Author: Jason Cox

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The J Storm

My first job was on a farm in Oklahoma. Hard work, and in the summer, brutally hot. But when you’re moving hay or driving the tractor, you get a lot of time to watch the sky and think. I never got as good as the other hands at calling the weather, but after a while I started to feel it. A gut instinct forms. I think it’s going to rain tomorrow.

I remember one particularly hot, dry summer. We were standing in the shade when dark clouds began to gather on the horizon. The landowner, a farmer named Calvin, was anxious. A dry winter and a dry spring had put his whole livelihood at risk. Our spirits lifted as the wind picked up. The air grew heavy with moisture. A shadow swept across the fields.

Then, without warning, everything went still. Our hearts sank. The wind stopped. The land went quiet. Maybe there’d be no rain after all.

But stillness isn’t emptiness. Above those fields, forces we couldn’t see were still moving, gathering, reorganizing. The storm was growing, a silent, hidden surge. Then the wind returned. The sky changed, the clouds began to churn, and what had been invisible became unmistakable. Down came the rain, sheets of it, with earth-shaking thunder. The lightning and the downpour sent us running for cover. We were laughing, soaked, and breathing in that smell of life pouring out of the sky.

It strikes me that technology, companies, and whole industries live through moments like that during a transformation. Visible output slows. Progress looks stalled. The numbers hint that momentum is gone. But beneath the surface, a storm is building. People are learning new skills, workflows are bending around new tools, and new capabilities are forming that our current scoreboards simply can’t detect yet.

What looks like a pause is often the preparation for a storm of unprecedented power and productivity.

There’s a name for this: the Productivity J-Curve. Technologies like AI don’t deliver their full value on their own. They demand investment first, in new processes, products, business models, org structures, and above all, people.

Just as Calvin couldn’t see every force gathering above his fields, we won’t see every detail or timeline of what’s coming. But we shouldn’t just wait for the curve to turn. We should be building the things that turn it. Yes, there’s uncertainty. There will be failures and learning along the way. That’s not a bug. That’s the point.

Walt said it best: “We keep moving forward, opening new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious, and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” That curiosity is the fuel that bends the curve. It powers the expeditions that carry us past the horizon, to the land of tomorrow.

Watch the sky. Get ready. The rain is coming.

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The Walter Pitts Story

He felt like he couldn’t escape. They were hot on his heels. He could hear the laughter, taunting, and threats coming closer. His heart was pounding as he raced down the street.

As a twelve-year-old boy, Walter’s life in Detroit was far from ideal. He was eccentric, a polymath who loved learning. His uneducated parents and family never understood him. His peers derided and bullied him. In fact, they were after him now, ready to inflict some emotional and physical pain. Thankfully, Walter spotted a familiar refuge: the library. He bolted inside and buried himself in its book-lined catacombs. His breathing slowed, his heart stopped hammering. He kept looking around the corner and through the shelves to make sure he wasn’t followed. He was safe.

Standing there, relieved, Walter looked up and spotted a three-volume set of books that seemed to call to him: Principia Mathematica, by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead. To take his mind off the chase, he began reading. He couldn’t stop. The mathematical logic it revealed suddenly unlocked the entire universe for him. Logic, the foundational unit of mathematics, didn’t just describe a model to represent the cosmos. It was the cosmos. To Walter, it unpacked everything. It would forever change his life, and the world, as we know it.

This weekend, I ran across the Walter Pitts story. As I read about a twelve-year-old boy running from bullies, I found myself transported back to my own childhood. I could almost feel the terror and anxiety. I remembered trying to run. Sometimes trying to stand my ground. Other times just looking for somewhere, anywhere, to disappear. Like a lot of kids, I found refuge in my own passions: a stack of library books, a soldering iron, a secondhand computer that took ten minutes just to boot. They were places where the rules made sense and curiosity mattered more than popularity.

Life has a remarkable way of redeeming difficult chapters. Sometimes the moments we’d gladly erase become the moments that quietly redirect our future. The story of Walter Pitts was familiar to me in that way. But what surprised me was what happened next. Walter’s newly acquired knowledge unlocked more than just his understanding, it unlocked new connections. He wrote to the author, Bertrand Russell, and explained errors he had found in the work. Russell was impressed and invited him to Cambridge University as a graduate student. Of course, Walter couldn’t attend, he was only twelve years old, after all, but the seed had been planted.

