How can you tell if someone does CrossFit? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.
And they’ll show you their calluses.
They’ll probably mention their WOD time, too.
The same joke goes for Vegans, Flat Earthers, and maybe even, ahem, bloggers.
My son does it with Pokémon.
My wife does it with Costco.
From Taylor Swift to sobriety. From arthritis to…don’t get me started on arthritis.
We all share this tendency.
Natural Obsessions
It’s natural. People want to talk about the things they are interested in. That is to say, they want to talk about themselves.
When your interest in yourself overlaps with another person, it’s game on. Fast friends. If I run across a recovering salesperson, writer, and cookie connoisseur that enjoys podcasts and deadlifting, I might be accused of having a “bromance.”
In the old days it was simply “having something in common.”
But these commonalities can get confusing.
Have you ever had a golfing buddy that doesn’t really like golf? I’ve got a few. What they really like is the six hours away from the house to slug beers. Golf is a means to that end. Their pre-shot routine is more about swigs than swings.
And when someone asks you a few open-ended questions—maybe some riveting topic like the weather—only to steer things back towards their topic du jour, they’re not into meteorology, they’re into themselves.
I carried a bag for 20 years and had the good fortune of working with a few college friends. It was a young company, the type where everyone goes out on Friday nights for a few dozen drinks and a Seattle dog.
As fun as it was, the conversations always drifted back to the office, and those chats would eventually get broken up by someone who had a friggin life.
“Are you talking about work again?!?”
And we were.
A company should be so lucky. They got us for ten hours a day, and because of that, the business infiltrated the remaining fourteen. It wasn’t uncommon for a coworker to admit they were having “work dreams.” They’d grind their teeth, wake up in a cold sweat, and jump into emails every morning before the sleep left their eyes.
We were obsessed. If you could lay out all our interests on an equalizer, the work category was turned all the way up (to eleven), and we searched for others that had the same one-dimensional sound. That way, we’d get to talk about the thing we had in common, and in a way, we’d get to talk about ourselves.
It’s a flaw, but it’s a human flaw.
Golden Gate Claude
Anthropic, the company behind Claude AI, ran an experiment.
“In the ‘mind’ of Claude, we found millions of concepts that activate when the model reads relevant text or sees relevant images, which we call ‘features.’
One of those was the concept of the Golden Gate Bridge. We found that there’s a specific combination of neurons in Claude’s neural network that activates when it encounters a mention (or a picture) of this most famous San Francisco landmark.
Not only can we identify these features, we can tune the strength of their activation up or down, and identify corresponding changes in Claude’s behavior.
And as we explain in our research paper, when we turn up the strength of the ‘Golden Gate Bridge’ feature, Claude’s responses begin to focus on the Golden Gate Bridge. Its replies to most queries start to mention the Golden Gate Bridge, even if it’s not directly relevant.
If you ask this ‘Golden Gate Claude’ how to spend $10, it will recommend using it to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge and pay the toll. If you ask it to write a love story, it’ll tell you a tale of a car who can’t wait to cross its beloved bridge on a foggy day. If you ask it what it imagines it looks like, it will likely tell you that it imagines it looks like the Golden Gate Bridge.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said “Somehow these interventions on the model, where you kind of adjust its behavior, somehow emotionally made it seem more human than any other version of the model. It has a strong personality. It has these kind of obsessive interests. We can all think of someone who’s obsessed with something. So it does make it feel somehow a bit more human.”
A lot of the talk around AI is targeted at human level intelligence and the Turing test, but those targets are off base. Golden Gate Claude is more human than Claude Sonnet or Claude Haiku, their “more intelligent” models. The intentionally flawed Golden Gate Claude chatbot, the obsessive version, is more like us. For an AI to pass the Turing test, they don’t need smarter, they need flawed. They need to crank up a few random-ass attributes, like Costco and CrossFit. Only then will the robots feel like one of the gang.
Amodei hits the nail on the head. We see a bit of ourselves in Golden Gate Claude, because we all have our “bridges.” We all have passions that we inevitably steer conversations towards. And like Claude, we are often more endearing when we let those passions show. They make us real, relatable, and human.
But what does it mean to be human? Yes, we’re creatures of passion and obsession, but we’re also creatures of connection. We evolved in tribes, around campfires, sharing stories. Our need to belong runs as deep as our need to be heard. The most human thing isn’t just having a passion – it’s sharing it with others who care. And caring about what they share in return.
So how do we balance these fundamental parts of ourselves? How do we honor both our need to share our passions and our need to connect?
The Better Way
Okay, we understand that humans are obsessive, that we like talking our book, we like bringing our own interests and expertise into the conversation. So how can we use that trait for good?
Mind the gap as they say. Make sure that when we circle back to the story, joke, or advice, that we aren’t blindsiding everyone. If the conversation is on music, we can safely slide into movies, but let’s pump the brakes on talking about the garden…unless it’s Madison Square Garden.
Even better than conversational adjacencies, connecting the dots of conversation back to ourselves, how about we turn up a few dials on the equalizer? Specifically, turn up our interest in the person we are talking to. Instead of everything reminding us of the Golden Gate Bridge, it reminds us of them.
“Oh, you went skydiving, you are a real adventurer, you went bungee jumping last year, right? How does that make you feel, why do you do it, has it changed the way you pick vacations?”
Like that.
Tuning up our neural network on them will make the conversation more enjoyable for both sides. They get to share; we get to learn.
The Power of Connection
It’s ironic. We’re wired to focus on ourselves. Our interests, our stories, our Golden Gate Bridges.
But some of the loneliest people I know, are also the most self-absorbed. Is it the chicken or the egg? I’m not sure. And I’m not sure it matters.
What matters is the cure for loneliness.
It’s actually quite simple.
As Charlie Munger says, “The way to get a good spouse is to deserve a good spouse.” And that advice applies here as well. To get a good friend, you need to deserve a good friend.
How do you do that?
By being a good friend.
“The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee,” John D. Rockefeller said, “and I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.”
The richest man in the world put this ability above all others. The ability to balance your precious Golden Gate Bridge with that most valuable of assets, an interest in theirs.
It’s not about suppressing our obsessions or pretending we don’t have them. That wouldn’t make us intelligent, it would make us artificially intelligent.
It’s about channeling that same passionate energy into genuine curiosity about others.
Maybe that’s the bridge we should all be crossing – the one that connects our story to theirs. A conversation rather than a monologue, means you listen and inquire, rather than wait your turn. We are looking for interactions that leave all sides feeling more connected than before.
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