You know, Herman, I was sitting in the kitchen this morning, just watching the coffee drip, and I realized how much my relationship with waiting has changed over the last couple of years. I think we all feel it. We live in this era where the gap between a problem existing and a solution appearing feels like it is shrinking every single day. It is like the world has lost its friction.
Herman Poppleberry here, and I think you have hit on something vital, Corn. It is that feeling of being on the precipice of everything, all the time. I was actually just digging into the latest benchmarks for the Gemini reasoning models—the ones Daniel was mentioning in the prompt he sent over earlier—and the leap in multi-step logic is just staggering. We are looking at the February twenty twenty-six technical reports, and the performance on the Frontier Reasoning Benchmark has jumped another fifteen percent just since November. It feels like we are finally moving past the era of A-I that just sounds smart and into the era of A-I that actually thinks through problems with a level of rigor that rivaled doctoral-level researchers only eighteen months ago.
It is incredible. Our housemate Daniel really hit on something profound with this idea of the art of hopeful pausing. He mentioned how these breakthroughs, like the extended reasoning modes we are seeing here in early twenty twenty-six, make it so easy to get swept up in this total optimism. If an A-I can solve a complex quantum physics proof that has stumped humans for decades, or predict the folding of a protein that could neutralize a specific virus in seconds, why can't it solve world hunger? Why can't it solve the chronic health issues that people, including Daniel himself, are dealing with right now?
It is the solver's high, Corn. When you see a machine perform a feat of logic that feels almost magical, your brain naturally extrapolates that success to every other domain. It is like seeing a car break the sound barrier for the first time and immediately wondering why we haven't reached Mars yet. But Daniel’s question is really about the emotional and psychological tax of that optimism. How do we stay hopeful without becoming impatient or, worse, becoming bitter when the solution to our specific, personal problem doesn't arrive tomorrow morning? We are seeing these reasoning models take minutes, sometimes even hours, to think through a single prompt now. They are literally pausing to get it right. And that is a huge shift from the instant gratification we have been trained to expect from technology.
That is the core of it. This tension between the macro and the micro. On a macro level, humanity is winning. We are seeing these massive leaps in material science and drug discovery. But on a micro level, if you are someone suffering from a condition that is still poorly understood, or if you are living in a region where food security is still a daily struggle, that macro-optimism can start to feel a bit hollow if it is not balanced with something else. So, let’s dig into this. What is this art of hopeful pausing? How do we actually practice it when the world is moving at ten thousand miles an hour?
I think we have to start by understanding what is actually happening with this reasoning mode that has everyone so excited. Because if we understand the mechanism, we can understand the timeline. In the past, Large Language Models were essentially world-class pattern matchers. They were fast, they were intuitive, but they were prone to hallucinations because they were basically just guessing the next likely word based on a massive statistical map. But what we are seeing now, with these reasoning-heavy models like the latest Gemini updates, is a shift toward search-based logic and inference-time compute. The model is essentially talking to itself, checking its own work, exploring different branches of a solution, and discarding the ones that don't hold up before it ever gives you an answer. It is using a process called chain-of-thought combined with a tree-of-thoughts architecture. It is literally weighing possibilities.
Right, it is the difference between an expert who blurted out the first thing that came to mind and an expert who sits in a room for three hours, works through the math on a whiteboard, and then comes out and says, here is the proof. It is a more humble form of intelligence, in a way. It admits that the answer isn't immediate.
That is it! And that shift—that deliberate, internal pause that the A-I is now doing—is actually a great metaphor for what Daniel is asking about. The A-I is practicing a form of reasoning that requires time and computation. It is not instant. And if the machine needs to pause and reason to find an answer, maybe we need to find a way to honor that same process in our own lives. We are so used to the search engine model of life—type in a query, get a result in zero point four seconds. But the big problems, the ones Daniel is talking about, they don't live in the search engine. They live in the reasoning space.
That is a fascinating parallel, Herman. But here is the thing: a machine doesn't feel the weight of the wait. If the reasoning mode takes ten minutes to solve a problem, the machine isn't pacing the room, checking its watch, wondering if it is ever going to finish. It isn't worried about its mortgage or its health. Humans are different. We have this biological drive for resolution. When we see that progress is possible, the waiting becomes even harder. It is like being in a slow-moving line at the grocery store. It is annoying, but you deal with it. But if the person in front of you suddenly gets their groceries for free and the line moves ten feet, and then it stops again? Your frustration levels through the roof. The proximity to the miracle makes the delay feel like an insult.
