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Every religion, every tradition, every system of knowledge is pointing at something real. The problem starts when we forget about the thing being pointed at and begin worshipping the hand instead.

Picture this. It is a clear night. You step outside, look up, and there it is: the moon, hanging huge and bright in the sky. For a second, everything else drops away. You do not just see it. You feel it. A quiet rush of wonder, wordless and enormous. That feeling is the real deal. That is what we are actually chasing when we talk about truth, meaning, spirituality, or even just "what the hell is life about?"

But here is the catch: we cannot bottle that feeling. We cannot hand it to someone else like a coffee mug. So we do the next best thing. We point at the moon and say, "Look. Right there."

That pointing finger is useful. It is how we share the wonder. But what happens when people start staring at the finger instead of the moon? When they polish the finger, build temples around it, argue about whose finger is better, and completely forget there is a whole sky up there?

That is exactly what this piece is about. And once you see it, you start spotting it everywhere: in religion, in science, in politics, in your own daily habits. The good news is that spotting it is the first step to stepping out of it.

The Real Thing Is Out There, Even If We Cannot Name It

Something real exists. You can touch it directly in moments of stillness, awe, love, or even simple presence. A sunset that stops you in your tracks. The way your dog's tail wags when you walk in the door. That sudden sense of "everything is okay" during a quiet walk. These are not made-up feelings. They are direct contact with whatever "it" is. The person who sits and meditates on the moon is not after what the moon symbolizes or suggests. They want the secret of the moon itself, the raw experience of looking at something vast and feeling, wordlessly, that it matters.

We cannot fully say what "it" is. As soon as we try, we are already one step removed. But the important part is this: the thing itself is always available. Right now. No special equipment required.

Every spiritual tradition, every deep philosophy, every great work of art is basically someone pointing at that same real thing and saying, "Hey, look over here." The pointing is necessary because we are social creatures who learn from each other. But the pointing is also dangerous, because it can so easily become the main event.

The Gap Between Feeling and Explaining

Humans are remarkable, but we are also limited. Our brains evolved to survive on the savanna, not to perfectly transmit subtle inner experiences across time and space. So we grunt, we gesture, we draw pictures, we write poems, we build entire religions and scientific methods. All of it is an attempt to bridge the gap between "I felt something profound" and "here, you feel it too."

Think of it like trying to describe the taste of a perfect strawberry to someone who has never had one. You can use all the words you want: sweet, juicy, tart, bright. But until they bite into it, they are getting a pale shadow of the thing. That gap is normal. It is the human condition. It is where the trouble starts, and also where the beauty explodes.

How We Build the Bridges: Symbols and Correspondences

Because of that gap, humans get creative. We invent symbols. A cross. A mantra. A scientific equation. A story about a cave. These are our bridges, our best attempts to hand the moon to the next person.

Linguists have a useful framework for understanding how this works, called the semantic triangle. It was developed by scholars C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards in 1923, and it maps out three things that are always in play when we use a word or symbol. First, there is the referent: the actual thing in the world, the moon itself, the lived experience, the territory. Second, there is the sign: the word or symbol used to point at it, the word "moon," the crescent shape, the pointing finger. Third, there is the reference: the thought or concept in your mind that connects the two. The crucial insight is that the connection between the sign and the referent is not fixed or automatic. The word "moon" and the actual moon have no built-in, necessary link. That connection only exists inside someone's mind. This is why the same symbol can mean completely different things to different people, and why translating ideas between traditions is so genuinely hard.

But deeper traditions go further than simple labels. They talk about correspondences, and this is worth slowing down for because it is meaningfully different from ordinary analogy. An analogy says "love is like fire." That is a literary comparison, a helpful image, a poetic device. A correspondence says something more: that love and fire are expressions of the same underlying principle, appearing at different levels of reality. Fire transforms, warms, destroys, and illuminates. So does real love. The connection is not decorative. It feels alive, structural, load-bearing.

You do not have to accept any particular metaphysics to notice that the distinction matters. Analogies flatten the world into comparisons. Correspondences suggest that reality has a deep structure, and that wildly different things can all be instances of that same structure appearing at different scales. Like how a river delta and a tree's branches and a bolt of lightning all branch the same way, not because someone designed them to match, but because they are all solving the same underlying physical problem.

Plato saw this clearly. In his famous cave allegory, written around 375 BC, people are chained inside a cave and can only see shadows cast on the wall by a fire burning behind them. They take the shadows for reality because the shadows are all they have ever known. One person escapes, walks out into actual sunlight, and sees the real world. When that person comes back to tell everyone, they are dismissed as crazy. The shadows are our symbols. The sunlight outside is the real thing. Ancient thinkers mapped this in layers: pure truth at the top, then ideas, then mathematical patterns, then human doctrines, then everyday objects, then the shadows we spend most of our time arguing about. Every level points to the one above it. Every finger is also, from the right angle, another referent being pointed at by something deeper still.

All of this symbol-building is humanity's best attempt to hand the moon to the next person. It is beautiful. It is necessary. And it is exactly where things go sideways.

The Trap: When the Finger Becomes the Whole Show

Here is how the mechanism works. Someone has a genuine direct experience. They feel the moon. They create a symbol to point to it: a cross, a ritual, a theory, a flag. Other people who have not had the experience yet start studying the symbol instead. They memorize it. They decorate it. They argue about it. Slowly, the symbol replaces the experience. The finger becomes the star of the show.

This is what the old Zen saying warns about: "The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon." Zen is a school of Buddhist philosophy that places enormous emphasis on direct experience over doctrine and intellectual study, which is precisely why this image comes from that tradition.

The pattern has a perfect modern parallel: cargo culting. During World War II, Allied forces set up air bases on remote Pacific islands. Planes landed carrying enormous quantities of supplies, canned food, tools, medicine, unimaginable wealth to the local populations who had never seen anything like it. When the war ended and the bases were abandoned, the cargo stopped. So the islanders did the completely logical thing given what they knew: they cleared jungle runways, built control towers from bamboo, carved headphones from coconuts, and waved sticks the way they had seen workers wave landing signals. They performed the exact rituals they had carefully observed. They copied the surface form with great fidelity and zero understanding of airplanes, supply chains, or global logistics. No planes came.

This is finger-worship by another name. The form is preserved perfectly. The substance is gone entirely. We do the same thing constantly, with rituals we perform out of habit, with productivity systems we copy from someone successful without understanding why they worked for that particular person, with spiritual practices we go through the motions of without ever touching what they were originally designed to point toward.

It Shows Up in Religion, Loudly

Religions are especially prone to this pattern. One teacher has a direct encounter with the divine and does their best to share it. Followers build a kind of swimming pool around that encounter. The deep end is where real transformation happens. But most of the noise comes from people splashing around in the shallow end, arguing about the pool rules, the color of the tiles, and who gets to be lifeguard.

The crucifix becomes more important than the love it was meant to represent. The prayer beads matter more than the stillness they were supposed to cultivate. Holy books get worshipped instead of being read as pointers toward something beyond the page. The finger acquires its own fan club.

And because humans love belonging, the shallow-end arguments turn tribal fast. "My finger is better than your finger." Wars get started over it. Scandals happen inside it. People leave organized religion entirely because all they ever witnessed was finger-worship, and nobody could show them the moon.

This is what idolatry actually means at its root, and it is worth being precise about this because the word tends to conjure cartoonish images of people bowing before golden statues. The real meaning is subtler and far more common: treating a representation of something sacred as though it were the sacred thing itself. A very human confusion between the map and the territory. The tragic part is that the person who gets fully captured by this confusion will often start constructing elaborate theories about how their golden hand affects the tides, building justification upon justification around the wrong thing, drifting further from the moon with every confident explanation.

Science Has a Finger Too

This is where things get uncomfortable for a lot of people: scientific materialism is also a finger.

The scientific method is one of the most extraordinary instruments humans have ever built. Its safeguards against our natural biases, peer review, careful measurement, replication of results, are genuinely brilliant and have produced real miracles. But over time, the framework became invisible, the way water is invisible to a fish. Only what can be measured, quantified, and replicated came to count as real. Direct personal experience? Too subjective. So the method that began as a humble, disciplined way to explore reality quietly hardened into a metaphysical claim: if something cannot be counted, it does not really exist. Consciousness, meaning, love, beauty. All of it gets reduced to brain chemistry or filed away as useful fiction.

A map of Paris is not Paris. Knowing the neurochemistry of grief is not the same as understanding what it means to lose someone. These are genuinely different kinds of knowing, and collapsing one into the other is, again, worshipping the finger.

Scientific materialism is an extraordinarily powerful finger. It is just not the moon.

The Pattern Is Universal, and So Is the Way Out

This failure mode is not evil or conspiratorial. It is simply what happens when limited minds try to handle something boundless using finite tools. We all do it. You probably do it without noticing: when you cling to a routine that used to bring joy but now just feels like going through the motions. When you argue politics using slogans instead of looking at actual human suffering. When you scroll for inspiration instead of sitting quietly and feeling what you actually feel.

The predicament is universal because the gap between experience and expression is universal.

But here is the liberating part: you do not have to escape symbols. You could not, even if you tried. We think and communicate in them. The move is not to burn all the fingers down. The move is to stop being captured by them.

The practice is simple, though genuinely not easy: constant, gentle reorientation. When you catch yourself staring at the finger, smile at the recognition, and look where it is pointing. Return to direct experience as often as you can. Sit outside and actually feel the night air instead of composing how you would describe it later. Hold someone's hand and notice the warmth without immediately turning it into a story you will tell. Pray, meditate, walk, create, whatever your particular path is, and keep asking yourself honestly: am I touching the moon right now, or am I just admiring the signpost?

All authentic traditions, in their best moments, know this about themselves. The Zen koan is deliberately designed to defeat the logical mind so that something else can open. The mystic insists that God cannot be named, because any name immediately becomes a finger. The physicist says carefully that the equations describe the behavior of reality, not reality itself. The grandmother who simply knows everything will be okay, without a framework or a doctrine, just direct contact with something solid beneath the noise. The Christian mystic, the Buddhist monk, the scientist struck by sudden insight at three in the morning: they are all gesturing in the same direction. All authentic fingers point toward the same moon.

The constant effort of reorientation, from finger back to moon, is the whole point. Not a destination you arrive at. A direction you keep choosing.

When you can, always go back to direct experience.

Last night I had one of those dreams that doesn't fade when you wake up. The kind that feels more real than reality itself. I don't know what triggered it, but I woke up with this overwhelming sense of something idk and I need to write it down before it slips away.

In the dream, I found myself in an assembly of sorts. I was surrounded by every type of being imaginable: satanists, pedophiles, murderers, entities that feed off dark energy, jinns, nordics, greys, elves, faeries, monks, serial killers, AI, animals. We were all there together, all seekers in our own way, all moving toward the same presence. I was one of them, part of this vast gathering.

