# Anjan Katta: Returning Computing to Its Hippie Ideals *Open Ed Podcast with Charlie Deist* --- **Anjan:** It's all about the mind. It's all about productivity. I'm trying to get smarter. But I'm so dysregulated. My circadian rhythms are so toast. I'm so disembodied. I didn't quite appreciate how much the screen, the light, the appearance of a computer—it's dysregulating. The blue light. This thing called flicker. The oversaturated colors and high contrast. Your computer is trying to simulate a Vegas casino. They have figured out to a science, this is how you put the human and their nervous system and physiological state to be most susceptible to getting stuck into these dopamine loops. **Charlie Deist:** Welcome back to the Open Ed Podcast. I'm Charlie Deist, sometimes known as the open ed newsletter guy, coming out from the shadows, away from my usual indoor desk, into the sunlight for a conversation with Anjan Katta, who is the founder of Daylight Computer. Probably my favorite piece of hardware, maybe my favorite piece of technology. Anjan, welcome to the podcast. **Anjan:** Thanks for having me on Charlie. It's delightful to be here. **Charlie:** I want to start with your story. There's a Wired article that I couldn't actually access because it was gated and I don't subscribe to Wired. But the title of the article is something about how Daylight is returning computing to its hippie ideals. It's one of these interesting facts about Silicon Valley that a lot of the giants—you think of Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, a lot of the people that were around in the early days of Silicon Valley—they had this combination of a technical background but also this very freewheeling creativity. **Anjan:** Right. A lot of people don't know this, but the essence of computing, the early pioneers who were behind it, they were all hippies. The core big idea they had was the human potential movement—we as humans could be and do so much more and feel then what society conditions us to be. And the idea for computers is they are our friends, our sidekicks, our exoskeleton to help us be the best versions of ourselves. There's a funny way that that is the core idea of computing, and what computing has become since then is totally different and totally the opposite of that. Instead of an expansion of who you are, it's a disassociation. It's a mechanization. It's a dehumanization. It's taking away so many aspects of our humanity. It's all about the mind. It's all about productivity, about efficiency. And frankly, you don't even get that with how distracting it is. I think that mirrors my own life and what led me to Daylight. Ever since I was a kid, I've just been a very sensitive person. ADHD, stimuli, novelty, always fidgeting, running around really hyper, and very susceptible to lights. I have seasonal affective disorder, so I'm sensitive to light. I need to be outside if I'm stuck inside all the time. I was sensitive to the seasons, and that's where seasonal affective disorder really comes to be. My sleep was sensitive, so blue light always would just keep me up. It would affect everybody around me, but for me it really would overstimulate my nervous system and keep me up at night. I sort of just shut down all my body and all my sensitivity because life was just too overstimulating, the artificiality of reality, and found my home in books. My dad's a psychiatrist, so our house was covered in all sorts of crazy books—reality is one way, but here's the deep truth of it, whether that's for food or for economics. I ended up spending a lot of my life from here. I grew up in a small town. There wasn't that much to do. Books became my way. Starting from that place of learning and being in my head and being analytical and always accumulating knowledge, that just took me to computers where computers were another way to get really smart and be in my head. I found you could find books online for free and articles and Wikipedia. The books around me were never as limitless as what I could find online. I just tried to consume as much information as possible. I would read and read and read for hours and my eyes were sensitive, so at a certain point, they thought I had glaucoma, but it was actually just such extreme eye strain from being on computers. I was going more and more into my head, more and more into consuming information, trying to get smarter. I think that is actually a reflection of what computers are and what computers try to be. They're just about being completely heady. They completely disembody you, and their promise is like, hey, you're going to be way smarter. Hey, you're going to be able to think better thoughts. The thing I faced in my personal life is, oh my God, this is fraudulent in the sense like I'm reading more, I'm trying to get smarter, but I'm so dysregulated. My circadian rhythms are so toast. I'm so disembodied. I don't remember what I'm reading the next day. I don't even know what I learned. I'm not able to articulate it because my brain and nervous system is frazzled. I'm basically just pretending. Because when you so fetishize the mind and getting smarter and learning and you don't take care of all of your being, it's sort of fake. Seeing that in my own life and facing it and the grief of you're not actually getting smarter here, you're not actually learning as much as you think you are—that made me realize there is no real learning, thinking, true contemplation, true expansion of yourself if you don't