What Kids Really Need in the Age of AI with Dana Suskind

**Guy Kawasaki** (0:00)
Where has time gone? This is the sixth year of the Remarkable People podcast, and I thought maybe it's time to find a revenue model. So if you'd like to sponsor this podcast, please reach out to me. You will be able to reach an audience of highly educated, high income, open-minded, I would even say growth mindset minded people.
And I will even read the ads or the promotions inside the podcast. We're not just going to slap it on at the beginning and the middle and the end. I will do the reading. One caveat, I will not promote products and services that I do not like. So if you have a remarkable product or service, you are in the right place. Guy at guykawasaki.com.
This is Remarkable People.

**Dana Suskind** (0:57)
The goal in those first five years of life is understanding that how we nurture our children, how we connect with them is actually building your baby's brain and that physical brain. Those first years of life, it's building the hard drive of the brain. It's like a computer. You're building the hard drive, the memory, the RAM.
K-12 is really important for developing the human, but it's more like software updates. If you were supposed to have an iPhone 16, but you only built an iPhone 4, software updates aren't going to help you. Those early years and how we connect as parents with our babies and our kids, really helps determine who they are.

**Guy Kawasaki** (1:40)
Hello, everybody.
Guess what? I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People Podcast. And, oh my God, we have one of my best buddies in the world on today. Her name is Dana Suskind, and she's one of the few people I would let operate on my head. She has the ability to take very tiny wires and connect them to actual nerves in your brain, which that is a remarkable thing. She, believe it or not, is a cochlear implant specialist for kids, for babies. Imagine that, that you have the power to help babies who cannot hear. Hear, oh my god, that is godlike, Dana. And Dana is one of the major influences in me getting a cochlear implant or two. She is definitely a huge factor in my existence at this point in life. You know, that's her day job. She's also a very, very accomplished writer and she's coming out with a new book. And any of you who have babies or know people with babies or have kids with babies, you absolutely should buy this book. It is called Human Raised and I read it and there's a lot of people I need to give this book to because it is all about the right way to raise a little baby and we'll get into it. So Dana, welcome to the show.

**Dana Suskind** (3:19)
Thank you so much for having me. And would you really let me operate on you? You're a little bit bigger than my usual patient.

**Guy Kawasaki** (3:25)
Yeah, but you know, a neuron is a neuron, right?

**Dana Suskind** (3:28)
That's true. That's true.

**Guy Kawasaki** (3:30)
How many implants have you implanted?

**Dana Suskind** (3:33)
Oh gosh, I would have to go back, but many, many, many, many little ears. But they're now, because I've been doing it so long. Now some of them are in college. It's wild to see them grow up. And it makes you feel so good knowing that they can connect and talk and hear.

**Guy Kawasaki** (3:52)
This podcast is famous for going down rat holes. So we're going to go down a rat hole right now, but I just don't understand. So my ENT, Joe Roberson, opened up my head twice. And I don't even understand how you can take a little wire and connect it to a particular nerve. Just give me the steps of how you do that at such a microscopic level. I mean, it's not like you're plugging a wire and you're charging your MacBook. So how do you do this?

**Dana Suskind** (4:22)
It's almost like that, but actually it's not one particular nerve. When you put it into the cochlea, there are little hair cells that are the appendages from nerves. So you're just lying this implant next to it and it basically bypasses the hair cells, the nerve parts that aren't working and stimulates the nerve directly. It's a pretty cool thing.

**Guy Kawasaki** (4:46)
Yeah, but you're not just doing that with, you know, is there a magnifying glass?

**Dana Suskind** (4:51)
Is it a micro?

**Guy Kawasaki** (4:51)
I mean, how are you doing this?

**Dana Suskind** (4:53)
Let me be clear. You go under a microscope that magnifies the cochlea, which is like a snail shaped organ and it magnifies this little P shaped organ, sized organ up to the size of a quarter. So I'm looking under the microscope and you have little tiny microscopic instruments and you slowly, gently put the electrode in and it's a miraculous thing.