Everyone Texts. Not Everyone Breathes the Same Air.

This was the first time I’d ever had a full day alone with Dax, my youngest grandson. First time having dinner with just Mason and Lincoln, no one else around. First time Lee Daley and I had uninterrupted hours together in years, maybe ever.

It all happened in one week. All of it felt rare. All of it made me realize something I’d been missing: everyone texts, but not everyone breathes the same air.

Wednesday Night at TED AI

The conference had just wrapped, and there was a great after-party. I walked around the room and noticed something striking: most people had come as individuals, sitting, lounging, staring at their phones.

At a conference about AI and human connection, everyone was looking at screens.

I spent several minutes looking for someone who wasn’t on their phone. It took a while. Eventually, I found a volunteer who was doing the same thing—looking for someone whose face wasn’t buried in a device. We spent 20 minutes talking about TED and TEDx, and her dream of someday speaking on the TED stage.

Here I am being an elder again, at an after-party, because I looked up.

Physical presence isn’t just rare—it’s actively avoided, even when we’re in the same room. And I’d just spent a week discovering exactly how valuable it is.

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The Day Dax Got Hooked

Every eight weeks, Kymberlee and I drive down to Santa Monica, and this time I said we should pick up Dax on the way. I had two options for how to spend the day: Santa Monica Pier with its rides, games, and cotton candy—standard 12-year-old fare—or the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City.

I saw the word “Jurassic” and thought it was perfect for a kid who wants to be a paleontologist.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology is run by a foundation honoring a Russian immigrant couple who’ve since passed, and they collected—or were given, or inherited —the documentation is deliberately vague—the strangest objects you’ve ever seen. They let eight people in every 15 minutes, no cameras allowed, which meant we had to remember everything.

The first thing we saw stopped us cold, then the second, then the third, each more compelling than the last. There were miniature carvings inside the eye of a needle, sonic experiences that blended as you moved through the room, a study of mathematics in Islamic architecture where you sit inside a tiled alcove that feels like being inside a mosque.

Five minutes in, we both started laughing when we realized there weren’t any dinosaurs at all. When I pointed this out, Dax said that it was fine because what we were looking at was way more interesting.

We took our time through the rest of the museum, calling each other over whenever something caught our attention—Renaissance instruments, 1800s aerospace theories, staircases built into the walls that were scale models of famous architectural staircases. At the top was a tea garden with fabric draped over the roof for shade, morning doves cooing, a pair of lovebirds in an aviary, and everyone speaking quietly.

“I feel at home here,” Dax told me.

Not because the museum had what he expected, but because we were there together, sharing attention, calling each other over to see things, building a shared experience that couldn’t be texted or FaceTimed or captured later. We had to be present for it.

Making Memories Without Cameras

Since we couldn’t take photos in the museum, we had to rely on memory alone. On the drive back, we talked through everything we’d seen—what was curious, what was strange, what made us laugh. I recorded our conversation on my iPhone and later fed it into EVERYWHERE™, my orchestrated intelligence system. Claude extracted the conversation into song lyrics, and when I asked Dax what kind of music he liked, I learned that, at 12, he already had a rich musical tapestry.

The one that connected with me was classic rock, though he also writes sea shanties. I told Suno.ai to blend classic rock and sea shanties, and five minutes later, we had a song.

The opening verse captured the day perfectly: “Started at Shake Shack, yeah we went to town / Burger, bacon, cheese fries, golden brown / But we didn’t have a shake at Shake Shack, no way / Saving room for all the things we’d see today.”

The bridge pulled in details from our entire adventure, including a line about “imprisoned animals” from the petting zoo at The Grove that we’d both noticed felt wrong. EVERYWHERE caught that tension in just two words, capturing a moment of shared observation that happened because we were physically together, both noticing the same thing, both feeling uncomfortable about it.

A week later, Dax is still talking about the day and still playing the song. That’s the