Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 414: What We Can Learn About Happiness from Babies | Alison Gopnik

Episode Date: January 31, 2022

Dr. Alison Gopnik is a psychologist at UC Berkeley and one of the world’s leading experts in cognitive development. She is also the author of several books, including The Philosophical Baby and The Gardener and the Carpenter. This episode with Dr. Gopnik explores two big and fascinating themes. The first is enlightened self-interest. We all want to be happy. Every sentient being has that in common. One of the most successful, although counterintuitive, strategies for getting happier is to get out of your own head and help other people. Alison argues that caring is a skill that we can all develop, and there are ways to scale it so that we can improve our entire society. The second, and related theme, explores what we can all learn about happiness from babies. In this episode Alison discusses: the “learning trap” common to adults that four-year-olds can help us avoid; the potential role of meditation in helping us see the world and solve problems more like children; the difference between our spotlight attention and children’s lantern consciousness; the strategy of solving problems by not trying to solve problems; and her critique of our modern conception of parenting, and what she thinks should replace it.Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/alison-gopnik-414See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, we've got two big and fascinating themes we're going to explore on the show today. The first is Enlightened Self-Interest, one of my favorite subjects. We all want to be happy every sentient being has that in common. It turns out that one of the most successful, although a little bit counterintuitive strategies for getting happier, is to get out of your own head and help other people. My guest today argues that caring is a skill that all of us can develop.

And further, there are ways she argues to scale caring so that we can improve our entire society. Long before I met her years before I met her for this interview, I actually heard Alison Gopnik drop a wisdom bomb on another podcast, one hosted by a previous guest on this show Ezra Klein. In the course of that interview with Ezra, Alison Gopnik said the following, and I'm quoting here, we don't care because we love, we love because we care. In other words, it is the act of providing care, the labor of love to be a little cute, that produces the love.

I have seen this play out in my own life repeatedly and powerfully. For example, when we had our first and only child seven years ago, my wife and I, that relationship caring for that screaming and pooping little beast produced a lot of love. Or when my wife went through breast cancer, which ended up improving our relationship, immeasurably although it was horrible in many ways too. Or more recently, when my aging parents has, I've gone through a complete kind of role reversal essentially becoming a parent to my parent.

It's actually made those relationships even warmer. So that's one thing we're gonna talk about. And a related theme we're gonna talk about with Elsen Gopnik, who by the way, is a psychologist at UC Berkeley and one of the world's leading experts in cognitive development. The other thing we're gonna be talking about

is what we can all learn about human happiness and flourishing from children, even babies. You're gonna hear Allison talk about the learning trap, that's a term of our common to adults that four year olds can help us avoid the potential role of meditation in helping us see the world and solve problems more like kids do.

The difference between our spotlight attention and other technical term here and children's lantern consciousness, the strategy of solving problems by not trying to solve problems, and her critique of our modern conception of parenting and what she thinks should replace it. Just to say before we dive in here, Allison Gopnick is the author of among other books, the philosophical baby and the gardener and the carpenter more recently. Also one vital heads up, there's a chance you may hear some faint background noises when Allison is speaking. This is the nature of recording remotely in a pandemic.

The good news though is that the noises only come up in the first couple of minutes and then they go away. We'll get started with Allison Gopnik right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make

you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist, Kelly McGonicle, and the great meditation teacher, Alexis Santos, to access the course, just download the 10% Happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10%.com. All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur.

I'm a new podcast, baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. On my new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby This is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast.

Allison Gopnik, link to the show. Well, so pleased to be here. So I want to start with something I heard you say on another podcast, Ezra Klein's show. I'm a big fan of Ezra. And you were on a show and you said something that this is an overused phrase. I tried not to use it that frequently, but it really changed my life. I think it's an incredibly powerful insight into the human situation.

You said, and I'd love to get you to unpack this after I repeat it. You said, we don't care because we love. We love because we care. Please explain. Yeah, so this comes out of a lot of work that I've been doing recently about caring, about caregiving, about taking care of people. And in many ways, the sort of quintessential example of that is the way that we take care of young babies. And often we think that we

love that baby, and therefore we take care of them. But actually, if you either just think about it or look at the science, it seems as if the very act of caring for children, the very act of caring for people in general, is the thing that makes us attached to them, the thing that makes us love them, the thing that makes us feel that they're special. And of course, babies are a really dramatic example of this because we have no idea who the baby is going to be before the baby arrives.

And not entirely, but to a remarkable degree, no matter what the baby is like, we have this feeling of attachment. And it's interesting that if you look at the evolutionary background for human beings, we have a much longer childhood than any other species. And partly as a result, because we need to have so much care for children, and I can talk about some of the other functions that has, much wider range of people care for children than for, in the case of other animals. So not just biological mothers, but fathers and grandmothers.

And what the great anthropologist Sarah Hurdy calls alloparents, people who aren't actually biologically related, are taking care of children. Now, maybe if it was just biological moms, you could say, oh, well, you know, it's just biology. You have these babies, so then you love them. But if you think about all those other people, the fathers and the cousins and the aunts and the caregivers, they aren't going to be triggered by biology to have these incredibly important overwhelming emotions and actions and motivations. And you can even show this in the neuroscience. The very act of caring for a baby changes your brain, changes the chemicals in your brain, changes the way that you function in a way that makes you have this very special relationship with a baby or the person

that you take care of. It's one of those deep profound things that we take for granted, taking care of a spouse who's ill, for example, right? Like you'd think that's a difficult thing to do. It's a hard thing to do. There's lots of anxiety and stress involved with it. And yet, it can make you feel that you're closer to that person, that you care more about that person, even when you don't expect that there's going to be a return.

And I think that's a really different way of thinking about relationships between people than the typical way that we think about, say, a social contract. So if you look at almost all the work on moral psychology in economics and politics, the sort of assumption is, well, look, the reason why people are altruistic, the reason why people treat each other well is because they have some kind of expectation that they'll get a return. I'll take care of you if you take care of me. And caregiving, especially caregiving for babies and children, but I think also the kind of caregiving that comes when you're taking care of someone who's in trouble or someone who's ill or someone who's elderly, it just doesn't seem to have that structure. And instead, what seems to happen is that you're extending yourself to take on this other person.