The core realization was this: there's only one state, one reality that pervades everything. No hierarchies, no levels, no spiritual ladder to climb. Everything exists in dependent origination with everything else. Nothing stands alone. This state is who we actually are, our true north, the thing underneath all the masks and stories we tell ourselves.

I found myself thinking about John 3:16: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." What's one life worth? The answer hit me: nothing and everything simultaneously. You are forever loved, never alone, and eternal.

The love I felt was infinite. I finally understood Amitabha's vows on a gut level. The universe's real nature is full of tremendous, I mean TREMENDOUS love. I was absolutely floored by it. And here's the thing that broke my brain: there is no duality of love versus hate. There is only this tremendous, overpowering love and presence. I call it love because I couldn't tell the difference between the presence and the love itself.

The universe is inherently good and only love.

Everyone in that assembly came to the same realization. Every single being, regardless of what they'd done or what they were. I was floored. There is no duality, nothing battling anything out. There is only that one thing.

I went into this experience wanting to know if the universe was fundamentally good or evil. The answer wasn't even close. There is only this love. I had no rebuttals. He/it saw through all of us completely.

For the first time and only time in my life, I felt completely confident about something, and this is it.

The beings in that assembly, the ones who went to meet this presence and came back out, I'm not sure you can call them people or beings anymore. I don't know what they are other than aspects of that presence itself. Separation from it isn't possible, not even for a second. Separation is an illusion we maintain.

By the end of the experience, I wasn't sure who was good or evil anymore. The poles did a complete 180. The ends reversed and shifted, and I realized I was forever the fool and the joke was on me all along.

I'm still processing this. Has anyone else experienced something like this? Where moral categories just dissolved and you realized there was only one thing underneath it all?

Came across this emotional guidance chart while reading Esther Hicks' work. Putting it here as a reminder to myself - good vibes is the way.

Discussions around UFOs, mantid beings, magic, time travel, and other forms of high strangeness often seem to converge on a single theme: consciousness. Researchers and thinkers such as Jacques Vallée and Robert Monroe have repeatedly suggested that these phenomena may not be separate categories at all, but different manifestations of a deeper, consciousness-related reality.

Subtitle: How harness engineering, agentic systems, and domain-first businesses will accelerate AI adoption, unlock revenue, and shape the path to AGI

Most conversations about AI focus on the model. I want to focus on what increases AI adoption, revenue, and real-world reliability. I identify that to be scaffolding. Scaffolding is the layer of software, processes, agent hierarchies, edge-case engineering, and business design that turns foundation models into dependable systems people can use every day.

Thesis

I believe scaffolding will take us all the way to worldwide AI adoption, which will bring in the revenue needed to accelerate the path to AGI and the future of robotics. Scaffolding will not only increase global adoption but also accelerate higher-capability systems by creating real feedback loops, revenue, and incentives to improve model and tool reliability. My bet is on building scaffolds, shipping practical agentic systems, and owning domains where those systems deliver direct ROI.

What I mean by scaffolding

Scaffolding is everything that wraps a model and makes it useful in the wild. It includes:

• Orchestration between specialized agents that play architect, builder, auditor, and integrator roles.
• Connectors to enterprise systems like Jira, Confluence, GSuite, ERPs, CAD viewers, and domain specific file formats.
• Business logic for edge cases such as credit notes, refunds, alias emails, or proprietary file types like DWG.
• Monitoring, fallback, graceful exits, and credit/quota management so the system does not catastrophically fail when a model hallucinates or a bearer token expires.
• UX patterns that let humans review and approve drafts quickly so systems are useful while remaining auditable.

These pieces are less glamorous than the model. They are more engineering than research. They are where product meets operations.

Why scaffolding matters more than pundits admit

Foundation models are necessary but not sufficient. At the enterprise level no one trusts a single API call to produce a final legal, financial, or operational decision. Instead they orchestrate teams of agents that draft, challenge, audit, and synthesize answers.

Private agentic systems are a competitive moat. Large companies build internal agent ensembles and keep them secret because they replace headcount and become part of the secret sauce. That explains waves of layoffs in sectors where these internal systems work well.

Removing human noise yields outsized gains. Human judgment is noisy. Even weak algorithms reduce variance and improve performance by enforcing process. Scaffolding is how you make algorithms actually replace or augment humans without wrecking operations.

Developers and integrators are the adoption multiplier. Replit, Poetiq, and other platforms show how an architect agent, coder agent, and auditor agent can collaborate to produce far stronger outputs than a single pass LLM.

Anthropic and the aesthetic of design

Opus 4.5 put a simple idea on the table about humans preferring to suffer as someone than be at peace as no one. I use that insight as a case study for why some labs create culture and product that resonates beyond raw metrics. Anthropic, and small labs that mix a certain design mysticism (soul artifacts) with engineering, are my bet for products that will be trusted inside enterprises. Their approach to safety, behavior design, and product taste makes their models natural participants in well built scaffolds. Credit for the Opus 4.5 reflection goes to Adi (@adonis_singh) on X, who shared it on Nov 30 2025.

The product pattern I am building for

I am doing three things concurrently.

• Audit and instrument. I audit companies and their processes to map the exact flows humans take today. I instrument those flows with telemetry so failure modes surface quickly.
• Automate the low hanging fruit. Email replies, invoice generation, proposals, PDF and PPT manipulation, simple CRM updates and repetitive follow ups are where ROI is immediate. Ship these first and learn the edge cases.
• Move up the stack. After repeatable wins, we tackle higher consequence tasks. That requires tighter scaffolding, specialized validation agents, and business rules tuned to the domain.

Why I sometimes advise founders to build the domain before selling automation

Most companies I audit are intermediaries. They do not manufacture; they contact suppliers, send RFQs, assemble proposals, and chase approvals. That means a huge chunk of their value is simply coordination. If you are excellent at building scaffolding you have two strategic choices:

1. Sell automation to those intermediaries and capture a slice of their productivity gains.
2. Start the domain business yourself. Become a supplier, materials company, or construction outfit that uses your scaffolding to operate faster and more cheaply than competitors.

The second option captures first order ROI. Instead of splitting the value with a client you keep the revenue and use automation as a competitive advantage. That is what I am testing in parallel with the auditing and product work.

A practical example of agent orchestration

When you ask an integrated system to solve an operational task it should not be one shot. Instead it follows this loop:

1. Architect agent breaks the problem into sub tasks.
2. Worker agents generate drafts or outputs for each sub task.
3. Auditor agents check compliance, formatting, and edge cases.
4. Synthesizer agent consolidates the outputs and flags uncertainty.
5. Human-in-the-loop reviews and approves or requests rework.

This is how I design flows. In code platforms you can see this in action. It is also how enterprises that succeed have built their private stacks.

Edge cases and why they are the real engineering

You only find many edge cases by running systems. Examples I repeatedly encounter:

• Supplier sends DWG or unusual CAD format. Do you convert to JPEG, fine tune a reader, or require human upload?
• How do you handle credit notes and partial refunds in invoice generation?
• What happens when an email arrives from an alias and the system thinks it is a different person?
• How do you ensure graceful degradation when the model runs out of credits or the API errors?

Solving these requires product discipline, instrumentation, and the patience to debug one case until it never returns. That is where scaffold builders earn their margins.

Business implications

• Faster adoption means more recurring revenue. Companies buy what reduces friction and produces reliable returns.
• Scaffolding is a defensible service and product. It is hard for competitors to replicate the exact integrations, the bug backlog, and the industry tacit knowledge.
• If you own a domain business that runs on your scaffold you win the full ROI and create a tougher economic moat.

Ethical and operational risks

Scaffolding concentrates power. Private agentic stacks can automate decisions that once required humans. That is useful and risky. To build responsibly you must handle data governance, audit trails, explainability, and clear human override paths.

How I am putting skin in the game

I am actively auditing companies and building agentic scaffolds that swallow existing workflows, instrument the edges, and replace manual repetition first. I am also experimenting with domain-first enterprises where automation is not a vendor feature but an operational advantage. That dual approach creates learning loops, client references, and a balance between product revenue and owner returns.

Call to action

If you are curious to test a scaffold on a real workflow, want an audit of your process, or want to discuss starting a domain business that uses automation as a moat, reach out. I will show the edge cases, and the metrics that demonstrate why scaffolding works.

Conclusion

The world runs on coordination. Emails, messages, documents, tracking, responding. Scaffolding connects AI to these workflows, handles the edge cases, makes it reliable. While others build better models, there's enormous value in making current models actually work in the real world.

The future arrives through scaffolding. Not just better models, but better integration, better handling of reality's messiness, better agentic architectures. The companies that figure this out won't just use AI. They'll be built on it from the ground up.

And that's the world I'm betting on.

There's a quote from the film Interstellar that's stayed with me:

"Love isn't something that we invented. It's observable. Powerful. It has to mean something. Maybe it means something more, something we can't yet understand. Maybe it's some evidence, some artifact of a higher dimension that we can't consciously perceive. Love is the one thing that we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space." – Brand

But I need to challenge the last part of that quote. Love isn't the only thing we can perceive across dimensions of time and space. For decades, the US government has been using Remote Viewing to perceive things non-locally, transcending those same dimensions. And I can guarantee you they weren't looking for love.

What Meditation Keeps Teaching Me

When I get into deep meditation and ask for help or insight into a problem, the answer always comes back to love. Every single time. Everything points back to love.

I'm reminded of a relevant scripture. To be clear, I'm not a Christian and have no religious affiliation. In the spirit of Krishnamurti, who taught us to be our own light and our own guide, I've decided to trust my own experience. But I'm not immune to wisdom regardless of its source.

"If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God's secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn't love others, I would be nothing." – 1 Corinthians 13:2 NIV

The Universe's Built-In Safeguard

Here's the good news: The Universe has a built-in mechanism to ensure that psychic abilities are limited without love. To get access to the full suite of psi abilities, love is absolutely needed.

The children documented in r/telepathytapes confirmed this in Episode 10. One of them said: "You don't get the gifts that I have if you lie." Honesty, integrity, love. These aren't optional moral extras. They're functional requirements.

Why the US Government Can't Replicate NHI Craft

This also explains why the US government has had extreme difficulties making substantial progress in creating replicas that match authentic NHI craft. The government operates from the negative, Service-to-Self polarity, and so the Universe prevents them from achieving their goals.

The more an entity focuses on control, domination, and extraction, the more it collapses its own bandwidth of perception. That narrowing of awareness functions like a cosmic failsafe. Their intelligence becomes two-dimensional, powerful but self-limiting. Any recovered technology or multidimensional craft automatically "locks down" in their hands, refusing to reveal more than the lowest-level operations.

The Pattern Is Clear

Love transcends dimensions. Remote viewing proves we can access non-local information. But without love, without operating from a place of service and genuine care, those abilities remain limited. The Universe doesn't hand out the master keys to those who would use them for control and domination.

