to the pub. So your world became wider. It became wider and smaller, it became hyper-local and global. Yeah. And I think that that is happening. I think that would be a good analogy for the world going forward. Yeah, where we're heading. I think the role of nations is it's only a 400-year-old idea. And I think it's an idea that's struggling to maintain relevance given the technological landscape we are living in. Not that we should go off on this, but I do think what we're seeing is five AI empires growing up in the US, and one or two, I don't know, China as well. So what are those five? So all the guys that are building the data centers and the power supplies to those data centers, Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, the NVIDIA guy, and somebody else. And then there's probably two or three in China. Yeah, right. The if if you were thinking about nations or middle management of the globe, these are going to be big, big uh power centres. But let's not go too far down that rabbit hole. But I think the existing nation paradigm is struggling for relevance, and the technology landscape we're sitting in now is allow we we need and want global access, we want to be in that open access world, and we enjoy that uh influences from all over the place and an ability to go to all sorts of places, and there's something that we need to find for meaning and purpose, belonging and rootedness in the few hundred yards around where we sleep. Yeah. And whether that's the street and the coffee shop that I see you on, um, you know, or the woodland that you're staying in, um, we need to I I actually think that's uniquely human, actually. If we're going all the way into the the what does it mean to be human, I I think that we are we live in the boutique beauty of the biological, i.e., we're very constrained, we're gonna die soon. And because we're gonna die soon, the fact that I want to sit here with you and you want to sit here with me, and yes, we're filming it and recording it, so there is that sort of sharedness about this moment, but there's also a real significant choice to be together in the context that I only have so many days left and you only have so many days left. Yeah, that is our superpower, that's our secret weapon, that's what makes things meaningful. If we were just always broadcasting to everyone all the time and we were gonna live for 10,000 years, it's what the words don't mean anything. It doesn't, it there's no opportunity cost, and so I do think that that's very valuable in our experience.

SPEAKER_02 31:11

Yeah. Um, we're kind of coming to the end of the conversation for the moment, and it's been interesting talking to you because you know we've gone off on lots of different things, but it's kind of looping, looping us back. Um yeah, if you know the audience that possibly listened to this would be typically business people um in you know Europe, US, further afield. What what kind of a couple of things, one or two things might you say here's something to think about as you go into the weekend kind of thing?

SPEAKER_01 31:46

Well, I'm I'm struck that there's a few things in my mind. So before I get to that, if I may, one is that in the year we've lived now with Mila, however much I love the woods and nature and the beautiful sounds, yeah, the sound of the dialysis machine going keeping my daughter alive ever is more important, is so important. And so I'm I'm struck more than ever that we need the on and the off-grid. We need the modern tech and we need to find base reality.

SPEAKER_03 32:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:16

Um, and so I'm very excited about how we weave the relationship between the two worlds ever more so to be efficient, effective, and also not lose our meaning or our our value, our human in the loopness.

SPEAKER_02 32:29

You're not saying you're not saying everyone should go back to the woods. No, and after after the winter reinvent things or reinvent or take away the invention of the case. Oh no, exactly. Okay.

Future Of Print And Live Events

SPEAKER_01 32:40

No, it's after six months I realised I either go in deeper or I realize it's not about an off-grid life, it's about an on and off-grid life. And there's value you get on that you don't get off, and value you get off that you don't get on. And when we're talking about work and what we do, we still have to weave between the analogue and the digital. People listening to this will feel differently about it knowing we're sitting in the room together than if we just did it on Zoom. Sometimes you have to do, and you're delighted. I spoke to a professor about pig kidneys the other day in New Zealand at the most obscure time. I'd never get him in the room. It's wonderful. But given that we can, it's great that we are in the room together. Um so face to face. Face to face is vital for this, for sharing of knowledge, for building trust. You know, how are we going to go and do a bigger project together if we don't understand each other better and and trust each other more? Um, and you and I find that Zoom, if you were to analyze it, I haven't done a long study on it, but if you'd were to analyse the structure of narrative in dialogue on Zoom versus in the room, put it this way: the broad mood board of a conversation we've just had, I guarantee we would not have had if we did this on Zoom. We would have stuck to the script, we would have, we would have been a lot clearer about getting to talk about the conferences and your events, and and and it just wouldn't have been the same. And there's benefit in both, but I'm pleased that we got to do this today. We can always get to the other one. And and and and maybe for another conversation, and then I'll I'll answer your question. I would like to know from you what are the two, three, five most exciting things for you in the future of print. You know, if with Carl a few weeks ago, we talked about what inspired Gutenberg with his printing press with stumping on wine grapes and how prolific that effect on all of society, on extending messages around the Reformation was. And I guess I'm excited to think about in a world that needs good ideas and new ideas, what might be happening in print that um that might provide new vehicles for ideas, good ideas, hopefully, to sh be shared around.

