I was unpacking and yesterday from a move and saw a copy of his "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" book and remembered he time he answered a fan email I sent to him with the simple reply "It's always nice to receive an email such as yours." - here's to hoping you are wrong about the soul Dan!
I firmly believe the only way to stop our culture from obsessing over the wrong things (politics, climate emergency, vaccines) is to give it something even worse to focus on - enter the War on Plastic! I genuinely hope this catches on and people start putting anti-plastic flags on their lawns.
I have noticed the same kind of degradation -- pair-programming with GPT4 used to feel like I was working with one of the smartest people in the world, and now it's really uneven.