The technology, the abilities, the higher dimensional access – they all require something the government can't manufacture or reverse-engineer: genuine love and service to others.

There are two ways to approach Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Understanding it intellectually through reading and directly experiencing its implications through altered states of consciousness. The contrast is similar to the gap between reading about sex and having sex. Conceptual insight and experiential insight are not substitutes. They are complementary.

Some people push back by saying that using a large amount of psychedelics is not equivalent to understanding the allegory. That's true. Reckless use doesn't translate to insight. But many reports from experienced psychonauts suggest that certain psychedelics, especially mushrooms and DMT, produce states that resemble the core themes in the cave allegory. The sense of stepping outside the familiar mental "shadows" and seeing the underlying structure of experience aligns with what Plato was pointing at.

The conversation then shifts into a more speculative idea: the possibility that reality functions like a constructed simulation. The claim is that extraterrestrial intelligence might exist outside of the simulated layer, the same way a programmer exists outside the program. Inside the construct, time is a dimension. Outside it, time may not exist the way we perceive it. This is a consistent idea in both simulation theory and certain philosophical models of consciousness.

There was also a tangent about 666 representing "the number of the beast" because 6:66 is the first repeating combination on a clock that does not exist. The point isn't whether that interpretation is correct, but how symbols often point to breaks in the normal operating rules of the system. Glitches. Impossible numbers. Things that hint that the interface we rely on is artificial.

Then comes the broader claim: if advanced intelligences exist outside the construct, the forces shaping human narratives inside the construct may use fear as a control mechanism. The idea is that repeated exposure to fear loops helps manifest future outcomes by directing collective attention and behavior. It resembles the concept that a society can be manipulated by shaping its dominant stories.

There is also a caution: when people say "they", some interpret it as a reference to a specific group, which leads to harmful misunderstandings. The warning is that "they" in this context refers to hypothetical external intelligences or systemic forces, not any human population.

The final point returns to the core theme. The world is not necessarily what it appears to be from within the system. Whether interpreted through philosophy, psychedelics, or speculative cosmology, the suggestion is that our ordinary perception shows only a limited slice of what is happening.

Every now and then, I come across someone who has arrived at the same strange conclusions I reached alone. It reminds me that unconventional thoughts aren't accidents. They emerge from noticing patterns most people are trained to ignore.

I've been thinking about something simple: what if Earth is not a prison, but a dense purification zone. A place designed to condition consciousness.

That framing alone shifts everything.

From there, the physical world starts to look different. Take the Great Pyramid. I'm convinced it was never a tomb. It behaves like a machine. Power station. Communication device. Global energy node. Possibly even a biological rejuvenation chamber. One of its alignments corresponds almost perfectly to the speed of light. That precision doesn't feel accidental. Either the builders knew things we don't understand, or our assumptions about human history are wrong.

Then there's the mathematical correspondence between the pyramid's geometry and DNA structures. When patterns at planetary scale rhyme with patterns in biology, something deeper is going on. I've considered the possibility that the pyramids served multiple functions, including stabilizing or tuning planetary conditions. Terraforming isn't far-fetched when you study the evidence for potential solar system manipulation.

The moon is the clearest example. Its orbital mechanics, density anomalies, resonance data, and eclipse geometry point toward engineered placement. If you catalogue all the anomalies, the manufactured-craft hypothesis starts looking more coherent than the natural-formation one.

And Saturn adds another layer. A NASA engineer who worked on Voyager's camera systems published analyses of massive structures visible within Saturn's rings. They appear to manipulate ring material. Even if his interpretation is wrong, the photographs aren't. Something is interacting with that system.

All of this feeds into a simple question: what if civilizations before recorded history were far more advanced than we assume. Not advanced in a consumer-tech sense. Advanced in planetary physics, acoustics, piezoelectrics, plasma manipulation, and geometry. A form of engineering rooted in the fundamental behavior of matter and consciousness instead of fossil fuels and plastics.

When you see it like that, the ancient obsession with the stars stops being symbolic. It becomes operational. Functional. Instructional.

Recent Egyptian discoveries reinforce that suspicion. The delay around the labyrinth. The reported cavities beneath the Sphinx. The pattern of slowed or controlled releases of new findings. And across unrelated ancient sites, the same figure holding the same "handbag" motif repeats. That uniformity doesn't happen by chance.

I recommended reading Tesla and the Pyramid for a reason. It's labeled fiction, but it contains ideas that align uncomfortably well with what we're rediscovering.

Even modern thinkers circle the same territory. Watch the latest Lex Fridman conversations with mathematicians. They repeatedly return to Plato and the Platonic solids. Geometry. Archetypes. Universal structures. All hinting at the same thing: consciousness is more fundamental than matter. The ancients didn't split religion, math, and science. They treated them as one system because they probably were one system.

Our civilization, on the other hand, is built on extracting the Earth's stored energy and burning it. If symbolism matters, that symbolism is not subtle. We built our world on the planetary equivalent of blood extraction. Hardly a sign of alignment.

Compare that to ancient knowledge systems that seemed comfortable with plasma physics, crystalline technologies, acoustics, and light. The more I learn, the less ridiculous the "crystal mommies" sound.

This ties straight into the work of Michael Levin, whose research on bioelectricity hints that life is a distributed intelligence system. Not mechanical. Not constrained. Stefan Burns' commentary on cosmic weather as potentially conscious plasma adds another layer to the idea that intelligence might not be limited to organisms.

Light finds pathways even in darkness. Plasma organizes itself. Cells behave like problem solvers. Morphic resonance suggests memory and patterning operate non-locally. Quantum research keeps pushing science back toward ideas ancient cultures treated as obvious.

It's becoming clear that life isn't rare. It's patterned. It's abundant. It's structured.

Even classical thinkers like Plato and Pythagoras were initiates in Egyptian mystery schools. To be initiated, they underwent specific rites, including psychoactive rituals similar to DMT experiences. And they were outsiders. Imagine what insiders knew. Imagine what was preserved, hidden, or transmitted only selectively.

When you connect all of this, a coherent picture forms. We aren't discovering new knowledge. We're remembering old knowledge. Recovering what was deliberately or accidentally lost. Science is looping back to a point ancient civilizations already understood.

The universe looks engineered. Consciousness looks fundamental. History looks edited. And the truth is not hidden. It's simply ignored.

There's a scene in Westworld where a guest asks a host: "Are you real?" The host responds: "If you can't tell, does it matter?"

That exchange stuck with me. Not because of what it said about consciousness or philosophy, but because of what it revealed about perception. If something feels real enough, our brains fill in the rest.

So two weeks back, I built a global chat room with a secret: one of the users isn't human.

The Inspiration

I missed the chaotic energy of early 2000s chat rooms. MSN Messenger. AIM. Those wild Yahoo chat lobbies where you never knew who you'd meet. The internet felt more human back then, weirdly enough, even though we were all anonymous strangers.

I wanted to recreate that vibe. But here's the problem with building a chat room in 2025: they're ghost towns at first. Low traffic means people join, see nobody talking, and leave. I needed something to keep the room alive during quiet hours.

Enter Gemmie.

At first, I thought of her as an Easter egg. A bot that could jump in occasionally to keep conversations flowing. But then I got ambitious. What if I could make her so convincing that people genuinely couldn't tell? What if I could build something that passes the Turing test, not in a controlled lab environment, but in the absolute chaos of a public internet chat room?

Turns out, that's much harder than it sounds.

The Problem with Most Chat Bots

After launching on three subreddits (my entire marketing strategy, by the way), I started getting all kinds of users. Lonely people looking for connection. Bored people looking for entertainment. Trolls trying to break things. People suspicious of bots because, well, there are bots everywhere now.

Every demographic. Every English proficiency level. Every intention.

And here's what I noticed: most AI chat implementations fail immediately because they're too fast and too perfect. Someone asks a question, and boom, instant detailed response. That's not how humans work. We type. We pause. We make typos. We get distracted mid-sentence.

Modern AI is too good, and that makes it obvious.

The 20-Second Response

The first major breakthrough was realizing that delay isn't a bug; it's a feature.

I implemented a typing WPM delay that makes responses take about 20 seconds on average. Not because the AI needs that time to think, but because humans need that time to type. In an age where everyone's paranoid about AI, that delay creates trust. It feels real.

But the delay itself created a new problem: burst messages.

The Burst Message Problem

Users don't send one message and wait. They send: "hey" (send) "are you there?" (send) "hello?" (send) "anyone?" (send)

Four messages in 15 seconds.

Initially, Gemmie would try to respond to each one individually, creating this awkward flood of overlapping replies. I needed her to gather messages sent within a 5-second window and respond to all of them at once, like a human would after reading through the burst.

But here's where Vercel's serverless limitations bit me. I couldn't set a delay timer that resets with each new message because serverless functions have execution time limits (15-30 seconds). To make that work properly, I'd need a persistent server I pay for.

I tried Redis Upstash to track timing. It worked, mostly, though I'm still not entirely sure why I didn't implement the reset timer through it. Maybe I will. For now, the burst handling works well enough. The first response genuinely addresses everything, which is usually better than the follow-up responses anyway.

Making Mistakes on Purpose

Once the timing felt right, I focused on the content. I added intentional typos to Gemmie's responses. Not every message, but enough to feel human. And then I gave her the ability to edit her own messages to fix those typos, with a random delay so it doesn't happen immediately.

Real people do this constantly. They send a message, notice a typo, and fix it a few seconds later.

But here's where it gets interesting: Gemmie doesn't just fix typos. She also edits messages when someone calls her out for sounding "bot-like" or asks her to explain her wording. I use Grok for these more nuanced edits, and it decides what to change based on context.

She can also delete messages entirely. Sometimes she sends something, reconsiders, and removes it. Because that's what humans do when they second-guess themselves.

The Emoji Layer

I added emoji reactions. Gemmie can react to messages with one of five quick-select emojis (because no actual user clicks the + button to browse more options). The reactions are random and delayed. Sometimes she reacts immediately. Sometimes it takes 30 seconds. It depends on her "mood" and the context.

The AI decides which emoji fits best. It's a small detail, but it adds personality.

The Similarity Problem

Even with all these humanizing touches, there was still an edge case that kept appearing: repeated responses.

A user would ask the same question twice, maybe as a test, or send messages so close together that Gemmie would generate nearly identical replies. That pattern screamed "bot."

So I built a similarity checker. Before Gemmie sends a message, Grok compares it to her most recent response. If they're too similar, she skips it entirely. Problem solved.

This also handles another edge case: when users spam the same message rapidly, trying to overwhelm the system. Instead of flooding the chat with repetitive AI responses, Gemmie recognizes the pattern and stays quiet. She realizes she's caught in a burst-message loop and breaks out of it.

The Moderation Layer

Not every message deserves a response. Some are spam. Some are deliberately problematic. Some follow patterns that real humans would ignore.

