The Creative Power of Childhood and What Adults Lose

If I take my um four-year-old grandson for a walk down the block, I suddenly realize that I always say it's like going to get a pint of milk with William Blake. You suddenly realize, oh, wait a minute. There's gates and there's dogs that are barking and there's little crates in the pavement and you know, all these things that you just literally don't see when you're going for a walk as an adult. Allison Gobnik, welcome to the show. I'm so pleased to be here. Sean, what are the biggest differences between the minds of children and the minds of adults? You have a lovely metaphor for this. the kind of classic way of

thinking about uh development for a long time or and this is still true. You hear this a lot in the AI world is that you know sort of the 35year-old AI guy is the peak of human intelligence and then development is just kind of building up to it and then aging is just sort of falling off from that peak. But that doesn't make a lot of sense from a biological perspective. And what I've been arguing is that the right way to think about development is that there's a kind of tradeoff between exploration, what computer scientists call exploration and exploitation. So the idea is that the children are the R&D department. They're the ones who are actually designed to explore the world around them, to experiment, to figure

out what's going on around them in this incredibly motivated way. even though it sometimes is sometimes makes their evolutionary uh ability to survive and reproduce um be under peril if they're sticking forks into the um into the light sockets. Um uh and then the adults are taking that information that you discovered when you were a child and then you could put it to use to do all the sort of straightforward things, the what computer scientists call the exploit things that we all do as adults. we, you know, find our way in the pecking order and we get resources and we find mates all the sort of typical adult abilities. So this explore exploit trade-off which is very deep and

very intractable, very hard to get rid of in computer science. I think the way that evolution resolves that is by giving us this early period of childhood when all we have to do and in fact all we want to do all we're motivated to do is go out into the world and figure out how the world works and then this later period where we can take all those discoveries and actually uh actually put them to use later on. Um so like you said the four-year-old proverbial four-year-old is seeing all this or doing all this crazy weird stuff. Is that because of the other metaphor that I like the lantern versus the spotlight consciousness that they're they are just simply seeing way

more and therefore attuned and aware of way more and reacting to that. Whereas the adults with the spotlight consciousness are just more sort of focused and targeted and blind actually to a lot of what's actually happening in front of us. Yeah. Exactly. If you think about this sort of general idea about the children of the explorers and the adults of the exploiters, you might imagine that would show up in lots of different aspects of their um of their minds and their brains. And one of the ones that I've been interested in is their consciousness. So the way that they experience the world. So if you think about this plan that the children are really designed to learn to try and extract as much information from the

environment around them as possible and the adults are really designed to do things like you know fulfill their plans, find the things that are most relevant to what they want to do, the goals they want to accomplish, you might imagine that their consciousness of the world would be really different. And in fact, there's quite a lot of neuroscience evidence that what happens with children is that their attentional system, which is very closely related to their consciousness, is much broader. So, it's taking in much more of the world around them. They're much worse. You know, we say that preschoolers are bad at paying attention, but what we really mean is that they're bad at not paying attention, right? They're bad at just

paying attention to the things we want them to pay attention to and not paying attention to. the airplane that's up way up high or the little speck of dust that's on the ground. Um, and if you're trying to get their jackets on and get them off to preschool, that's really a disadvantage. But if what you're trying to do is get them to it what if what they're trying to do is learn as much as they can about the world. This kind of broader lantern picture is actually really going to be helpful. So the typical story about adult attention and adult consciousness is it's like a spotlight. you're paying attention to the thing that you're you're really focusing on. That's what you're conscious of. And again, there's both

neuroscience and psychology that shows that you literally become blind to all the things that you're not paying attention to. You just don't see the things that you're not paying attention to. And I think what happens with little kids is that's kind of the opposite. What they're doing is seeing everything that's going on around them. Is it possible or is it impossible to explore and exploit simultaneously? Can we not be a lantern and a spotlight at the same time or at least switch seamlessly between the two? Um, I think it's not poss. It's definitely not possible to do it at the same time. You know, you could prove that you can't have a system that's maximally exploring and exploiting. And I think it's interesting that if you

think about, you know, a question people always ask is, well, what could grown-ups do that would make them be able to have this wider consciousness like children? And I think grown-ups, grown-up humans do have a lot of techniques. they use to kind of be able to do this exploration certain kinds of meditation, what's sometimes called open awareness meditation that puts you in a state that's very much like the lantern consciousness. But it's interesting that you know like the instructions for doing that are just sit in one place and don't do anything. Um so what you can't do is have that lantern consciousness and then you know go to the faculty meeting and um deal with the politics and worry about your you know worry about your um