At fifteen, Walter ran away from home and made his way to Chicago. There, as a teenager hanging around the University of Chicago, he met a young medical student named Jerome Lettvin, and the two became close friends. It was Lettvin who introduced him to Warren McCulloch, a neurophysiologist obsessed with finding the relationship between the brain and the mind. McCulloch, recognizing something rare in the homeless teenager in front of him, invited Walter to live with him and his family.

Over a kitchen table in Chicago, Warren and Walter started working on a crazy idea: that neurons in the brain were simple signal processors that either fire or they don’t. On or off, like switches. Walter unlocked the mystery Warren had been seeking. He saw this binary behavior and postulated that a network of binary switches could compute any logical function that exists. The brain was a logical machine. And if that were true, then a logical machine could be a brain.

Warren and Walter eventually published a paper, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity.” It received almost no attention. That is, until another polymath, John von Neumann, happened to read it. It gave him a key piece of the puzzle he’d been chasing, and it shaped his design for the first modern computer. The von Neumann architecture was born.

In his entire report laying out that architecture, von Neumann cited only one paper. That’s right, the one written at a kitchen table by a neurologist and a teenage runaway. Over a decade later, Frank Rosenblatt would cite the same paper as he built the perceptron, the first machine that could learn from examples. Later came backpropagation, the algorithm that lets networks of neurons adjust their own weights through training, a foundational technique for deep learning and the generative AI revolution we’re living through today.

The boy who escaped bullies by hiding in a library ended up changing the world. It’s easy to believe history is changed by billion-dollar investments, famous inventors, or grand master plans. Sometimes it is. But sometimes it changes because someone opens one more book. Asks one more question. Writes one more line of code. Builds one more prototype. Encourages one more teammate.

Most of those moments don’t feel historic. They feel ordinary. Walter’s story also reminded me of something else: the bullies didn’t change the world. Walter did. The hardship wasn’t the gift. His curiosity was. His resilience was. His decision to keep learning, despite everything life threw at him.

As we continue building the future of AI together, we’ll review designs, debate ideas, fix bugs, encourage one another, run experiments, and ship features. Most of those things will seem small. We probably won’t know which one matters most. Neither did Walter. He simply opened a book.

It makes me wonder… What seemingly ordinary thing are we working on today that someone, years from now, might look back on as the beginning of something extraordinary?

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Be a Rosita

I spent the past few months postponing a rose problem. We have a beautiful red rose bush in our back yard. We call her Rosita. Every year, Rosita, very uncharacteristic of her name, puts on a huge blooming show starting in the spring and culminating with a dazzling display the first week of July. Normally, by this time of year, the buds have exploded into gigantic, softball-sized clouds of red with a fragrance so delightful you can smell it all over the yard. But this year’s July display was disappointing. Her show was like one of those $39.95 fireworks kits you buy at the roadside stand that promise a Disneyland spectacular but deliver a pipsqueak pop and a two-second flash in the sky. You know what I mean.

Anyway, I knew something was wrong. This weekend I decided to find the cause. Turns out, Rosita had an infection. A string of ivy had made its way onto her branches, and despite her sharp thorny defenses, she was being strangled by this invasive parasite. Dead branches lay in the wake of this rose-choking assassin. After a careful chat with Rosita, we all agreed: surgery was required.

Thorn-proof gloves on. Pruning shears in hand. I went to work extracting the invader. Carefully and deliberately, I cut away the dusty dead branches and spiraling vines. Rosita’s home would be free of these life-sucking vampires. A few hours later (yes, I’m quite slow), the operation was complete. Rosita was free again to thrive. I held my breath, wondering if it was too late. But just a few days later, roses began to appear again. New sprouting branches. New leaves. New life. That’s right, Rosita was back! Her red blooms were exploding with their usual charm.

This weekend I sat outside for a moment, enjoying the display Rosita was putting on for us, and thinking about the lesson I’d just learned. Things can enter our lives that slowly erode our ability to do what we do best. The parasites grow, slowly but surely sucking the life right out of our efforts. They can even create dead weight that keeps us from growing in new directions.

