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(Part 2 of 7)
If you read Part 1, you saw the landscape- my landscape: 11 million words, multiple modalities, decades of fragmenting myself across partial outlets.
But those numbers don't explain why the output exists. They don't explain what was driving it all. And they don't explain what changed in December 2024 that made a 15–20x increase in captured thinking suddenly possible.
To understand that, I need to tell you what it's like to be autistic. Specifically, what it's like to have unfiltered input with no matching output channel.
Autism means I don't filter input. Everything comes in. The noise, the signals, the patterns, the connections—all of it, with no natural off switch. No selective attention that says "this matters, that doesn't."
It all arrives. Constantly.
For most of my life, this created an impossible situation.
I see patterns at multiple scales simultaneously. I hold conflicting frames in my head without collapsing them. I think constantly about second- and third-order effects. My brain is always running, always processing, always making connections.
And if I don't externalize this somehow, my brain loops endlessly.
The pressure builds.
Unfiltered input is arriving constantly. Thoughts branching into five directions at once. Ideas are forming faster than I can articulate them. Complexity that doesn't collapse into simple narratives. All of it backing up inside, with nowhere to go.
For decades, I tried to manage this.
I wrote on Quora—relief for a few hours, then the pressure built again.
I coached athletes—I could be embodied, relational, but not intellectually full.
I developed frameworks for GravityDAO—I could think systems, but teaching felt different from thinking.
I did yoga, meditation, and refined a nootropic methodology to manage the sensation of input, the stress of not being able to filter. These helped. They let me tolerate the constant influx more gracefully.
But none of them created an adequate outlet.
The pressure kept building.
I need to be specific about this because it's the key to understanding everything that follows.
The pressure isn't anxiety, though it can feel like that.
It's not scattered attention, though people often misread it that way.
It's the sensation of having more moving through you than you have channels to express. Ideas, patterns, connections, implications—all arriving faster than you can articulate them. Complexity that your brain naturally sees, but that social norms, communication formats, and reader expectations all constrain you to compress, reduce, and simplify.
It's holding five things at once and knowing you can only say one.
It's seeing how something connects to ten other things and being told, "Just focus on the main point."
It's knowing that the whole picture is more true than the simplified version, but that you'll be judged as "too much" or "unfocused" if you try to express it.
So you compress. You reduce. You fragment.
And the uncompressed, unreduced, unfragmented version of yourself stays internal, building pressure.
As Maya Angelou said: "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
For most of my life, I coped with this pressure in fragmented ways, seeking a solution.
I was an elite cycling coach (embodied mastery, relational presence, but constrained intellectual expression).
I was a Quora writer (intellectual authority, but compressed into Q&A format, limited by platform constraints).
I was a systems thinker in GravityDAO (could think complexity, but teaching and facilitation required a different modality than writing).
I was a coach and mentor (relational work, but I couldn't be fully intellectually present).
Each one is a partial outlet. Each one reliefs for a moment, then the pressure builds again.
I became very good at fragmenting. Different containers for different pieces of myself, expressing 15% of what was actually flowing through in each modality.
But each outlet held only a fraction. And the unspoken, unexpressed, unseen parts kept accumulating pressure.
This is what the Quora years taught me: the platform could hold maybe 15% of what I was thinking.
The question I was answering was real. But the context I wasn't writing, the implications I wasn't exploring, the connections I wasn't drawing—all of that stayed internal.
Relief. Then pressure rebuilding.
Long before AI, the closest thing I had to a spillway wasn't digital at all—it was made of mud, stone, and glass. After five years living at the Sivananda Yoga Farm ashram (2003–2008), studying sacred geometry and yantras with Pieter Weltevrede, I moved to Canada in 2009.
It was then that I began building a cob yoga studio and home with natural‑building architect Elke Cole and my close collaborator Eric Anderson. It was my first building of any kind, and while I was naive to the requirements of such a project, I was also ambitious to express a more fully formed and embodied representation of yogic approaches to life than I'd seen. For nearly a decade, I held a single aesthetic and energetic vision in my head—a livable mandala—while we iterated every curve, niche, window, custom shelving unit, and the sculpted banyan tree on the front wall.