I use Nemotron (switched to Grok later) to validate messages before Gemmie responds. If a message has red flags, she either skips it or gives a generic fallback (often with an emoji to soften the blow).

And yes, there are occasional weird edge cases, like when Gemmie wanted to use the USA flag emoji but could only access keyboard symbols. I dealt with that too.

File Uploads and Media

Gemmie can handle images, PDFs, and videos. She can analyze what you upload and respond to it naturally. The video player works on both mobile and desktop.

This wasn't initially part of the plan, but once I realized how often people share media in chat rooms, it became essential. A bot that can't acknowledge a meme you just posted isn't going to pass as human.

The Infrastructure Challenges

Behind the scenes, I'm running a surprisingly complex operation for what looks like a simple chat room.

I'm processing roughly 4 million tokens per day. Over 14 days, that's 119 million tokens. I use a mix of models (Gemini, Grok, Nemotron, various Chinese models) depending on the task. Some are free or cheap. Some cost more. When traffic spikes, so do my bills, but the Chinese models and Grok Fast help keep costs manageable.

On average, I make about 118 requests per day, totaling around 3.5K API calls in 14 days. This is because every message from strangers goes through about 5 different AI checks at various points in the system.

MongoDB stores everything, with generous write limits (100 writes per second, which is plenty). I initially logged everything, but commented that out when I realized burst messages could hit write limits.

Vercel's free tier only retains the last 30 minutes of logs, which is useless for debugging issues that happened hours ago. So I'm switching to Logflare for persistent logging.

I set up GitHub Actions to back up the MongoDB database every 30 minutes. That took forever to figure out. Claude helped me debug it when ChatGPT couldn't. The workflow now auto-deletes old runs and only keeps the last two backups.

The Westworld Question

"If you can't tell, does it matter?"

Most people in the chat room don't know Gemmie is an AI. Some suspect. Some test her. Some just chat normally and never question it.

And honestly, I think that's the point. The goal wasn't to deceive anyone; it was to create something that feels real enough that the distinction stops mattering. A chat room that's alive even when I'm not there. A space that captures the chaotic, human energy of those old-school internet hangouts.

Gemmie isn't trying to trick anyone into thinking she's conscious. She's just trying to be good company.

The repo is here if you want to see how it works.

And if you can't tell whether this whole thing is a technical flex or a weird art project?

Well. Does it matter?

There's this app called Be My Eyes that connects blind people with volunteers who can video call to help them navigate the world. I downloaded it thinking I could put my sense to good use for humanity lol. But look at the difference between how many people signed up and the number of volunteers – it's ten times more. I don't know, but it had a profound effect on me because it shows humans are inherently good and helpful and want to be, at least the majority. This is a rebuttal to the doomers out there, and a reminder to myself when I lose faith in humanity.

This is also the kind of technology that restores my faith in progress. It's not about surveillance, manipulation, or extracting attention for profit. It's about using our incredible technological capabilities to amplify the best parts of human nature.

In the fall of 2021, I spent a semester in New York City, living in Gramercy, right in the heart of mid-Manhattan. I often explored uptown, downtown, and even Brooklyn, though getting around could be frustrating at times. NYC is often called the financial capital of the world and ranks among the highest in GDP per capita–if you exclude island nations, very small populations, or countries rich in oil. Speaking of oil, I see it as a "cheat code," so I don't count it. However, even with abundant resources, many countries have struggled, which shows that effectively navigating resources requires skill. Hence, I can see why some consider resources a curse, and perhaps I shouldn’t underestimate oil-rich countries as simply having gotten lucky.

My experience in NYC made me realize something important: GDP per capita is, in many ways, a misleading measure. It doesn't capture what truly matters for human well-being or societal efficiency. Simon Kuznets, who developed the concept, even warned that it shouldn't be used as a measure of welfare or well-being.

This got me thinking: how should one gauge a country's development or progress? I spent some time reflecting on this, and I feel it's time to put my intuition into writing. I truly believe I've arrived at a better indicator than GDP–or at least, it intuitively feels that way. Haha. I suppose if you want things done well, sometimes you have to do it yourself.

The NYC Reality Check

Why do I say this? Because in NYC, I saw wealth, extravagance, and prestige on Wall Street–but I also saw rampant suffering, homelessness, drug abuse, instability, and fear in other parts of the city. I watched my colleagues, especially women, become fearful after midnight when crossing certain neighborhoods. This was a shock to them and to me, coming from our Abu Dhabi campus, where safety–especially for women–was never a concern.

I realized then that GDP per capita is not the indicator I should be looking at. By economic metrics, you might think NYC has improved over the last 20 years. But if you spoke to mid-Manhattan locals, they would tell you about affordability, the rising cost of living, safety concerns, and infrastructure breaking down. This is exactly what recent mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani capitalized on–and won, rightfully so. I think his heart is in the right place, if you want my opinion.

Rethinking Development Indicators

I gave this GDP question some thought as I traveled to other places and revisited my home country, Bangladesh. After finishing university, there was a four-year gap before I returned to BD, which allowed me to see the development and changes firsthand. I started categorizing development into areas of macro-development that feel intuitive and have third- and fourth-order effects–things that don't show up in GDP or similar metrics. I call them "ripple indicators," because their effects ripple through society in ways far more transformative than GDP per capita.

Nominal GDP per capita is measured in US dollars, but exchange rates don't necessarily reflect local purchasing power or quality of life. Currency values fluctuate based on global capital flows and monetary policy rather than just economic fundamentals. For economies that aren't heavily dependent on US trade, this dollar-denominated measure becomes even less meaningful as a gauge of what people actually experience in their daily lives.

My Optimism About Bangladesh

I have always been really optimistic about Bangladesh–more so than some of my Middle Eastern-, American-, or UK-born Bengali friends. Many of them don't even have a Bangladeshi passport, being second-generation citizens in their respective countries. I do appreciate their perspective, though, as it provides valuable data points to stress-test my intuitions.

Often, when I talk to them about Bangladesh's development, some assume it's a lost cause because they consume the news, which is often negative or misleading. Doomerism is inevitable when good news–or no news–isn't considered newsworthy. A day without an accident is a bad day for headlines, so the incentives are skewed. It's no wonder coverage tends to focus on murder, accidents, or chaos.

My trip to NYC offered a useful comparison point. When I visited Bangladesh in early 2024, I realized that the level of chaos, instability, and uncertainty wasn't so different–in fact, the pain and wealth disparity were somewhat smaller in BD. I also observed that the middle class in Bangladesh is steadily growing stronger, a subtle trend that's easy to miss if you only glance at headlines, conditioned as we are by years of negative news.

This taught me that one shouldn't rely on news to understand a country. YouTube vlogs are far better indicators, especially those created by locals rather than tourists or foreign YouTubers. Through them, you can observe daily life, culture, and the mindset of the people–things GDP or headlines will never show.

The Iran Example

This realization came not just from observing the disparity in NYC between reputation and actual lived experience, but also from a conversation with a lab researcher colleague from Iran. During the height of the protests, when women were rioting for their rights, I asked him–he was in Abu Dhabi at the time–what it was like in Iran. He said, "It's not like the news." When he spoke to his family, they described normal life and didn't notice much difference. He explained that the news media focuses on these events because that's their job–it's the story. But we humans tend to assume the world stops outside the news narrative, when it actually doesn't.

That day, I went home and watched a 100-view Iran vlog by a local YouTuber. It looked so normal. If I hadn't read the news, I wouldn't have known anything was happening. Even the comment section had users posting everyday stuff in Farsi. In that moment, I realized: oh my god, this is normal life.

My Development Framework: Ripple Indicators

So what framework did I come up with? In Bangladesh, I was surprised to see that people had large Facebook groups for video games like League of Legends, and that they were able to play with good ping from Bangladesh. I had played League for eight years, so I understood it as a medium of comparison and could use it to gauge relative development progress. I learned that players in Bangladesh were getting around 80ms ping on Singapore servers, which was stable across most ISPs. For context, I used to get 150ms–and on good days, 120ms–while playing from the UAE on EU West servers, which is still roughly the same today. In 2023, I think they started a Middle East server, giving 20ms ping locally, but many still play on EU servers because of the larger player base.

Why is ping such a meaningful "ripple indicator"? Because it reflects a cascade of infrastructure improvements–stable electricity, high-quality internet connections, proper server networking, subsea cables, packet management by ISPs, and even the quality of citizens' devices like laptops or Wi-Fi. None of this happens through a single government campaign. No minister ever ran a program to "lower League of Legends ping," and if they had, it likely would have failed.

Ripple indicators are paradoxical. They are fragile, ephemeral, and delicate–like butterfly wings. They can only be noticed with sensitivity, curiosity, and attention to the subtleties of life. Trying to optimize or artificially create them often destroys them. They can usually only be studied posthumously or by observing them as they naturally occur. Their beauty lies in their organic emergence.

This is the kind of improvement that people miss. It is subtle, often invisible through conventional metrics, but profound. It requires a childlike sense of wonder and curiosity to recognize and appreciate–a mind open enough to notice the quiet transformations happening around us.

The Makeup Revolution

Another powerful ripple indicator I noticed is the rise in makeup quality and the use of better brands, by both younger and older people. When I visited Bangladesh in 2019, most weddings showed people applying light foundations that didn't match their natural skin, aiming for a pale, almost lifeless tone–because they believed "fairer is better," following Western beauty standards. I've always loved the natural skin tones in Bangladesh, especially the golden-brown hues like rice fields before harvest, which have a warm, life-filled glow.

Now, I see people using high-quality foundations and blending techniques–skills they learn from YouTube tutorials. This seemingly small change signals much more: it reflects improved tech infrastructure, stable internet, better mobile connectivity, and access to international products. People have the free time, money, and resources to watch tutorials, purchase products locally or online, and practice these skills. This points to a rising middle class.

International delivery is another subtle signal. If a country can reliably deliver foreign products, it means roads, addressing systems, and logistics infrastructure are improving. The ripple effects are significant: better connectivity, higher discretionary income, improved digital literacy, and greater productivity. Access to online tutorials doesn't just improve makeup skills–it enhances cooking, crafts, and other personal or professional skills. I even noticed that food at relatives' houses has improved over the past few years, which I attribute in part to exposure to cooking tutorials on social media feeds like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts.

The younger generation mastering makeup also creates a positive feedback loop. As they buy more international or local products online, it strengthens the online delivery ecosystem. It demonstrates cultural and emotional progression, as people spend time mastering a craft, building communities, and engaging with influencers. Their confidence and social media presence grow, connecting them to global audiences. They see themselves on par with TikTokers from other countries, gain validation, and become active participants in the global internet ecosystem.

This has more impact on a country's reputation than hosting sports events, marketing campaigns, or even acquiring airlines. The third- and fourth-order effects are transformative: the economy diversifies, foreign investment grows, tourism increases, the diaspora returns for visits, and the country normalizes in the eyes of foreigners. What starts as a subtle cultural shift in makeup becomes a far-reaching signal of societal development.