That is a crucial observation. The proximity to a solution makes the absence of a solution feel more acute. We are closer than ever to solving things like protein folding for custom medicine—I mean, look at the success of the AlphaFold three implementations last year—or optimizing global logistics to end food waste. But the implementation gap—the distance between a digital solution and a physical reality—is still there. We can solve the math of world hunger on a screen, but we still have to move the grain, fix the soil, and navigate the politics of a dozen different nations. The A-I can tell us exactly where the food needs to go, but it can't drive the truck. Not yet, anyway.
And that is where the art of hopeful pausing comes in, right? It is about acknowledging that the answer might be in the works, but it isn't here yet. Daniel mentioned his own health stuff, specifically those complications after his gallbladder surgery. It is a perfect example. We have the technology to see inside the body with incredible detail, and we have A-I models that can analyze symptoms, but sometimes, the specific combination of factors in a single human body—the microbiome, the genetic markers, the surgical history—is still a mystery even to the best doctors. For Daniel, seeing the news about A-I curing rare diseases in a lab must feel like a ghost of a promise. It is there, but he can't touch it.
It is. And for someone in that position, optimism can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, you think, maybe the next update to a medical A-I will finally catch what the doctors missed. Maybe the next iteration of the reasoning models will be able to simulate my specific biology and find the fix. On the other hand, if you pin all your happiness on that one future moment, you are essentially putting your life on hold. You are refusing to live in the present because you are so focused on a future resolution. You are living in the gap. And the gap is a very lonely place to be.
So how do you pause without losing hope? Because that is the trap, right? If you stop looking for the answer, if you just accept that this is how things are, does that mean you have given up? Does pausing mean the end of progress? I think about this a lot with the climate crisis, too. We see these breakthroughs in fusion or carbon capture, and we want to celebrate, but then we look at the thermometer and it is still rising. How do we hold both of those things?
I don't think pausing is the same as giving up. I think hopeful pausing is about changing the frequency of your search. Instead of refreshing the news every five minutes for a breakthrough, you check in once a month. It is about moving the search for a solution from the foreground of your life to the background. Think of it like a background process on a computer. It is still running, it is still gathering data, it is still hopeful, but it isn't hogging all the central processing unit cycles. You are freeing up your mental energy to actually live your life while the search continues. It is a form of cognitive offloading. You trust that the world is working on it, so you don't have to work on it every second of the day.
I like that analogy. It is about resource management. But I want to push back a little on the optimism side. Is it possible that we are too optimistic about what A-I can solve in the physical world? We have talked about this before on the show—I think it was back in episode five hundred and twelve when we were looking at the limitations of digital-to-physical translation. Even if Gemini or some other reasoning model finds the perfect cure for a disease, we still have to go through clinical trials, manufacturing, and distribution. In twenty twenty-six, those things are faster than they were in twenty twenty, but they aren't instant. A clinical trial still takes months to ensure safety.
You are hitting on a major reality check there, Corn. There is a common misconception that once the A-I solves the logic of a problem, the problem is solved. But in the real world, the logic is often the easiest part. The physics, the biology, and the sociology are the hard parts. We can have an A-I design a carbon-capture system that is ten times more efficient than anything we have now, but we still have to build the factories. We still have to find a place to put the carbon. We still have to deal with zoning laws and supply chain shortages for the specialized filters. The A-I is a genius architect, but it is not a construction crew.
Right. So, if we tell people to be optimistic because A-I is getting smarter, but we don't mention that the physical implementation is still stuck in human-time, aren't we just setting them up for a massive crash? If Daniel expects his health issues to be solved because he read a headline about A-I reasoning, and then six months go by and he is still in pain, that optimism turns into a poison. It turns into resentment.
That is why the art of hopeful pausing is so necessary. It is a defense mechanism against the hype cycle. If you understand that the timeline of discovery is different from the timeline of implementation, you can adjust your expectations. You can be genuinely excited about a breakthrough in a reasoning model without expecting your life to change by Tuesday. It is a more mature form of hope. It is not the wide-eyed hope of a child waiting for a toy; it is the steady hope of a gardener who knows the seeds are in the ground but understands that the harvest is months away. You don't scream at the dirt because the tomato isn't red yet. You know the biology is doing its work.
The gardener metaphor is perfect. You don't dig up the seeds every day to see if they are growing, because that would actually kill the plant. You have to leave them in the dark for a while. You have to trust the process. But let's talk about the practical side of this. For a listener who is struggling with something right now—whether it is a health issue like Daniel's or just a general sense of anxiety about the state of the world—what does hopeful pausing actually look like in practice? How do we stop digging up the seeds?