So when you have a baby and you're taking care of a baby, it isn't that you are taking care of the baby because you think you should. It's because the baby has become as important to you as you are yourself. And in the meta-meditation tradition, in the Buddhist tradition, I think is a really nice example of that, where the practice is to try to feel the same way about other people that you would feel about the people who are your closest to. Yes, and I'm glad you made that connection to meditation,

meta-meditation, M-E-T-T-A, ancient word that roughly translates into friendliness. The underlying supposition there is that love, and I'm using the word love in the most capacious sense, the ability we have as mammals to give a crap, love is a skill. It is not some factory setting that is unalterable. It is not some magical, kizmed-oriented condition that you fall into. It is a skill that you can train. And that is the underlying supposition beneath metam meditation where you're training your friendliness

muscles, your capacity for warmth. But it is also, as I understand it, baked into your, we love because we care, we don't care because we love. And that is scalable to all sorts of human interactions. For example, for me in the office, I have been correctly accused of, at times not paying sufficient attention to junior staffers. I have found that just forcing myself to do it,

even for staffers who I may not feel like I have got some immediate spark with, just the act of getting myself in the habit of getting interested and asking mentor-style questions, et cetera, et cetera. All of a sudden, the caring is there to meet me when I'm doing the action. And so I just think this has profound ramifications for how we conduct ourselves in the world. You know, I think one way that we could phrase this and more and more people I think are thinking about worrying about caregiving.

And of course, the pandemic has made questions about how we care for other people really vivid. One of the interesting challenges is, how can we scale up that feeling that we so naturally have for our babies or for the people that we're really close to or the people that we take care of? Is there some way that we could scale that up beyond just the relationships between individual people so that we could have a more general feeling of care in the society at large. And very much the way that our society currently functions is that those relationships of care

are invisible. The daughter who's taken care of her elderly father or the mother who's taking care of a baby, they don't show up in the GDP. They're just sort of treated as if it's either a very badly paid form of work or a very expensive kind of consumer good to care for the people around you. And I think what we've realized with the pandemic is that kind of care is absolutely central. Any society desperately needs to have that kind of care in order to be able to function.

One of the things that I found incredibly touching during the pandemic was there were more than once you'd hear interviews with the elder care workers, you know, terribly badly paid, not very well treated, doing this difficult and then very dangerous work. And people saying, well, why are you doing it? And what they'd say is, well, look, it's Mr. Smith. It's old Mr. Smith. I can't leave him. I can't just neglect him. My personal relationship with this person who I care for is really important and it's really what's motivating me to do this kind of work. And the question is there's some way

that we can support those personal close relationships and those personal close feelings so that there are present and available on a larger scale. And you know, I think again, if you're thinking about the Buddhist tradition, the kind of ideal of the Bodhisattva, or you see similar ideals and other kinds of spiritual traditions, is that you could feel that way about everybody. And I think the truth is for humans, you can't feel that way about everybody. You can't feel that close tight connection to everybody on the planet. But you might think of that kind of feeling as what you should feel for everybody on the planet. And you might set up our lives so that it was easier to have those kinds of relationships.

An example that I've given just a simple straightforward one is we could provide resources for people who are going to take care of particular elders. Or something that I think people are increasingly trying to do is to have intergenerational living so that elders could be involved more in caring for children and vice versa. Children could be involved more in caring for elders, even if it isn't your grandchild or your grandmother. And that possibility, the idea of putting together people who are from different generations, who have different kinds of needs, rather than segregating them. Here's the elders are often the assisted living and the children are often in child care rather than doing that, trying to put people in

positions of care and support people in positions of care. Recognize that taking care of someone is really important and that you should have medical care leave, child care leave, ways of actually institutionalizing some of those relationships and supporting those relationships. And if you look at some of the philosophical traditions, again, the idea that you could scale up their social contracts is really kind of basic to economics and politics, right? So the idea going back to Thomas Hobbes is the way that you can get people to get over their own selfish interests is to have a very large-scale social contract where I do

something for you and you do something for me. And that works pretty well if you've got to agents who have equal amounts of power and resources. But it doesn't work very well for these cases that are so fundamental to the human condition, where we're vulnerable, we need to be taken care of, we need other people to care for us. That model doesn't work very well. And the question is, what could we do as individuals to be able to support those relationships of care? And what could we do as a society to support those relationships of care?

And I think that's going to be one of the most important challenges facing us as we go forward. And we don't have very good institutions to do that now, either on an individual or a larger societal basis. Beyond intergenerational living, what kind of institutional structural changes do you think could be made to harness this capacity we all have to give a crap, etc. or care, whatever you want to call it. Well, one thing that I thought about that I think is an interesting possibility is that one of the very few cases we have of love being supported institutionally is marriage. So marriage is an example where we say what we're going to do is we're going to have both special responsibilities and special privileges for these two people to care for each other.

But of course, it's a very narrow slice of all the relationships of care that we have in the world. And I think as we've started to expand our ideas about marriage, you could imagine, for instance, having a relationship with a friend, where you just said, this is my designated career. And I will formally say, I am going to care for this friend. One of the examples I have is, you know, I have a very close friend who doesn't have any close family and isn't married and she really worries

what will happen if I get sick or what will happen if I need care. And to be able to say, here's someone who has officially legally taken on this role. Another example is Godparents. You know, it used to be that there was this institutionalized role of being the Godparent for a particular child. We still have it in some of the religious traditions, but you could imagine actually having that return as a formal role so that when children

are born, they don't just have two parents or are very often just one parent who's taking care of them. There could be other people that you could turn to who were officially recognized and supported as being God parents. Another example is elder care, which is going to be an increasing issue as we go forward. Very often what happens is that you have a bunch of different siblings or children or grandchildren, and somebody ends up being the one who is taking the brunt of the caregiving. how about if that person got a caregiving allowance to take care of an elder? So you could say, yeah, this sibling is going to be the one who will get so much money a week who's responsible for the caregiving. I like the idea of sort of extending our idea of marriage so that the way that we do care in a lot of current societies is, as I said, either we have this kind of market mechanism where you're paying for it or you're buying it or you're selling it.