SPEAKER_02 34:53

It came from that technology. And a couple of other influences. And a couple of other influences. Um you know, the I would argue that a lot of the technology that we see in the industry at the moment that is being used in manufacturing kind of stumbles upon um it's the advantage that it offers. Does that make sense? Yes. You know, it's it's kind of there's off we always think about problem solution, don't we? And so in any environment, work, business, life, personal, there'll be a problem, you'll be trying to solve it. And uh sometimes you find things that might be useful as a solution to something that's not necessarily there as a problem. But what you can do is you can then think, actually, I'll I'll bank that. I'll bank that idea because it leaves you know, it could be used in this. So I think um in our own world, in in the the future print world, we are just seeing uh evolution of the technology used for non-traditional printing t uh applications. Uh, you know, I had a conversation this morning about printing on widgets that you know on the on things that might go inside of a washing machine or inside of a microwave. And and the thing is it's really difficult to print on, you know, the 3D dynamic of a product. And so um this technology is doing that now and enables people to quickly fast print onto coat onto something that's a funny shape and then put it into something and and do it with variable data so you can literally do it one one colour, one different colour, da da da. So it can be done really quickly. And these are all stumble-along kind of pieces of technology, they kind of work it out and then go, hey, we should tell the market we can do that.

SPEAKER_01 36:45

Yes, do you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_02 36:46

It's exactly what he said with Gutenberg, you know, he was kind of going, well, we compress wine using this press. So what if we squeezed parchment with water and squeezed the water out and then created something? You know, it's just an evolution. We're always evolving, aren't we? It's like you said earlier in the conversation.

SPEAKER_01 37:04

Well, and uh and with my social entrepreneurship hat on, I get excited looking at the most well-tooled commercial businesses operations because often a new idea comes along and it gets used for to create an efficiency on what is to me a quite uh business as usual type of thing. But it doesn't mean that the idea it couldn't be transformative if you had a medical person sitting around the table going, Oh, we've been trying to do that thing with the organs, which are also very difficult terrain to da-da-da-da-da. And all of a sudden you've transformed the whole space, but it would never have got created by the medical person, but they need to understand what's going on. And I think one of the wonderful things about sharing the stories of, as you say, stumble along innovations that may have been made without an intention of how it's used or for a different use case. Sometimes people can hear that and go, Oh, I could put that to work in a completely different way. It solves my problem. And and that's the beauty of sharing these stories. And I guess I get excited about you know, any creative area that's developing new platform-level technologies, how could that apply to real-world themes that I care about? You know, things like the places that we live in, the homes that we design, uh, medical care, intelligence more. How does this affect how intelligence flows between machines and humans? Anything like that, I get very excited about. So I I look forward to talking more and maybe where would I what's the best thing for me to come to to well I was thinking so so yeah, I was just thinking, so um, you know, that we were obviously doing a podfest uh with FuturePrint in London in June.

SPEAKER_02 38:51

It was something that I was thinking about as we were talking that it might be quite interesting to have you talk about this with some other people, you know, so and kind of have some technology people sitting around the same table around the conversation, you know, maybe top talking about AI and how good or how bad or how much of an opportunity it is, or so so I think yeah, there's definitely some areas to to think about. And um I think just generally it's been a really interesting conversation that we've had. And um, yeah, you know, I'll point from this podcast, I'll point to some of the things you've done uh on you know, so that people can look on video or social media so to get a bit more understanding of what you've done. Because it's been great having a chance to talk to you.

SPEAKER_01 39:34

Oh, you too, Fraser. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 39:35

Thank you very much, Dave. And uh I hope that we can catch up either as I said at one of our live in the future.

SPEAKER_01 39:42

The pod podfest sounds awesome, and I'd love to I think it'd be very fun to explore where AI meets the new world of printing. Yeah. And possibly even have some other social people in the room who go, how could this transpose across to uh to other solving other problems that matter for people in the world? Brilliant. Dave, thank you for your time and uh hope to catch up with you in this in the near future.

SPEAKER_02 40:09

Thanks, Razor. Thanks so.

SPEAKER_00 40:10

Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, you can subscribe now for more great audio content coming up. And visit futureprint.tech for the latest news, partner interviews, in-depth industry research, and to catch up on content from future print events. We'll see you next time on the FuturePrint Podcast.