The docking scene from interstellar is a perfect encapsulation of how I expect humans and A.I.’s aka robots to work together. CASE and TARS are hyper intelligent mission specialists, crucial to the success of the mission, but they don’t have the instincts of cooper. So when cooper begins the docking sequence on pure adrenaline. CASE tells him it’s impossible and he shouldn’t waste fuel. He’s trying to keep the humans alive for longer, but cooper knows if they don’t risk it all right here, right now they’re dead and so is everyone back on earth. “It’s impossible” CASE says, “No. It’s necessary” Cooper replies. Once the human instinct to survive kicks into high gear the human processing speed is deep and instant, the robots though smarter than Cooper can not compete with his millions of years of instincts honed under the most intense evolutionary pressures. Cooper is optimizing for the right goal. They race towards the ship and now CASE and TARS help initiate and pull off the calculations and mechanics for the spin move docking sequence in real time something cooper could not do on this own. Brandt passes out from the G force as the robots race to complete the task. Cooper even tells TARS to take over if he passes out. Eventually they dock and take back control of the ship. But without the delicate symphony between human and robot intelligence extending, leveraging and coordinating with one another everyone dies. It’s an amazing sequence and a reminder that we shouldn’t worry about our new robot buddies, because they will help us do great things. Who we should worry about are the creepy gatekeepers attempting to stifle what we are allowed to do with them.

There are three groups that people who had bad childhoods belong to. I’ve learned over the years that a bad childhood is a specific thing. It’s not being poor, or living in chaos or even necessarily being abused though it often does contain all those things. Abuse especially. It’s something more particular than just I was abused/neglected/mistreated. Whatever the mechanism, it’s when a child comes into adulthood with a feeling that they are inherently worthless. The first group are those who get crushed under the weight of it. The weight of “worthlessness” is real and most people break under it. Bad childhoods predict worse outcomes on almost every measurable dimension income, health, relationships, addictions etc… this is the largest and most common group. We interact with people like this often, unfortunately bad childhoods are not rare. A second smaller group are those who actually find peace with it. Usually through therapy or faith or time. They become healthier and happier. They find worth inside themselves. They reframe the experience and begin to tell themselves a new story about why they are worthy of love, affection, care etc… they go on to have happy and fulfilling lives. They spread love to others because they remember what it felt like to be worthless. We sometimes meet a wonderful person like this. They are beautiful souls. The third group are ultra rare. They are the ones who neither heal, nor allow themselves to be crushed by the weight of the wound. It creates a motor that never turns off, and it’s why people with bad childhoods sometimes succeed at extraordinarily high levels. These are the people who attempt to justify their existence with external achievement. They set out to show the world they do have worth. The ones who succeed stay inside the wound long enough to let it drive them somewhere, without letting it kill them along the way. This is a painful and costly archetype because the task itself is infinite by design. Every success gets metabolized in about 72 hours and you’re back to needing the next one. It’s genuine rocket fuel, and it never stops burning, but it comes with a heavy cost. You can’t resolve an internal wound with external achievement. The survivors who transmute the wound into achievement are visible precisely because they’re the rare exception. We usually see these people on tv. We often admire and lookup to them. I’ve known people in all three groups. The first deserve more compassion than they get. The second have something the third will spend their entire lives chasing and never quite reach. And the third will build things the world remembers, and die wondering if it was ever enough.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

If you talk to my wife she will tell you I am an extremely intense guy, but if you ask me I’m just a chill normal guy.

I sometimes mistake wanting someone to be strong for evidence that they can be. I invest in them early on hope/optimism and by the time the evidence is in that they will never grow. I’ve overcommitted to a structure where I end up carrying the both of us. This is an issue i’m working on correcting in myself. Posting publicly as a reminder.

People say time heals everything and usually that’s true. But every once in awhile there’s a situation that makes me increasingly mad and I’m even more pissed off about it months after the fact than I was when it happened. Those moments are rare and I think it’s best to harness that energy into something productive.

People be like Hodl where you based at? Bro I’m based everywhere I go.