Or else we say, okay, well, we're going to have a squad of professional people who are going to provide care teachers, doctors, medical elder care workers, et cetera. And I think that's really good. We need to have more of that. We need to have more support for people who are providing that kind of care. But often the way that care plays out is not so much in I'm a professional and I'm going out and I'm professionally giving care to anybody who shows up who needs to be cared for, but shows up in these kinds of close relationships between an individual person who's caring and an individual person who's being cared for. And I think obviously we should have more support for just the professional carers, but I think if we had more support for individual people to care, that would be an important thing to have too, and we could do things to encourage that. Another thing is just the physical geography, the fact that we're so mobile,

the fact that it's so often we're living across the country from the people that we care for. And trying to figure out how could we bring people together literally or are there technological things that we could do to try to bring people together even when they're not in that face-to-face propinquity that would allow individual people to care for other individual people. Here's another idea, a nice idea, which is that you could have a grandmother core. And some people have actually tried to do this in preschools. So you'd have the preschool teachers who are trained as we're instituting universal preschool, but you need a lot of people to just look after three and four year olds. So how about if you had a designated grandmom who would be making as much money as she would if she was you know working in Walmart could be a designated grandfather too. And that role wouldn't be the

role of being on the trained professional teacher. The role would be the role of being a grandparent, telling stories about what it was like when you were young, giving ideas about the past. And there's a lot of evolutionary work now that suggests that really is the function of that extra 20 years of life that we humans have. So that would be another example where children could get an extra care, but it would be one care for each classroom where you could imagine those specific personal relationships developing. So I think if we're imaginative, we could think of a lot of examples like that that would

help at a societal level as well as at an individual level. And one of the other things that I've been thinking about a lot is the idea of thinking about different kinds of human intelligence. So when you think about intelligence, when people talk about intelligence, this is maybe a little bit unfair, but not entirely, I think. We tend to think about the 35-year-old psychologist or philosopher who is sitting in his office writing about intelligence. And we tend to act as if that's the sort of peak of intelligence, and everything else is just kind of building up to that peak intelligence as you're a child and become an adult or falling off as you're an adult and become an elder. And that doesn't make very much sense

from an evolutionary perspective, right? I mean, it was so great to be the 35 year old psychologist we could all have the intelligence of a 35 year old. And instead, what I've been arguing is that there's a trade-off and intrinsic trade-off between different kinds of intelligence. And the intelligence of childhood, this kind of wide-ranging exploration and play and creativity, really trades off from the intelligence of adulthood, which is about getting resources, acting

effectively, narrowing your focus to particular tasks, particular problems. And that, again, is different from the intelligence of elderhood, which is this kind of care and teaching intelligence, the intelligence that you need to be able to care for someone, the intelligence you need to be able to give up some of your own ambitions and pass on information to the next generation. One other thing that I think is really interesting about care is that it involves this real tension between your own autonomy and the autonomy of the person that you're caring for. So, again, if you were just involved in a market, you have a social contract, you say,

okay, we're equal exchangers, I'll do this for you, you do this for me. But when you're caring for someone, there's this really interesting problem that you have, which is you want them to be able to autonomously to care of themselves, but you know that they can only do that if you're caring for them. And I think anybody who's in a care relationship, whether it's caring for a child, caring for an elder, caring for someone who's ill,

is constantly having to negotiate, right? How do I let them make their own decisions? How do I let them figure out what's best for them? And at the same time, thinking, but they're not in a position where they can completely decide what they're going to do. I need to be able to set aside my own goals for the goals of another person

and also help that person to articulate their own goals themselves. That's a really challenging thing to do. It's a really challenging, cognitive thing to do. But it's the thing that we have to do when we care for people. And I think there's some reason to think that as we get older and our own goals and desires and demands seem to get tuned down that we're more conscious of being able to do this kind of care and transmission.

So I think it's a much richer picture of human intelligence when we recognize that there's this intelligence of childhood that's about exploring, figuring out what's going on in the world, innovating, doing new things. And then there's also this intelligence of elderhood that's about caring, teaching, passing on information. And of course, those in the middle are able to do all of those things. They're able to explore and able to care. But of course, they're also doing the work of the world. They're actually going out and doing the things that we have to do as adults, where we do have to be focused. We do have to accomplish our goals.

A minute ago, you were talking about this kind of structural idea as you had for scaling caring. And one of them was this fantastic, We were talking about this kind of structural ideas you had for scaling, caring. One of them was this fantastic, stupendous idea of mobilizing grandparents. I love that idea. You went on to talk about this special intelligence that gets magnified among the elderly. When I was listening to you talk though about the structural change that I was thinking about how I approach this in that I'm not a policy thinker, I'm not a politician. I'm really just trying to appeal to the 35 year old version of myself,

pre any experience with meditation, pretty selfish guy, really just looking for self-optimizing tools, et cetera, et cetera, not necessarily looking to be better at caring, per se. I think what that person was missing was that caring, even though it's hard, and I say this is a parent and the son of elderly parents who require some care, and so I understand that caring can be wrenching and frustrating and all of that, but it infuses life with so

much more happiness and meaning that I was missing out on as a 35 year old. And so as I was listening to you talk, I think there's a parallel project here. On the one hand, there is, yes, I think we should structurally try to scale caring as much as possible. I also think culturally we should just be making the case to people that there is such a thing as in light and self-interest, and that the less you're in your own head with your head up your own, but the happier you are likely to be. Yeah. I mean, I think it's one of the paradoxes that if you asked most people, what's the thing in your life that gives your life meaning? What's the thing that makes you happiest? What's the thing that is most profound?

Where have been the, you know, the kind of deepest moral decisions that you've had to make. What most people would talk about is their relationships to their children, their relationships to their families, their relationships to their parents, to their spouses. And yet, if you read philosophy, for example, when I wrote my book, The Philosophical Baby, I looked through the 1967 Encyclopedia Philosophy, and you could read the thousand pages of the 1967 and psychopedia philosophy and think that humans reproduced by asexual cloning. You have no idea that we had children. I think there were seven really striking that these relationships and these practices like caring for children that are the things that people find meaning and happiness and satisfaction in are so invisible from the philosophical traditions and even from the

spiritual traditions. So I think spiritual traditions have often used the analogy of caring for children, but even so often both philosophy and theology have been pursued by celibate men. They're the ones who've been writing about it. Celebrate men who've retreated from the rest of the world. I think taking those relationships seriously, taking care of a child seriously, not just as something that kind of shows up in the lifestyle section of the paper, as how to, here's how you should parent, not just as something that kind of shows up in the lifestyle section of the paper as a how-to, here's how you should parent, but saying these are really deep profound relationships and

activities. They're not just something that should show up in the lifestyle section. I think that would be a really important cultural shift and maybe as a wider range of people are involved in caring for children as men have become more involved in caring for children and caring for elders, that conversation will start happening in a broader way. But I do find it a bit frustrating that the whole conversation about caring for children, for example, is so oriented around fixing up your house or doing some other how-to.

