Transcript

Trust your Senses | Florian Kaps | TEDxMünchen

have you noticed this flickering on this super expensive digital screen just you know I think you know maybe we should give the digital some more time to slowly and carefully develop and you know never forget the magic of true analog real things so I'm very happy to talk in real to you after this digital lady I'm doc I'm more than proud to be invited here in this beautiful theater especially because finally I am invited to talk about the most essential points for things in my life and this is exactly Oh faith love and hope so I discovered the importance of that aspects very early because I was happy to grew up with a lot of love and faith from my parents and a very clearly defined hope they told me so they said son we support whatever you do just one thing you know we hope that you always be will be the very best in doing what you're doing so I said okay no pressure that's easy but then unfortunately I found out I'm not really talented in anything so I had to develop new strategies and I came up with a brilliant strategy and because the only chance for me to be the best in what I'm doing is to specialize on things nobody else is doing and this was really successful within ten years I was the leading scientist for spider eye muscles so as everybody knows only two of the eight eyes of every spider do have some little muscles but you know this is the moment if you have questions about AI spider eye muscles you know you I'm very happy if you come to me after the talk and I can sign your favorite spiders and stuff like that but unfortunately you know I'm telling the story very very often never ever did somebody had any questions about spider eye muscles and it soon turned out that earning money as the world's leading spy item muscle expert is pretty hard so I kept the concept but I was looking for new projects that nobody else was doing and happy happy enough the project found me in in a very short instant in 2003 when somebody took this portrait on Polaroid from myself and my wife immediately said this is the best portrait ever taken from you and this this is magic you know you should this is this is a really cool material so I started researching and surprisingly nobody else in 2003 you know gave a about Polaroid it was clear you know in the digital world nobody needs an instant picture because digital images are much more instant than they're for free not even the Polaroid management these are the two leading managers from Polaroid they had any love they had any faith or hope for their own material they just decided to invest in digital technology so with just a few glasses of red wine they gave me the worldwide rights to sell Polaroid online because that's not funny well advise everybody loved it hey coach what's happening here so I became the very best online shop for Polaroid film on the world you know again maybe there have not been any others but it turned out pretty crazy because still many many people over 2 million people had polaroid cameras and soon with the help of the Internet I had 40,000 customers we had a small business you know everybody loved what we are doing because we supplied them the Polaroid films all over the world so very successful even earned some money my wife was happy and then I got a call Polaroid called me and said hey talk you know you're our favorite online shop and whatever but unfortunately we have to close down the very last factory producing Polaroid film this factory was in Enschede the Netherlands but as they really loved me and they believed in me and they want to support me they sent me an invitation so at least they can have some beers at their closing party so I said wow this is really cool they have faith in me and I went there and I said hey hey guys no problem you closing it down but you know I have all these customers and I I still started this business and the numbers are going up like crazy I do believe that there is something magic about analog technologies even in the digital world so don't scrap the factory you know sell it to me at scrap value you know and I do it you know I don't know too much about producing film but you know how hard can it be I'm no spider I muscle expert and they said it's impossible it's impossible it's impossible I said okay fine I call the company The Impossible Project I believe it it's impossible just give us the chance to do it and yeah that's what happened we bought the factory and with the 10 most experienced employees down there average age was about 70 years we started restarted the Polaroid factory and you know press love the people loved it they said wow this is so great this is this is David against Goliath and basically you know they compared us to Led Zeppelin that in the same year they also made this retro style comeback romantic so this is how it all started but then something crazy happened this young generation you know all the people who grew up digitally and all of them that we thought they are lost to digital photography and digitally content they suddenly started to discover and fall in love with our products that we started to produce from 2010 on so not the old guys like me with this romantic retro whatever nostalgic feelings they started to really really take it to the next level and this was totally crazy and even you know it grew and last year so 2018 The Impossible Project the company called Impossible Project they bought Polaroid so they really lift it to the next level and they even introduced and built a new camera so more than three million packs of film will be produced this year and sold this year from this crazy little tiny factory that we rescued I honestly think you know this is not too great that it became so big because investors came in and it became more more complicated and there were so many other things to do so I left the operational management in 2013 I wanted to understand better what is happening why is suddenly the digital generation so crazy about what we are doing so the answer is it's basically the answer is pretty easy because we have five senses taste smell we can feel we can hear we can see and whatever is digital this is all behind a glass screen and this is you know you can see it and if you are lucky you can hear it but you never can lick it you never can touch it you can not even smell it and this is a big big problem only the real analog things they can give you all you need to really experience and feel like a human being because when you look in the mirror you know who is the feeling he looks like this but he looks in the mirror even after long night you know there is much more starting from Earth see how hard it was for it see but the earth you know we have eyes ears that's super important and more even more important we need all of these senses to to fall in love to to trust somebody and to take the right decisions so this is bad news for all these digital companies the most important sense of all of that and you know the most neglected sense of all of that is how the smell sense and this is Cecil tolas she's a close friend of mine and one of the most important