Since I started this newsletter, I have been dancing around a theme, and I want to take it head on.
I told you about the scammers who used AI to try to scam me out of three hours in my driveway. I told you about the imaginary garden I built for my wife when I couldn’t build the real one in time. The real one just got built. And if you follow me on Instagram, you have seen Chandler, who is five, scoring goals in the Champions League, and you have seen me playing basketball like I was Kyrie Irving.
None of it was real. All of it was fun, except the scam. People keep asking me whether a world where AI pulls at what counts as real scares me. My honest answer is that I was trained for it, and not by a computer. I was trained by a hospital in Clinton, Massachusetts, when I was twelve.
The game
I broke my wrist watching a football game. Not playing. Watching. A kid named Ryan Gorman came from behind and tackled me while I stood on the sideline, and I landed on my wrist, and it snapped.
Nobody believed me. The other kids kept poking it to check. You were not going to ask for an ambulance in front of your friends at twelve, so I sat on the grass and waited for the game to end and a ride to show up.
A week later, the temporary cast had to be turned into the permanent one. My mom was supposed to pick me up at school. She was late, the way she was always late back then, and when she finally came she drove me around for hours. We missed the appointment. Something else was on her mind that day, and whatever it was mattered more than me. Some of that story I’m still not ready to tell.
My mom was struggling then. When you grow up around someone whose mind is fighting her, you learn early that what’s real is up for debate. My grandparents, Raymond and Eleanor Cain, were living with us to help my mom. They were there for some of the darkest moments. If my mom was the part of my life I could never be sure of, they were the part I never had to question.
My grandfather, Poppy, was an Irish guy with a long turkey neck whose whole thing was kindness: if you ever see a kid sitting alone at a table, you go sit next to him. I’ve carried that most of my life. My grandmother, Mimi, was deeply Polish. Pierogis every Christmas, and pączki, the Polish donuts. So I knew who I was: Polish on my mom’s side, Irish and Jewish and Russian on my dad’s. You grow up inside an identity like a house. You don’t check the foundation.
The hospital
We finally got to the ER at Clinton Hospital. I saw my good friend’s mom on the way in and said hello. A nurse started changing the gauze and running through the normal questions. My mom stood in the corner looking like something was bothering her.
Then the nurse got to the one about family history. Any genetic illnesses?
I said no.
My mom said, “That’s not true.”
I looked at her. The nurse looked at her. I asked what she meant.
“We actually don’t know,” she said. “I’m adopted. His grandparents aren’t his real grandparents. We just found out who our real family is.”
I told the nurse not to listen to her. She was just saying things. She said things.
“No, Joe. It’s true. It is true.”
The nurse put down the gauze. “We’re going to give you guys a second.”
So I sat there with half a cast on my arm and listened to my mother explain that Mimi and Poppy had adopted her as a baby. My grandmother had lost pregnancy after pregnancy and couldn’t carry a child. They had finally adopted, and fostered another child too. The Polish side of me, the pierogis, the grandfather with the turkey neck: none of it was in my blood.
There is nothing wrong with being adopted. Adoption is one of the most generous things people do. But there is something wrong with being twelve, in a hospital, with your arm half wrapped, and learning that the identity you built yourself out of is not quite real.
I sat there with half a cast on and listened to my mother take my family apart.
What survived
I was heartbroken. I felt like everyone had lied to me, and the people who had lied were the people I trusted most. For a while my world was upside down. Mimi was still making pierogis, and Poppy was still Poppy. I didn’t know what to do with that, because the story I had built myself out of had just been taken away in a sentence. It took time. The love remained. But it wasn’t the same love. It had been broken and set again, like my wrist.
That day did something to me that took thirty years to understand. I stopped believing reality is a fixed thing you can stand on. Any morning, a sentence can rewrite what’s true. It’s happened to me enough times that it no longer scares me. I’ve gotten comfortable in the space where the floor might move.
Science has been saying a version of the same thing for a century. The double-slit experiment. Schrödinger’s cat. The multiverse, the simulation: those are hypotheses, not findings, but serious people hold them, and they are not dorm-room thoughts. The people who have looked hardest at the bottom of the world came back saying it is stranger than it looks from here.
Now AI is pushing the same question on everyone at once. A video of a politician saying something he never said. A voice on the phone that sounds exactly like your daughter. A photo of something that never happened, shared a thousand times before anyone checks. The question of what is real is about to get asked of all of us, every day, whether we like it or not.
Being trained for it does not mean I can spot the fake. Nobody can, not every time. What the hospital taught me is what the morning after looks like. A sentence turns your world upside down. You walk around for a while with the floor gone. And then the world turns back, and what turns it back is never proof. Nobody showed me a document in that hospital. What turned it back was Mimi at the stove and Poppy at the table.
A lot of people are about to have their world flipped by a video or a voice. I can’t tell them the floor won’t move. I can tell them it comes back, and it comes back on people. When you can’t trust what you see, you end up trusting who you know. I’m looking forward to finding out what else survives.
— Joe
P.S. Has reality ever changed on you in a single sentence? Write me and tell me: joseph@josephlapin.com. I read every one.