And the real depth of that relationship and those experiences, I think, gets lost. And again, taking care of children is just like taking care of elders. It's frustrating and it's tedious depth of that relationship and those experiences, I think gets lost. And again, taking care of children is just like taking care of elders. It's frustrating and it's tedious and it's difficult in all sorts of ways. But it's also deep. It's also profound. It's also a very important part of what makes us human.

And that's not just parents taking care of children, but just our relationship with the next generation in general is one of the things that makes us human. Much more of my conversation with Allison Gopnik right after this. Life is short, and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time, you're on earth? And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is Short, with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions like, what is the meaning of life?

I can't really help you. But I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode, I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs and sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times, but if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like, if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it?

Follow life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music or Wondering Out. Let's dive into babies for a second. There are many angles I want to pursue from your book. Let's just start with this notion that children and babies learn in a very interesting way and there might be something that we can learn from how they learn.

And you did an experiment that really illuminated this. Can you talk about that? So I've been collaborating with a bunch of people in artificial intelligence. So I'm part of the Berkeley AI research group. Why would a developmental psychologist be collaborating with people in AI? Well, it's because one of the things that we've realized is that if we're going to have machines that are capable of doing sophisticated things,

they're going to have to learn. And human babies are the best learners that we know of in the universe. And one of the really basic foundational problems that comes up in AI that people in AI have talked about is what's called this explore exploit trade off. The idea is you want a system that's going to try to solve a problem, find a new solution,

develop a new hypothesis, but you also want systems that will act effectively, that will make decisions that will do things out in the world. Both of those things are necessary for intelligence. But the trouble is there's this kind of intrinsic trade-off between exploring widely, thinking of lots of different things, considering lots of different options, and being able to settle in on the option that's actually the best option. And in computer science, they talk about this kind of trade-off all the time. So if you're spending a lot of time thinking about solutions that are very different from the ones that you currently have, you might be wasting a lot of time thinking about solutions that are very different from the ones that you currently have.

You might be wasting a lot of time thinking about things that aren't going to actually help you very much. And you might think, well, you'll be better off just making little tweaks to what you're already doing and trying to see if that works better. But if you just make little tweaks to what you're already doing, there might be a much better solution that's much further away. It's really different from what you're currently doing. And if all you're doing is just tweaking the way that you currently are, you're never going to find that much better solution. So there's this real trade-off, and in computer science,

the solution to that trade-off is often start out exploring and then exploiting. So start out by looking at the big broad parameters of the problem. Start out trying to see what's going on in this world in general, and then narrow into, okay, what can I actually do? What's the best answer to this problem? And I think you can see that Explorer first exploit later kind of structure in things like brainstorming and a lot of practices that we have when we want to be both creative and innovative and effective at the same time. And my argument is that childhood is really evolution's way of solving that explored sport problem. So the idea is that by having a protected childhood, we have a period where we can explore,

we can try lots of different options, we can do different things because we're protected. And this is the flip side of the caregiving we were just talking about. The caregiving is so important because it allows a new generation of children to explore. So all right, that sounds very theoretical. So what we did was we did an experiment that is based on the idea of what's called a protoboid learning. So here's how the experiment goes. You have a little box and if you put the right thing on the box, then you'll get stickers.

It will light up, but you put the wrong thing on the box and you don't get stickers, in fact, you lose stickers. And you get to decide, should I try this or not on the box? And this is a nice example where there's a trade-off, if I try it, then I'm gonna find out whether or not that block is really rewarding or not. But of course, if I try it and it turns out that it's the risky one, it's the one that makes me lose stickers, I'm gonna lose. And what happens

with grownups is that after they've tried a couple of blocks, they stop trying things that are new. So what happens is after they try a couple of blocks, they decide, okay, I know what the role is, it's striped ones are good and spotted ones are bad, and then they just never try the spotted ones. But of course, if you think about it, it might be that maybe the green spotted ones actually are good even if the red spotted ones are bad. And you're never gonna find that out if you don't actually try. And we think that a lot of disorders,

like anxiety disorders, phobias, things like that, seem to have this kind of structure, right? So you get on the plane, you have a terrible experience on the plane, and then you develop a fear of flying, and you'll never get on a plane again. But of course, most of the time, if you just had managed to go on trial, you would have found out that, actually, it's not so bad.

So what we did was we did this kind of task with four year olds and seven year olds and grownups. And what we found is lots of other studies had found is that grownups get stuck in what's called a learning trap. So they won't explore when they should. They won't get the information they need to really solve the task.

But interestingly, the four-year-olds didn't. So the four-year-olds were much more willing to risk losing something in order to get information. And if you know any four-year-old, I've just spent several months with my 18-month-old grandson. And that's essentially all they do all day long is try things and see what's going to happen, even if it's gonna have bad outcomes.

So if you think about a busy box, the great 18-month-old toy is a busy box. And all the busy box is you press buttons and turn things and then things happen. So the four-year-olds just want to know, well, what's going to happen if I put this block on? The result is that they actually learn how the machine works much better than the adult stream. Because they're willing to risk losing something to find out more about how the world works,

they're actually better at learning, especially learning things that are not obvious, that are more subtle or stranger than the adults are. And we and others have a bunch of tasks now that show that same pattern. Most of the time, grown-ups are better at exploiting intelligence than children. So most of the time you give grown-ups a task, they'll do better than children. But on these tasks that really require you to explore, to be innovative, to think of an alternative that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise, to be able to take risks to get that outcome.

Then you see that the children can actually be better than the adults. A lot of the things that we think of as bugs from the exploit perspective, things like being random and noisy, both literally and metaphorically and variable, and doing lots of different kinds of things, being impulsive, playing instead of working, being insatiably curious, all those are things that are not necessarily advantages if you just want to act as quickly and effectively as you can, but the more advantages if you want to explore as much as you can. And those are all things that

we associate with children. Those are all things that are characteristic of children. There's a really beautiful, very, very simple task that shows this is true, even with rats. So if you think about psychology, the absolutely canonical psychology experiment is you put the rat in the maze and it goes down one arm of the maze and there's a shock, goes down the other arm of the maze and nothing happens. And then, of course, the rat will never go down the arm of the maze where there was the shock. That's like absolutely classical psychology 101. But again, if you think about this from the perspective of things like anxiety or phobias, you can see why that might be a disadvantage because maybe there isn't a shock anymore. Maybe there's cheese at the end of that maze. Maybe the world has changed.