uh worry about your profits and do all the other things that we do as adults. Um one way that I think is actually the you know one of the few ways I can think of that you could do both at the same time is taking care of little kids. So, if you're taking care of little kids, you're doing this really important task, but you also get to see the world through their eyes, which gives you a sense of what this lantern is like. You know, if you if I take my um four-year-old grandson for a walk down the block, I suddenly realize that I always say it's like going to get a pint of milk with William Blake. you suddenly realize, oh, wait a minute, there's gates and there's dogs that are barking and there's little crates in the pavement and, you know,

all these things that you just literally don't see when you're going for a walk um as an adult. Yeah, humans are pretty rare in the animal kingdom in terms of how long it's crazy how long we are fully dependent on our parents to survive. Is that just evolution's response to the way our brains develop? Well, it's interesting. One of the things that seems to be a uh you know, so there's this puzzle, right? We have this very long childhood, much longer than any other animal. Um and we also have a much wider network of caregivers. So, you know, if you look at uh chimps, for example, the biological mothers are the ones who are doing most of the care. But for humans, as long as we've evolved, we've had

fathers involved in care. We have uh what's called pair bonding which is very unusual in biology. We have what uh people call alo parents. So people who aren't even biologically kin who are taking helping to take care of the young. And we have my personal favorite the post-menopausal grandmothers which again is pretty much um is very distinctively human. The only other species we know of are the orcas who actually have these postmenopausal grandmothers. So we have this wide array of species of people who were taking care of these helpless children for so long. So there's a big investment in the whole species. And one of the ideas about you know what could have triggered this change is that um we live in what

uh AI people call the non-stationary environment. So our environment is changing much more and we're changing our environment much more than other species are. There's just a paper that came out in PNAS like yesterday that was really fascinating about this about how many different environments we went to very quickly as soon as humans evolved. We were literally going, you know, we were exploring a much wider range of places than any of our other close primate relatives did. And you know, our chimps and gorillas are still pretty much in the same place that they were when they evolved. and we've ended up you know thriving at least so far every place on earth and even you know even in outer space. So what happened was that

that if you have that if that's your ecological niche then having this really long period when you can explore and having a lot of people who will take care of you when you're doing that exploration is a really good strategy and that seems to be the human strategy. Support for the show comes from Shopify. Every thriving business starts with a series of what if questions. There's what if nobody likes me, but also what if they really, really do. There's only one way to find out, and you can make it happen with help from Shopify. They say millions of businesses around the world rely on Shopify for e-commerce. From businesses just getting started to household name brands, it can help you

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changes and it becomes what we would consider an adult mind? Yeah, it's interesting. We've looked at this in uh in one of the studies that we did where we actually looked at kids from the time they were four up until basically adulthood. We looked at people at all these different ages every year. And what seems to happen is that there's two important uh transitions. One of them is around um or maybe six seven um across the world you see a shift in the way that children are functioning and the way they're being treated in the society. Of course in our culture it's that they go to school but in other cultures it's that they start becoming apprentices or they move from the mom's um house to the other house where the other children

are. And that seems to be a shift to from this completely wide-ranging exploration to you know how do you make the shift from explore to exploit? Well, one way you do it is by having seven 8 nyear-olds who are really learning about the kinds of exploit techniques that the adults have. So, you know, if you think about a seven or eightyear-old, what they like to do more than anything else is become really competent at some specific kind of skill that adults have. And that's I think one of the things that I've always thought is kind of interesting is when you talk to people about kids in school, one of the things they'll say is, you know, it's frustrating because the kids really want

to do things like sports or music more than they want to do science and math and English. But of course, if you think about it, sports and music are the areas where you get to become really skilled if you're a seven or eight year old, right? And then of course, um, puberty, adolescence is the other transition. So you get this transition in adolescence where and you can show this in the neuroscience this it's sort of like the brain seems to be pretty constant between you know seven and 12 and then with puberty there are these big changes but even that isn't the end of the story because what we discovered and other people have discovered is that adolescence itself seems to be a period

