That's a good reality check for the way that Hollywood works. That's for sure. And in terms of the reality for octopus intelligence and the potential applications, I wonder if you and Dominic have any ideas about potential spinoffs that could come from a clearer understanding of an octopus mind's inner workings. For example, could they come in the form of smarter autonomous robots or better AI? Because in the book, as you note, the arms of an octopus have some autonomy from the brain. Or would we be able to recruit octopuses to do work underwater in the same way that the US military uses marine mammals to do mind detection or equipment recovery? Or will the insights that come from research into octopuses have totally different kinds of applications?

I love that question because whenever I mean a passionate scientist, I always like to ask something along the lines of like, what's the most like science fiction application you could imagine the fear of research, which I don't think they get enough of. Well, there's, you know, Dr. Octopus and the whole distributed, yeah, that thing, which I mean, if you really like at it on like the movies that they're actually they act more like serpents, actually, so does the crack in on the Pirates of the Caribbean movie, but I mean, that that's a whole different conversation. Yeah, I'd say that like robotics is a super relevant area. And that's that's primarily because software botics robots without really many hard parts at all. They're more like flesh and they're compliant and they're flexible. And there's a lot of benefits that come out of that, but also like a lot of challenges that come out of that. So some of the benefits are like, really, we deal with on a day to day basis as we're like grabbing something, our tissues actually soft. And so in some ways, it actually conforms around the shape of that object, which makes our ability to like manipulate our environment like really adaptive, right? Because like we don't actually have to think about a lot of the ways that our hand is forming around an object. Our flesh is doing a lot of the work for us. So our brain doesn't actually have to have to compute a lot of that. So with soft robotics, say like a soft robotic manipulator, you can conform around any shape, make a bit of like what they would call universal gripper. And that's super nice because now the robot doesn't have to essentially process exactly what the shape of the object is. The flip side of this is how do you even control something with infinite degrees of freedom, right? How do you control like a soft like the octopus does like this soft limb? I can bend in any direction anywhere down its length. And so that's in regard to like robotics, but just in distributed computing, like things like edge computing, I think it's really interesting looking at how the sort of peripheral nervous system of the octopus is communicating to generate such adaptive behavior.

Yeah, I would add that in the book, they do go into this at one point and kind of and suggest that there is another kind of drone technology out there in which unlike the drones that are strictly controlled by an operator, the drones just explore the world by themselves. And the operator sort of passively sits back and then takes control when they think they need to, you know, in order to redirect or like nudge it. And I think that's one one way of thinking about it. But I think also I just recently wrote an essay on this called How is a skateboarder like an octopus? And I think one of the one of the things that we are not good at is actually seeing how like animals we are. What the essay talks about is is the way in which we think about consciousness and the way in which we also, especially someone like an athlete, I was a skateboarder for years, it's pretty much all I did after school for hours and hours until it was too dark to ride a skateboard anymore, you know, from when I was about 12 until when I was almost 18. And I remember one day when my house was kind of at the top of a hill that sloped for a couple miles pretty gently to a parking lot where I used to meet my friends to go skateboarding. And as I rolled down the hill, I would usually try to do some tricks and you know, you fall, you pick yourself up, you're used to falling as a skateboarder, it's like just part of the game. And I remember one time that I probably starting in my house and getting to that place did a hundred different tricks, some of them that I hadn't landed before. And I hit everything. And it was perfect. Everything was perfect. Every single, you know, all the idea, every half cab, every kickflip, every slide, just everything worked. And when I got to the parking lot, I kind of looked back up the hill and was like, all right, it doesn't get any better than this, right? What struck me, what strikes me looking back at that experience is that there's this way in which the body is in control and not the brain. And I think that we understand very well if we can connect to those moments in which we are ourselves are sort of these drifting physical forms that are not completely conscious of what's going on with our limbs, we probably understand quite well something of what it feels like to be an octopus.