Editing The Pen Addict 619/transcript (section)

== Early interest in technology and computers ==

* Actually, that's a resounding no to that question, too. So I, you know, went to high school here and I was really into computers. I had my Apple IIc back in the days. Raising my hand. Yes, I had that. Excellent. I was I thought, you know, computers were amazing. I was so fascinated by it. I studied computer science in college and I was all about technology. And that's before technology was so, you know, part of our lives. So still kind of I felt like it was a niche thing that had this cool potential. Yeah, it's no wonder. No wonder you and I get along so well, because I grew up with an Apple IIc in my room. There you go. All right. Now we're talking. Yeah. I'm sure most of the people have no idea what that is. No, no, no. We're talking pre-Macintosh. Yeah, yeah. Luckily, my dad was like one of those early IT converts at his job. So I was able to get some of the some of the cool stuff when I was a kid. And that led me to my career in IT, kind of kind of like yours. But turns out we have a different passion that led us in paths. Probably neither one of us would have expected at this point in our lives. So if I could actually elaborate a bit on that. So you're asking about, you know, did I bring things from Japan? You know, no, I was I brought my Apple IIc to America. It's like I didn't I didn't bring pen and paper. I brought my Apple IIc with the big hunking CRT monitor and everything. That's what I was proud of. That's amazing. You know, I studied computer science, came to Silicon Valley. And, you know, I didn't think much about the analog tools. I was trying to perfect my digital tools. And, you know, IT high pace place or trying to stay afloat. So it's about, OK, productivity. Let's you know, I was reading. I was all about, you know, getting things done and testing every other like to do list application. I was a big time Palm Pilot user. I was intrigued by the Newton, but didn't have the budget to go that far. And then I just felt like it wasn't doing it. It just wasn't doing it for me. So I decided to start writing things out. I didn't like the infinite surface of the computer where, you know, people talk about inbox zero. And, you know, after that, they talked about inbox bankruptcy. I felt like I was suffering a to do list bankruptcy and it just wasn't working. So I started just pulling out a sheet of paper from the copy machine and limiting myself to that one sheet of that defined surface. And that I felt like brought a little sanity to my life. And I did that for a few years. And then one day I was in San Francisco, Japantown, went to a stationery there, stationery store there. Shout out to Mido. Picked up a Marmon report pad, which is just a report pad of loose papers that were, you know, glued together. And I don't know what motivated me, but I decided, you know, I'll just I'm using this so much in my daily life. Let me buy a nice notepad. Yeah. And I took that to work and started writing on it. And that was my aha moment. It's like immediately I could tell, wow, this is different. I thought paper was paper was paper. But what is it about this that's just so just pleasant to write on? And that kind of opened my eyes and started, you know, commuting to Mido and trying different things out and realizing just the joy of tactile tools. You know, I was banging my head against the computer keyboard and monitor. I didn't want to have anything to do with waste. And I thought handwriting was so wasteful, inefficient. Yet that wastefulness, deliberateness kind of brought in constraints that I felt liberated me. So that's kind of my journey to realizing that analog tools are good and also brought back memories of, wow, you know, the things I took for granted as a child. Yeah. A, are hard to get over in the States. But B, if you make the effort to find them out, they're not going to break your bank, you know. Yeah. Instead of 25 cents a pen, I'm going to spend, what, 175. Yeah. Big whoop-dee-doo. But realize that that's all it took to open up this whole world. And I got fascinated. I felt like, you know, productivity and all the techies were getting obsessed about was swinging so far to the digital side. Yep. That I felt it was time for kind of restore the balance. It's not like one or the other. It's not digital or analog. There's great use of technology, but also great use of analog. And that's kind of when I started thinking there's something here. This is really fascinating. I don't hear too many people talk about it outside of niche markets. And I felt like there's a more broader market appeal to this space. Yeah. So for someone that was born and raised, well, not born, but raised in Japan, it took until you got to a Japanese stationery store in San Francisco to discover Japanese stationery, really. Correct. Correct. I was listening to you talk about all the computer stuff. And we don't hear about it anymore. But you struck a memory here. We used to really fight everything going paperless back in the day. That was the code word. You don't hear that much anymore. It was like, oh, everything's going to be digital. Everything's paperless. And look at us now. We're talking about pens. Exactly. Isn't that funny? Yeah. I kind of remember there was some kind of 70s movie. I can't remember what it was, but how this guy from the 70s, time warped into the future. And everybody was eating pills because it was so inefficient to have a full meal. And pills were the way. And he was like, you know, we think efficiency was going to be the future. But boy, you know, so many things, food, you know, tools, everything, you know, we're still hanging on to older ways of doing things. And there's a reason for that. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what we're going to talk about a lot of that today. And I was thinking before we, when I was making the notes for this, I can't remember when exactly how our first conversation went. But I like I found some emails I put in the show notes that I we've my emails go back to 2016. But I know we started talking well before that. And just to to set set some background here, Bruce would go to Japan and he would come back with different stationery and send it to me. So we had struck up this email conversation and friendship. And Bruce understood the types of products that I liked, right? You know, fine pens, you know, interesting paper, cool storage items. And, you know, once or twice a year, I'd get a care package from you. What was it like shopping for stationery at that time when you're in this discovery phase, trying all of these things out? And again, this was the inexpensive stuff relative to like the fountain pens that we're going to talk about later or something like that. This is your like your store gel pens, your ballpoint pens, you know, the one dollar pad at the convenience store type of thing. So tell me kind of what drew you into this discovery phase, because that's what our conversations meant the most to me was you would send me a product, but you wouldn't just say, hey, try this pen. And you'd be like, look, OK, they'd be like a note or a long conversation about, you know, this is why this products exist. And this is what this company does. And this is what they're trying to do. What do you think? So tell me about how you got so deep into it so quickly. As far as, you know, how far back we go, my memory is fuzzy, too.
* But I wouldn't be surprised if it was around 2016.