that again is different from in some ways you know adolescence are temperamentally more like the preschoolers they're exploring But what they're exploring is the social world as opposed to the physical world. So what they're exploring is what are all the different ways that people could be related to one another. What are all the different kinds of social organization that we could have? Um and we actually have some empirical evidence for that. And then it's at the end of adolescence, you know, like early 20s that you start to get this shift back to something that looks more like regular adulthood. And then one of the other things that I've been very interested in is I think there's yet another shift in what you

might call elderhood. You know that post-menopausal grandmotherhood, but it applies to men as well where you get you get a real shift to this kind of care and teaching uh mode kind of care and teaching intelligence rather than that exploit 35-year-old intelligence. So, in some ways, one of the paradoxes is that as people get older, in spite of the fact that they're getting creakier and they're not as good at doing things, um they often get happier. And I think that's because you're sort of released from the need to fulfill, you know, do all the 35-year-old things and then you can focus on teaching or uh passing on the information that you've already got or caring for a new generation of

grandchildren. Why do you think it's so hard for adults to enter into that playful mindset? Is it because we're in spotlight mode and we're not in lantern mode and so we're more self centered or more goal directed so we can't just stop and be. Yeah. I mean it's you know as you can tell and I think there's a bit of a selection effect here. you know, I'm a scientist and in a way being a scientist or an artist or uh even a podcast host as an adult activity is kind of has these elements of play and exploration and part of what we do as adults is have different roles. Um, and so I'm obviously love the three-year-olds really sympathetic to those wild crazy poets, but the truth is you would not

want them to be running your department. Um, and we actually have a very vivid example of this recently. Like you would not really want to have someone who was taking ketamine on a regular basis restructuring the uh restructuring the federal government. Like we have reason to believe that would be a really bad idea. Um or maybe building your electric vehicle. Yeah. Right. Exactly. The idea would be the same things that might make you effective as an innovator or an explorer are not necessarily the same things that are going to make you effective in policy or in running the running a

business well or running a government well. And you know those children wouldn't be able to survive unless there were grown-ups who were not off in their lantern of attention. grown-ups who were spotlighted on, oh my goodness, you know, now we have to get groceries and how do we how are we going to put nap time in and how am I going to make enough money to take care of these children and send them to school, right? I mean, if it weren't for grown-ups who were doing that kind of work, um we wouldn't be able to have that kind of exploration. So, I think we tend to um valorize the exploration and innovation perhaps too much. Um my uh my husband was the um co-founder of

Pixar and of course whenever anybody's talking about something like Pixar they say oh you know how did you manage to manage all of that creativity and how did you get that kind of creativity and innovation and he always says no the reason why that company succeeded was logistics. it was there were a lot of people who would just do the work of um the work of you know the work of exploit the work of let's focus let's try and make the uh make this actually work so I think it's really is a trade-off between the two kinds of capacities well what do you think for adults is the biggest loss in that trade-off moving from explore to exploit obviously exploit mode is good for building things and getting done in the world maybe

building civilizations probably couldn't do that without spotlight consciousness. But what is the biggest loss in that move? Well, again, I mean, you know, I want to emphasize that you couldn't not only could you not build civilizations, you couldn't raise another generation of kids, right? I mean, you know, you'd have to just to be able to also that, right, just to be able to keep your children and the other people around you alive. Um, you need to be able to have some of that kind of focus. Um I think it's a loss in the sense that again we could emphasize some of these techniques

that we use that we could use to have a broader view more in our culture than we do. So in our culture, even though there's kind of lip service to the idea that we really want innovation and creativity, it's still true that we have this very um outcomebased kind of scorebased culture where the question is, you know, even ironically I've had this conversation with say uh here's a example that I think is really terrible and interesting at the same time, which is like people in Silicon Valley micro dosing psychedelics because they want their apps to be better and they want to be more creative, right? Like that's really kind of destroying the whole idea, right? That what you want to do is find the formula for you

to be more creative. And if you think about being a parent, my um uh book about the gardener and the carpenter, I think a real crisis actually something that's really destructive is that we have a kind of view of parenting that's like this kind of exploit outcome um uh enterprise where you know we're supposed to be getting certain kinds of benchmarks or we want our children to come out in a particular way and we think that if we just do the right kind of parenting then they'll come out that way. that whole approach to things which we I think we do really exaggerate in our culture um means [snorts] that you don't have just the time to think or to look around or to explore or to hang out

