A funny thing has happened on our way to the digital utopia: we find ourselves increasingly missing reality.
In this spirited audiobook, David Sax has found story after story of entrepreneurs, artisans, and creators who make real money by selling real things. And they're not just local craftspeople, either. As paper is supposedly vanishing, Moleskine notebooks - a company founded in 1997, the same year as the dot-com boom - has grown into a large multinational corporation. As music supposedly migrates to the cloud, vinyl record sales were up over 50 percent in 2015 and generated almost $350 million in sales. And as retail was supposedly hitting bottom, star Silicon Valley companies like Apple and Amazon are investing in brick-and-mortar stores.
Sax's work reveals not just an underreported trend in business but a more fundamental truth about how humans shop, interact, and even think. He captures what you're missing when you can't find a good song in a vast iTunes library or can't recall the details of an eBook you read; any simulation of a sight or smell or activity you experience in the real world is just that - a simulation. As you listen to this enlightening audiobook, that seemingly simple observation gathers ever more weight.
The success stories in this audiobook are eye opening, even inspiring. You'll come away from this audiobook with a renewed sense of what it means to work, live, and shop. For anyone who has grown weary of overnight billionaires and social media market disruptors, it is proof positive that there's another side of the story.