Imagine waking up early, eager to peep dazzling carpets of brilliant orange flowers at the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve. Instagram posts promised a spectacle.

You drive to the reserve north of Los Angeles, but the rolling hills aren’t alive with color.

Bummer. The bloom is over.

Thanks to AI, and a local scientist, such disappointment may soon be a thing of the past.

This year, Steve Klosterman, a biologist who works on natural climate solutions, launched a “wildflower forecast,” powered by a deep-learning model, satellite imagery and weather data.

In a sense, Klosterman, of Santa Monica, developed the tool to meet his own need.

Last spring, the Midwest transplant was hankering to see some wildflowers. He assumed there was some online resource that offered predictions or leveraged satellite images.

“Surely, there must be something,” he recalled thinking. “But there was nothing.”

There are tools. The state reserve operates a live cam trained on one swath of land. Theodore Payne, a California native plant nursery and education center, runs a wildflower hotline, where people can call in and hear weekly recorded reports on hot spots.

“These are all essential resources,” Klosterman said. “At the same time, they’re limited.”

Klosterman isn’t green when it comes to plants. His PhD, at Harvard, focused on the timing of new leaves on trees in the spring and color change in the fall.

For a class project, a team he was part of built a website that predicted those leaf changes in the Boston area. It was a hit.

To create the poppy bloom predictor, Klosterman turned to AI initially developed for medical imaging. He has harnessed it to instead analyze satellite images of the Antelope Valley.

The model scans 10-by-10-meter squares of land to determine whether poppies are present by their telltale orange color. (It also identifies tiny yellow flowers called goldfields.)

The model is trained on satellite images — which go back nine years — along with past weather data.

It then uses the current forecast, and recent flower status, to peer into the future.

If the mercury is going to hit 100 degrees and wind is picking up — and in previous years that led to withering flowers — that will guide the prediction.

Right now, the model can forecast five days out and is, as Klosterman puts it, “very much a work in progress.” It would be better, more powerful, if it had 100 years to learn from.

As more data are collected, it might someday be able to forecast a week or two out.

Right now, poppies are popping at the reserve in the western Mojave Desert.

It rained throughout the fall and into winter, and poppies need at least seven inches of rain to make a good showing, said Lori Wear, an interpreter at the reserve.

Snowfall in January seems to push them to another level, but that didn’t happen this season. So it’s a good bloom, but not extraordinary, she said.

Still, poppies — California’s state flower — blanket swaths of the protected land.

“It almost looks like Cheeto dust,” she said, “like somebody had Cheetos on their fingers and just smeared it on the landscape.”

Poppies here have typically peaked around mid-April, but variable weather in recent years has made it hard to predict, she said. Klosterman believes right now is likely the zenith.

Also blooming now: goldfields, purple grape soda lupine and owl’s clover. Wear described the latter, also purple, as looking like a “short owl with little eyes looking at you and a little beak.”

An SUV drives through blooms near the reserve. “It almost looks like … somebody had Cheetos on their fingers and just smeared it on the landscape,” said Lori Wear, an interpreter at the reserve.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

Advertisement

On Sunday, Klosterman experienced the blooms for himself, using his technology as a guide.

It offers predictions in two forms. The first is the amount of the valley — shown in a satellite image — covered in poppies and goldfields, expressed as a percentage. The other is an overlay of orange and yellow splotches on the land.

The map showed a fairly high concentration of poppies near a stretch of Highway 138. He went there and, lo and behold, vibrant flowers awaited him. He sent proof: a smiling selfie in front of a sea of blossoms.

Klosterman’s tool may help answer arguably more complex questions than poppy or no poppy, such as a more precise understanding of the conditions the flowers need to thrive.

Experts know rain is key, but it’s more complicated than that.

Steve Klosterman takes a selfie in a field of California poppies.

(Steve Klosterman)

Heavy rain can supercharge invasive grasses, crowding out the blooms. Natives actually tend to do better after several years of drought, once invasives not adapted to the arid climate die out. That’s what led to an epic superbloom in 2017, Joan Dudney, an assistant professor of forest ecology at UC Santa Barbara, told The Times in 2024.

Klosterman wondered if the recent heatwave would desiccate them. But his model didn’t show that, and neither did his trip. So it’s possible other factors play a significant role in their persistence, such as length of day.

The model could also shed light on what could happen to the flowers as the climate warms. Will they migrate to the north? Will there be fewer blooms?

To game that out, Klosterman said you could invent and plug in a weather forecast with higher temperatures.