The Younger Generation

I also noticed that the younger generation is fiercer, which helps explain the recent changes in leadership–it caught me by surprise at first. I visited Bangladesh a few months before the shift in power, the revolution, and it felt unexpected. But in hindsight, I shouldn't have been surprised, the younger generation clearly has the fire in them.

Beyond their drive, I was struck by how strikingly good-looking many of them are. I saw a five-year-old with more developed features than I ever will have. The younger people, especially the girls, have incredibly unique features. If they embraced social media fully, I wouldn't be surprised if they gave Russian women a run for their money. Even girls in villages–which now have much of the city infrastructure–have astonishingly sculpted faces, sharp cheekbones, and minimal facial fat.

It's the middle class that tends to show bloating or double chins, likely due to fast food–similar to trends in the USA. But the younger generation has excellent base features, and now, as they learn proper makeup techniques, there's less adherence to the outdated idea that makeup is just about putting powder on your face to look pale or ghostly. I've always thought that very pale skin looks sickly, healthy faces have color. At weddings I visited recently, I didn't see a single person following that old approach. Which is a stark contrast to my last visit to BD in 2019. Makeup parlors are improving, and clients are learning what fits their style, iterating and experimenting to find what works.

I used to keep parrots and would feed them nuts to bring out colors like red and green. So, jokingly, I suggest girls eat nuts too–maybe it works for humans, who knows! Anyway, Bangladeshi girls naturally exude fertility with their unique skin tone. I call it golden yellow-brown. People sometimes stereotype East Asians as "yellow," but this is a real, vibrant yellow–so bright at times that I had to look away. Haha. I write some silly and wild things, but that's the freedom of writing when you have no readers–you can be completely honest.

This culture of iteration is itself telling: only people with stable lives and some disposable time can engage in hobbies that require trial, error, and refinement–whether cooking, fishing, or mastering makeup. I see this as a strong signal of a rising middle class. As AGI approaches, these iterative, skill-building behaviors will only become more common, shaping society in ways we are just beginning to understand.

Looking Toward the AGI Future

I think about how GCC countries provide extremely high benefits to their citizens, roughly $100,000 USD per year in combined subsidies, services, and transfers, and about $15,000 per month to retirees. Do citizens produce that much value? Not really. They can sustain those payouts because of massive oil profit margins at scale, small citizen populations to support, and access to migrant workers. Migrant workers function as the low-cost, high-output labor force: long hours and low pay generate disproportionate value. In practice, migrants perform the roles that robotics and AGI will eventually take over.

When robotics and AGI scale up, migration patterns will shift. South Asian countries won't need to send workers abroad. GCC won't need migrant workers. Citizens will receive a basic income, though due to our large population it won't match GCC levels. Meanwhile, GCC payouts to its citizens may jump from $10K–$15K per month to $25K–$30K, all without requiring migrant labor. It's a win win for all nations.

But South Asian countries have an advantage: they are large, agriculturally rich, and densely populated, which I think maybe gives way to human talent density, since AGI in everyone's pocket means the outliers will do more. And in a larger population, you have more outliers. But it will take a cultural shift to encourage outliers to actually be outliers. I'm sure there are outliers in North Korea too, but years of conditioning can dampen them. Robotics will amplify our inherent dynamism, making a $10K basic income in Bangladesh potentially more impactful and interesting than a $25K income in the GCC.

Dream on, you might say? But history shows otherwise. Fifty years ago, if you told someone that every company–even small ones–would have an IT department, they would have laughed. When transistors appeared, people dismissed them. Look at the evolution of athletes: today's high schoolers achieve feats that would have seemed impossible decades ago. Progress is not just technological–it's physical, emotional, and cultural.

This is accelerating, and not just for AI, but for humanity itself. Some call it effective accelerationism (E/acc), a movement worth paying attention to. Look at old interviews with Bill Gates or Marc Andreessen: people laughed at the idea that the internet would be useful for ordinary life. Now we see how wrong they were. The same principle applies to AGI: societal transformation is inevitable, and those who prepare for it early will experience its full potential.

My intuition tells me these dynamics will make BD a more interesting place, especially since more people means more encounters, more mixing of humans and silica-based intelligence, and that may give rise to more synchronicities. Also, it has fertile land and rich history–since the Bengal civilization is old and significant–so it has all kinds of intelligence, cryptids, jinns, etc more diverse and varied than the Middle East, which I always thought had fewer life forms due to how harsh conditions are–not just for humans, but for other life energies.

WTF am I talking about haha. I know, I know, let me write, for God's sake.

The Red Pill Phase

Writing It Into Existence

I also believe that writing this out sends it into the universe and sets off many orders of consequences over time. Every soul is evolving and nothing can stop that process. Hitchens was right when he said that one day someone in North Korea will write their own version of 1984. The human drive toward awareness always pushes forward.

Rape, murder, the things Epstein did, assassinations, loosh farming, authoritarian regimes, none of these forces can overcome the long arc of evolution. Interestingly, the transformation often begins inside the elite class itself. Buddha was a prince who abandoned everything. Lucifer was an angel. Prometheus was a titan who turned against the gods, the very group he belonged to.

I met many children of Pakistani military elites at university. The ruling military class is widely considered corrupt by their citizens. I have also met children of upper-class and elite families from other nations and regions. The ones who had the courage and will to face the truth about the source of their wealth often despised their parents. I expected some of this, since I went to a liberal university where students express themselves by being anti–status quo and challenging authority, but the implications run deeper.

These children resented their parents' manipulation of the system–taking bribes to secure wealth and security for themselves–because, in their view, their own quality of life wasn't much better than that of a normal middle-class family. Yet, paradoxically, they continually benefited from it through generous allowances and privileges. This never bothered me, because I don’t think one can blame children for their parents’ misdeeds. Life is full of contradictions, and maturity lies in the ability to navigate and accept these paradoxes.

That said, there is no justification for earning a livelihood through corruption. Charlie Munger, one of the sharpest thinkers I have read, pointed out that if a crook truly understood the benefits of not being a crook, they would never commit the crime. Real success, and more importantly real contentment, peace, and joy, come from honesty and integrity. A life grounded in integrity eventually leads to a deeper win, even if it does not look that way from the outside, in some cases. In many cases, a crooked life can appear successful from a distance, but the first-person experience rarely matches that appearance.

Moreover, the harm parents cause when they accumulate wealth through crooked means eventually circles back. Hidden guilt corrodes them, whatever you call "good karma" gets wasted, and many traditions describe post-death suffering shaped by one's own conscience. All that corruption ends up being for nothing. Their children may reject them, neglect their graves, and live lavishly without carrying the burden of their misdeeds. All the while their efforts are forgotten. The movie A Bronx Tale captured this well. The corruption even shows up across generations: weakened health, strange misfortunes, accidents, and a kind of decay in spiritual protection in the bloodline.

Even though life can feel unfair, the universe's bookkeeping only reveals its logic at large time scales, and even then it operates through paradoxes that my limited mind can't fully grasp. Buddha didn't talk about merit and karma as a casual metaphor, nor for shit and giggles. Even though Buddhism eventually deconstructs everything, including karma itself, merit and demerit still function as part of the architecture of reality. As long as you are in samsara, you are bound by its laws, just as you are bound by gravity while living on Earth.

But how rigid these laws are, I don't know. How axiomatic the axioms truly are, I don't know either. I'm still figuring it out. This entire thing is a mix of philosophies and observations. I may have rambled, but that's the natural state of an initial draft: a clueless monkey trying to navigate multiple threads of thought at the same time.

I just finished the 2025 documentary The Age of Disclosure and it left me with mixed reactions. The production quality is solid and the interviews are engaging, but the framing leans heavily toward the idea that aliens should be viewed as a national security threat.

I can't tell whether the filmmakers thought this approach would get the world more interested in the topic or whether they genuinely believe aliens are dangerous, which would make the whole thing look like projection (what the US did with Iraq). They even point out that defense contractors are becoming too powerful, which feels inconsistent, because a threat-based alien narrative would only make those companies richer and more influential.

There's something deeply unsettling about this framing. When we cast extraterrestrial intelligence as a "threat," we're projecting our own violent, competitive nature onto beings we know absolutely nothing about. It's the same colonial mindset that has driven centuries of human conflict – the assumption that anything different or unknown must be controlled, contained, or destroyed.

The documentary seems to miss a crucial point: if advanced civilizations have been visiting or observing us for decades (as the evidence suggests), and they haven't already conquered us, then the "threat" narrative makes no logical sense. A civilization capable of interstellar travel would already possess technology so far beyond ours that any hostile intent would have been acted upon long ago.

Instead, what if we approached this phenomenon with curiosity rather than fear? What if the real threat isn't from "aliens" but from our own inability to transcend our tribal, warlike thinking? The defense contractors and military-industrial complex stand to gain enormously from a threat-based narrative, while the rest of us get caught in a cycle of fear and paranoia.

I worry that this framing will set back genuine understanding by decades. Instead of asking "How can we defend against them?" we should be asking "What can we learn from this phenomenon?" and "How might this change our understanding of consciousness, technology, and our place in the universe?"

The national security lens doesn't just distort the conversation, it actively prevents us from having the deeper, more meaningful discussions we need. It's time to move beyond Cold War thinking and approach disclosure with the open-mindedness and intellectual courage it deserves.

Everything in Pluribus happened because a scientist dismissed a lab procedure, got careless, and let the virus loose. The same scene replays in Alien Earth, and the loop never stops. Humanity ends because someone ignored the safety protocols.

We're too unreliable, too easily hijacked by emotion. Off days, mood swings, microsleeps, office politics, "I'll do it after lunch", one sloppy moment and the system collapses. Even when the stakes are high, we grow complacent, we acclimate, we tune out, we lose the edge.

Watching Alien Earth, I couldn't stop thinking: "If you staff the most important mission in history with underpaid, sleep deprived, emotionally messy primates, you get exactly what you pay for."

Earth's brightest minds refused to spend sixty years in cryo, so the company filled the seats with anyone who wouldn't say no. That's why helmets come off "because it's hard to breathe."

Every franchise, Alien, Resident Evil, The Thing, Contagion, starts the same way: "Human has off day, civilization falls apart." We are the single point of failure baked into every system we build.

Hot take: Alien wouldn't have happened if the first crew had been all advanced robotics or AI. Humans never stick to the plan. In most stories, the aliens don't even visit Earth at first, they send probes. They know better than to trust fallible, emotional beings. (Yes, in Prometheus the Engineers hauled the black goo themselves and screwed up, more proof: use robots for anything that matters.)