And if you never go down that arm, you're never going to find out that things have changed. And the fascinating result is that although this is psych 101 for grown-up rats, if you look at young rats, if you look at adolescent rats and baby rats, it's just the opposite. So they prefer to go to the arm of the maze where there's the shock, which seems really bizarre, like why would that be? But of course, the reason is you're getting information there and you're not getting information in the other arm of the maze where nothing happens. And again, I think if you think about your four-year-old, they'll often end up not to mention your teenager. They'll often end up doing things just to see what will happen. But there's another

twist to this, which gets back to our conversation about caregiving. And that twist is that really lovely experiment recently showed that this was true with four-year-old humans as well, is that they'll do that, but only if the mother's present. So if the caregiver is present is around, then they'll explore even the negative option. But not if the caregiver isn't there. This is true for the rats as well as for humans. Having a sense that we're in this safe environment we're being cared for has this incredible advantage

of letting us go out and explore. So I think it's important that these two things are two sides of the same coin. The children, the babies, and the grandmothers between them, the caregivers, the parents, the people who are taking care of the same coin, the children, the babies, and the grandmothers between them, the caregivers, the parents, the people who are taking care of the children, and the children themselves, between them are allowing this tremendous human capacity for innovation and exploration. I have a million questions.

I want to talk about what we grown-ups can learn from how kids are learning and what changes we could make to tap that. But before I do that, this thing you just said about how kids are more comfortable doing the exploring if there's a supportive grownup nearby. I believe I've heard that concept referred to as ego coverage. I think it's an idea that's around

in lots of different traditions and arguments. By the way, I just did a piece along essay in the Wall Street Journal about a fantastically interesting new study that's just come out in nature neuroscience reviews that looked at lots of different kinds of evidence. And what it suggests is that having this nurturing environment actually extends your brain development. So, what seems to happen is that children who have what's called adverse child experiences, signals that caregiving is not available grow up too quickly, hip-heurity earlier, they even seem to get their adult teeth earlier, their brains mature to an adult state earlier.

And you might think, oh, well, that's good if you have your brain grow up faster, but it turns out that it isn't really good. Having a longer period of exploration and childhood is actually really good, especially if you're going to be in an environment that relies a lot on learning, later on. So let's talk practicality. Are there any actionable nuggets that can be extracted from this learning you've done about how babies and children learn? Yeah, so of course, that's the big question that everybody always asks is how could we apply this to grownups? And I think it's really important to say,

look, that exploit intelligence is absolutely crucial, right? We couldn't feed the children unless we were able to actually have specific goals and focus our attention and go out and make those kinds of things happen. So we need to be able to have both sides of this coin. We need to be able to focus and plan and do all those things, but we also need to be able to have this kind of broader wide-ranging exploration. And I think we can get some clues from the children about the kinds of circumstances that allow that. So

get back to the point about caregiving. Feeling as if you're in safe environment where nothing is going to necessarily depend on what you do in the next minute. That's an example of something that seems to be one of the cues for this kind of explanation. And being able to pull yourself out of the planning, acting, mode into the other mode, that seems to be something that helps. Having new information, something like just trying to master a new skill that you've never mastered before, puts you back in the position of being the child, puts you back into a position of beginner's mind.

And I've argued that very relevant to this podcast, meditation seems to do that. So I think it's fascinating that the way meditation works is that you are awake, alert, your brain is really active, especially if like good meditators, you've had a big pot of tea before you just sit down, but you're not moving and you're paying attention to your breath, you're not planning,

you're not going out and doing all the things that you do when you act in the world. And I've argued that both the function and the phenomenology, the experience, is like what you get with children. So what happens is instead of just doing that kind of narrow local search for a solution, there's a kind of paradox, which is not trying to find

a solution can actually open you up to more possibilities than you would otherwise have. And there's a certain amount of evidence that this kind of broader plasticity, as the neuroscientists say, this ability to change what you're doing, this ability to think more broadly. I mean, I think it's fascinating that context for that is not actually trying to do things. So taking at least some time when you're not trying to do things can actually help you to find a broader range of solutions, a broader range of ways of thinking about the world and solving things.

And I think if you even think about the experience, especially if things like open awareness meditation, I think that's a lot like what it's like to be a baby. That sense that you're open to everything that's a lot like what it's like to be a baby. That sense that you're open to everything that's going on around you, that you're seeing all the shadows on the wall, you're hearing the sound of the birds in the background. And normally when we're in exploit mode, we edit all that out of our experience. We don't take in all the information that's going on around us because it would

be terribly distracting if we were trying to accomplish a particular ended a particular time. But what we can do is put ourselves in a position in which we have this broader, more open relationship to the world. And I think there are other things that do the same thing. There's a lovely work by my colleague, Dacker Keltner. I don't know if you've had him on. He would be a great person to have. We have, we have had. He's a friend and he's great. Yeah, he's fantastic, right?

So, Dacker's work on awe is very similar. So, the state that you get into when you're in a state of awe, when you're among the redwoods, or when you have a sense that your personal self has shrunk and the world has expanded. And I think both those feelings and those functions are very much like what you see in young children, what you see in babies. So babies are sort of in that state of awe pretty much all the time. I mean sometimes they're fussy and miserable, but a lot of the time if you hang out with a baby

or you hang out with this rear-old, you'll experience as you watch them, just look at those eyes and you'll realize, wait a minute, they're actually seeing everything that's going on around them, not just the little tiny fragment that I see. One of the things that I say in one of my books is that you go to get a pint of milk at the 7-11, and if you're grown up, you walk down those four blocks

and you have no idea you're blind to what's going on. Try doing that same walk with a four-year-old and suddenly you realize, oh, wait a minute, this is incredibly exciting. There are dogs, there are pizza flyers, there are things that you can wiggle back and forth and look, there's a little dandelion and it takes you about 10 times as long to get to the corner, but you realize that even just those couple of blocks are incredibly rich and full of things to learn about and full of things to experience. So just being with a small child, I think, gives you a chance to both experience this

kind of broad awareness and also to experience these deep emotions of caregiving at the same time. So just to see if I can send this up, if we're looking to learn, we grownups are looking to learn from how children and babies learn, there are things we can do when we're in group collaborations or if we're working on our own, we might have safe periods of time where any ideas find and we can jar ourselves out of our normal sort of super focused exploitive mindset, which is useful. We need it if we're going to get the milk at 7.11, but we also, if we want to infuse our work with more creativity and innovation, we also want to have access to this other mindset.

