What if the answers to our biggest challenges aren't ahead of us — but behind us, buried in the 98.4% of human history we've lost? Marco Ciappelli interviews Jack R. Bialik, Author of Lost in Time: Our Forgotten and Vanishing Knowledge, for An Analog Brain In A Digital Age Podcast.
There's a particular arrogance embedded in how we talk about progress. We speak about innovation as if it moves in one direction only — forward, upward, smarter, faster. But what if the line isn't straight? What if it loops, doubles back, and occasionally vanishes entirely?
That's the uncomfortable question at the center of my conversation with Jack R. Bialik. His book Lost in Time: Our Forgotten and Vanishing Knowledge doesn't read like a history lesson. It reads like a case file — evidence, example by example, that the civilization we assume is the most advanced in human history is also, in some critical ways, deeply amnesiac.
Take cataract surgery. We learned it in the 1700s, right? Except we didn't. Indians were performing it in 800 BC. The ancient Egyptians and Babylonians had diagrams of the procedure dating back to 2,400 BCE. The knowledge existed, worked, and then — somewhere in the chaos of collapsing empires and burning libraries — it vanished. We didn't progress past it. We forgot it, and then reinvented it from scratch, centuries later, convinced we were doing something new.
Or the Baghdad Battery: clay pots, 2,000 years old, that when filled with acid can generate 1.1 volts of electricity. We don't know what they used them for. We don't know who figured it out. We just know it worked, it existed, and then it didn't anymore.
This is what Bialik calls the pattern of loss — and it's not random. It follows catastrophe: the Library of Alexandria, the systematic destruction of Mayan records, the slow erosion of oral traditions as writing systems took over. Knowledge disappears when the systems that carry it collapse. And here's where the conversation gets uncomfortably relevant: we are building those systems right now, and we are not thinking about how long they'll last.
The curator at the Computer History Museum told Bialik that to preserve the data from early IBM PCs and Macintosh computers, they had to print it on paper. The floppy drives had become brittle. The formats were unreadable. The digital archive was failing — and the only solution was to go analog. A vinyl record from the 1920s still plays. A CD from the 1980s may not survive another decade.
I've been thinking about this since we recorded. My brain is analog — that's not just a podcast title, it's a philosophy. I grew up in Florence, surrounded by things that had survived centuries because they were made to last: stone, fresco, manuscript. Then I jumped on the digital train like everyone else, seduced by infinite libraries on my phone, music on demand, knowledge at my fingertips. But what Bialik is pointing out is that fingertips are fragile. And so are hard drives.
The deeper issue isn't storage format. It's the distinction Bialik draws between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge is the data — the cataract surgery technique, the battery design, the pyramid engineering. Wisdom is knowing why it matters, when to use it, and what the consequences might be. We've gotten extraordinarily good at accumulating knowledge. We are considerably worse at transmitting wisdom. And wisdom, Bialik argues, doesn't live in databases. It lives in the space between people — in stories, in teaching, in the slow transmission of judgment across generations.
That's why oral tradition survived when everything else failed. Not because it was more sophisticated, but because it was more human. It didn't require a device to run on.
I don't know how to solve the digital longevity problem. Neither does Bialik — not yet. But I think the first step is admitting we have one. That's actually one of the quietest, most powerful arguments in the book: be humble. We don't know everything. We never did. And some of the things we've lost might be exactly what we need right now.
The question isn't just what we've forgotten. It's what we're forgetting today, while we're too busy scrolling to notice.
Grab Lost in Time: Our Forgotten and Vanishing Knowledge — link below — and spend some time with a perspective that goes very, very far back. Which is maybe the only way to see very, very far forward.
And if this kind of conversation is what you come here for, subscribe to the newsletter at marcociappelli.com.
More of this. Less noise.
— Marco Ciappelli
Co-Founder ITSPmagazine & Studio C60 | Creative Director | Branding & Marketing Advisor | Personal Branding Coach | Journalist | Writer | Podcast: An Analog Brain In A Digital Age ⚠️ Beware: Pigs May Fly | 🌎 LAX🛸FLR 🌍
____________ About Marco
Marco Ciappelli is Co-Founder & CMO of ITSPmagazine, Co-Founder & Creative Director of Studio C60, Branding & Marketing Advisor, Personal Branding Coach, Journalist, Writer, and Host of An Analog Brain In A Digital Age podcast. Born in Florence, Italy, and based in Los Angeles, he explores the intersection of technology, society, storytelling, and creativity — with an analog brain, in a digital age.
___________ About the Guest
Jack R. Bialik is a technology expert and author with a 40-year career spanning electrical engineering, project management, F-15 fighter simulation for the U.S. Air Force, Nokia, Motorola, and the Department of Homeland Security. Lost in Time: Our Forgotten and Vanishing Knowledge is the result of years of research into the technologies, wisdom, and innovations that vanished from our collective memory — and what that means for our digital future.
In this episode of An Analog Brain In A Digital Age, Marco Ciappelli sits down with Jack R. Bialik, author of Lost in Time: Our Forgotten and Vanishing Knowledge, for a wide-ranging conversation about one of the most unsettling facts in human history: that 98.4% of everything we have ever known is gone. The two explore ancient civilizations that performed cataract surgery millennia before modern medicine, generated electricity 2,000 years before Edison, and engineered structures we still cannot explain. But the conversation doesn't stop in the past — it confronts a very present danger: that our rush into digital storage may be creating the conditions for the next great knowledge collapse. From the Library of Alexandria to floppy disks that had to be printed on paper to survive, Bialik and Ciappelli examine the fragile thread connecting what we know, what we've lost, and what we're losing right now — and ask the question neither can fully answer: are we building wisdom, or just accumulating data?
3 QUOTES — JACK R. BIALIK
On the pattern of forgotten knowledge:
"We forget knowledge all the time. It's happened over and over in the centuries. We did cataract surgery in 800 BC — the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians had diagrams of the procedure dating back to 2,400 BCE. And then that knowledge vanished."
On the difference between knowledge and wisdom:
"If our technology gets too far ahead of our wisdom — our wise choices — maybe we could destroy ourselves the way Atlantis supposedly did. We have to be really smart and think about the future, so we make good decisions for our children and our children's children."
On digital storage and longevity:
"We're not thinking about how long that device is going to last. Is our children's children going to be able to use it? We need to think about how we can save our information in a way that it is recoverable in the future — and just doesn't go away."
3 QUOTES — MARCO CIAPPELLI
On technology moving faster than human nature:
"Technology has been going extremely fast — way faster than any time in history. But our brain isn't really going that fast. We are still very much reacting to phenomena and emotions that are engraved in our DNA."
On the analog-digital paradox:
"My brain is analog — I love my vinyls, I grew up in the eighties. But I jumped on the digital train. I like my infinite library of books on my phone and I like my vinyls. The question is: how long does any of it last?"
On the real lesson of the episode:
"I don't have answers — we don't have answers. We just make people think a little bit more. If you have more questions now in your head than when you started this episode, I think we did good."