For now, Klosterman’s forecast is limited to the Antelope Valley. But if it expands to other areas, and other flower types, it could help people like Karina Silva.

Silva woke up at 5 a.m. last Wednesday to travel from her Las Vegas home to Death Valley National Park, hoping to beat the heat and the crowds to the superbloom.

But several hours later, she and her husband, David, were still trying to find it.

The hillside behind her was sprinkled with desert golds, but the display fell short of the riotous eruption of flowers posted on social media. The superbloom ended in early March, according to park officials.

“I was just thinking it was going to be this explosion of different colors,” Silva said by the side of the road overlooking Badwater Basin.

Everywhere you look these days, the landscape is clogged with confidence men: People with limited experience landing high-ranking government roles. Networks helmed by leaders with scant broadcasting experience. Wellness empires built by entrepreneurs without medical training. An arrogant acquaintance whose presence you find thrilling, maybe.

Perhaps you, too, have noticed the decline in humble brags and performative apologies on social media? A concurrent rise in unshakable self-assurance, unsolicited advice and provocative hot takes? The overqualified don’t hesitate to remind you of their résumé; the underqualified declare themselves authorities; the appropriately qualified claim that their email job is “saving lives.”

If ChatGPT can replace us while insisting that there are only two Rs in the word “strawberry,” it’s no wonder some see the time for a spiky new affect.

“Everyone’s trying influencing; everyone’s paywalling their Substacks,” said Gutes Guterman, 29, a founder of the magazine Byline. “You have to seem like an expert for people to believe in you.”

Amelia Dimoldenberg, a comedian who has made a career out of charming celebrities in her YouTube video series “Chicken Shop Date,” was an early adopter. Deploying the attitude — perhaps the natural register of flirtation — to great effect, she reliably convinces her A-list guests that they are probably a little bit in love with her.

And it has a natural progenitor in drag and hip-hop culture, where reads, diss tracks and storied beefs are founded on inflated egos. It’s the inner voice that drives someone to put out a song titled “I Am a God” and set out to conquer other industries.

Still, it used to be that “impostor syndrome” dominated conversations, the anxious stance of millennials with adult responsibilities and women leading corporate workplaces trying not to rankle. Even if you felt deserving of accolades, the social graces of the time required the expression of modesty.

Now, in an era of aggressively handsome incels and macho political posturing, cultivated humility feels trite. A younger generation, coming out of high school and college in Covid lockdown, feels less beholden to dampening their light. Who has time for affected meekness when playing the braggart not only tickles the soul, but has the potential to convince others of one’s own greatness?

“You’re standing on the ledge, wondering, ‘Should I dive in?’” said the actor and comedian Ivy Wolk on an episode of the popular TikTok show “Subway Takes,” summing up the potential pitfalls of self-doubt. At the same time, she added, other people are coming up behind you “ready to jump.”

Maybe It’s Fun?

It’s partly a product of a new media environment. On platforms like Substack and TikTok, where success relies on convincing others to invest in your singular personality, showing vulnerability or doubt can be risky. Whether it’s posting about a reading series at your local bar or achieving internet notoriety by instructing young men on how to become “gigachads,” these ventures require being bullish on one’s own value.

At its least offensive, toxic confidence is low stakes and entertaining. It’s newsletter writers filling your inbox with unsolicited gift guides and dishy, unedited diary entries. It’s that mediocre actor you barely dated starting a podcast with a paywall and calling herself a political pundit. It is the author Lisa Taddeo directing a post on Instagram to the winners of a fellowship she had been not been granted: “I’ll be watching what you do. I hope it’s better than what I do. But I don’t think it will be. Because what I’m doing is going to be EXCEPTIONAL.”

It’s whatever drives the chaos agents in your orbit to become life coaches.

Perhaps a simple truth is that toxic confidence is charming if you like the person and intolerable if you don’t.

Consider Amanda Frances, a new cast member of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” who has embraced the moniker of “Money Queen” and says she made her fortune selling money manifestation courses.

“I had no formal business experience,” she told her castmate Bozoma Saint John, the first Black C-suite executive at Netflix, over lunch. “I found out I had a gift around, like, the energetic part of money.”

Later, Ms. Saint John gossiped to another castmate, Rachel Zoe, about the interaction: “You’ve never had a job before, so how are you telling people how to get money?”

All of this bravado probably owes something to President Trump, who is known for — among other swaggering displays — using superlatives to boast of his intelligence.

“Nobody knows more about taxes than me, maybe in the history of the world,” he once claimed, for example.