take care of the entire stack of your being: your mind, body and spirit, your nervous system. The point of Daylight was like, oh wow, okay. This has hit me as a key wisdom of my life. How do we now refactor computers to reflect this as well? **Charlie:** I heard recently someone describe the internet as the library of Alexandria times ten or times a hundred, but the limiting factor on what allows us to absorb it is not the amount of information or even the interface that we use to interact with it. It's literally the screen. I've had that experience too. I was on screens a lot growing up—video games, computers. I remember the first Macintosh, the one with the swivel screen. I'm sure I was just glued to that thing for hours and my eyesight started to deteriorate. Around my sophomore year of high school, I started to have to strain to be able to see the whiteboard in the classroom. And for the next maybe ten years, my eyesight just kept getting worse and worse. That myopia, progressive deterioration, it's also mirrored in what you're describing with the hyper compression into this headspace. There was a term Marshall McLuhan used to describe modernity—he's talking about the hypertrophy of the eye, which we have literally where your eye muscles get locked in on closeup, and that's basically what nearsightedness is. But we also have it at a mental level where we abstract ourselves into the machine almost. You use the term dysregulate. What in your research is the connection between the screens that we use and some of those underlying symptoms? **Anjan:** My first impression was like, oh, it's just these algorithms. They're so addicting. It's the fact that you can open 300 tabs and you get 20 links. It's only the software that's the problem. To be totally frank, even upstream of that, I thought the problem was myself. I don't have enough willpower, I don't have enough discipline. I'm not good enough. Once I got over beating myself up, which I think is a very honest experience with computers today—you blame yourself for not being good enough because of the way you use it—then you sort of realize, wait a minute, the software here is a huge perpetrator. These things are diabolically designed to be as addicting as possible. That is dramatically different than early computers. That's even dramatically different than computers 20 years ago. But the next layer that really opened me up, and that's where Daylight comes from, is I didn't quite appreciate how much the screen, the light of a computer, the appearance of a computer actually deeply plays a role in the way it's dysregulating. What I learned is: number one, the blue light from computers; number two, this thing called flicker, which I can explain in a second; number three, the brightness mismatch with the rest of the environment; number four, the oversaturated colors and high contrast that a computer has; and number five, it keeps us indoors. All five of these really contribute to dysregulating you at a vagal and nervous system level, at breathing and tidal volume level, at blink rates. And to your point, the associated mood tone, cognitive tone, because that comes from the hypertrophy of the eyes, your dopamine system, your melatonin and circadian system, and all the metabolic processes that come out of that. It's a fancy way of saying basically your body gets put on high alert, high arousal, high stimulation when you're on a computer. The simplest tagline to describe it would be: basically your computer is trying its best job to simulate a Vegas casino in terms of its light environment. The Vegas casino blocks out all the natural light. They have incredibly bright lights. It's a ton of blue light. It's all flashing and flickering, and it's all extremely oversaturated. They do that because they have figured out to a science, this is how you put the human and their nervous system and physiological state to be most susceptible to getting stuck into these dopamine loops, most stuck into these consumptive stimming loops. That's essentially in a smaller way what our computer is doing to us. Just one small example that I find so illustrative: when we feel more tense when we use a computer, one of the reasons why is there's a phenomenon called screen apnea. There is sleep apnea—that's the common one, which is while you sleep, you don't breathe, and there's a whole host of problems in your life that comes from that. Well, some researchers realized there is the equivalent of that for screens and they call it screen apnea. Basically because you have sympathetic overregulation and not enough parasympathetic, and this deer-in-the-headlights response you get with the light of a computer, you actually, when you're on a computer, the screen apnea phenomenon is: one, you breathe less—you literally take less breaths per minute. And number two, your tidal volume is less, meaning you actually breathe shallower. The combination of these two is you're dysregulated. You're a bit more anxious. I could go on, but there's a litany of ways that computers physiologically actually put us in a place that then makes us dysregulated for the rest of our day, but also then more susceptible to the dopamine slot machines that are the YouTubes and TikToks and the feeds. It's a vicious cycle that builds on top of each other. I was like, we have to start with light. That same Vegas casino slot machine on the side of a beautiful river in Northern California, the Yuba River or something? It's not as addicting. There is