That was the million-dollar question. Despite all the progress I’d made over the last year, I didn’t have a good answer. I was still searching for the right rhythm and balance. I knew that the single girls club in Atlanta was no more sustainable than a jet-setting life of leisure. Where was the middle ground? What was my equilibrium?
It was right around this time, early in the summer of 2018, that a strange DM came through on my Instagram account. Something about a new dating show being filmed in Atlanta….
chapter two STUCK IN THE BORED ROOM
Cameron
“Bad news, guys,” the helicopter pilot said. “You’ve got a black bear right above you on the cliff and he’s pretty hot and bothered. We’re gonna have to find you another way out.”
I’ve always been the adventurous type—as a kid, I fantasized about life as an intrepid explorer or archaeologist, like Indiana Jones—but being surrounded by both a blazing wildfire and a frightened bear wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.
It was the summer of 2012 and I was on the side of a mountain in remote Quebec, working as a wildland firefighter. When I was growing up in small-town Maine, most of my early summer jobs were pretty standard—painting buildings, mowing lawns, and taking care of the grounds at the local beach. But as soon as I turned sixteen, my father suggested I take some firefighting classes. Once I earned my “red card” firefighting certification, I spent the next eight summers in the wilderness.
Besides the adventure of the work, I was able to make a lot more money fighting fires than pushing a lawn mower or wielding a paintbrush. Plus, I was proud to be doing work that protected people’s lives. Working with the Maine Forest Service, I fought many fires in my home state, but I also went up and down the East Coast battling blazes, from Florida all the way up into Canada.
That mountaintop in remote Quebec was definitely one of the hairiest situations I’d encountered on the job. We were working on a monstrous fire, about three hundred thousand acres, and it was raging fast across the Canadian range. Firefighters are taught safety protocols (always have an escape route, recognize “Watch Out” situations, et cetera), but sometimes you can’t avoid the danger.
My squad had been taking helicopters to a remote part of the fire line every day for a couple weeks trying to contain the blaze. There are different strategies for this. In some situations, we’d drop a pump into a nearby water source, like a pond or brook, then run hose to the fire and flank it. Other times, we’d try to create a barrier that the fire couldn’t cross by digging out all the available fuel—trees, roots, brush, basically anything that will burn.
Fire is a fickle beast, and that’s especially true with forest fires. The slightest shift in wind can send it howling in a completely different direction. That’s what happened to us on that hot summer afternoon. We were positioned toward the top of a steep mountainside when all of a sudden fire started roaring up the slope.
There’s an expression in firefighting: “attack from the black.” Basically, it means the safest place to fight fires from is where the forest has already been burned through completely—the “black,” as it’s known. If you are completely surrounded by black, the fire has no fuel with which to move in your direction.
I looked back at our escape route that led back to “the black,” but the bear was blocking our path. The shift in wind caused the fire to grow and spread more rapidly. It was quickly forming a semicircle around us. I kept working the fire’s perimeter while keeping an eye on our narrowing escape route. That’s when we got communication from the helicopter hovering overhead, with a clear visual of the riled-up bear on the hillside above us.
I don’t know that I’d say it was a life-and-death moment, but I could feel my adrenaline surging as I worked to contain the fire around us. I did my best to remain calm and focus on the task at hand. “We need a bucket drop over here,” the squad boss said over the radio. The bear was pacing anxiously near the edge of our narrow escape route, while the flames were coming fast and the ground underfoot was starting to erode. We kept digging out the fuel from the fire line trying to contain its spread and make another way out.
Just then, another helicopter appeared and dropped a bucket of water, about two thousand gallons’ worth pulled from a nearby river, between us and the bear. That spooked the bear and sent him running back hard into the black, while extinguishing some of the nearby flames. With the bear out of the picture, there was just enough of an escape route to make our way to safety.
* * *
Five years later, while sitting in an office conference room in the Hurt Building in downtown Atlanta, I was reminded of that firefight on the mountaintop in Quebec. Not that the boardroom was life-threatening, but I still found myself planning my attack while also looking for my escape route, with not many good options.
To back up the story a bit, I’d come to Atlanta in the summer of 2012, shortly after fighting that Quebec fire in fact, to start a master’s degree program in neurophilosophy at Georgia State University. My parents hadn’t been thrilled with the decision. I remember when I first dropped the bomb on them that I was not going to med school. I was home from college for Thanksgiving break and we were driving to my sister Alaina’s basketball game.
“So, I’ve decided I’m not going to go to medical school,” I said, after gathering up the courage for about ten minutes. The silence was deafening.
“What are you going to do instead?” my mom asked.
“I want to be a philosophy professor, so I am going to apply to grad school for philosophy.”
“You know, you won’t make any money doing that,” my mom said finally, after what felt like an eternity.
