Dr. David Eagleman

There's no way I'm going to be able to be as good as he is.

That's a genetic thing that he drops into the world with that I don't.

Fine.

So given that, people are off on different trajectories anyway.

The way I think about this, I don't know how this will translate just in terms of audio, but like a space-time cone in physics is where you start in one spot and then there are all these different trajectories you can take into the future.

Picture this like you're starting at the bottom of the ice cream cone and you can –

You can take any different trajectory as long as it still exists within the ice cream cone.

OK, so, you know, we drop into the world with our genetic skills and predispositions.

We have childhoods that we don't choose.

We're born into a cultural language and era that we don't choose.

And that defines the limits of the ice cream cone about where we can go with that.

As far as specialization goes, you know, economists will argue this is part of what makes a very healthy society is that.

You know, some people become the lumberjacks and some the lawyers and some the accountants and whatever.

You know, I do feel like we're in a really great era, though, in general, in humankind, where kids do get very broad educations.

And they're sort of encouraged to try everything and spend a few years in karate and in soccer and in piano lessons and so on.

That's wonderful.

So...

My father was a psychiatrist, and he always said, really, the whole job of a parent is just to open doors for the child.

That's it.

So you give the child all these lessons, you open all these doors, and then the kid takes their own path, depending on, you know, this extraordinarily complicated formula of things that we'll never understand, but they go through one door and not the others.