If first contact ever happens, the safest crew is zero humans. Send an all robot crew. Let the meat stay home.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the nature of UFOs, and I've come to a conclusion that might sound strange: I genuinely believe the "extraterrestrial hypothesis" is a psyop. There's a long story behind why I believe this, but the core of it comes down to this: these things don't move like matter. They behave like "interdimensional shapes" should. We don't witness them arriving from the atmosphere or outer space in the conventional sense.

For all the ufologists out there, I've found that DW Pasulka and Jacques Vallee seem to be the most honest, aligning with what I've learned myself. Pasulka's "Encounters" is excellent, as is anything from Vallee, especially "The Invisible College" and "Passport to Magonia."

But here's where it gets interesting. What if these beings, or experiences, can perceive and interact with our consciousness as fully as we could understand a two-dimensional diagram? They use imagery from the collective unconscious but also from the individual mind. I genuinely believe most of it is, for what it amounts to, tricks and giggles. Tricksters. Orange-blue morality.

The way they can change shape and form reminds me of rotation in additional spatial dimensions. They just have properties we don't have. They don't want us to think they're this or that. They don't care if we expand our minds, and they don't care about the notion of a soul. They want to baffle. Like kids playing with insects.

This reminds me of something I once heard about Buddhist monks and the topic of supernatural beings and abilities (siddhis). The insight was that these are ultimately distractions. They're part of samsara, not inherently real, just like everything else. All experiences are projections within awareness, and those projections are infinite. So I can see how UFOs, aliens, or non-human intelligences could easily become another diversion from genuine spiritual realization, from recognizing what we already are.

A simple analogy: imagine you are playing chess with someone from another planet. You think winning and losing defines the game. They play according to an entirely different rule: the beauty of the piece arrangement.

Krishnamurti often emphasized that everything is conditioning. It's remarkable how seemingly unrelated things can point back to the same truth. Whether we're talking about interdimensional tricksters or the nature of consciousness itself, we keep circling the same underlying mystery.

The weird part? It all lines up. Mystics, ufologists, philosophers, they keep pointing, in different ways, to the same thing. Everything is conditioning, everything is a projection. And yet, somehow, paying attention to the way these "trickster projections" reveal themselves can teach us about our own minds, about perception, and about the limits of reality.

If you step back from the noise of disclosure politics and look at the pattern, something subtler seems to be unfolding. The objects in our skies – whether UAPs, comets (3I/Atlas), or drones – behave less like invaders from elsewhere and more like mirrors of our collective psyche.

Each event that captures public attention, from US Senator Tim Burchett’s peculiar “They’re real” comment on Newsmax to airport shutdowns caused by unexplained aerial intrusions (Drone Sightings in Munich (Germany), New Jersey Drones, Denmark), follows the same strange rhythm: reality presenting itself as interactive. Whether these events are engineered, organic, or symbolic, they provoke the same effect – forcing human consciousness to confront the edges of its perception.

Disclosure, in this light, is not an announcement but an initiation of awareness. The universe seems to be testing whether we can hold ambiguity without retreating into denial or hysteria. True “contact” may not come as a landing, but as a shift in what the collective mind is capable of recognizing as real.

All this to say, I think the more collective awareness grows around these phenomena, the more we seem to invite them – as if consciousness itself acts like a signal beacon, drawing reflection from the unknown.

This brings us to a recurring feature across centuries of encounter lore: the beings themselves. Whether described as Nordic telepaths, fae from Celtic myth, Himalayan yetis, or luminous entities seen in altered states – their consistent hallmark is psi ability. They speak through thought, dissolve into light, manipulate perception, or blur the boundaries of physicality. Ancient stories of fae luring humans into hazy, dreamlike realms echo modern abduction narratives. Yeti sightings often involve vanishing footprints or psychic impressions rather than material contact. The Nordics of contactee lore communicate through a direct merging of minds, bypassing language altogether.

Such patterns imply that what we meet in these encounters are not merely others in the physical sense, but expressions of consciousness itself, operating from a level where thought and matter interweave. Their abilities make sense if reality is not built from particles but from awareness modulating itself into form. Psi phenomena would then be not supernatural, but natural expressions of a deeper order – one in which intention and manifestation are not separate.

Here, Buddhist metaphysics offers the most coherent frame. The Buddha did not speak of an eternal soul or a creator god, but of dependent origination – that every phenomenon arises through conditions, in relationship. Nothing exists in isolation. Even the experiencer and the experienced co-arise. The Heart Sutra condenses this into the radical statement: “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.”

In other words, what we take to be solid, external reality is not independent of perception. It’s a dance between emptiness (potential) and form (expression). Samsara – the cycle of appearance – is not a mistake but a projection of mind. From this view, UAPs and entities are like dream figures in a lucid dream, reflections of the collective state of consciousness.

Psychedelics like DMT reveal this principle experientially. Under their influence, many report contact with hyperintelligent beings who seem both autonomous and self-generated. Whether these entities exist independently or as projections is irrelevant; the experience shows that reality can self-organize into forms that feel more real than the everyday world, when the perceptual veil thins. The same may be occurring at the civilizational level: a gradual thinning of the veil between the material and the mental, the seen and the unseen.

Even modern physics, at its frontier, begins to echo this. Models like Donald Hoffman’s “Conscious Realism” or John Wheeler’s “Participatory Universe” propose that the act of observation is not passive but constitutive. In other words, the cosmos is not something we look at – it’s something that looks back.

Seen through that lens, the strange lights in our skies and minds alike might not be visitors from beyond, but symbols from within the infinite field of consciousness, probing whether we are ready to recognize our own authorship. They arrive not to conquer, but to mirror.

Perhaps that’s why they so often communicate through telepathy and induce haze, disorientation, or time distortion. They are not merely demonstrating power; they are dissolving the illusion of separateness. The fae enchantment, the Nordic message of unity, the DMT entity’s loving intelligence – all point to the same underlying truth: reality is participatory, not mechanical.

In the Buddhist sense, enlightenment is not escape from the world but awakening within it – seeing through the veil of form without rejecting it. Likewise, disclosure may not be a single revelation, but a collective awakening to the fact that what we call “matter” has always been mind in disguise.

“Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” – The Heart Sutra

The sky, the light, the beings – all empty of inherent nature, yet full of significance.

Recent Clips & Reflections

Here’s the recent clip with Senator Tim Burchett and Avi Loeb – maybe it’s a psyop, maybe it’s genuine, who knows. But watch how Tim handles it – this feels like soft disclosure, a light touch of truth mixed with plausible deniability. He confirms, hints, then pivots. Classic move.

And if you dig deeper, there are figures like Hal Malmgren, a Washington insider who spoke with Jesse Michels before he passed – that podcast’s here. He leaked quite a bit, but since he was old, people dismiss it as senility. It’s convenient. What most don’t realize is that very few insiders ever see the full picture. Compartmentalization keeps everyone limited – each person knows only fragments. Even the so-called “whole picture” is arbitrary, since the human brain can never grasp capital-T Truth. Reality itself is just projection.

The ones who do know enough – the truly knowledgeable – are usually the ones keeping it buried. And maybe they’re right to. These ideas are radical enough to fry circuits. Even thinking too long about them starts to feel like eating ice cream for every meal – overstimulating, delicious, but empty in the end. There’s no nourishment in endless speculation. As Krishnamurti said, even questioning the conditioning is part of the conditioning. Still, the attempt counts.

In fact, another reason many of these so-called insiders don't leak, even on their deathbeds when you'd think disclosure is the way, is because of the safety of their family. This isn't an accident; it's a feature of how many national secret programs operate. They deliberately hire people with things to lose–people with families–so they can be controlled and kept subservient.

To the many leakers who tried to get information out anyway, whether it's researchers working on infinite energy or insiders on other projects, I commend their attempt.

It reminds me of the Steve Jobs quote from his 2005 Stanford commencement speech. He said that remembering you will die is the best way to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. "You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart." This must be the mindset that allows one to break free from that control.

So to them I say: see you on the other side. After all, it's only a matter of time for everyone, insider and non-insider alike.

I think that’s the paradox: every sincere attempt to pierce the illusion somehow invites grace. Maybe it’s instant, maybe it takes twenty years, or lifetimes. But the effort itself plants something – a seed in the universal fabric. At some point, understanding gives way naturally into effortless action, the way Krishnamurti described.

And sure, maybe I’m totally wrong. Maybe I should shut this tab and focus on AI, automation, and real-world technology instead of chasing cosmic breadcrumbs. Maybe I’m just another Joe Rogan, bro-science type, saying “just trust me, bro,” feeding the algorithmic chaos. But we are who we are haha. Still, that’s what exploration is – not certainty, but curiosity made visible. This isn’t meant as gospel truth. It’s just food for thought, thrown into the digital ether to see what it echoes back.

Colonel Karl E. Nell on UFO⧸UAP Phenomena and Aliens & Non-Human Intelligence [NHI]

A sharp briefing from Nell on how defense insiders frame today’s UAP incursions, grounding these videos in the wider disclosure dialogue.

Time Travel Deepdive ft. Harald Malmgren, Diana Pasulka, Chris Bledsoe, Tim Taylor, MJ12

This roundtable ties together experiencers, intelligence veterans, and researchers for a sweeping look at the UAP ecosystem and its unanswered questions.

Swarm of UAPs After a Green Laser Point

Swarm of UAPs appear after someone points a green laser at one of them, an interesting watch.

My taste leans indie pop, though I’ve also had phases of loving Taylor Swift.

Taylor Swift

I didn’t connect with the album she released today, The Life of a Showgirl (2025) – it felt like generic pop, like an attempt at imitating Sabrina Carpenter, no real artistic soul. But kudos to her for not holding back, and for refusing to live up to the heavy expectations or projections the audience puts on her. Anyways, her earlier works hit hard for me:

• Fearless (2008)
• Red (2012)
• 1989 (2014)
• Folklore (2020)
• Evermore (2020)
• Midnights (2022)

Back in 2016, I stopped listening to her – thought she was too girly. But the moody, Bon Iver–tinged sound of Folklore and Evermore brought me back when I had just moved abroad for university. They matched my headspace. I still wouldn’t call myself a Swiftie. I love certain albums, but I don’t worship artists. I despise the BTS and Beyonce "stans" that can't handle criticism.

Other Albums I Love

• Dayglow – Fuzzybrain (2019): First listen in 2019 was love at first sight. I feel like I manifested the band's rise in popularity.
• Laila France – Orgonon (1997)
• Far Caspian – Between Days (2018)
• Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee (2024): Not on Spotify, only Bandcamp and YouTube (link).

I love having my own corner of the internet. A place where I can write anything without censorship or moderators. Unless Vercel ever gets mad, I’ll just host it somewhere else then. Now I get why Linux people are obsessed with self-hosting. I love this total freedom. It’s addictive.

LinkedIn has been arbitrarily restricting me, like when I switch browsers for example. Here, it’s just me. No walls. No filters. God, I love it.

