LenaRc !🐀

Becoming a pilot nearly killed me, twice. It also saved my life. Fifteen years ago, my world was upside down. I was in founder mode building a company, raising three young kids, navigating a struggling relationship, leaving my religion, inflamed, sleep deprived, fatigued, and fighting chronic depression. Driving home from work one day, I saw a sign inviting prospective students to take a discovery flight. I thought this flight might occupy my mind, giving me an hour of desperately needed relief. Thirty minutes after arriving at the airfield, the instructor and I were seated in a Cessna 172. The instructor told me to take the controls and explained the departure procedure. Caught off guard, I suggested it would be better if I just observed. He insisted I take the controls, reassuring me that his hands would be on the dual controls at all times so not to worry. Reluctantly, I took the controls. We radioed our departure to the local airspace, lined up, and accelerated down the runway. At 63 mph, I pulled back the controls to raise the nose, and up we went. All of my life’s pain disappeared as I became absorbed in managing the throttle, pitch, heading, radio, traffic surveillance, and my instrument panel. I was mesmerized. I earned my pilot’s license two months later and bought my first airplane, a Bonanza A36. It could fly faster, further and have more passengers than my trainer airplane. I made myself a promise to never fly alone, and hired a full-time co-pilot. General aviation accident rates are nearly 10x higher than commercial airlines. I began flying myself everywhere across the country. For business: Austin, NYC, and Omaha. For family trips: Niagara Falls, Mount Rushmore, Bahamas, and later, with a longer range airplane, we flew to Europe via Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Scotland, London, Paris and Rome. In my first year of flying, I nearly died twice. I had hired a co-pilot for my safety, and ironically both incidents resulted from his errors. However, the worst mistake was my failure to recognize the bigger pattern: despite my co-pilot having logged over 1,000 flying hours, nearly all of the hours were “in the pattern”, meaning instruction time around the airport and not “in the wild” (out in high stress, cross country operations with severe weather). Lesson learned. After these two near-death experiences, I decided that I’d need to either stop flying or get a jet. A jet would give me engine redundancy and the capability to cruise above weather systems rather than through them. The Bonanza had a ceiling of 14,000 (before I needed to supplement oxygen), where a jet could fly in the 30,000’s and 40,000s, above weather. A jet would also allow us to always fly with the assistance of air traffic control in controlled airspace versus in un-cleared VFR (visual flight rules) flight. I purchased a small jet, a Citation Mustang, and completed my type rating (licensed to fly the airplane). It was a steep learning curve. Jet speed is different from small airplane speed. Everything happened faster, the airplane was more complicated, and multi-engine dynamics were a big step up. It was exhilarating. Part II In an unexpected twist, learning to fly brought me back from the depressive dead. When I started flight instruction, my personal life was a mess. The most irritating part of my existence was that every day, around 7pm, just after putting the kids down, I’d overeat. I tried everything to stop myself but nothing would work. My willpower at that time of day from the stress and strain of life was zero and I was powerless against the chemicals in my body that demanded this daily self-destruction ritual. My pants were too tight and I couldn’t button the top button. It drove me insane. But I refused to concede and buy a bigger pair. I turned to my pilot training to help me design a solution: I needed structured operations for my food consumption and self control. Aviation is substantially more safe than driving because it operates on structured protocols, checklists, and active risk management. Safety and performance are a system. You don’t just get into an airplane and wing it. Before every flight, there is a pre-check routine where you thoroughly inspect the airplane, ensuring everything is in flight-ready condition. There are other checklists for starting the airplane, taxing, taking off, cruise, descent and landing. There is a manual beneath your seat with a written protocol for anything that could go wrong with the airplane. You are required to memorize and execute procedures flawlessly under pressure. Aviation culture assumes human fallibility and designs systems to overcome those limitations and liabilities. As I was learning this new way of thinking and operating, I wondered if these new autonomous systems would map to my personal life. I was in desperate need of help and nothing I had tried was working. It was clear that Evening Bryan, the version of me who took control of my body at 7 pm, was no match for the stress and weight of the day. He wasn’t a bad guy, he just wasn’t equal to the responsibility of withstanding that tension. It was a system error to ask him to operate Evening Bryan under his duress. I put Morning Bryan in charge instead and he made an operational guide for all other Bryans to follow. Morning Bryan is my best Bryan. He’s responsible, motivated, high on will power, and thinks long term. He created a checklist that required all Bryan’s to be finished eating by 5 pm. No matter what, no more food after 5 pm. That was when the danger zone started. There wouldn’t be any exceptions, ever. This worked. It was challenging for the first few days but it quickly generated it’s own momentum. I started sleeping better, losing weight, and feeling less fatigued. That simple trick fixed years of mayhem that had been unfixable. With that success behind me, I expanded the protocols to include food types, amounts and timing. In retrospect, after a few months of this new system, it seemed weird that I previously winged it daily, stumbling from meal to meal. I felt like I got back 40% of my total energy capacity that was being spent thinking about, planning, debating, and regretting my food consumption. My life today basically runs like an airplane. Part III Aviation culture then jumped into other areas of my life. I’d started a new company, Kernel, to build a non-invasive brain interface to merge human cognition with AI. I’d been thinking about what mathematician Alfred North Whitehead observed: "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." Society is on a continuous curve of increased automation. We solve one layer and step up on the next. This is how we scaffold progress. Clean water infrastructure, power grids, washing machines, dishwashers, and are examples of automating tasks that previously took hours. It was the mashup of aviation culture, Kernel, AI and automation that got me imagining building my Autonomous Self. An automated system that keeps me in pristine physical condition, youthful vibrancy and peak performance. A system that would allow me to not die. Don’t Die was born. For the past five years, I’ve been engineering the v1 human prototype for Don’t Die: an autonomous system built to preserve and protect life. It accounts for biological fallibility, offloading human limits to deterministic protocols. As we integrate deeply with AI, stepping up through layer by layer physiological automation will allow us to navigate frontiers previously unimagined. Immortalism is the corresponding philosophy that honors existence as our species' highest value and pursues that objective through quantitative and mathematical means. I never would have guessed that a discovery flight would have flown me in this direction.