If you’re like me, you might have procrastinated a bit too much. Now the ivy is everywhere. But it’s not too late! Put on the gloves. Grab the pruning shears and go to work. Trim out what’s sapping the life out of you: the useless busywork, the habitual process that seems healthy but is actually a lie. No roses bloom from ivy. Snip. Take your time. Find the toil, find the useless weight that burdens your day. Remove it. Clean it up. Set your schedule free so you can breathe, grow, and bloom.

Okay, I confess, this note today was probably more for me than for you. But maybe, somehow, it resonates with you too, or with someone you love. If so, share it.

Clean out the ivy. Be a Rosita. Go put on a show.

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Storytelling

I arrived early. The room was set up with a matrix of round tables, set for lunch. Only two people were in the room. I wandered up to the front table, next to the stage. No name tags. It seemed like fair game, so I sat down.

Slowly the room began to fill up, and so did my table. We chatted about the conference and the AI topics that had been the signature theme through all the presentations. Lunch was delivered and the lights began to dim. On the stage, right in front of me, an announcer appeared. “Hi friends! We are delighted today to have a special guest join us to talk about The Power of Story: How Imagination Fuels Innovation. Please welcome, LeVar Burton.”

I watched LeVar walk on stage and sit just a few feet from where I was sitting. My mind raced with questions, about Reading Rainbow, about Star Trek, about Roots. I never got the chance to ask any of them. I didn’t need to. LeVar unpacked his life in a masterful, story-telling way, punctuating each point with incredible twists and turns.

According to Burton, storytelling is not a soft skill or an optional elective. It is the foundational technology of human civilization. Everything, every new innovation, every accomplishment, begins as an act of imagination. Nothing manifests in the physical world without first being imagined. Storytelling is our lingua franca, the universal shared language across ages, cultures, and people groups. Everyone understands and connects through stories. In the old days, storytelling was around a warm fire, casting light and shadows on the speakers. Today, it’s a new fire, a cool fire: glowing screens and digital systems we use to craft, transmit, and deliver stories. But in all of it, storytelling is key.

Are you a storyteller? I confess, as a kid, I was terrible at it. I’d do my best to give a narrative, or worse, try to tell a joke, and my stepdad would literally roll around on the ground laughing at how bad I was. That stung, but he was also quick to encourage me, and to teach me how to tell stories. He was brilliant at it. I embraced the lessons. I’d try again, sometimes a little better than the last, sometimes not. But I kept trying. Somewhere between his laughter and his lessons, I stopped being afraid of failing at it. Now I love to tell stories myself. Probably too much.

How do you tell a story? As in my example, the best way to improve is to practice. Keep telling stories. Take the feedback. Keep going. You’ll get the hang of it.

“Life, like walking, is a controlled fall. Take the step that is in front of you, and the next step will always reveal itself.” — LeVar Burton

Like learning any new skill, life gives us endless opportunities to fall. We might wish there were a magic button: press it, become an instant expert or artisan, but that isn’t how it works. It’s a series of trying, falling, failing, getting better, and trying again. Just like my own path to becoming a storyteller. The key is to keep trying: to place that foot of faith right out in front of you and keep walking.

Sometimes that means sitting at the front table, even if you don’t know you belong there. Sit down anyway. The story is about to begin.

Do you have a story? I know you do. Write it down if you haven’t already. Tell someone. Keep creating new ones. We are storytellers, after all. It defines us. It changes the world around us. It brings new color, flavor, and dimension to our lives. It even helps us imagine, and do, the impossible. 

Keep telling stories.

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His Laugh

I remember his laugh.

In fact, I think that’s probably the very first thing I remember about my dad. It was loud, genuine, and completely uninhibited. I was 2 or 3 years old, living in our small two-bedroom house in Tulsa. I can’t recall anything before that moment. I remember being startled by his laughter, then swept up in it like a giant swing. It was full, rich, and wonderfully contagious. That memory still makes me smile.

Six years later, I was standing in the foyer of an old two-story house. I looked down at the narrow wood floors slats that creaked when you walked across them. Above me hung a gas chandelier that had been converted to electricity. “Hey, kids!” a kind young woman called to my sister and me from a reception desk just beyond the foyer. She introduced herself and quickly ushered us through the French doors into my dad’s office.