scientists to work together because she talks a lot about the importance of smell so some you cannot fall in love without you know smelling a person you cannot build up trust smelling this is super super super important and the problem is smell is the only sense directly connected to the center of your brain so you cannot influence it so marketing cannot influence sense so when you go into a room or a hotel even before they can give you some messages you already know if you feel good if you like the hotel or not and this is a big problem because back in the days a customer and this is what the name comes from its from kundo it's it's somebody you trust a confidant so this is somebody you meet in person you sell somebody you talk with somebody you convince somebody it was you know how we did business together but as this has been disconnected by digital things and by globalization there is no contact anymore and a customer more and more becomes a consumer or he becomes even the product of the company in the digital world so this is a problem and I have been invited to many too many talks about customer experience with big companies and I found out customer experience is just a login process nobody really treats their customers as real people this is changing Airbnb was one of the first companies that really started to celebrate experiences other than just a service Amazon started to basically build real shops in in the digital world they they slowly started to carefully try to understand of you know how these real people with all of their senses work and even the beloved Facebook started an analog research lab ladies and gentlemen I was just I was helping invited there recently so it's really existing you see it's next to the dream room but you know and in order to kick these asses and to help the digital companies to slowly connect with reality you know so far only the analog companies try and invest a lot of money to connect with the digital world now the other thing is happening so to be the number one best expert in doing this we opened this crazy place in Vienna called super sense it's a Venetian Palace and it has basically a department for one department for it for each sense so we do smell projects we do vinyls oh my god my time is running up so we do a lot of things so for example ah this is important this is the main message of this talk you probably you know don't trust me in whatever I'm telling you this is very very important but start to trust your own senses again you have these five senses and even in the digital world you know this are the senses that will protect you that will help you to take the right decisions and be clear that in a digital world only two of your senses can be used so how is everything in reality don't forget about the reality so I have to be shorter here for example you know we cut vinyl records which is super fantastic you know a very good example of how much the young generation is longing for analog medium there is a funny and very interesting research PVC for now they found out that almost half of the people who buy a vinyl record they you know don't have a turntable or they are not using the turntable they're just buying the record because it's a real object it smells like they're artists they can't touch it so they listen to the stream and they sniff the record and this is you know the beautiful thing about it another thing is you know not just this this tangible tangible aspect of of vinyl records when I say trust your senses what we are doing and what's the best thing of all of it we we put the the young generation just in the chair with nice speakers and we play a very nice analog recording to them and this is like serving somebody who thinks that the hamburger tastes like the thing you get at McDonald's when you give them a first time a real wonderful hamburger handmade with real meat then is what's going on because factious they they grew up with mp3 an mp3 was developed as a storage optimization medium so what they did is they cut out information from music so the brain can put it together and make music again when you listen to it and this is as a matter of fact when you listen to mp3 music the brain has to work really really hard to make it you know music information in contrary when you listen to the fool you know beautifully recorded Soundwave the brain can totally relax and feel good so even physically there is a huge difference if you listen to mp3 or digital music or analog music and again now we are not teaching this I mean we don't try to be super sophisticated we just were outside of super sense we create rooms that you can experience it for on your own so this is a room we do for the 25 hour hotel so we put in turntables they pay us a lot of money that we take throughout all the digital from their rooms it's the best job ever and put in some turntables and and and the typewriters and stuff like that but important is this is not just for design and making them look cool but you you see you know here this little mark so I think there is a bigger picture of that so this is the position that we want you to sit down on this couch and to experience you know the reason why you have two ears there is a reason behind that believe me because this gives you stereo hearing and this is it feels like you know this change even ten centimeters left or right this will change the whole way you experience music and this is the beauty of it all so still there is you know one question and this is a very important question because you know after the most of the talks people come to me and say okay I have no no questions about spider eye muscles but I think this is super cool you know this is so retro this is such a great trend this you know this this memory of the past and I say hey hey stop stop stop stop I you know this is not the trend this is you know the digital is a trend you know did you listen you know do you still have a mobile phone so how bad is digital and honestly without the the possibilities of digital of connecting and sharing and pornography you mentioned it wonderful you know without all of that I would not be standing here but it is really bad and it really makes me angry the same as flaky you know what we are doing with this digital how big companies are using it and how all of us have the tendency to totally overestimate the impact it has on our lives even on the TEDx there is the sentence in our fully digitized society you know I have a question why are you sitting here spending money to sit in this room you know you can't download all of these videos digitally for free in just you know when when you cannot download it soon that you are sitting here this gives me hope that that we will find and will be start working together on a perfect combination of analog and digital that we will never forget that we are analog human beings and we love the imperfection of our lives and the hardness of reality so my answer is if you never stop to have faith in your own senses there's really hope and if you will never stop fight for the things you love I think you know the future will be great thank you very much