Kamenica closed his speech with this stunning example of what education-enabled wonder looks like. The fact that trees grow primarily from carbon dioxide in the air — not from nutrients in the soil — is a well-established scientific truth that nonetheless sounds magical when you hear it for the first time. Photosynthesis captures carbon from CO2, and that carbon becomes the wood, the bark, the leaves. The metaphor of 'special glasses' captured Kamenica's central argument: education doesn't change the world, it changes how you see the world. The same trees, the same sunlight, the same leaves — but with the right knowledge, you can see that 'little tiny bursts of energy give the tree momentary strength to gobble up the carbon from the CO2 around it.' The mundane becomes, in his phrase, 'the realistically fantastical.' This was an economist arguing that the greatest return on educational investment isn't measured in dollars but in daily moments of awe — a radical proposition from someone whose profession is built on measuring returns.