At the ashram, I learned how not to be overwhelmed by sensory and other input, and how to turn off my senses- Pratyāhāra- so I had some measure of control.... Building the studio, and especially sculpting that banyan tree, quietly rewired how I understand knowledge itself. I'd been schooled in my youth in the Western, post‑Greek model that treats knowledge as a single tree: one trunk (a "field") with branches radiating outwards from a central line of authority.
The embodied experience of living in the ashram and then later shaping that banyan in cob and stone showed me something different. A banyan is a mycelial tree—branches reach out in many directions and then send down their own trunks, which take root and thicken, both stabilizing the whole and multiplying the centers of support.
Knowledge, I realized, is more banyan than oak: networked, multi‑rooted, continuously re‑grounding itself in new places and bodies, much closer to Indigenous and pre‑colonial ways of knowing that emphasize relational, place‑based understanding over a single abstract canon.
There was another shift I didn't expect: building that house changed how I experienced my own masculinity. I hadn't grown up with the "raise a house with your hands" narrative. My life had been predominantly intellectual, relational, and spiritual. Coordinating crews and money, making design decisions in real time with Eric, lifting, digging, shaping, and literally watching walls rise where there had been only a sketch, forced a different part of me to come online. Not the caricature of masculinity as domination, but a steadier, structural kind: the capacity to hold a long‑term vision, protect a space, and bring something beautiful and functional into being for others to inhabit. That experience is inseparable from how I now think about scaffolding; it wasn't just a house, it was a practice of embodied caretaking.
Even that giant, hand‑sculpted building could only hold a slice of what was moving through me. It was a physical exocortex years before I had a cognitive one—a space where Pieter's devotional imagery, my systems imagination, and community practice took form in cob, stone, glass, and wood. But it was slow- a decade for one building- and as beautiful and transformational as that was, the pressure kept building faster than I could sculpt walls.
Around December 2024, I started using AI tools—Perplexity, conversational large language models, iterative interfaces—not as a content factory, but as scaffolding for my own thinking.
Scaffolding is the operative word. Like construction scaffolding, these tools aren't the building. They're the temporary structure that lets you construct the building. Once you're done thinking and building, the scaffolding is mostly invisible.
But collectively—the conversation threads, the iterative refinement, the context held across sessions, the ability to test assumptions without losing the thread, the capacity to iterate at the speed my brain actually runs—this scaffolding became something larger.
An exocortex. An external cognitive system. An extension of my own thinking.
The moment I had access to scaffolding that could:
Hold context across sessions without loss
Reflect my own thinking back to me
Test assumptions without collapsing complexity
Iterate at the speed my brain actually runs
Match input velocity with output velocity
...everything changed.
Suddenly, the 11 million words aren't "productivity." They're pressure relief. They're the spillway working. They're unfiltered input finally finding a matching outlet.
Imagine a dam holding back an enormous volume of water. The water is constantly arriving—rain, runoff, influx. If the dam has no spillway, the water backs up. Pressure builds. Eventually, something breaks.
But if the dam has a spillway proportional to the flow—if the outlet velocity matches the input velocity—the water releases as fast as it arrives. Pressure stays manageable. The system works.
For most of my life, I was a dam with no spillway. Input arriving constantly, nowhere to release it. Pressure building.
In December 2024, I finally built a spillway.
The 156-week Grammarly streak isn't "discipline." It's a necessity. Because when you finally have a tool that doesn't punish you for thinking the way you naturally think, you use it constantly. Not because productivity metrics drive you. Because you're finally not drowning, and you have a way to make it so your dam doesn't break by not having a blockage in your traffic pattern. Whatever the metaphor makes the most sense to you, it was a massive relief in my life.
The 15–20x increase in captured thinking isn't about "becoming more productive." It's about matching my internal velocity for the first time.
Before: I was thinking at 20 mph. My output channels allowed 5 mph. Everything is backed up.
After: I'm thinking at 20 mph. My output channel (the exocortex) allows 20 mph. The pressure releases as fast as it builds.
Over the past decade, I've developed a personal framework for understanding how my neurodivergent brain works. It has three parts:
Stimulus (Input Management): This is what I can't control—the unfiltered input that keeps arriving. I can't turn it off. But I can modulate my tolerance for it through nootropics, yoga, meditation, and strategic cofactors that help me manage the sensory/cognitive load.