something about the design of the entire light environment that plays a role. That's why we wanted to reinvent the screen of a computer to really get at the heart of the way the computer uses light to affect us. **Charlie:** Well, I'm just going to briefly show—this is my Daylight. I was an early adopter, so I think I got in maybe in the second or third round that you guys were shipping these. I was super excited to get my hands on one, and it was one of these things where one way to look at it is basically like a faster, more responsive Kindle. But another way is really it's a replacement for your laptop or your desktop. I could have a whole separate conversation about the combination of the new dictation tools to totally change the way that we interact with computers. Less of this hunched over typing locked in, and in a more expansive state where you're maybe using the stylus a little bit and you're speaking and you're interacting with it in a much more detached way. It's putting it back in its place as a tool rather than a machine. I see a lot of debate about the classroom and same thing for homeschoolers doing distance learning or virtual learning. There's this debate about like Chromebook versus textbook or adaptive apps versus pen and paper. Which one is better for kids learning and kids cognition? I think there's sort of a false dichotomy there. We can have now, because of the e-ink technology—what was the technological breakthrough that allowed this and how did you come to understand e-ink as being such a break from traditional screens? **Anjan:** I had this notion like, how do we rethink a computer to be healthy, physically healthy, mentally healthy, and then hopefully intellectually healthy? I was looking around at how do I change light? Over time I wanted to change ergonomics. I wanted to change EMFs, I wanted to change materials to be natural. There's a whole swath of ways to make it more humanistic. But it kept coming back to light. I was like, okay, what's my favorite environment to think and learn something? It's outside, under a tree with a moleskin in my hands, right? Thinking and doodling and this. I was like, this paper is just calm. There's of course many beautiful benefits to paper. You never need to charge it. It's there. It lasts forever. But even putting that aside, just the way paper is so calm, you can use it outside in the sun. Even at nighttime it's—obviously you need to have a lamp or something, but it's just, it doesn't demand. It doesn't put strain on me. It's not intense in the way a computer is. I was like, is there a way to make a piece of paper digital? If I could control Spotify from a piece of paper, if I could read my homework that I would have to have or a PDF or a contract I'm doing, or if I could do my emails, write my emails by hand and send them out—why do I need to go to a computer? You very quickly turn to Kindles and e-ink as the best version of this digital paper. Something that's analog, but actually has computational capabilities and can have apps and PDFs and docs. The main problem we ran into when we tried to turn Kindles into basically iPad replacements or Chromebook replacements is the screen is so slow. The actual screen technology is so slow. You can't actually use it for computer stuff. You can't scroll, you can't zoom in, you can't type easily on the keyboard. You can't scroll through results and search. You can't swipe to the next page very quickly. It's good for Harry Potter and it's not good for what I wanted, which was for it to replace my iPad, to replace my laptop. We went on a six-year journey of basically figuring out how to make these e-paper screens fast enough that they could actually be able to replace what we have to do with a computer, whether it's in school or work or Spotify or Audible or a book you're trying to read, while also retaining the analog paper-like benefits of no blue light, no flicker, being able to use it outdoors, being able to use it at nighttime, being able to have it in a way that's not overstimulating for you. I essentially found an old Japanese technology that some crazy professor has been spending 30 plus years working on and connected it with another material science breakthrough from the Netherlands and from Florida State. Long story short, I was like, okay, if we put this all together, maybe this could solve this key technical problem that makes it so slow. I thought we would do it in two years and it took six years. **Charlie:** Talk a little more about that as a learning process. You're connecting the dots between these different fields. The information, the knowledge hadn't been synthesized into any single source. You had to connect the dots. How were you in the position to or how did you put yourself in the position to connect those dots? Just as a microcosm of how innovation happens. **Anjan:** I'm so glad you asked this question. There's such a good lesson for the wider world here. There's so many innovations that we all would just say we obviously want that are just waiting there because of structural reasons. The entire reason I was able to come up with this is because I was not in the field. Because I was completely new and completely naive to this. I think that's the entire reason I was able to do it. Why? It's because everybody else in the field who believed in these paper-like computer screens, the best they could do is what came in the Kindle. And believe it or not, that was invented in the nineties. It even starts