Rarely does Mr. Trump shy from holding forth in speeches and free-associative monologues beyond those typical of presidents. It has become a modus operandi for his administration. Last September, for example, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth summoned hundreds of the U.S. military’s top officials to the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va., for a widely broadcast, in-person meeting.

Highly decorated admirals and generals sat stone-faced as Mr. Hegseth delivered a nearly hourlong speech. He concluded the address by warning enemies abroad with the acronym “FAFO” — language more commonly found in online circles than in formal military settings, roughly translating to “mess around and find out.”

The proclamation was met with minimal audience response — a lonely woo from the crowd — and the assembly was later described as a “waste of time” by former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. Senate Democrats estimated the event’s cost at roughly $6 million in taxpayer funds.

Borrowed Ego

If we occasionally find ourselves in the thrall to confidence men, it may be because we desire a bit of what they have.

Looking up to someone bold and brash can give one “that feeling of borrowing ego strength,” said Rachel Easterly, a psychotherapist based in Brooklyn. She referred to narcissism in children, an otherwise normal phase of childhood development.

“It’s very frightening to be a small, helpless person — you’re in a world where you don’t have a lot of power, so you compensate with this defense,” Ms. Easterly said. “It can happen on a societal level.” When Freud, Donald Winnicott and others were developing their theories on why people were drawn to cults of personality, she said, it was “in the context of societal collapse and war.”

“We are feeling similar sorts of existential dread as adults now,” she added, “in terms of nihilism in our culture, climate change, income inequality.”

That may be why so many were drawn to “Marty Supreme,” last year’s blockbuster about a striving table tennis wunderkind, and captivated by Timothée Chalamet’s brashness in promoting it.

“This is probably my best performance, you know, and it’s been like seven, eight years that I feel like I’ve been handing in really, really committed, top-of-the-line performances,” Mr. Chalamet, the film’s lead, said in an interview last year.

“This is really some top-level stuff,” he added, using an expletive.

Mr. Chalamet collected a Golden Globe and a Critics Choice Award for his portrayal of Marty. But by the time the Academy Awards rolled around, he had gotten a bit too comfortable in the culture’s embrace of his toxic confidence, and it quickly turned Icarian.

In a sit-down with the actor Matthew McConaughey, Mr. Chalamet claimed that “no one cares about” opera and ballet. It didn’t seem to occur to him to backtrack or to try to reassure members of those communities of his admiration. Instead, he doubled down, taking aim at artists’ lack of income: “I just lost 14 cents in viewership.”

Punching down is one way to make these high levels of confidence less charming. Those who manage to pull it off tend to be those who are not enjoying their success at another’s expense. Light ribbing is passable.

At the Winter Olympics in Milan, the Chinese freestyle skier Eileen Gu exhibited a bubblier version of toxic confidence as she described what it was like to be inside her own head (“not a bad place to be”) and what she would tell her younger self (“I would love me, and that’s the biggest flex of all time”). She was also honest about the intensive routines she maintains so that she can compete in the Olympics, study quantum physics at Stanford and model with IMG — and the enormous pressure she puts on herself to keep it all up.

That makes it difficult to argue that moments like this are unearned: After winning gold in the women’s halfpipe and two additional silver medals this winter, a reporter asked if she considered her achievements “two silvers gained” or “two golds lost.”

She broke into laughter: “I am the most decorated female free skier in history.”

Don’t Be Coy

For those who aren’t multihyphenate Olympians, it’s possible that beneath the slick veneer of seemingly absolute assurance remains the same anxious, uncertain person merely following the new social dictates of the moment.

“I genuinely don’t know if everyone believes in themselves as much as they say they do, but I think it’s sort of the only option,” said Ms. Guterman, the magazine founder, who described herself as “appropriately” confident. “Because if you don’t really believe in yourself right now, you don’t really have anything going for you.”

The mentality seems to have helped Ms. Wolk. After being forced to delete her social media by a cable network as a teenager, she kept posting anyway, quickly gaining half a million followers. Last year, after a turn in the film “Anora,” Ms. Wolk, now 21, portrayed a brutally assertive, pigtailed motel clerk in the A24 mommy-horror flick “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” working alongside ASAP Rocky and Rose Byrne.

If you have a goal, it doesn’t serve you to be coy about it, Ms. Wolk said over the phone. “You can’t lie down and hope that opportunities just come up,” she said. “You have to go out and grab it and say yes.” •

Share this with someone who needs more toxic confidence.