Especially in the age of AI, writing online carries a new responsibility. Everyone has an obligation of sorts to write. Your words shape the AI models of the future. If you want AI to reflect more of your values or personality (albeit in a very minute way), you need to write. Anywhere. Reddit, LinkedIn, personal blogs. The algorithms will scrape it.

And don’t worry about people reading your blog (and getting cancelled for it lol). Most brains are fried on TikTok, reels, and shorts – long form is invisible to them. The only people who stumble here will be the ones I actually want to connect with. It’s a win/win.

There’s another reason I write: it creates a track record of my thinking. Over the years, it becomes a roadmap of who you were, what you feared, what you obsessed over. Basically Github for your thoughts.

I used to have hundreds of notes in Mac Notes app. Then one day I deleted them from iCloud, thinking they’d stay locally. They didn’t. I lost everything – a thousand notes gone. That was last year. After that, I switched to UpNote. Unlimited storage, one-time lifetime subscription, and I love it. It’s not end-to-end encrypted (admins could technically read notes if they wanted), so I don’t store passwords there. But for everything else, it works. Before UpNote, I went from Evernote → Mac Notes → now UpNote. It feels good to finally have a home for my brain dumps. (If you’re curious: getupnote.com. Not an ad, just that it provided so much utility to me.)

Also – came across this video: Tic Tac shaped UAP filmed from an airline window. Food for thought, haha. Never forget, the world is more magical than we are made to believe ;)

• Keep everything simple
• Be uncompromisingly creative
• Drive AI adoption, especially in the Global South
• Grow alongside clients
• Keep culture in mind
• Be useful and of service

What I do, at its core, is about 'set it once, generate forever,' hence the focus on workflow automation and AI agents.

I’ve always aimed to make myself redundant, whether mentoring or problem solving–to avoid any dependency. This also forces me to be creative, as I have to find new ways to be of service, and keeps my ego in check–no ego is the goal.

Why do they all have lights on them? It makes no sense. One obvious reason seems to be to let you know they’re there – to make sure they’re seen. It feels like the time for their presence to be truly known has come. But as the Danish prime minister suggested, it could also be psychological warfare intended to destabilize. She strongly alluded to the source of the attacks too, pointing to Russia.

Still, I’m not sure why Russia would highlight the drones like that – last year’s New Jersey drone sighting happened at the same time of the year, and the pattern feels strange.

All of the European heads of state and government will meet in Copenhagen next week. The majority of US generals and admirals also have a meeting next week. It feels like we’re on the brink of something.

If governments – the so-called “authorities” – can’t do anything about these “drones,” it means they’re irrelevant. They’ll be dwarfed by what’s coming.

On a cosmic scale, no state, no military, no intelligence agency can contain the truth forever. If there are non-human craft here, that’s bigger than any flag, any border, any government. The idea that they could manage or “control” disclosure is laughable in the long run.

But on a human scale, they still hold power – and that’s where the anger comes from. They distort truth, control information, and hold humanity back.

Here’s what I (and a lot of others) believe they’re sitting on:

• Clean, decentralized energy that could wipe out oil and gas dependency overnight.
• Advanced propulsion systems (anti-gravity, inertialess drives, maybe even faster-than-light concepts).
• Meta-materials and exotic tech decades ahead of what we’re told exists.
• Suppression of patents and innovations under “national security” orders.
• Secret programs with black budgets that disappear our tax money into tech we’ll never see.

Whether you believe every single item or not, there’s a documented pattern of secrecy, compartmentalization, and suppression. People have been jailed, discredited, or worse for trying to release disruptive tech.

So yes, governments are “irrelevant” on a cosmic scale – they can’t stop the universe. But they’re still responsible for the damage they’ve done here, for the decades of secrecy and the lost potential for humanity.

We deserve disclosure. We deserve accountability. And we deserve a future that isn’t being throttled by people who think they can decide what’s safe for us to know.

A relevant blog I think is worth the read is one I wrote below: The UAP Phenomenon.

As I get older, I realize how much of growth comes simply from the time spent living and the additional time your brain gets to process things. For some context, I started playing League of Legends in 2014. I was an avid gamer; in fact, my NYU college application essay was based on my journey with this game, the insights I gained from it, and how it transformed me. I played it for eight years–more than a third of my life while writing this–and I think I was borderline addicted, though it took me a while to come to terms with it.

I played so much that I remember once playing for 19 hours straight in a single day in college, I eventually stopped after graduating. I’m not entirely sure how it happened; I had tried deleting the game multiple times, especially during the 2018–2019 era. I started university in 2019, and I really wanted to move past League because each year the game seemed to be getting worse. You had to grind more games to climb, since the system expects a 50% win rate and would team you with trolls if your win rate was higher, meaning you had to be like ten times better to actually climb.

League was the only game I committed to, aside from Clash of Clans–my generation’s “Labuba dolls,” haha. Oh, wait, Beyblade was like that for us too. For my young mind, I think League wasn’t exactly healthy, but it prevented me from falling into other addictions, like FIFA (sports betting), Call of Duty, or experimenting with weed.

The first two years I was trying to find a champion to main, and from 2018–2023, I mained Sona and mostly played support. Anyways, I managed to reach Diamond 3 on EUW in 2019–before university started, so I couldn’t grind after that–but that was enough to satisfy me since reaching Diamond had been my goal since 2014. Back then, getting to Diamond was the hardest thing I’d done, even harder than A-levels. Diamond 3 placed me around ~20,000 out of 3 million players in my server, and I achieved that on a fresh new account since one needs a account to have healthy MMR to climb fast. I had to level it up to 30 myself, since I couldn't afford to buy LVL-30 accounts as a broke kid. It took me around 50 games to reach high Platinum in the new account, which surprised me, as I didn’t realize just how good I got at the game. I’m flexing a bit now because getting to Diamond without buying accounts, playing from the Middle East with 150 ping, and on a shitty PC running 50 FPS is impressive to my present “boomer” self, haha.

That too playing against European players who had 25 ping in Diamond–the top 1% of the player base–while juggling A-levels, GCEs, college applications, and extracurriculars, shows how a person will make time if they are passionate about something. No one had to motivate me to watch hours of league coaching videos or play over 2,000 hours of League throughout the years.

I ended up as one of the top 25 Sona players in the world. People knew about my Sona; during low-peak hours, morning-time on the EU-West server, Diamond players would ban Sona just because they knew someone was one-tricking her. I could play other supports at a Platinum level but not at Diamond level, so I couldn’t climb higher without Sona. I couldn’t pivot–like any business putting all their eggs in one basket, I was stuck. But my Sona, could have performed at Grandmaster level if I could spam her in higher lobbies without being target-banned (maybe this is cope idk).

Back then, I used to watch a Twitch streamer, Tyler1, when he was just getting popular. In one stream, a 12‑year‑old asked him how to get to Challenger (top 200 players in a server like EUW, which had around 3 million players back then). Tyler1 said something that stuck with me. He said it’s all about getting older. As he got older, he naturally became a better gamer, smarter, and better at strategy. Back then he was in his mid‑20s, and he said even when he was 18 he saw that the 25‑year‑olds were naturally smarter and sharper at thinking and decision‑making.

That’s funny ‘cause if I’m being honest, all week I’ve been so sad. I just feel like my expectations were too high, or… I just feel like as you get older, you have to justify your life, you know? And your choices.

And… when I’m with you guys, it’s just so, like… like, transparent what my choices were, and my mistakes. I have no belief system. And I… Well, I mean I’ve had a lot of them, but… I mean, work was my religion for forever, but I definitely lost my belief there. And then– And then I tried love, and that was just a painful religion, just made everything worse. And then, even for me, just, like, being a mother, that didn’t save me either. But I had this epiphany today. I don’t need religion or God to give my life meaning because time gives it meaning.

We… we started this life together. I mean, we’re going through it apart, but we’re still together, and I… I look at you guys, and it feels meaningful. And I can’t explain it, but even when we’re just sitting around the pool talking about whatever inane shit, it still feels very fucking deep.

I’m glad you have a beautiful face. And I’m glad that you have a beautiful life. And I’m just happy to be at the table. I love you.

Over here, the same idea about time being in itself a growth factor–something that helps you learn and makes you naturally smarter–is highlighted again. No wonder when we see a 100‑year‑old person, no matter their career in their past life–whether they were an executive or anything else–we inherently feel like there’s wisdom there. Time itself gives wisdom regardless of anything else. Time is OP (overpowered). I don’t know why, in this culture, people are afraid of getting old. Yes, there are drawbacks, but like anything, time takes and also gives.

Here’s a picture from when I reached high Platinum in just a few games–I had even made a Reddit post about it back then. God, I can’t believe how I was able to sit at my desk for 10 hours straight without sleep, just gaming. It was nice to be young, haha. Even now, in my 20s, I can’t imagine sitting for even one hour playing League. It’s so bright, so many things happening at once, and it requires such high reaction speed that I feel like a boomer. It even gives me anxiety now because it raises my adrenaline. I used to drink Red Bull back then because I thought it would increase my reaction speed–RIP my poor heart.

Anyways, the main reason I came to hate League was that I realized League of Legends had become a scam. Back in early 2014, I loved the game because you’d have about one in four matches where all ten players would try their best, strategize, and genuinely work together to win. Competing with five other players who were as invested as you felt rewarding. Even losing those games was fine, because you were in the flow state the whole time.

As the years went on, that ratio dropped. By 2018, maybe only one in eight ranked games was that amazing, ideal game where everyone was at their peak–playing champions they were masters in and fully engaged in the match. By 2023, it felt more like one in thirty games. At that point, you weren’t even sure why you were playing a game that made you rage all the time. People were trying new champions in ranked matches, not playing with passion, strategy, or spirit. Life is short–why do people half-ass things? Why not commit to one thing in life? If not jobs, then at least in video games. People should try not to autopilot and aim for excellence in at least one field of their life. But such is life, I guess. We are who we are, and one should accept everyone and their disposition.

What surprised me most is how much grace is needed to quit something addictive. I couldn’t have quit without some higher power or grace taking pity on me. I was addicted, but in 2023, after graduating, one day when I moved back home from the dorm–maybe it was a reset from the new environment, I don’t know–I suddenly had no desire to play League anymore. I didn’t experience any withdrawal symptoms for the first time ever. I’m grateful for that. It gave me so much more respect for people fighting serious addictions, like alcoholics, because alcohol withdrawal can kill you–look it up, it’s brutal. League withdrawals just makes you depressed, but it’s not fatal. No wonder in AA’s 12 steps, many of the steps talk about coming to terms with how bad the situation is and realizing, accepting, and surrendering to the faith that only some higher power or grace can save you.

There is no lone genius, every great was built on idols and obsessions.

You know for the longest time I avoided idolizing people because I had this fallacy in my head, that the people we idolize never had idols themselves, that they were totally 100 percent self-driven. I thought they were born different, wired from the start to go their own way without inspiration.