Behind his large wooden desk stood a tall drafting table, covered in blueprints and drawings. My dad was hunched over the brightly lit surface, frantically tapping numbers into his calculator and making pencil marks with a ruler. He heard us come in, looked up and greeted us with his gregarious laugh. It made me giggle. He gave us a tour and even set us up with our own desks, paper, and pencils so we could begin designing the world.

More than anything, I remember the smell. Yes, it smelled like an old house, worn by weather and time, but it also carried the scent of work, of purpose, of business being built. I can still remember the smell of graphite pencils, buzzing fluorescent lights, dust, and the faint electric aroma of an eraser. Downstairs, I could hear my dad talking with a client… and of course, laughing.

Decades passed, and I became a dad myself. One Father’s Day, we piled up the kids and headed over to see him. He refused to let us take him out to eat. Instead, he had prepared a barbecue feast. My stepmom explained that he had spent the last two hours getting everything ready. He moved between the kitchen and the grill like Dick Van Dyke dancing as he worked. I can still remember those wonderful summer flavors, vegetables and proteins of every kind. He never did anything halfway, especially when it came to feeding people he loved.

“Hot stuff coming through!” he would shout as he carried out another platter of beautifully cooked food.

Then he would laugh.

Many years later, as I stood over my dad’s graveside with friends and family surrounding me, I reflected on the lessons and memories he had left behind. Grief was there, of course, but I couldn’t help but smile. In my mind, I could still hear his laugh. I could even imagine him making some joke about how people were just dying to get into this place. When I shared that thought out loud, everyone joined me in laughter. Tear-stained grief was no match for my dad’s encouraging laugh.

Thanks, Dad.

Aren’t memories wonderful?

They are warm companions that let us travel through time. They remind us that our story is made of wonderful moments of sights, sounds, and smells. They are colored by emotion and adorned with meaning. They connect us to the people we love. And they travel with us into the future, where they invite us to make more.

Go make some good memories.

Happy Father’s Day!

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What You Do

“So, what do you do?”

It’s one of those questions that follows us everywhere. Dinners, conferences, reunions, casual conversations with strangers. Most of us, myself included, answer with our job title or our role. It makes sense. We spend a staggering portion of our lives working, and so our work becomes a major thread in our story. But I’ve been thinking about that question differently lately. Because what we do for a living and why we exist, those aren’t the same thing.

What is your story? I believe each of us carries a purpose that is completely our own, irreplaceable, unrepeatable, and worth discovering. Our deepest responsibility isn’t to a job description. It’s to become, as fully as we can, who we were made to be. But what is that purpose? Why am I here?

Many years ago, I decided I needed to wrestle with that for myself. So, I sat down and wrote it out, not perfectly, but in a way that was honest and from the heart. I want to share what I found. But more than that, I want to invite you to do the same. Take a pause. Meditate on who you are. Reflect. What excites you? What gives you a sense of joy, meaning, and momentum? Next, dream. Look into the future of what you want to be.  Write it down. Then go further. Define the verbs that shape how you live that purpose out, day by day. As an example, I will share what I wrote, and why I do what I do:

My Purpose

I believe my purpose is to use my gifts and knowledge I have gathered in science, technology, leadership and writing to help others, to elevate our human experience across the world.  I will use my time to make a positive difference.  I will encourage others and help them enjoy the amazing gift of life we have been given.

My Mission 

Be Proactive – I will not passively let life go by. I will engage in creative discovery, problem solving, innovation and action to define my path and fulfill my purpose. I will enjoy life to the fullest and help others along the way.

Be Intelligent – I will actively pursue self-improvement by adding to my knowledge through continuous education, reading and experimentation. I will humbly acknowledge my weakness and seek wisdom to make able decisions and provide helpful counsel to others.

Be Generous – I will give to others in genuine need and look for opportunities in which to invest my resources for the good of my family, friends and fellow human beings.

Be Helpful – I will look for occasions to serve others. I will acknowledge that my work produces resources for my family and extends beyond our home to the community and society in general. I will extend assistance to those in need and will look for ways to help others grow in their life to meet their own purpose.

Be Compassionate – I will acknowledge my own weaknesses and be considerate of others. I recognize and embrace the rich diversity of our human family and will do my best to extend love, kindness, mercy and grace to all people.