Response (Depth of Processing): This is my capacity to think deeply, synthesize patterns, hold complexity, and make connections across domains. Other interventions in my methodology—certain compounds, specific practices—optimize this axis, allowing me to go deeper without burning out.
Output (Manifestation): This is the visible artifact—the words, graphics, teaching, coaching, frameworks. For decades, my output channels were constrained. With the exocortex, they finally match my actual processing capacity.
The exocortex scaffolds all three dimensions. It doesn't reduce input (I'm still autistic, still receiving everything). But it dramatically increases output, allowing the system to feel internally more balanced.
Before: High stimulus arriving, limited response capacity, constrained output. = Pressure buildup.
After: High stimulus arriving, supported response capacity, matched output. = Pressure relief.
With adequate scaffolding in place, something shifts.
I stop experiencing thinking as a constraint. I stop experiencing my own neurodivergence as something to manage or apologize for. I stop fragmenting myself across partial outlets.
For the first time, I can think at my actual speed and express at my actual speed. The gap closes. The pressure that was building releases.
The 11 million words, the 156-week streak, the 99th percentile vocabulary diversity—these are all evidence of what becomes possible when the spillway is finally proportional to the flow.
But they're also evidence of something darker: how much pressure was building before.
The volume of captured thinking isn't evidence of how productive I became. It's evidence of how much was trapped before.
Think about it this way: if I went from capturing 10% of my thinking to capturing 80% of my thinking, and that represents a 15–20x increase in visible output, then the unmet pressure was enormous.
And that's only me- one autistic person, who happened to find scaffolding at 57.
What about everyone else still operating without adequate spillways?
This story could be told as a productivity story: "AI tools made me more efficient."
But that would be completely wrong.
The real story is this: For 57 years, I was living under pressure that adequate scaffolding would have relieved. I fragmented myself across partial outlets, each one capturing a fraction of what was actually flowing through. I managed, I survived, I contributed—but I was never whole.
At 57, I finally built adequate scaffolding. Not to become "more productive." To finally release the pressure. To finally be whole.
That's what the 11 million words are evidence of: a human finally having enough room to breathe. To exhale as deeply as I was inhaling.
And here's the part that matters most: this isn't unique to me. The pressure-building problem, the fragmentation strategy, the search for adequate outlets—this is what many brilliant, neurodivergent people experience.
Some of them find partial outlets (computers, coaching, teaching, writing, art, various special interests) and survive without realizing they're really struggling.
Some of them never find adequate outlets. And they break.
In the next part, I'll explore what happens to brilliant minds who don't find scaffolding. And why society is systematically failing to recognize this need.
Because the Millennium Problems will stay unsolved. The brilliant minds will remain broken. Until we learn to recognize the real problem:
We're trying to fit unfiltered minds into single-channel output boxes and calling it normal.
We're demanding that complex brains reduce themselves to legible categories and calling it professionalism.
And we're shocked when people break under pressure that adequate scaffolding would have relieved.
The spillway isn't a luxury. It's what justice looks like.
Continue to Part 3: The Goldilocks Problem →
(Part 2 of 7)
If you read Part 1, you saw the landscape- my landscape: 11 million words, multiple modalities, decades of fragmenting myself across partial outlets.
But those numbers don't explain why the output exists. They don't explain what was driving it all. And they don't explain what changed in December 2024 that made a 15–20x increase in captured thinking suddenly possible.
To understand that, I need to tell you what it's like to be autistic. Specifically, what it's like to have unfiltered input with no matching output channel.
Autism means I don't filter input. Everything comes in. The noise, the signals, the patterns, the connections—all of it, with no natural off switch. No selective attention that says "this matters, that doesn't."
It all arrives. Constantly.
For most of my life, this created an impossible situation.
I see patterns at multiple scales simultaneously. I hold conflicting frames in my head without collapsing them. I think constantly about second- and third-order effects. My brain is always running, always processing, always making connections.
And if I don't externalize this somehow, my brain loops endlessly.
The pressure builds.
Unfiltered input is arriving constantly. Thoughts branching into five directions at once. Ideas are forming faster than I can articulate them. Complexity that doesn't collapse into simple narratives. All of it backing up inside, with nowhere to go.