For me, it starts with what I call the information diet. When you are desperate for an answer, you tend to over-consume. You read every study, you follow every tech influencer, you join every forum. And while that feels like you are doing something, it often just keeps your stress levels at a constant peak. Hopeful pausing means setting boundaries. It means saying, I am going to trust that the brilliant minds in this field are working on it, and I will check in on the major milestones, but I am not going to live in the comments section. It also means recognizing the difference between useful information and noise. In twenty twenty-six, the noise is louder than ever because A-I can generate so much of it.
I would add that it also involves a shift in focus toward what is solvable right now. If the big problem—the world hunger, the chronic illness—is currently in a pause state, what are the small things you can control? Maybe you can't solve world hunger, but you can volunteer at a local food bank or support sustainable farming in your own community. Maybe Daniel can't solve the long-term complications of his surgery today, but he can find a way to manage his symptoms, improve his sleep, or find a community of people who understand what he is going through. It is about finding agency in the waiting room.
Reclaiming your agency is key. One of the dangers of being overly reliant on A-I optimism is that it can make us passive. We start thinking, well, the super-intelligent machine will fix it eventually, so I don't need to do anything. We become spectators of our own salvation. But hopeful pausing is active. It is saying, I am holding space for a future solution, but I am also taking responsibility for my present well-being. I am not waiting for the A-I to tell me how to be happy today.
It is almost like a meditative state, isn't it? You are acknowledging the thought—the desire for a solution—and then you are letting it go for a while. You aren't suppressing it, you aren't denying it, you are just giving it permission to exist without it needing to be resolved right this second. It reminds me of what they call the Stockdale Paradox. You have to retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, and at the same time, confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
Precisely. Admiral Stockdale survived years as a prisoner of war by practicing that. The people who didn't make it were the ones who said, we will be out by Christmas, and then Christmas would come and go. Then they said, we will be out by Easter, and Easter would come and go. They died of a broken heart. The ones who survived were the ones who said, we might not be out for years, but we will get out eventually. That is the essence of hopeful pausing. It is the endurance of hope.
And I think we need to talk about the role of acceptance in this. Acceptance is often seen as a negative word, like you are giving up or being lazy. But in the context of hopeful pausing, acceptance is actually the foundation of hope. If you can accept that the answer isn't available today, you stop wasting energy on the frustration of its absence. You accept the current reality as the starting point, not the ending point. It is like being lost in the woods. If you spend all your time screaming at the trees because you aren't home yet, you are going to run out of energy. If you accept that you are in the woods, you can start building a fire and looking for water while you wait for the search party.
That is a subtle but huge distinction. Acceptance of the present doesn't mean the rejection of a better future. It just means you are no longer at war with the clock. And honestly, Corn, I think this is something we are all going to have to get better at as A-I continues to accelerate. The faster the discoveries happen, the more the implementation gap is going to stand out. We are going to see a world where we have the answers to almost everything in a digital sense, but we are still waiting for the physical world to catch up. We are going to be living in a constant state of hopeful pausing. We might have the cure for cancer on a hard drive for five years before it is available at your local clinic. How do we live with that knowledge?
That is a wild thought. A world where all the blueprints for a utopia are finished, but we are still waiting for the construction crews to show up. That could be incredibly frustrating if we don't have the right mindset. It could lead to a kind of societal neurosis. But it could also be a time of great creativity. If we aren't constantly stressed about the search for answers, what else can we do with that mental space? Maybe the art of hopeful pausing allows us to focus more on human connection, on art, on the things that A-I can't replace. If the machine is doing the heavy lifting of reasoning, maybe we can do the heavy lifting of living.
I love that. It turns the wait into a gift rather than a burden. You know, thinking back to some of our earlier episodes—I think it was around episode four hundred and eighty where we talked about the psychology of waiting rooms—there is this idea that the waiting room is a wasted space. But what if the waiting room is where the actual life happens? What if the pause is the point? What if the time it takes for the A-I to reason, and the time it takes for the world to change, is actually the space we need to grow into the people who can handle those solutions?
That is deep, Herman. And it brings us back to Daniel's prompt. He asked how we can balance optimism with the need for patience. I think the answer is to realize that optimism and patience aren't opposites. They are partners. Optimism gives you the reason to be patient. If you didn't have hope, you wouldn't be patient; you would just be hopeless. You are only patient because you believe something is worth waiting for. Patience is just hope with a watch.