with the people that you're close to. And I think that is a real crisis in the way that we run our culture now. We have a tendency to think of children as these like ill-formed pre- adults, right? We're trying to teach them how to be more like us, rational, calculating, linear, goal oriented, getting things done. And it just misses the whole point of who they are at that stage of life. And the more I started seeing my child that way, the more he became a teacher to me as much as I was teaching him because there's so many lessons for how to live and learn by just watching kids in that explorer mode where everything I mean there's magic in the most mundane stuff of life. And right, you can't build a civilization like that. Uh but I

don't think you can build one without it either. Yeah. No, I think that's right. And I think that's true. If you look at you know a sort of general tension between what people in uh cultural evolution call imitation and innovation. So civilizations always depend on the idea that on the one hand humans have this amazing capacity to take advantage of the cultural um discoveries of the previous generation. I think of it as being, you know, all those grandmothers are telling you about what happened, you know, 50 years ago and that is enabling you to make progress. People sometimes call this like the cultural ratchet.

It's one of the arguably our sort of secret sauce that's let us succeed in as many different environments as we have. But of course, doing that wouldn't be do you any good unless at somewhere along the line someone was innovating. Someone was saying, "Oh, no. I'm not going to do it the way grandma did it. I'm going to take what grandma knew and now I'm going to do something that's really different. And it's that kind of balance between those two capacities that's crucial for actually making uh making cultural progress. Support for the gray area comes from HIMS ed which as everyone knows shorthand for erectile dysfunction is more common than many people realize and dysfunctional erections can be easier to treat than you might

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Um, what was your argument there? Is it about this imitation innovation thing? And you know, two or three years in technology time is like an eternity. So, it's the tech has evolved a lot since then. So, have you changed your mind at all about any of that? So, the question is like what's missing from the current systems? And it's a bit of a whack-a-mole game because every time that you say, look, I did this experiment with kids and they could do this and the, you know, your cutting edge LLM can't, somebody is sitting in the back and training the LLM so it can do exactly that thing. But the great um capacity that kids have is this being able to deal with the out of distribution environment, being able to deal with the non-stationary

environment, being able to figure out something new when something changes. And almost by definition, that's something that the large models are bad at because the whole point of the large models is take all the information that's already out there and find the kind of average of all of that information that's already out there. And what that means is if you're in a situation in which something has changed, you're not going to be able to go out. There's nothing in those systems that lets them go out and figure out, oh, okay, that training that I had two years ago, that really is wrong. That's really not capturing the environment because now the environment is uh now the environment is different. And we

have some experiments where we can show, for instance, that if you give children a new machine that works in a new way that's not like any machine that they've seen before, doesn't work the way most machines work, they're extremely good at figuring out the structure of that machine. And interestingly, they're better than grown-ups. Grown-ups tend to, you give them that kind of problem, tend to rely on what they already know, as you might imagine, given their given their brains. So, they have a hard time if something is really different from anything that they've seen before. And so do large models. That's their that's the um that's the problem they have. And I think a lot of people feel

like the path to something that had an intelligence that was actually like not just human intelligence but like kitten intelligence um animal biological intelligence would be systems that were in a sense more like robots. systems that were embedded in the real world that could go out and do things in the real world and get new data and new information and then take that new data and change what they think about the world and then iterate that process. That's what humans and indeed you know smart um animals are doing. And you know go back to um that's what four-year-olds are just doing all the time, right? They're That's why they love sticks because a stick lets you Sticks, man. God, they love sticks.

Sticks are just fabulous, right? They let you go out and find something. My kid found a musket on the way to school this morning. We were walking to school this morning. I was walking my kid to school this morning and he found a stick on the ground and identified it as a Civil War era musket. That's right. And he made me take it home and set it by the door so that it would be there when it got home. I would have walked right past that stick a thousand times over, but it's a musket. It was right there.

Um, that kind of pretend play, by the way, is another example of this really like you would not think of this is a musket. Um, that's just like not in your It's a stick. Yeah. So sticks are another example that I like is, you know, you don't even have to look at six-year-olds. Look at uh one-year-olds. One-year-olds and the TV remote, right? The one-year-olds think that the remote is the most fun thing in the entire universe. And think about it, right? Like there weren't remotes like not just not in the police scene, but not like when I was growing up, right? And remotes work in this incredibly bizarre way. They work at a distance.