For decades, I tried to manage this.
I wrote on Quora—relief for a few hours, then the pressure built again.
I coached athletes—I could be embodied, relational, but not intellectually full.
I developed frameworks for GravityDAO—I could think systems, but teaching felt different from thinking.
I did yoga, meditation, and refined a nootropic methodology to manage the sensation of input, the stress of not being able to filter. These helped. They let me tolerate the constant influx more gracefully.
But none of them created an adequate outlet.
The pressure kept building.
I need to be specific about this because it's the key to understanding everything that follows.
The pressure isn't anxiety, though it can feel like that.
It's not scattered attention, though people often misread it that way.
It's the sensation of having more moving through you than you have channels to express. Ideas, patterns, connections, implications—all arriving faster than you can articulate them. Complexity that your brain naturally sees, but that social norms, communication formats, and reader expectations all constrain you to compress, reduce, and simplify.
It's holding five things at once and knowing you can only say one.
It's seeing how something connects to ten other things and being told, "Just focus on the main point."
It's knowing that the whole picture is more true than the simplified version, but that you'll be judged as "too much" or "unfocused" if you try to express it.
So you compress. You reduce. You fragment.
And the uncompressed, unreduced, unfragmented version of yourself stays internal, building pressure.
As Maya Angelou said: "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
For most of my life, I coped with this pressure in fragmented ways, seeking a solution.
I was an elite cycling coach (embodied mastery, relational presence, but constrained intellectual expression).
I was a Quora writer (intellectual authority, but compressed into Q&A format, limited by platform constraints).
I was a systems thinker in GravityDAO (could think complexity, but teaching and facilitation required a different modality than writing).
I was a coach and mentor (relational work, but I couldn't be fully intellectually present).
Each one is a partial outlet. Each one reliefs for a moment, then the pressure builds again.
I became very good at fragmenting. Different containers for different pieces of myself, expressing 15% of what was actually flowing through in each modality.
But each outlet held only a fraction. And the unspoken, unexpressed, unseen parts kept accumulating pressure.
This is what the Quora years taught me: the platform could hold maybe 15% of what I was thinking.
The question I was answering was real. But the context I wasn't writing, the implications I wasn't exploring, the connections I wasn't drawing—all of that stayed internal.
Relief. Then pressure rebuilding.
Long before AI, the closest thing I had to a spillway wasn't digital at all—it was made of mud, stone, and glass. After five years living at the Sivananda Yoga Farm ashram (2003–2008), studying sacred geometry and yantras with Pieter Weltevrede, I moved to Canada in 2009.
It was then that I began building a cob yoga studio and home with natural‑building architect Elke Cole and my close collaborator Eric Anderson. It was my first building of any kind, and while I was naive to the requirements of such a project, I was also ambitious to express a more fully formed and embodied representation of yogic approaches to life than I'd seen. For nearly a decade, I held a single aesthetic and energetic vision in my head—a livable mandala—while we iterated every curve, niche, window, custom shelving unit, and the sculpted banyan tree on the front wall.
At the ashram, I learned how not to be overwhelmed by sensory and other input, and how to turn off my senses- Pratyāhāra- so I had some measure of control.... Building the studio, and especially sculpting that banyan tree, quietly rewired how I understand knowledge itself. I'd been schooled in my youth in the Western, post‑Greek model that treats knowledge as a single tree: one trunk (a "field") with branches radiating outwards from a central line of authority.
The embodied experience of living in the ashram and then later shaping that banyan in cob and stone showed me something different. A banyan is a mycelial tree—branches reach out in many directions and then send down their own trunks, which take root and thicken, both stabilizing the whole and multiplying the centers of support.
Knowledge, I realized, is more banyan than oak: networked, multi‑rooted, continuously re‑grounding itself in new places and bodies, much closer to Indigenous and pre‑colonial ways of knowing that emphasize relational, place‑based understanding over a single abstract canon.