earlier in the seventies if you go all the way back. All the people who believed in it basically just ran out of juice. They've persisted for five years, they persisted for ten years, but after 15 they're like, I can't do this anymore. When you go talk to the key professors, when you talk to the companies, they all had the right idea, but they were too early and it just took too long to create a lot of these underlying material science process technologies—lithography etching, gel polymers, dichroic dyes, I could go on. Everybody in this field is like, this is a graveyard. This is a dead end. For 20 years, everybody's been saying it's three years away and look, nothing has ever worked out. Of course I had to get really lucky, but when I started to look, I did it with open eyes. I didn't know that this has been a graveyard of a field and some of the key breakthroughs happened in 2008, in 2012, in 2015, in 2018. It's sort of interesting that it's so proportional almost. The people who tried in 2010, they didn't have those other breakthroughs. The people who tried in 2014, the people who tried in 2003. I just showed up and finally after 30 years, enough of the underlying technologies had matured enough. Because I was not a professor in one particular field, I wasn't working for Apple in one display division, I was willing to look at a much broader—I was not a specialist—much broader set of things. One of the crucial papers was not even from displays, it was used in other opto-electronic applications and I brought it together. I think that combination of being naive enough to look widely, to not be jaded when everybody else is like, this is dead—sometimes it takes an outsider or a beginner's mind—allowed me to put this all together and be like, this works on paper. And every expert, I'm like, they're like, no, no, no, no. There's no way this works. They couldn't ever say specifically, and I'd give them my math and I'd say, here, there's so many photons. This is how they did it, this is the angles, and can you prove my math's wrong? And they go, nah, but it's not going to work. And whatever my personality type is, I'm like, oh, you haven't told me this is wrong. So I kept going and going and going and going. The Japanese professor was generous enough to take me under his wing, provided his lab to create the first prototypes. Japan was where we did this. It turns out it sort of worked. It tells me how many other fields are there where if a beginner came in, was curious—it did take me two years of deeply studying, being part of it, going to every conference, reading the textbooks. I did have to put my work in, but I'm like, how many other fields are out there that if somebody came in and was curious, in two years you can go to the edge of human innovation? I was average and by the end of it, no one else has come up with this. That's very empowering for how many other things. **Charlie:** A variation of the story comes up so many times. It's kind of like a version of the hero's journey in a way. It's the story of entrepreneurship, rebel academics, people that crack the problem that's eluded the field for a long time. The common thread seems to be they had that mindset of either not knowing that it was impossible or not taking that as a final answer from the people who are supposedly the experts in the field. An entrepreneur seems to be the ultimate autodidact. You have to be able to dive into so many different fields. You mentioned that you got access to the Japanese professor's lab, but just to get to that point, you were operating on a little bit of faith that the answer was possible before you could see it. You had to have the faith that this would actually be possible. At this point, what's to stop one of these big tech giants from coming in, whether it's Amazon with their Kindles or Apple, and kind of taking the underlying technology and just putting their operating system on it? **Anjan:** We spent two years making an RVN Linux, that's a sort of solo OS. We had to throw it away, but the idea was we truly wanted our own operating system that had no Google tracking, no spying. Privacy and security and sovereignty matter a lot to me. But turns out that's—you need a lot more resources to get that to production. So that's another day. To answer your question, the anti-capitalist answer here is I just want in some sense to show the world there is a total other way to do computers that don't need to be so unhealthy. Now it does have a trade-off. The computers are black and white. They're grayscale, right? So they're not for Netflix, they're not for playing Fortnite. But the whole point is there's a lot of other stuff on computers where you don't really need oversaturated stimulating colors if you're listening to an audiobook or reading a book or whatever it may be. I think it would be delightful if people realize this was a way and at all different price points. Obviously a startup has so little scale, things have to be expensive and even then you don't make much money. I think it'd be delightful for people to adopt this and all schools and Chromebooks and tablets and so on could have this technology. Long term I am actually not opposed to that. Maybe my investors would not enjoy me saying this. So that's one perspective on it. The second perspective is it just turns out it's really difficult to copy us on this. There are some very subtle technologies. We have like five patents on it, and these companies can be pretty brutal, so they