You know, you press a button and then this bunch of things happen and you press one [clears throat] button and Bluey comes on and you press another button and Paw Patrol comes on. Um uh and that's an example of something that every one-year-old, you know, this is something that's completely new. They've never seen before, that's not part of their background, and yet very quickly they're acting on it to try and figure out to get new information and figure out how it works. And at least the current crop of AI isn't good at doing that at all. And there's a really striking difference between the large models where they're generating text and they're very good at generating text and say robotics where they're much

much further behind where even just you know picking something up and putting it in a new place is really difficult and expensive and requires enormous amounts of training. Okay. So well they're not very good at it right now. Right. Right now these systems are really just like hyper efficient exploit machines. Right. But can you see a world where it evolves and we get something like AGI or strong AI and it actually becomes something different something more actually becomes capable of the kind of exploration that you're talking about with children?

I mean would that be the game changer for you? Well, I mean the question is uh I mean the first thing to say is that you're not going to get there just by scale which is the thing that the artificial the AI people keep saying right so it is true that scale may let you get more and more language and do things that are kind of amazing like use syntax and grammar and do coding right that turns out to be something that you can do by looking at the statistics in very large databases and generalizing from them. It's really important to say the only reason that you can do that is because a bunch of humans have put all of this information out on the internet. So the current AI like the large models are completely

dependent on the fact that human beings are actually the ones who've who've made these discoveries and understand the world in a particular way and are putting all that data about what they know and understand out on the internet. That's not trivial. I mean, those cultural technologies, our ability to organize and access information, that's the thing that makes us different from any other um from any other species. You know, I'm I'm reasonably intelligent, but me plus the UC Berkeley library, that's orders of magnitude more intelligent than I am without the UC Berkeley U library. But just continuing that scale isn't going to get you to going out into the world and exploring and changing what you think as

a result of your exploration and creating. I mean, I think the creativity uh question like why decide that the stick is a musket as opposed to all the other things that it could be. That's something that the systems are not good at uh are not good at doing. I mean another question is what would we want to do it or which kinds of cognitive capacities would we want to have in uh another system. I mean you know calculating numbers that's definitely a kind of intelligence everyone would have thought that was a kind of intelligence 100 years ago. Um we just take for granted of course we want to have machines that can do that. That's something that is really tiresome and tedious and difficult for humans. So the question is what kinds of cognitive

capacities would we like to offload and which ones um which ones maybe we don't um we don't want to offload and we need to make conscious decisions about uh we need to make some kind of conscious decisions about how that works and there's actually some interesting work my colleague James Evans who wrote this paper in science with me about um uh AI being cultural technologies um has some interesting examples where LLMs for instance seem to reason better if instead of just having a single uh model that is trained on everything, you have different models with different kinds of training and different um tuning cooperating with one another. That actually seems to be a better way of getting to the right answer than having

the quote unquote super intelligence. Well, this is partly why I wanted to talk to you because if you listen to enough of those the 35-year-old white tech VC guy, [snorts] um it's very clear that many of them think of intelligence, human intelligence, as just simply a matter of processing power, right? That's all it is. And so therefore, well, as processing power continues to go up and up, it's just simply a matter of time before whatever human intelligence is, we will meet that and surpass it. Um, but you seem to think intelligence, human intelligence is a little more complicated than that. Is that is that a fair interpretation? In fact, I think probably most people who are actually working in the field

feel that way about it. It's the it's a relatively small group who have this kind of uh who have this kind of distorted picture. But I do think if you're thinking from the perspective of cognitive science and I think more and more are saying no it isn't as if what you see in human intelligence is some single processing power that's getting to be you know that's getting to be greater and greater. What you see is these many different kinds of cognitive capacities. Um, one of the important ones for instance, so one of them is this one about going out into the world and exploring. Another one is building world models, building pictures, internal models of how the world works.