And so as you were saying, the ways that we can do that would be having brainstorm periods where everything's kosher to say, also doing meditation or putting ourselves in a position of awe. Those are ways that we can access what children and babies are accessing. Naturally, thanks to evolution. That would be the argument. Now, I don't think we're ever going to be able to do it quite as well as the children and babies do, but at least I think that capacity is there. We can also recognize that even though it might seem like it's not productive in the moment,

it's productive in the long run. And by the way, Dan, I would add to that, hanging out with babies, that would be my other meditation. That's a good one. You know, it's interesting. I know you're a fan of Joseph Goldstein, the great meditation teacher.

You told me before we started rolling here that you, I didn't know this, that you used the 10% happier app and that you like Joseph's guided meditations. And I was having a conversation with him a few years ago. I was complaining to him about writing and how much I hate writing. And he was really urging me to infuse my writing day with a lot more meditation that when I'm in this situation of the internal clamp down, this, you know, gotta get it done,

gotta bulldoze through this problem. He's like, no, that's when you should do a nice long sit to put your brain back in the mode of openness and often an answer will come. It may not be the answer you were looking for, but something will come. And I've really found that to be very, very useful. Well, I think in general, this is an interesting piece that's come out of the AI work as well. This will sound like this is the opposite end of the world from Joseph, but I think it's actually

relevant. We have a project that we're doing with robots. And it turns out that if you train robots with someone just playing with, say, a bunch of things on a desktop, they actually end up being more robust than if you train them to imitate somebody accomplishing the goals that you want the robot to accomplish. So, you know, let's say you want the robot to take screws and put them in a box, right? Something sort of thing you'd like robots to be able to do. The problem is if you just show them, here's screws coming into a box, they'll learn how to do that specific thing.

But if you move the box in an inch away, or you put brass screws instead of steel screws, then they can't figure out what to do. Whereas it turns out that if what you do is instead, show them a grown-up or in our experiments, even a child, just give them the screws in the boxes and say, yeah, just play with these things. And then you give that information to the robot. You end up with a much more robust understanding.

And you can sort of see why that is, right? When you play, what you do is try lots of different kinds of things. You try moving the box over to one side. You try it with different kinds of screws. And that suggests that this act of play, which is something that, again, children do completely spontaneously. And again, it's this kind of a paradox, right? Even though the essence of play is that you're not working, you're not trying to do something that, but by not trying to accomplish the goal, you actually can get to a place where you're going to be more effective at accomplishing the goal. But even though we sort of recognize it, it's still very hard to find time for it, right? It's hard to actually force yourself when you have a deadline or when you're trying to get

something written to say, all right, here's the sensible thing to do, stop writing and go and do something else. I must say one of the things that I've discovered and this is a particularly wonderful thing about being a grandparent, as opposed to being a parent, is as a grandparent, I can just say, you know what, I'm just going to go and hang out, play with my grandchildren for the next couple of hours.

And I've discovered that by having a role that says, anytime there's a chance to play with the grandchildren, no matter what my deadlines are, no matter what the reviews are, that the paper wants, I'm gonna go and play with my grandchildren instead. That's actually been really helpful in terms of life as well as work. Having that space where you're not in the narrow range of work

is actually really helpful for being able to shake yourself up and do something else. And again, this is classic going for a long walk, playing a musical instrument, doing something that isn't the thing that you're trying to do. There's a wonderful term, again, that comes from AI, which is the local optimum. I don't know if you've used that, talked about that. So it's the local minimum or the local maximum. And the idea is that when you're trying to do something, often you can be in a situation in which any small change that you make is going to make things worse, so you just end up being stuck, right?

But if you made a big change, then you could actually make things better. And that's the idea of a local optimum. So what happens is you get to a point where, given where you are now, this is the best thing that you could do. But if you did something completely different, you might actually end up doing better. And one of the challenges for understanding intelligence is how do we kick ourselves out of these local optima? When we've become really practiced and good at doing one

particular thing, for example, it becomes very easy and natural to think that's the thing to do. And just doing something that we're not good at, doing something that's really different from the things that we do every day can be the sort of thing that will kick you out of that local optimum and give you a sense of other alternatives. I think traveling, we can't do that as much as we used to in the last couple of years, but traveling is another example of something that just kicks us out of our local optimum. And I think gives us a lot of the same kind of experience again that children have. So, you know, my two-year-old,

anytime he goes into a new room, it's like he's got a trip to Paris. It's amazing and exciting. And everything's there that you haven't seen before. And look, you know, there's a light. And there's a drawer. And there's books to pull out of the bookcase. But I think for adults where we know more

and we understand more, getting that sense of novelty is harder and doing something like traveling is another kind of classic example what we can do to kick ourselves out of those local optimum. Much more of my conversation with Alison Gopnik right after this. and gov Nick right after this.

I wanna ask you about, you mentioned this before, but I wanna go back and go deeper on it. You said that certain types of meditation in particular sort of like open awareness or choiceless awareness meditation where you're just aware of whatever's happening right now, stuff that normally you would tune out. You said that that's similar to what it's like to be a baby. is happening right now, stuff that normally you would tune out. You said that that's similar to what it's like to be a baby.

And in your book, The Gardener and The Carpenter, you've all chapter where you talk about this lantern consciousness. And well, I'm going to shut up and just let you hold forth on it because it's so interesting this connection between lantern consciousness and meditation and babies. So please. Yeah, so we know a little bit about even the neuroscience of attention. And what we know about the neuroscience of attention

is that the way that it typically works in grownups is that when we pay attention to something, that part of our brain becomes more plastic, again, as the nurse not to say, becomes more changeable. We can take in the information from what we're attending to and use it to alter that little part of our brain. But at the same time, the other parts of our brain actually kind of get shut down.

There are what are called inhibitory chemicals that keep the rest of our brain from being active. And it's kind of like our brain is saying, okay, most of your brain is not broke, don't fix it, just leave it be, and just change this little part that's relevant to the task that you're trying to solve now. And there's evidence for monkeys, for example,

that if you give them a task like where it turns out that what they listen to will, if they press a button when they hear something, they'll get a drink of juice, or if they press the button when they hear something, they'll get a drink of juice, or if they press the button, when they see something, they'll get a drink of juice that actually their brains change differently depending on what they've attended to.

