The LGBTQ community in the Rio Grande Valley gives me so much hope for Texas. I’m betting on these folks. In the long run, they’ll beat the likes of Abbott. We’ll see nationally prominent trans Texan politicians in about a decade.

Every generation believes it is the last, that the curtain is about to fall. Suspiciously, the predicted end is always within that generation’s lifetime. Mortality really skews our perception of reality, inducing an existential solipsism in the collective psyche. It’s super annoying.

Not convinced by doomer shit. Humans have a very, very old habit of predicting that the end of the world is imminent. It’s an evolutionary quirk of our species that almost certainly helps us survive as a collective, at the cost of our mental health as individuals. People ignore good news by default.

My three most controversial convictions:

1. Nonlocal consciousness is real. Not a religious belief — drawn from extensive personal experience.

2. The transmedium vehicles encountered by the US Navy are extraterrestrial.

3. Human civilization will continue to thrive in 100 years.

SpaceX is a pretty cool company that’s done a ton of good for spaceflight, but Starbase has some serious environmental issues. It wouldn’t exist without Elon and the Texas government viewing the people and environment in the RGV as inherently less valuable.

Speaking of tech downsides, I’ll be in Brownsville again for the doc series next week, getting reactions to the Starship debacle and surveying what’s left of the sea turtle nesting grounds on Boca Chica. Classic robber baron stuff going on in the Rio Grande Valley.

Change is scary. But it’s an irresistible constant. Folks project their fear of their own death + fear of irrelevancy (loneliness, really) onto complex social trends and see only the downsides. It’s good to hedge against bad outcomes, just not at the expense of benefitting from positive change.

Panic around Generative AI in the creative world is largely based on ignorance, but I’m sympathetic to it. Nobody wants to feel like their livelihood is about to be made irrelevant. Folks also are skeptical of tech optimism after the toxic age of social media + web3 being mostly Ponzi schemes.

I was just a poor kid from Indiana working a string of shitty jobs when I became a filmmaker. Digital opened the floodgates for the poor and marginalized to start making movies. AI is already further radically democratizing filmmaking. The big studios will lose their monopoly, not consolidate it.

There’s only one filmmaker on this platform working on a documentary series about voting rights in Texas, and that’s me. Well, until the rest of my team get invite codes.

All I ask is:

1. A tall ship

2. A star to steer her by

3. A social media network that doesn’t corrode my mental health

Tried Instagram, even tried going back to Facebook (RIP FB circa ‘14, that was a good site), but I missed microblogging, man. Let’s see what Jack & Company are cooking up over here.