will eventually find a way to copy you, but there's a lot of different process technologies. There's one manufacturer in the world right now that can actually implement our IP and we have an exclusivity with them for the next couple years. So that helps, at least in the short term. We get a chance to actually bring this into the world and not get squished so quickly. The third thing is, I think generally companies are pretty pessimistic, cynical about things like this. Like who wants a healthier black and white computer? People are dumb. They just want colors. They just want to get distracted. They call it the innovator's dilemma. It's not that they can't do it, they just think it's small and dumb and unrealistic, and then by the time it proves people aren't dumb, they actually do want to reclaim their health, they want to reclaim their attention, they want to not piss away their time, by that time it's too late. The small guy now has his own momentum. **Charlie:** In some sense the consumer appetite for shiny objects functions as a bit of a moat for you guys, that you still have this a little bit more niche audience of more concerned consumers who are worried about their relationship with technology. I think probably there are no consumers who are more concerned about screens than parents with their kids. You hear all this talk about the zombified kid after being on an iPad for an hour. In some cases, they might not even become a zombie—that's the wrong analogy because they're overstimulated. When you take the object away from them, maybe they kind of look like a zombie when they're glued into it, but then they're dysregulated, right? They're keyed up and it's not good. The handful of times I've made the mistake of letting my kids who are three and six use the iPad on occasion, just watching Daniel Tiger or whatever, it's like I definitely don't want that to be the default of how they interact with devices. But at the same time, I do see the potential for personalized learning and there are all these adaptive AI apps that are coming out and it feels like you could be leaving money on the table or learning on the table by just refusing to use technology altogether. That's where I think this technology, whether it's in the schools or parents who are being more selective, it's worth seriously considering, given that kids are spending so much time even outside of school on their devices. The time that we want to put them on devices when they're in school has to be more intentional and we can't ignore what seems like just a lot of mounting evidence that this has very real effects and the effects are not evenly distributed. Some kids might do fine on a regular Chromebook, but the people like you, the more sensitive kid—and I think I might be in the same boat. I don't know if it's a gene or a lot of genes. **Anjan:** Especially those of us who are neurodivergent, we're the ones most susceptible to the way existing computers are built. **Charlie:** Tell us about the new initiative with Daylight Kids. **Anjan:** The high level thing to share here also is not to say that because we've made a healthier screen, we've made a healthier computer—that's the important part. The important part is actually just being outside, being in the dirt, having your hands on physical things, playing with other kids, playing with other people. That to me is the real sauce. The reason we exist is because it's unrealistic and probably not in the best interest of your child's development to be a Luddite, to completely get away with technology. So the point of Daylight is almost like the least computer possible, and you do what you need to and you put it away and you go outside and you put your hands in the dirt and you play with other people. That's the high level of how we think about this. There are aspects of technology that are either hard to get rid of because school has them or they're actually useful, like an audiobook or Spotify or it's actually a very powerful way to stimulate your own kids' learning and thinking and curiosity and expression. Some of the adaptive learning apps that you're talking about—people know about Khan Academy. There's new things like Reading.com and Ava and Alpha Schools and Time Back, which for all intents and purposes are 80% book, 20% teacher, and the teacher is embedded in it. It's personalized to you, and the same way a tutor is like, okay, that's too difficult for you. Let's do this. Okay, you didn't seem to quite get that. Let me do that. Basically, instead of needing a tutor to be there, the actual quote-unquote textbook has that. That's inherently digital. The hope is Daylight gives you a safe, healthy, clean way to be able to access these things. I love the promise here is not like my kid's going to be a million times smarter. Though that may be directionally also true. It's instead of now four hours and more tantrums and more difficulty to have the kid be engaged or do it, it gets done in an hour or 45 minutes and they're engaged and now there's more time. Now you don't have all these negative associations and emotions around learning or reading or this. Frankly, I think this idea that we need YouTube and games is the only way to keep kids engaged, I don't think is true. It's like sugary candy—if that's all that's there, they're going to pick it every time over hummus and carrots. But if hummus and carrots are there, they objectively taste good if your senses haven't been ruined by the other things. We came up