I’d been pre-med during my undergrad at Bates College in Maine, mostly because my parents wanted me to go to med school. They’d raised me well and I appreciated their guidance, but I’d never felt at home in the pre-med program.
“I’m sorry, Mom, but being a doctor just isn’t my passion,” I said.
“Well then, what is your passion?” she asked.
I did my best to explain that developing a deeper understanding of the mind, specifically the way in which the brain gives way to the mind, was the only thing truly exciting to me. Even as an eight-year-old boy, I was obsessed with the idea that you could control your mind through things like meditation and hypnosis. I even believed you could achieve almost supernatural powers by learning how to focus your mind and wrote a small book I called The Book of the Mental Arts complete with drawings of meditation focal points. Since then, I have dedicated much of my life to understanding how physical processes give rise to mental processes.
“Well, it’s your decision,” my dad chimed in, with a note of disappointment in his voice. “We want to make sure you are well off and you don’t have to work forever until you can retire.” I told them I had considered all my options and the process led me to the clear decision that a graduate program in philosophy, with an emphasis on neuroscience, was the next step in my academic journey.
That’s how I ended up in Georgia at the age of twenty-two. I lived in a shotgun house in the Grant Park neighborhood of Atlanta with four other philosophy grad students. It was a time of partying and philosophizing. Most of the parties are a bit hazy, but I recall one particularly well. One of the guys in the house was turning twenty-five and we decided to have a “Fire and Ice” party. We made an ice luge for whiskey shots and built a huge bonfire in the backyard. The entire philosophy department showed up, along with their own guests. There were probably over sixty people crammed into the narrow house and around the fire outside. The air was thick with cigar and weed smoke. One of the guys was secretly dating one of his students (a surprisingly common occurrence) and had invited her to the party. I remember seeing her storm out the front door, while my housemate calmly lit up a cigarette and shrugged his shoulders. At one point in the night, everyone began chanting for me to rap, to which I eventually obliged. The drunken antics and intense debate raged on so long I don’t r
emember sitting down in the armchair I woke up the next morning in.
My housemates and I used to argue 24/7 about everything and anything, from Kant to the nature of consciousness to the morality of eating animals. When there was nothing better to argue about, we’d debate whose turn it was to do the dishes.
I really enjoyed all the philosophical inquiry, but I was also getting more and more into the computational neuroscience side of things—to the increasing frustration of my philosophy professors. I remember telling my advisor that I wanted to write my thesis on what sort of algorithms and systems would have to be in place for a robot to be capable of emotions.
“Look, these algorithms are interesting and all,” he said. “But your thesis really has to answer some kind of philosophical question.”
I understood. But I also knew that my academic journey was pushing me deeper and deeper into the realm of artificial intelligence, or AI. I’ve mentioned my lifelong fascination with the human mind, going back to early childhood. I didn’t want to spend my time theorizing about how cognitive systems worked anymore; I wanted to make them! The more I learned about the capacity for computers to simulate intelligence, and in the process solve even larger life problems, the more I knew I had found my true calling.
I realized there was so much good I could do with AI, including help in the fight against life-threatening diseases. This had been a mission of mine ever since I watched my grandmother lose her battle with Alzheimer’s in 2000. I’ll never forget visiting her in the hospital with my mom.
“Who are you?” Grandma said at one point, looking directly at her daughter of forty years. Even though my mom and I understood Alzheimer’s debilitating effects on the brain, that was still a heartbreaking moment for my mom. When I saw the pain in her eyes, I vowed I would not let the same thing happen to her.
My worst fears came true when Mom was forced to endure her own gauntlet of illnesses, starting with breast cancer in 2012. Four rounds of chemotherapy were enough to send the cancer into remission, but it nearly took her life in the process. Seeing her unresponsive to Dad’s and my attempts to talk to her in the hospital room after the last chemo treatment forced me to face the real possibility that she might perish. It was the hardest experience of my life.
Mom won the battle against breast cancer. However, we did not have long to celebrate before she started noticing she was having muscle tremors and difficulty with certain movements. At first, the doctors thought her sudden onset of tremors might be caused by something else. But my mom knew the truth, and after throwing myself into a crash course on Parkinson’s disease I did as well.
My mom’s health battles have been a test for our entire family, but her strength and fortitude are extraordinary. Her fights have brought our family closer together and given us all a deeper appreciation for life. Mom’s health challenges also hardened my resolve to marshal whatever resources I could to fight these diseases.
I became more resolved to leveraging the power of AI in search of a cure or at least more effective treatments. In this sense, I knew I’d be coming back to the path of medicine that my parents wanted for me, but on my own terms.
That’s how I ended up pursuing a second graduate degree at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence at the University of Georgia from 2014 to 2016. To the outside observer, it might have seemed like my goal was to become a career student, jumping from one discipline to the next, but I was very focused throughout this time on quantifying the human mind and learning how to re-create intelligence.
