 If I wanted to make a call to a member of my genus, should I use a homophone? Well, that was an adventure. A solid year of interesting topics, great conversations, puns, more puns, different puns. I thought that I'd take a moment and talk a little bit about why thunk happened. The 0th episode gave a sort of mission statement, but I never really explained where the idea came from. My sister Rebecca has worked hard to be extraordinarily smart. Seriously, smart as a whip beats me by 20 points in 7 wonders every time we play. It's kind of annoying. We were having a conversation about what would happen when an AI became complex enough to count as a person. When she said something to the effect of, oh, it would just be pretending to be a person. It couldn't actually have feelings or anything. I was a little blown away because from what I knew, there was no reason to suspect that that was the case. It was just an artifact of bad sci-fi from the 70s, which might be convincing if you had never been exposed to certain concepts in cognitive science or philosophy, but otherwise was kind of silly. That really crystallized something for me. Even really smart people who are used to finding patterns in information and figuring out their implications need exposure to certain ideas to even begin thinking about them. Even the most genius geniuses can't think about things that they've never noticed before or concepts they've never heard of. They need some sort of boundary or definition on the fuzzy parts of ideas before they can analyze them. Sort of a handle to grab ahold of. I also wanted to have a sort of archive of concepts to reference quickly in conversations. If somebody asked how can atheists exist in a world without purpose, I didn't want to have to type out existentialism each time. I would just link them to YouTube. So that was the plan. Make some videos, give some people some information to chew on so that their own ideas would be more robust, and give them a little bit of context for those ideas. I had no clue that anyone would want to watch. I am well and truly humbled by the number of people who have subscribed, and by the fantastic discussions that you've had in the comments, in the YouTube comments, threads of thoughtful and level-headed discussion in which people actually change their minds. That is astounding. You guys astound me. So where do we go from here? As much as I love making videos every week, it's really hard. So I'm going to break it down to one video every two weeks. That'll give me a little bit more time to tinker and make sure that everything works and fits together well. And it'll also give me some breathing room to do some stuff on the side, like maybe 60-second conversation starters or a trailer. Which brings me to content. There are a whole lot of you subscribers. What do you want to see? Do you like the philosophy bits? Do you like the educational science bits? Do you like the analysis of pop culture bits? Which direction do you want Thunk to go? Also, do you ever reference Thunk in conversations? Like, do you share it with anyone? What's your favorite episode to date? Really, just drop me a line with anything that you feel like. If you want a free sticker or if you just want to say hi, you can shoot me an email or leave a comment below. I promise I read everything and I'll respond to any questions you might have. Okay, this part's important. I'd really like to thank Rob, Kourtney, Tanya, Stefan, Michelle, and Elena, and especially Liz, for putting up with my endless edits and requests for comments and things. I literally could not do this without you guys. And a big thank you to everybody watching for a mind-blowing year of interesting ideas, intelligent conversation, and a lot of really terrible puns. If you haven't yet, don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share. And don't stop thunking.