with Daylight Kids. It basically has kids software. It's blocked from the internet and distracting apps. It's just got books and drawing and stories and learning apps. It's just the good parts of the digital world. The goal here is to just allow a little bit of digital into your life without it taking over. **Charlie:** My last question here is sort of thinking about the future and different futures that could evolve. We've all seen Apple Vision Pro and there was a lot of fanfare at first. I feel like there's some sense in which most people still kind of recoil at the idea of full-on virtual reality. It's still a little too dystopian. Whenever I put those things on, I just immediately get motion sickness, really bad, and I want to run in the other direction. They just released the iPhone 17 and it's basically the same iPhone, just a little bit slimmer, a little bit shinier, and that seems to be like Apple's only trick these days. Just thinner and shinier. **Anjan:** And shinier. **Charlie:** Right. I wonder if Steve Jobs might have been more on this bandwagon, like if the technology had existed. If he'd be designing a beautiful full desktop—I mean like your whole desktop is a surface, is a computable surface that you can write on and draw on. I think I heard you talk in another interview a little bit about that as sort of the big picture vision. Can you speak to that a little bit and sort of how could this be integrated into the classroom? What are some futures that you see? Where are we going to go with computers? **Anjan:** I think regardless of what future you map out, one of the key questions for human society is: what does a wise relationship to technology look like? It's as simple as that. The point of Daylight is what's the best wisdom we can bring together of what makes a thriving human? It turns out you can't have any discussion if you don't have health. You can have everything in the world, but if your health's not there. You start going up the stack. You can have everything in the world, but if your nervous system is shot, you won't be able to enjoy it. If we can start with the principles of what's the stack that allows a whole human that can then thrive, then the goal of computers is, okay, what are the different capacities a human has that we can take advantage of? One of them is to be spatial. Now we're making basically a fat piece of paper with the tablet, and that's always the way I relate to what a tablet is. It's a fat, magical piece of paper. But to your point, why can't whiteboards? Why can't our desks, why can't other things be calm, feel analog, be part of our house or interior design, not be impinging on our attention or nervous system, but when you want to be like, okay, what's my plan for the week? Or what's the habit streak I'm on? Or what's this physiotherapy thing I want to be doing? Maybe you've seen these Skylight calendars and things like that. It's nice to potentially have these computational surfaces. In lieu of not having them, this is my place. You can see I try to do the analog equivalent of it. I would not recommend this. This is a little bit like conspiracy theory, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia style. But I think this is our vision: how do we have computers that magically disappear into your environment, but give you magic back? I think of Tom Riddle's diary in Harry Potter as the most inspiring example of what technology can be, or the newspapers if Sirius Black's shouting on it, or the Marauder's Map. For all intents and purposes, they feel analog, but they're magical. They can react to you. They have their intelligence, they can help you. To me, that's where I want computers to go, where it's not about computers, it's about magical objects and surfaces we have in our world. And none of that matters if it's not respectful of your attention, your nervous system, your health. In the short term, it'll look like potentially us making a healthy phone, a desktop monitor with a Daylight screen. But further than that, I think it'd be really cool—we're talking about the long term here—to make computational surfaces. **Charlie:** It's a future I'm very excited for and hope that I'll be able to remain an early adopter. It's the only piece of technology that I feel good about bringing into my bedroom and even into my bed for bedtime reading. I often will just switch it onto airplane mode and put it under my pillowcase. Actually I love how the case that it came in—you guys send a little, it's like a little pillowcase around the computer. I feel like if I were to ever go camping, I'd bring that along and I would just use that as my pillow. I know that there's more exciting things coming and the feature that I'm most excited about that I saw you demoing on your Twitter the other day is this little yellow button here on the side. Can you tell me more about why you installed this button before it had a function? **Anjan:** Oh, I'm so glad you asked. There are two main form factors of computers. One is like, oh, I need to do real work, and you need to sit on your laptop or desktop and be hunched over and your shoulders hurt and you're clicking and clacking away, and it's not necessarily the best environment for you, but it's where you have to be. Or you're on your phone, but then your pinky is crooked and you're holding something and it's small. It's felt like these are the two main ways we've been able to do things with computers. I've always felt like the key part of a tablet