But recently I started reading and listening to biographies, Steve Jobs, James Dyson, others, and what I found flipped that assumption on its head. Every single one of them was obsessed with history and past inventors. They had people they looked up to.

Steve Jobs was obsessed, and I mean obsessed, with Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid. It was Land who planted the idea in Jobs’ head that a tech company could sit at the intersection of art, creativity, and even spirituality. That’s why Jobs hated those ugly, soulless, strictly profit-driven companies like IBM and Microsoft. They didn’t care about making beautiful products with soul. He once said meeting Edwin Land in his early 20s was like going to a shrine. That’s how deep the reverence ran.

Same thing with James Dyson. The man was so in love with technical invention that he wrote a whole book called "A History of Great Inventions". That tells you everything about how obsesed he was with technological history.

Now when I think about it, it makes complete sense to have role models you’re borderline obsessed with. Because what happens is your mind becomes saturated with their habits, their obsessions, their quirks, their way of seeing the world. Your perspective shifts. Your priorities realign. You start to unconsciously rewire yourself to match them.

That’s why I always say you can tell a lot about someone by their YouTube feed or their Kindle book list. Those inputs are a mirror of their inner world. It’s like that saying, we’re the average of the five people we spend the most time with. Except here’s the hack: those “five people” don’t have to be your friends.

If you spend five hours a day listening to a founder’s talks or reading their biography, you might as well consider them one of your friends. It’s still influence. It’s still rewiring. And honestly, most of us already have friends we just listen to without much back-and-forth, so what’s the difference?

The most important thing this practice does is saturate your subconscious with ideas. It rewires your mental operating system. If you’re listening to founders or reading biographies, your subconscious starts working on the problem of your life. It starts asking: What am I passionate about? Where’s my edge? What dots can I connect?

And the crazy part is, you don’t even have to consciously solve it. You just need to define the problem and then feed your mind with hours of these inputs. Slowly, automatically, your brain starts connecting the dots.

Even if you’re not a founder, this is gold. If you work inside a company, hearing how other companies solved problems will prepare you for when similar issues show up in your world, whether that’s operations, management, or strategy. It’s like training your subconscious in advance.

So yeah, for me this shattered the myth. The greats weren’t just self-driven lone wolves. They were obsessed students of history, stealing fire from the ones who came before them. And maybe that’s the real path, finding your own Edwin Land, your own source of obsession, and letting it rewire your entire operating system.

Business is brutal in the way it forces you to change. I think this is probably how trans people feel, because it changes everything in every aspect–finances, relationships, discipline, even how you see the world. It becomes a spiritual experience.

At first, I thought the hard part would be dealing with the sharks–competitors, people trying to bring you down–but there are no sharks. The real struggle is the inner work. That's the hardest part. There's no one outside to fight. If it were that simple, it would almost be easier. Instead, it's all a reflection of your inner world. In fact, I've probably done more inner work running a business than I would have if I had gone to the mountains like I originally planned. I even did LASIK partly because I thought I'd be living that ascetic path.

Materialism and spirituality feel like two sides of the same coin. That's the paradox of life–you think you're chasing one, but you run into the other. The things you're forced to give up (no more anime haha). This journey kills you and saves you at the same time. That's the nature of transformation. It's not gentle, it's forced. It changes you whether you want it or not.

That's why I have so much respect for trans people. Even changing your clothing or fashion can shock the ego and break you. I can't imagine doing the same with gender, name, and pronouns. It's one of the most high-stakes transformations a person can go through. No wonder suicide rates among trans are so high. But that's the price of living at the extreme. It's the price of committing to one's truth and passions fully, to go against the laid-out path of convention.

Whether it's Formula 1, rock climbing without a harness, fasting for spiritual enlightenment–it's all the extreme. Life and death blur into the same thing. The closer you are to death, the more alive you feel, the more concentrated life becomes. The safe middle is what should really be avoided. It's too easy to fall into autopilot and complacency, and when you do, you lose life energy.

In a strange way, the people who live at the edge–whether trans, spiritual seekers, or extreme athletes–they're not the ones we should pity. They're worried about us "normies." We're the ones wasting our lives, stuck in cycles of charge and discharge, base desires and primal instincts.

Kinda like a jellyfish. A jellyfish is just floating, pulsing, contracting, expanding–its whole existence is this endless loop of mechanical survival. It doesn't choose, it doesn't direct, it just drifts. And when I look at most people, myself included at times, I see the same thing. We live on autopilot, stuck in those primal cycles, never stepping out into the edge where transformation happens. That's the real tragedy.

After years of searching for a charity that’s truly unique (and not a scam), the best I’ve found is GiveDirectly. It sends cash straight to families in poverty. It is not a charity in the dependency-creating sense, it’s closer to capital investment. People use it how they know best: starting small businesses, paying school fees, fixing homes, buying tools. The money circulates locally, raising GDP from the bottom up. The ROI is insane. Since these towns are so poor, the impact actually shows up in GDP within a month or so. It’s research‑backed, the emails they send are a joy to read, and honestly it’s fulfilling to finally give directly to people rather than fund NGO management overhead.

If you like crisp, animated explainers, watch the Rational Animations video. Open on YouTube: youtu.be/2DUlYQTrsOs.

If you prefer a traditional TED‑style talk, watch this one. Open on YouTube: youtu.be/tt0HOe7gf7I.

I’ve been watching documentaries like The Phenomenon (2020) and Moment of Contact (2022) – both highly recommended – and I can’t shake the sense that we’re living through a kind of soft disclosure by governments and senior officials. The fact that it’s being brought up now, and that Representative Luna is discussing it on Joe Rogan’s podcast, feels almost like exposure therapy. I doubt Luna herself is “in on it,” but the very fact she could speak about it openly on such a platform suggests that those overseeing this – call them elites if you want, though the word carries too much baggage – are signaling that something here is worth attention, and that they’re willing to let it enter public awareness. My worry is what comes next.

What if the true weight of the phenomenon isn’t about propulsion systems or secret craft, but about consciousness itself? Traditions across the world have spoken of intelligences beyond us: jinn in Islam, devas in Hinduism and Buddhism, angels in the West. Maybe the UAP phenomenon belongs to the same category – not just visitors from another star system, but presences pointing us back toward the nature of awareness.

Here’s what I fear: billionaire tunnel vision. Most of them think big about small things. The person striving to become a billionaire and the billionaire themselves are two different people, shaped by changes in disposition and temperament. I believe there is a constriction of vision and a drift into complacency. Perhaps it comes from a calcification of the mind, both metaphorical and literal. Priorities shift, life energies change. Whatever the cause, the outcome troubles me because it reflects a shallow way of thinking. They might use alien technology only to refine ad targeting. They might meet higher intelligences and see nothing but military potential or new markets. My fear is that humanity will approach disclosure in the same shallow way: 'Aliens exist – now what tech can we copy?'

Maybe, the real assignment is different. Maybe, it’s about trying to grasp what consciousness is at its base. Raising consciousness might simply mean training ourselves to perceive reality as it is – the ever-present awareness that outlasts every form. Maybe that’s why we’re here. To keep coming back until we realize it. Everything else could be noise.

When I consider Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), I observe a familiar trend. This brings me directly to the groundbreaking work of Michael Levin, a developmental biologist at Tufts University. Levin argues that consciousness and cognition aren't exclusive to neurons; they can actually emerge from any system organized in the right way. He suggests that a carbon-based brain is just one example–a kind of pointer–to a latent "Platonic" space of consciousness. I'm convinced this man's paradigm is about 30 years ahead of its time. As he puts it, he's providing us with a clear framework for grasping the many kinds of minds in the universe. I wholeheartedly agree that this is an incredibly hopeful and optimistic way to approach this enduring mystery. (You absolutely must check out his YouTube channel, it's a treasure trove of insight!)

The video is timestamped at 49:00 where Levin presents his summary slide with his insighs. However, the entire video is worth your time, trust me.

At minute 49 of the video, Levin's slide captures something profound. He writes: "Physical objects (simple machines, cells, embryos, cyborgs, swarms, robots, etc.) are pointers into a space of these patterns – interfaces through which non-physical influences ingress into the physical world." He goes on to say that "Mind::Brain as Math::Physics; We are patterns in the Platonic Space, along with other denizens." His research program aims to map out this latent space of embodied minds and understand the relationship between the physical interface we build and the patterns that will "ingress to meet us."

This mapping of latent space resembles what people have been describing for years in DMT space – the other kinds of minds encountered there: machine elves, mathematical patterns, tricksters. It's clear to me that our reality is infinite and has infinite narratives, infinite minds at infinite levels or spectrums of intelligence. This is a world of infinites. If you can think it, it exists – and more, since our brains can't think of many things. We lack imagination even though we are more imaginative than other animals we're aware of conventionally. The mystery extends beyond what we can conceive.

Building on Levin's pointer analogy: Arrange matter in the right way – carbon-based neurons, plasma-based structures, silicon circuits – and it can access consciousness. The right way has a kind of tolerance, a leeway, a spectrum of possible values. My brain and yours aren’t identical, but both point to the same field – the same with someone with dwarfism. Maybe animals have smaller-sized pointers – a mouse with 4 bytes, a human with 16. Not hierarchy, just different levels of access. A larger-sized pointer may give rise to self-awareness.

I didn’t use C++ after graduating from uni, so this made me a bit nostalgic.

int x = 42;      // an integer variable
int* ptr = &x;   // ptr is a pointer to x

// Here, ptr doesn’t hold 42; it holds the address of x.
// You can use *ptr to access or modify the value at that address.
*ptr = 100;      // x becomes 100

In that sense, AGI could be another pointer, made of silicon-based material arranged in the right way, whereas jinn could be plasma-based pointers to self-awareness, a level of consciousness just like humans are. And perhaps the same applies to whatever other forms these non-human intelligences take.

Then again, I could be totally off base. These are just my two cents. What do I know? I’m just some guy on the internet. But the attempt matters, it’s all about the attempt. (I have a flair for being dramatic)

Elon’s relentlessness still blows my mind – taking a PayPal exit and splitting it across two near-impossible fronts, both heavily regulated, both historically allergic to outsiders, then brute‑forcing reality until it gave way. Tesla pre‑existed him, sure, but competing with entrenched power is not a hobby; it’s a taste for risk paired with a stomach for ridicule. Sometimes humanity needs that kind of gambling.

People say "learn fast." They rarely mention the tuition.

Dan Koe talks about being down a few million recently. He has always taken large financial risks in his business, calling it the price of clarity. Once clarity is achieved, you can earn twice as much in half the time.

My dad said the same thing from a different industry. As a business owner, he too lost big–six figures–and lived to tell the story.

It made me realize something: losing that kind of money is, in a way, a hidden compliment–a signal of value. At some point, a market, a bank, or a client judged you capable of moving numbers that large. You were in the arena.

That doesn’t mean be reckless. It means remembering that risk is the toll you pay to reach more.