So if you're hearing something and you get the reward, then you can actually literally see that the neurons in the auditory part of your brain change, whereas if you're getting the reward because there's something visual, then the neurons in your visual cortex change. Okay, so that's a really nice elegant story about how the kind of attention

that we typically have as adults, which is classically referred to as spotlight attention works. So attention seems to work like the spotlight. It lets you see one particular thing and then everything else around it gets dark. But when you look at baby monkeys and when you also look at baby humans, you see something quite different. So what you see is that those chemicals that make your brain more plastic, more changeable, babies brains are just

saturated in those chemicals. And we know that the babies brains are much more plastic. They do much more than the adult brain. And not only that, but they don't depend on this kind of attention. So if you just have a baby monkey and just play a lot of complicated sounds, the baby monkey's brain will change in the light of those sounds. For the adults, that will only happen if there's something that, like, a reward that depends on those sounds. So what that suggests is that the way

the brain starts out, it's really picking up information from everywhere around, right? It's not just picking up information that's relevant to its particular goals. The brain's starting out, just finding things that are new or fascinating or that have patterns and it's designed to pull in that kind of information. And I think if you think about what it feels like to have a brain that's like that, it's like this kind of lantern of consciousness rather than a spotlight. So you're pulling in all sorts of information about everything that's going on around you rather than just focusing on the thing that's most important to you.

One of the things I say is, you know, we say that babies are bad at paying attention. What we really mean is that they're bad at not paying attention. So they're bad at not paying attention to that little piece of slough that's on the ground or that sound of that airplane that's way up high that I haven't noticed yet. And that kind of attention, again, is not great if you're trying to solve a particular task, but it may be just what you need if you're picking up information from the world around you. And there's beautiful work by my colleague Celeste Tid and others that show that babies pay most attention to the things that will teach them the most. So instead of paying

the most attention to the things that will, you know, get them the most reward, get them the most. So instead of paying the most attention to the things that will get them the most reward, get them the most juice, the things they pay the most attention to are the things that have the most information that will tell them the most about the world around. And that's a very different kind of attention than the attention that we're used to as adults. And I think the experience is this kind of lantern consciousness.

It's this sense that everything around you is illuminated, which again, at least in my quite amateur practice, is the striking experience that at least certain kinds of meditation seem to come with, where the internal monologue is deemphasized and then the birds and the light on the wall become vivid in a way that they don't in our ordinary experience. So when I originally started talking about this, these different kinds of consciousness, I had a wonderful letter from someone who was a store detective. And he said what he would do was just sit on a balcony,

a pie over the store floor, and then look around to make sure that everything was fine and know when we shoplifting. And he said the only people who ever saw him were the children. So he said, you'd walk along. There'd be the grownups who were concentrating on doing the things that they wanted to do. And it was the four-year-old who would look up and wave and notice that someone was standing up there on the balcony. And you know, my 18-month-old grandson, here's the airplanes way before I hear the airplanes. He notices every possible airplane that's going by.

So I think that kind of consciousness is a very different kind of consciousness than the consciousness that we usually have. And, you know, aside from everything else, it's just a very satisfying and marvelous way of being. And I think we have reason to believe that it may be an index of our brains being more plastic, getting us out of the rots of our everyday experience, recognizing that the world is broader than we think. You know, something that I've thought about with this Dan, I've talked about this a bit

with my friend Michael Paul and about some of these experiences as well, is, you know, you might think, well, look, is this a hallucination? You know, so it feels good. You have this feeling that, you know, you're at one with the world and your ego is disappearing. But is that just, you know, you do a bunch of weird things? It's like, sit in one place for a long time and then you get this strange feeling or you take care of a baby and you love the baby

and you feel as if there's no boundary between yourself and the baby. Is it just a hallucination? And what I think is it's just the opposite. I think it's when you're in those states that you're actually, at least for a few minutes, you're actually seeing the reality. And the reality is that we aren't separate

from the world around us. We aren't separate from other people. Our hallucination is the hallucination that there's this little person inside of our heads who's the haemontialist and the self that's the most important thing in the world and that we should be listening to her all the time. Now, that's a very useful hallucination. It's probably the hallucination that that helps us to get through the world. But I think when we can at least have those moments of not experiencing that self, experiencing a lack of boundary between ourselves

and the world, a lack of boundary between ourselves and other people. I think just as a cold-blooded scientist, that's actually a more accurate picture of the way the world works in our place in it than the picture that we usually have. I love that. Just in terms of flashlight versus lantern consciousness, it strikes me having done a few meditation retreats that if I'm understanding this correctly, you and often in essence are taught to use a flashlight consciousness like hone in on the sensations of the breath.

And then you can drop it a few days in and you get the lantern. It's like you use one to get to the other. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think that makes perfect sense. And that's also what the neuroscience, I think, suggests. So one of the things that's interesting about meditation practice, you know, for grown-ups, you can't just sort of turn it off.

You can't just sort of say, all right, I'm going to have this lantern consciousness. I'm going to get rid of my everyday attention because the everyday spotlight is so deeply part of the way that we work in the world. And I think exactly a way of describing the way meditation works is that it uses that attention. So it uses that capacity that you have to attend to allow you to get this broader understanding of what's going on around you.

And there's some evidence that that's true in terms of the neuroscience as well. So it's this interesting paradox, which is training your attention so that you can turn it on things like just what your breath is, actually seems to allow you to give up that attention later on. And I think when you're meditating, you kind of have that experience, or again, this is my amateur experience. You kind of have this alternation between your focusing a lot, and it's even pretty effortful to make sure that you don't wander off and you have to pull yourself back.