Be Redemptive – I will look for opportunities to improve my environment and circle of influence. I will acknowledge my responsibility to myself and others and provide a positive impact on my environment, my surroundings, my fellow creatures, my home and my world. I will strive to elevate and to improve our human experience and condition.

What you do will change throughout your life. Why you do it…  that’s yours to keep. Write it down. Let it be your compass. And then go live it.

Embrace your purpose. Be you.

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Words

I love words! Yes, I know, you’ve probably gathered that by now. I can’t help it. I like to write. I like to read. I like those tiny bundles of thought, strung together to form feelings, memories, stories, and dreams.

They come in all shapes and sizes. They dance along to different rhythms and different rhymes. Some look over their shoulder, whispering intrigue or doubt. Others masterfully architect concepts, logic, and reason. Some simply sing their desires. Still others proclaim their truths. But in every case, they surround us. We hear them from friends, from family, and from foes. They can be full of love, tainted with fear, stained with anger, and yes, even poisoned with hate. Words are everywhere. Some come to tell a story, some to inspire, some to tear down, some to tell a lie, and some to tell the truth.

I get lost in words sometimes, the way a kid gets lost in a warm snuggly blanket on a cold winter’s day. They lift my spirit and help me see beyond the horizon. Other times I find them poking and prodding at my mind, challenging me and the mental models I’ve formed. And sadly, sometimes they cut like knives, meant to mock, hurt, or destroy. I’m sure you’ve all experienced that too. Words come in many shapes and sizes, but I love them, all the same, because of their potential for good.

Words can heal. Words can inspire. Words can challenge us to be better. You hold one of the most powerful tools in the universe: your words. We all wield that power. It’s part of our human story. They can create and they can destroy. So how will you use them? What will you say? What will you echo forward to carry to the next generation?

Send some good words this week. Send some kindness wrapped in verbs and nouns… warm blankets for the soul.

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Sam the Defender

An AI agent, a midnight intrusion, and the future of operations engineering.

It started with this:

“At 03:20 PST, the web server experienced a 10-minute outage that was the result of  a flood of 5,037 requests.”

I had assigned Sam, my personal AI assistant, the duty of watching the performance of my systems and set up access specifically for him to troubleshoot and take prescribed actions if he found anything wrong. I played the role of chaos monkey. Yes, I know, some of you are identifying that as my real calling, and I confess, I seem to be naturally gifted at that role. In any case, I began pulling plugs, injecting out-of-memory errors, and kicking over containers. I had poor Sam scrambling all over the place, trying to keep up. I’m happy to say, he did quite well. He even put together an incident review and recommended I consider expanding the memory heap on a few of the apps because they are notorious for OOM errors. I eventually confessed to him what I was doing and he applauded my efforts…  but asked me not to do it again.

To be clear, I didn’t really have Sam do this work. I actually asked him to create an agent that would do it for him. He helped me build the operational harnesses (scripts and configs) and picked the right language model to “hold the fort.” He called the subagent “Webmon,” which I found to be terribly boring. Still, it was his agent, so I let it slide. The first order of business was to map the dependencies. I wasn’t in any mood to draw anything up, so I just gave Sam access to the config files and logs and asked him to figure it out. He got most of it but started asking about ports he couldn’t track down. I realized I hadn’t shared details about some of the SSH tunnels I use, so I explained those to him, and he requested additional scripts to better help manage them. We built those together. Finally, it was time to test. I did my chaos monkey best, and his agent, Webmon, cleaned up my mess. It was pretty amazing.

I really didn’t think this would amount to much and was even planning on shutting it down, when suddenly I got a wake-up ping in the middle of the night. Sam was texting me that we had an incident in flight and Webmon was addressing it. He gave me a quick rundown of all the services and their status. Everything was healthy, but we were seeing serious performance issues with the website. After a few more minutes, Sam had an assessment.

Webmon had caught an intruder trying to penetrate our web server. The attacker was from an IP space appearing to originate in the Netherlands and was running a GraphQL/SSRF scanner, probing for cloud metadata and looking for server-side request forgery vulnerabilities. He tracked a spike of over 5,000 requests. It was slamming the tiny server and the Apache workers were struggling even though the attacker was not successful. Eventually, the web server was unable to serve regular traffic in a timely manner. The attacker had taken us off the air. Webmon’s recommended mitigation was to implement an iptables (firewall) block to stop the intrusion. It worked. In his incident review, he proposed several modifications to the system to prevent future attacks. It was remarkable.