is it's like holding a book or a legal pad. It's very, as you're saying, lean back. It's a little more expansive. You can be on a couch, you can be on the grass, you can be at a picnic table. It allows you to be in a far greater variety of environments, especially this guy where you can see it outside, but you previously couldn't do serious work on a tablet because tablet keyboard is hard. What really changes this is voice. Because if a computer can understand you and you can just speak into it to type and dictate and ask it to change things and "hey, bold this and justify that, and here I'm going to dictate this part of what I'm doing," then this actually becomes a serious computer. There's no longer a huge disadvantage to you at your desktop with a click-clack keyboard. The point of that button on the side is regardless of where you are in the operating system, we want to make it super easy. We call it the walkie-talkie button for you to be able to just talk and dictate into the thing. Our hope is this creates a new dimension of lean back computing that allows you to still do the stuff you really have to do for school or work or whatever. **Charlie:** I'm a big fan of the voice dictation already just on my desktop, and once I need to start to exercise the muscle of using the Daylight as my primary device—and I feel like there's kind of a learning curve with all these things. You have to—I feel like I'm sort of like the old person who's adapting to a smartphone or something after years of only using word processing on a desktop. But the possibilities I think for kids' education, getting the academic stuff done in a shorter amount of time, but then also just being able to let your imagination run wild and to do your own deep research into the things you're interested in, to be able to be reading and click that button and ask a question about what's on the screen and have it fill in with that context—this is the future of computing. I'm certain of that. I think you guys are doing a lot of good by trying to reclaim the soul of the original Silicon Valley ideas, that freewheeling creativity. Anything else? I know Daylight Kids is ramping up, and I want our families to know that Daylight computers would be reimbursable with their technology allowance. So if your kid is dysregulated, being in front of the computer too much, this is something that is worth a try. And the device, it's under a thousand, right? What's the price point? **Anjan:** $729 with our Kids bundle. **Charlie:** Fantastic. Any kind of closing comments? Speak to the kid in the audience or the child of the parent who's listening, who might be someone like you growing up. Speak to that child right now. **Anjan:** I love the way one of our customers said it. They're like, my kid loves the Daylight because when they previously had an iPad, they were only allowed 45 minutes of screen time a week. I give them unlimited screen time with the Daylight and it turns out there's something called Brilliant.org, which is like an educational game type thing. It turns out that's more interesting than picking on your sister, but less interesting than your backyard. That is what Daylight is for. I would say it allows you to have the engaging aspects of a computer without it being bad for you. For parents, the way I would think about it is Daylight is a guilt-free or healthier iPad. You can think about it as replacing an iPad or if you don't want to give your four-year-old an iPad, here is a middle ground rather than giving them nothing. Or an eight-year-old who's really getting into reading, Daylight is a really great tool for that. The other use case is this holidays we're launching a keyboard case. You can use Daylight as a Chromebook replacement. So for schoolwork and all the things where you're forced to use a Chromebook, our hope is here's a way for that to be a lot healthier. It's an iPad replacement and a Chromebook replacement. A lot of people use it as their secondary device as well. Weekends and nights and mornings, it's a Daylight. No other device is allowed into the bedroom except the Daylight. Then for their normal day, they can use their Windows or Mac. But whenever it's something more flexible, they're able to read something on a Daylight, read the newspaper, listen to Spotify, connect it to their speakers or whatever it is. Our hope is a lot more kids can not be so dysregulated by computers and not have to be totally Luddites. **Charlie:** And adults too. I'm setting a New Year's resolution for myself. I know it's only September, but by January 1st, I want to be writing the Open Ed Daily. I want my default to be writing it with my new keyboard case or even better, would be with voice dictation. So Anjan, please tell me that I'm going to be able to get access to the voice dictation before next year. **Anjan:** We're finally getting the resources we need to hire the folks to do it, but I appreciate knowing that you can be one of the first people on the list. **Charlie:** All right, thanks again Anjan. It's been a pleasure talking with you. Go check it out. Daylight Computer, Daylight Kids. We'll hope to have you back on before long. **Anjan:** Hey, thanks for hosting us. Our goal is just to show people there can be hope. Computers don't need to be so terrible for you. There is another way and these big companies will not let you know this. So I'm glad podcasts like you exist so we can be the rebels. **Charlie:** All right, onward. Thanks Anjan. **Anjan:** Hey, bye.