The scene at the AI institute was totally opposite from my experience in the philosophy program. Instead of constant debate and partying, everyone had their nose to the keyboard, writing code and studying algorithms, all day, every day. It was intense.
I lived in a seedy apartment complex my mom called the roach motel once while she was visiting. This was a more solitary time in my life, but I was okay with that because I was committed to the AI path. The only problem was I was struggling to pay my bills, since my research assistantship paid next to nothing. Out of desperation, I started checking out online job sites and discovered that I could make good money taking on freelance data science projects.
Over the next six months, I began building my reputation as a freelance data scientist and reached a point where I was hiring peers from the institute to help with larger projects. I eventually caught the attention of the CEO at a small financial software company that was looking to take a big step forward.
My phone buzzed one morning with a message from him, asking if we could chat about a potential opportunity. I gave him a call and he began describing the problem he was facing: his company had won a contract to build an anti-money-laundering system for a large financial services company, but he had no idea how to build it. He asked me how I would solve the problem. I described my solution, and when I was finished he offered me the job on the spot.
After the success of the anti-money-laundering system, I ended up hiring an entire team of data scientists and taking the lead as Chief Data Scientist. From there, it was hyper start-up mode, with me taking on increasing responsibilities, including opening two new offices in Atlanta. I found the spaces, set up the furniture, got the computers up and running, all while managing the team and developing the software. I was invested in this company. I felt like I had a hand in a lot of its early success. I was proud of the fact that I had pulled together this ragtag team of data scientists and had already built solutions to problems that were seen as intractable. I was only twenty-five and I was leading the charge against competitors many times our size and winning the “champion challenges” for the clients’ contracts. Not only did I prove my leadership and vision to these clients, but I also proved them to myself.
At first, the CEO seemed to agree. But at a certain point I could sense a change. I felt like I was not getting credit where credit was due, and it seemed like he was trying to put me in my place. We had clashed horns several times over where our efforts were best placed, and I realized ultimately there was no persuading him. Still, I stuck with it, doing the work and bringing in more good people. My team secured a few big wins and I thought things were looking up.
That takes me back to the conference room in the Hurt Building.
The CEO was not based in Atlanta, but he would fly into town a few times a month. It was on one of those visits that he asked for a private meeting. I reserved a room for us and waited for his arrival. I thought he was going to congratulate me for the team’s recent successes and possibly even give me a raise.
Instead, I was met with scorn. You’re not hiring the right people, he told me. You’re not project-managing effectively. You’re not saying the right things to clients. On and on he went for the better part of an hour.
There was some merit to his criticism: I had made some hiring mistakes. I prioritized projects I was interested in over others he felt were more important. I had stood my ground against clients who I felt were giving our team unreasonable deadlines. Still, I felt the wins my team and I had secured outweighed these mistakes. But the level of criticism was truly shocking. I took responsibility for these mistakes and highlighted my latest successes, but it all fell on deaf ears. It’s not my style to storm out of any meeting, so I waited for him to run out of steam and then made my way out of the conference room, still trying to process what just happened. I knew from that point that my time with the company was limited. The fire was clearly closing in and I had fought it as long as I could. I had to make my way to the black.
* * *
After that letdown with the CEO, I started to check out more and more. I still showed up to work every day, but most of the time I’d shut the door to my office and work on whatever project interested me most. Lunch breaks got longer and longer. There were more coffee runs throughout the day.
One afternoon, I was coming back from one of those extended breaks when I noticed this long line of guys leading into my building. I went in for a closer look. They were all shuf
fling their feet, some looking around self-consciously, while others were puffing up their chests. There was a guy with a clipboard standing near the front of the line who seemed to be in charge.
“Hey, what’s going on here?” I asked him.
“Casting call for a reality show,” he answered.
“Oh yeah, what’s it about?” I asked.
“It’s a dating show called Married at First Sight: Second Chances,” he said. “A man and woman whose spouses left them are going to be dating a group of eligible singles to see if they can find the one.”
“What could go wrong?” I joked.
“Exactly,” he said with a devilish grin. “You interested?”
“Nah,” I told him. “I have a girlfriend.”
“Well, if it doesn’t work out, let us know,” he said.
“Will do,” I said, and made my way back into the building, already depressed at the thought of returning to the boredom and frustration that awaited me there. As I turned through the revolving glass door, I caught a reflection of the line of guys waiting for their chance at love. A small sliver of me wanted to keep turning through the door and walk to the back of that line. I started to fantasize about the adventure of a new reality but, for the time being, resolved myself to focusing on the current one.
chapter three ALWAYS MR. WRONG
Lauren
I stared at the DM in my inbox, half laughing at it. Though life after thirty was looking up for me in many ways, dating was not one of them. The message was from a casting agent. “Hey, there’s a new dating show filming in Atlanta and I think you would be a great fit,” she wrote, or something to that effect.
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