Toxic

Confidence

On the way home, I stop by one of my watering holes for cocktails and a light meal. At this one, happy hour is frequented by local folks — a few of them salty dogs from the marina nearby. Once the bartender spots me, she starts preparing a margarita — with lots of love, as she likes to describe it.

Scanning the bar for a seat, I see a young woman engaging with the regulars. She is attractive: blond, blue eyes, soft facial features, petite and in good physical shape, and smartly dressed, a rarity at this Marina del Rey joint. She has a captivating smile and, as I soon find out, she’s funny and a good storyteller.

I sit next to her, and in between sips and bites, I learn a few things. She grew up in Los Angeles, and now lives abroad and is on a visit, checking up on her mom. She had plans for a ladies’ night out but that changed when her friend had to attend to a last-minute emergency.

“Well, how’s the ceviche?” she asks.

“So-so. The short rib tacos are tastier,” I say, taking a bite.

“How about the margarita?”

“Boozy. I make them better,” I say.

“Hmm.”

Observing her easy chat with the bartender about drinks is fun, as I appreciate people who are curious about options and details.

Soon a margarita arrives. “Boozy is good,” she says.

I laugh.

We continue chatting and slowly reach a moment where our stories are easy and playful. She is curious about my accent. I tell her about my formative years in Lima, Peru, and my family’s adventures relocating to the U.S. We also talk about places we’ve been and favorite destinations we’d like to explore.

After I finish my second drink, the check arrives.

“Well, it’s been fun, and now I’m taking the show on the road!” I tell her.

She looks at me flirtatiously and asks: “Can I come along?”

“I’m just going home.”

With a wink, she says, “I hear the margaritas are killers.”

Giggling, we get into our cars, and she follows me home.

In my loft, everything catches her eye: books, art, pictures, CDs, liquor cabinet, furniture, the colors of the walls. She is having fun, but the thought that perhaps she is scoping the place for robbery crosses my mind.

As I prepare our drinks, she asks about my life.

A fortunate man, I had a fulfilling and challenging career as an audio engineer. I traveled the world recording music, supported coverage of news events and various cultural and scientific expeditions. I learned along the way and contributed to a better understanding of the human experience with reports and stories aired on public radio.

These days I enjoy “full-time living” (my moniker for retirement): golfing, tennis, hiking, travel, reading, writing, cooking, music and happy hour.

With drinks at the ready, we toast to our chance meeting.

“Yummy. This is the tastiest margarita,” she says after her first sip.

We move to the living area, and looking over my eclectic CD collection, we talk about music we like. For fun, we start playing DJ, listening to handpicked selections on the couch. When Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It” plays, she holds my hand and asks: “Would you join me for a dance?”

We get up and sway to the groove, and as we get closer, our eyes meet. Then she says: “Be sweet to me.”

We kiss long and hard, and when my hand touches her back, I hear a sigh.

“Wakey wakey, sailor,” she says, caressing my tummy.

“Wow! You’re delicious trouble,” I say, half-awaken.

“I think we broke a record,” she tells me, smiling and playing with her hair.

Pulling her closer, we embrace, her head resting on my chest, and in silence, we breathe our scent and hear the beating of our hearts.

It’s the middle of the night, and she has to go. We get up, and I start on an omelet as she gets ready.

She joins me in the kitchen, and as we eat, she talks about her life: about her mom, work and a love relationship needing contemplation. “A work in progress,” she says about sorting through some difficulties with her partner.

Looking at her, I’m listening, loving the moment, thankful we are living it and confiding comfortably.

Now it’s time to go, and giggling over nothing, we walk to her car.

I ask her to text me when she gets to her mom’s. She gives me a thumbs up, and with a kiss and a warm hug, we say goodbye. Then I watch her drive up the exit ramp into the night.

I turn around and feel alive! So much so that I skip back to my place.

Now, sitting on the couch with eyes closed, my thoughts take me back 45 years when I was at Georgetown University and met the woman who became my wife.

How magical it all had been: the way we smiled at each other, the coquettish small talk, and the tender sound of our voices. It led to lovemaking, courtship, falling in love, marriage and many years of growing up and building a life together. Unfortunately, we grew apart, and after 16 years, it ended in divorce. And I have remained single since.

Tonight, out of the blue, that magic feeling from long ago returns with this enchanting woman! A gift: from my lucky stars and Father Time.

My cell dings: “Delicious Trouble checking in. Home safe.”

“So fun and special to have met you xo,” I reply.

The author is a retired audio engineer who lives in Los Angeles.

L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.