And then you get these moments when you're not effortful anymore. You're just experiencing the world in this broader lantern-like way. It reminds me a little bit, this is using, it feels artificial and forced and torturous sometimes on a retreat where you're using the flashlight, you know, by just honing in on the breath or whatever you're using it to ultimately get to the lantern. But it reminds me of that game that I don't know if you played when you were a kid where somebody holds your arm against your side and they tell you, try as hard as you can to lift your arm up, but they're holding your arm down. And then you do it for 90 seconds or whatever

and they say, okay, now stop trying to lift your arm and they take their hands away and your arm just floats up. Because you've done all of this work and at some point it pays off in an extra ordinary experience. Yeah, I mean, the basic kind of paradox is that you have to work in a tend to be able to not work in a tend and the opposite paradox is true. You have to be able to not be productive in order in the long run to be productive. But I think it's interesting that if you look both at computer science and

evolution, they both have exactly that problem, right? And exactly that kind of solution. So both in computer science and in evolution, what seems to happen is that you have these capacities for play, for curiosity, for broader exploration. And in the long run, they actually allow you to thrive, survive, and thrive better. But you have to not pay attention to the long run in order to be able to have those short run advantages. And sometimes I think when I'm talking to people in Silicon Valley and so forth, I think in our culture in general, this is kind of funny contradiction where people will sort of say, okay, so now Professor Gottman, tell me what I need to do to play, right? Or people will say, all right, what do I need to do to make my children play and be creative and curious, right?

There must be some formula that I can have to make myself be more creative. And of course, the whole point is that you can't have the formula that it's by giving up the formula and the intention and the goal that you can get this kind of broad experience. And evolution and computer science suggests that in the long run, it will do you good,

it will enable you to have more possibilities. But I think in the short run, you should just do it because it's such a great thing to do. Yes, yes. We only have a few minutes left, but I want to give you a chance to talk about what you probably wanted to talk about in the first place, which is the central, as I understand it, the central thesis of your book, The Gardener

and The Carbender, which is this whole industry that's grown up around parenting. But often the modern conceptions of parenting are profoundly wrong, you say. So I don't know if that's too much to bite off at the end of an interview, but I'd be interested to hear you say a little bit about it at least. Well, it's actually very relevant to what we were just talking about because I think the parenting idea, which is a relatively recent idea, was something even the very word only started showing up in the 70s in the United States. I think that's a very good example of something where turning it into a goal-directed activity,

turning it into a kind of work really distorts the practice, really distorts what it's all about. So the parenting picture is that what you need to do when you're a parent is to make a child that has particular kinds of characteristics. Make a child who's going to be smarter, make a child who's going to be more successful, make a child who's gonna be more successful, make a child who's gonna be happier. And I think that's just completely the wrong picture. If you think about it from the perspective of the intelligence of exploration and the intelligence of care,

instead what you're trying to do when you're a parent, this is the metaphor about the gardener, is to create a rich nurturing environment in which these children who are, you know, fantastically good at exploring and learning. Nothing that we can do is gonna make them better intrinsically at learning. They're really designed to learn.

What we can do is give them a rich, nurturant space in which they can use their capacities for exploration and learning. And I think even more profoundly, if you think about those care cases, it's just intrinsically meaningful and significant and an important part of human life to be able to do that. And again, to get back to my point about our hallucinations, again, people sometimes say, you know, if you think about the experience of taking care of a child,

it's a little comic, if you're outside it because, you know, you see that to the person who's caring for that child, that child is like the most amazing, wonderful, terrific, interesting thing in the entire universe. And if it's not your grand child, you're likely to say, yeah, that's a nice baby. I mean, I like that baby. But it's not like my baby. And of course, your first thought is, well, that's a nice baby. I mean, I like that baby. But it's not like my baby. And of course, your first thought is, well, that's a hallucination, right? It's just because of the biology. But again, I think it's the other way around. I think it's when you're in those relationships, is when you realize the truth, which is that every person is uniquely valuable, uniquely important

center consciousness, uniquely fascinating, uniquely important, different from everybody else, and marvelous because they're different from everybody else. And I think it's more like that it's only in those moments of love and care that you realize that truth about other people. It's pretty hard to recognize that truth about other people for all the billions of people on the planet. But you can realize that truth about other people, it's pretty hard to recognize that truth about other people for all the billions of people on the planet. But you can realize that truth about other people in that relationship. And then at least, step strafely, you can say, and you know what, that's actually true about other people as well.

And I think that's a much more satisfying, liberating, reassuring picture of the relationship between parents and children, this picture of general care for another human being, then the picture that this sort of carpenter picture that you have a job to do and the job is to create a child that's going to come out in a particular way. So even if you could, and I think you probably can, accomplish this end of, okay, here's the list of things that I want my child to be like, and I'm going to do these bunch of tips that I got from the parenting book, and I'm going to do these bunch of tips that I got from the parenting book and here's how the child is going to come out. Even if you could do that,

you would have defeated the whole point of parenting from an evolutionary perspective, which is to allow each generation to innovate, to do things that are new, to be different from the previous generation. So if you knew how they were going to come out and you could control that, you would have kind of missed the whole point of having a new generation of humans. So I think it's part of this general point that we think about in many different traditions that being in the moment, appreciating the profund of caring for children is one of these really deep profound experiences, but caring for people in general is seeing that as being valuable in and of itself, rather than always trying to think, okay, here's this work that I have to do that we'll have some outcome later on. I think that leads to a more satisfying experience both for the parents and

for the children. Very quickly before we go, can you just shamelessly plug your book and any other resources that you're putting out in the world you want people to know about? Yeah, so the philosophical baby is the book that's about really focusing on some of these philosophical questions about consciousness, the gardener and the carpenter I've talked about that as well. All of my books are really trying to summarize years and years and many, many, many articles by many, many people

in the scientific community and try to apply them to some of these philosophical questions. The book that I'm working on right now, which won't be out for a while, is going to be called Curious Children Wise Elders, How Intelligency Falls. And that's going to have more of this work about caregiving. But if you go to elseengopnik.com,

which is my website, both my academic articles, and then things like my TED Talk and my Wall Street Journal columns are on that website as well. So that's a good way to get to it. And some of the more recent essays that I've done are there too. So that's an easy one-stop shop. I should add, by the way, that the podcast interview

that you mentioned with Esther Klein, the first one that I did on Vox, is one of my favorite interviews. And that was a really fantastic one. So I highly recommend that as a kind of intro to Galpnik as well. I agree. Thank you so much for doing this.

Pleasure to finally meet you, and this was great. Thanks very much Thanks again to Alice and got Nick Thanks as well to everybody who works incredibly hard to make this show a 2.5 times a week reality Samuel Johns Gabrielle Zuckerman DJ Kashmir Justin Davy Kim Baikama Maria Wartelle and Jen Poyant I would be remiss if I did not shout out our compatriots over at ultraviolet audio who do our engineering. Thank you to those guys. We'll see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode. We're going deep Dharma with a teacher named Matthew Brenzover. Hey, hey prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music.

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