Right on. And with these new reasoning models, we have more evidence than ever that the bus is coming. The logic is being solved. The reasoning is getting deeper. The breakthroughs are real. We aren't just wishing for a miracle; we are watching the architecture of the future being built in real-time. That should give us the confidence to pause, to breathe, and to wait without fear. We can see the headlights of the bus in the distance. We don't need to run down the road to meet it; we just need to stay at the stop.
It is a powerful shift in perspective. But let's look at the flip side for a moment. What about the people who feel like they don't have time to wait? When we talk about things like world hunger or terminal illness, a pause can feel like a death sentence. How do we talk about the art of hopeful pausing in those contexts without sounding dismissive or insensitive? Because for some people, the bus isn't just late; it is too late.
That is the hardest part of this conversation, and I want to be really careful here. For someone in an urgent crisis, a pause isn't an art form; it is an agony. In those cases, the optimism isn't about sitting back; it is about fuel for the fight. The hope that a solution is near is what keeps people pushing for better care, for better policy, for more funding. In those situations, you don't pause the search, but maybe you pause the despair. You use the optimism to stay in the game for one more day. It is about using the future as a lifeline to pull yourself through the present.
That is a vital distinction. Hope as fuel versus hope as a reason to rest. Depending on where you are in your journey, you might need one more than the other. If you are exhausted and burnt out from searching, you need the art of hopeful pausing to recharge. If you are in the heat of the battle, you need the optimism to keep your shield up. And maybe the role of those of us who aren't in a crisis is to hold that hope for those who are too tired to hold it themselves.
And I think as a society, we have a responsibility to bridge that gap. If A-I is giving us these breakthroughs, we need to be working just as hard on the human side to speed up the implementation. We can't just tell people to wait hopefully; we have to show them that we are doing everything in our power to make that wait as short as possible. We need to be the construction crews for those digital blueprints. The A-I has given us the map, but we still have to walk the path.
For sure. The A-I gives us the answer, but the human effort is what delivers it. I think that is a good place to start wrapping this up. This idea of the art of hopeful pausing isn't about being passive. It is about being strategic with our hope. It is about knowing when to push and when to breathe. It is about recognizing that we are living in a unique moment in history where the impossible is becoming the inevitable, but the inevitable still takes time.
And it is about trusting that even when we are pausing, the progress isn't stopping. The reasoning models are still searching, the scientists are still testing, and the world is still turning. We are part of a massive, collective effort, and sometimes our role in that effort is simply to stay hopeful and stay healthy until the next breakthrough arrives. We are the witnesses to a transformation.
Well said, Herman. I think Daniel's idea of the art of hopeful pausing is something I am going to try to practice more intentionally. Especially on those days when the news feels overwhelming or the solutions feel too far away. Just taking a moment to acknowledge that the seeds are in the ground, and it is okay to let them grow at their own pace. I might even just sit in the kitchen and watch the coffee drip a little longer tomorrow morning.
I might join you, Corn. Though I will probably be thinking about the fluid dynamics of the drip.
Of course you will. And hey, speaking of growing, we have seen this show grow so much over the last six hundred-plus episodes, and that is really thanks to the incredible community of listeners we have. If you have been enjoying these deep dives and our brotherly back-and-forth, we would really appreciate it if you could leave a review on your podcast app or over on Spotify. It genuinely helps more people find the show and join the conversation. We are trying to build a community of hopeful pausers here.
It really does make a difference. And if you want to get in touch, like Daniel did, you can find the contact form and our full archive at my weird prompts dot com. We love hearing your thoughts, your theories, and even your own weird prompts. Whether it is about A-I reasoning or the best way to brew coffee, we want to hear it.
Definitely. We live for this stuff. And honestly, Herman, I am feeling a lot more optimistic after this chat. Not just about the technology, but about our ability to handle the wait. I think we are going to be okay.
Me too, Corn. Me too. Thanks for the deep dive into the reasoning benchmarks. I know you have been waiting to nerd out on those all morning. I have some charts on the Gemini three point zero inference-time scaling laws that will blow your mind.
Save those for the after-show, Herman! I can only handle so much reasoning in one sitting.
Fair enough! I have a stack of papers on the desk that I am going to get back to right now.
Alright, well, let's get to it. This has been My Weird Prompts.
Thanks for listening, everyone. We will talk to you in the next one.
Stay hopeful, stay curious, and don't forget to breathe during the pauses. Bye for now!
Goodbye!