And when you get that kind of model, like a theory, then you can make brand new predictions again that are completely unlike anything that you've seen before, which is not the sort of thing that the large models are doing. Um, and you know, my one of my books is called The Scientist in the Crib. I think kids actually are developing those intuitive theories. And not just me, I think developmentalists have discovered that even little kids are developing theories that are a lot like scientific theories. And those theories, those models are the things that actually enable you with relatively little data to make really good generalizations even when the world has shifted, even when

the world isn't the way that you thought the world was before. When parents do come to you and say, "All right, I'm buying everything you're selling about children and intelligence." What is your simplest most essential advice? Chill out. Um that and the chilling out is not only going to be better for the kids, but uh but better for the caregivers as well. That having a an attitude of I'm involved in this relationship and it's got terrible features sometimes, the way all human relationships do, but most of the time it's got these marvelous features. Most of the time they're fascinating and beautiful and fun to be with and they love you more than you're ever going to be loved ever before and you love them

more than you ever are going to love anybody else in your life. Like that's an amazing thing, right? That's just baseline. Um, and to be able to sort of appreciate the fact that's happening and to be able to sort of appreciate the fact that you got this ringside seat on the biggest human miracle that we know of, which is these children being able to learn so much. um as opposed to thinking, okay, this is what I need to do next and this is, you know, this is what I need to do to get them into the sports league or get them into Berkeley or get them into, you know, the next phase. Um I think that's better for grown-ups and for kids that would make the process and, you know, I

think this is relevant. I mean, I think people genuinely are, you know, not having children because they have this picture about this is a not only is this a job that I'm not very well trained for, but it's an incredibly, you know, difficult job and I don't know what the outcomes are going to be. And if you could think of it as more like a relationship um than a job, that would at least be a help. It's a really hard job and a really a very rewarding relationship. But yeah, it's also very hard. Yeah. Well, like all rewarding relationship, but maybe I should just chill out.

Difficult and confusing sometimes, but you know, having human relationships is the great thing that humans do. And I think it's interesting as I've been thinking about all this care work that, you know, in a way there's an argument that the way what humans did was take this biologically induced necessity to take care of little kids and you know generalize it to all these other human relationships. So the fact that we do take care of people who are weaker than we are. The fact that we take care of elders, the fact that we even, you know, at least in the old days had us a helping to take care of people who were on the other side of the globe. The fact that we can do that, I think is rooted in this impulse to take

care of uh of these young helpless children. But then that generalization enables us to thrive and to function in the world in ways that seem like deeply satisfying and deeply important. I love what you say about caregiving work which has been horrendously undervalued in the modern age. You know, I also heard you say one time you were talking about care and love. Mhm. And how we have this tendency to think, well, of course you care for the people you love. But you flipped it and said, no, you love the people you care for. Yeah. That love is actually the act of caring. And it was really profound, Allison, because I heard you say that and I'm sorry. I just I heard you say that and it really it transformed when I was doing the hard stuff

of parenting, you know, the getting up in the middle of the night and changing the diapers and all that stuff. It transformed my relationship to that where I thought of it, no, like this is actually what love is. I'm caring for it doesn't have to be a parent, right? You could care for anyone, a friend, a parent, anyone. Um, but it was the act of caring that is the love. Um, and I just think it's a profound point. Um, and we don't do enough caregiving work. We don't value caregiving work. We don't reward. Yeah. I Yeah, I'm I'm talking too much now, but I just wanted to say that and you can say anything else you want about that. That's very touching to me. And you know I have to say this latest set of work

that I've been doing I've been trying to extend the caregiving from thinking just about children to as in you know gardeners to thinking about elders or thinking about people who are ill or thinking about all these other cases where I think the same thing happens at least to some extent um you know that care is very wound up with these feelings of love and also feelings sometimes of duty but love and duty are you know some of the most deep important things about being human. You know, that everyday experience of taking care of children, of being taken care of, of taking care of elders and people who are ill and students, all those things that are have traditionally been part of women's realm, but in

particular, things that have to do with kids. I think thinking about that, taking it seriously, not treating it as if it's just, you know, a thing that happens in the background is um is a opens up all of these just intellectual horizons, intellectual problems, intellectual questions, scientific questions in a way that I at least have found very satisfying and I think would be good for the culture at large. I think that's a really good place to end. Um do you have a website? Where can people go to check out your work? Yeah, allisonison.com.

Very simple. And there's uh a bunch of uh of recent papers like these recent papers about AI as well as links to uh all the other all my other writing and podcasts and talking too. Well, thank you so much, Sean. This has really been great. Allison, I it really is it's it's so nice to finally have you on the show. I find you to be a tremendously interesting thinker and I've learned a lot from listening to you and reading you. So, it's been a pleasure. So, thank you. Well, I love hearing about the sticks and the musketss. So, hey, thanks for watching. Every week, we bring honest and nuanced conversations about what's happening in culture, tech, and the world of ideas to your video and audio feeds.

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