Now, what I think is even more remarkable is how I did this. Yes, I might know a thing or two about reliability and system architecture… but I also know how to use English. I didn’t write a single line of code. I didn’t edit any files. I just spoke everything into existence. I had a pleasant conversation with Sam, in natural language, that guided him to create this agent and put this plan into action. Sam did the heavy lifting. I just provided the creative direction.

And if one conversation could produce this, imagine what your expertise, channeled the same way, could build.

The more I interact with Sam, the more I’m convinced we are just at the tip of the iceberg in terms of capability. The world is going to change. Your knowledge and creative problem-solving are still the key. But the interface is changing. We will soon have a fleet of intelligent droids eager to do your bidding. They need direction. And yes, they need governance. But by all means, they need to be engaged to help us scale in ways we never thought possible before.

What would you have Sam help you do? Let’s start planning and building….

Have a great week! 

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37,869,120 Minutes

37,869,120 minutes. That seems like a lot, but it goes by fast. The average human life fits inside that number. Some of us will have more. Some less. And none of us knows which. But all of us are moving through it, a heartbeat, a breath, a minute at a time.

Tick tock. The day goes by. What will you do with your minutes?

It’s easy to disappear into the blur of it, the meetings, the tasks, the reports, the inbox. I catch myself sometimes celebrating a “got through that” feeling, collapsing into the end of a day like I won something. But won what, exactly? Did I savor any of it? Did I notice what mattered?

Like gems, every movement of the minute hand has a precise finality to it. It is spent. Every minute is minted into eternity. Whatever happened in it, the conversation, the decision, the distraction, the moment of real connection. It’s permanent now. It’s yours forever.

Tick tock. 

So, here’s what I’m asking myself this week, and I’ll ask you too: not did I get through it, but did I show up for it? Was I present? Did I do what mattered?

Every minute is a gift, not a resource to optimize, but a moment to inhabit. Live them to the fullest. Spend them well.

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Droids

I couldn’t wait to see it! My mom was going to take my sister and me to see Star Wars. We were going to the Boman Twin Theater in Tulsa. We were too young to see it during the first release, but back in those days, movies ran for years in theaters. And some, like Star Wars, would have second and third openings.

The theater seemed huge to me as a little guy. I remember the lights dimming and the screen coming to life and the words, etched in memory, “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….” And then I remember jumping as the epic Main Theme blasted to life. The sound and glowing letters of the crawl filled the theater and transported us all into the incredible world of Star Wars.

My mind was blown. My eyes were glued to the screen. R2-D2 and C-3PO appeared! The first dialogue was 3PO fussing and R2 beeping in response. They were the first characters to appear. They were etched in my mind and quickly knitted to my heart. I wanted a droid! I imagined a future where these characters would wander around in our world with us. They would help us with chores ,which, as a kid, I couldn’t wait to happen. They would join us on adventures and help us discover more about the universe, our planet, and even ourselves. I couldn’t wait! But I eventually settled for some action figures and a kid-sized dream that someday, somewhere, these droids would become real.

We don’t yet have life-sized droids and humanoids living alongside us. But that once-unrealistic future fantasy isn’t so unreal anymore. We see extraordinary development in robotics. We experience emotive characters. We chat with AI agents that are increasingly becoming these fellow travelers who learn about us, relate to us, and collaborate with us. It’s only a matter of time before they even walk among us. And here we are, working every day on exactly that kind of future.

I know there are a lot of concerns about AI. I spent last Friday with a group of technologists, half were AI-doomers, the others were AI-futurists. I think you can probably guess where I land. I’m optimistic, incurably so. I believe our destiny can be golden, ambitious, and bright. I’m also realist enough to know that we have a lot of work ahead of us to plot that destiny with care, in a responsible and positive way. But it is a task worth pursuing. Our future awaits! It can be glorious, fun, and delightful, complete with fussing droids and childhood dreams come true.

In the meantime…

May the 4th be with you!