There was another shift I didn't expect: building that house changed how I experienced my own masculinity. I hadn't grown up with the "raise a house with your hands" narrative. My life had been predominantly intellectual, relational, and spiritual. Coordinating crews and money, making design decisions in real time with Eric, lifting, digging, shaping, and literally watching walls rise where there had been only a sketch, forced a different part of me to come online. Not the caricature of masculinity as domination, but a steadier, structural kind: the capacity to hold a long‑term vision, protect a space, and bring something beautiful and functional into being for others to inhabit. That experience is inseparable from how I now think about scaffolding; it wasn't just a house, it was a practice of embodied caretaking.
Even that giant, hand‑sculpted building could only hold a slice of what was moving through me. It was a physical exocortex years before I had a cognitive one—a space where Pieter's devotional imagery, my systems imagination, and community practice took form in cob, stone, glass, and wood. But it was slow- a decade for one building- and as beautiful and transformational as that was, the pressure kept building faster than I could sculpt walls.
Around December 2024, I started using AI tools—Perplexity, conversational large language models, iterative interfaces—not as a content factory, but as scaffolding for my own thinking.
Scaffolding is the operative word. Like construction scaffolding, these tools aren't the building. They're the temporary structure that lets you construct the building. Once you're done thinking and building, the scaffolding is mostly invisible.
But collectively—the conversation threads, the iterative refinement, the context held across sessions, the ability to test assumptions without losing the thread, the capacity to iterate at the speed my brain actually runs—this scaffolding became something larger.
An exocortex. An external cognitive system. An extension of my own thinking.
The moment I had access to scaffolding that could:
Hold context across sessions without loss
Reflect my own thinking back to me
Test assumptions without collapsing complexity
Iterate at the speed my brain actually runs
Match input velocity with output velocity
...everything changed.
Suddenly, the 11 million words aren't "productivity." They're pressure relief. They're the spillway working. They're unfiltered input finally finding a matching outlet.
Imagine a dam holding back an enormous volume of water. The water is constantly arriving—rain, runoff, influx. If the dam has no spillway, the water backs up. Pressure builds. Eventually, something breaks.
But if the dam has a spillway proportional to the flow—if the outlet velocity matches the input velocity—the water releases as fast as it arrives. Pressure stays manageable. The system works.
For most of my life, I was a dam with no spillway. Input arriving constantly, nowhere to release it. Pressure building.
In December 2024, I finally built a spillway.
The 156-week Grammarly streak isn't "discipline." It's a necessity. Because when you finally have a tool that doesn't punish you for thinking the way you naturally think, you use it constantly. Not because productivity metrics drive you. Because you're finally not drowning, and you have a way to make it so your dam doesn't break by not having a blockage in your traffic pattern. Whatever the metaphor makes the most sense to you, it was a massive relief in my life.
The 15–20x increase in captured thinking isn't about "becoming more productive." It's about matching my internal velocity for the first time.
Before: I was thinking at 20 mph. My output channels allowed 5 mph. Everything is backed up.
After: I'm thinking at 20 mph. My output channel (the exocortex) allows 20 mph. The pressure releases as fast as it builds.
Over the past decade, I've developed a personal framework for understanding how my neurodivergent brain works. It has three parts:
Stimulus (Input Management): This is what I can't control—the unfiltered input that keeps arriving. I can't turn it off. But I can modulate my tolerance for it through nootropics, yoga, meditation, and strategic cofactors that help me manage the sensory/cognitive load.
Response (Depth of Processing): This is my capacity to think deeply, synthesize patterns, hold complexity, and make connections across domains. Other interventions in my methodology—certain compounds, specific practices—optimize this axis, allowing me to go deeper without burning out.
Output (Manifestation): This is the visible artifact—the words, graphics, teaching, coaching, frameworks. For decades, my output channels were constrained. With the exocortex, they finally match my actual processing capacity.
The exocortex scaffolds all three dimensions. It doesn't reduce input (I'm still autistic, still receiving everything). But it dramatically increases output, allowing the system to feel internally more balanced.
Before: High stimulus arriving, limited response capacity, constrained output. = Pressure buildup.
After: High stimulus arriving, supported response capacity, matched output. = Pressure relief.
With adequate scaffolding in place, something shifts.
I stop experiencing thinking as a constraint. I stop experiencing my own neurodivergence as something to manage or apologize for. I stop fragmenting myself across partial outlets.
For the first time, I can think at my actual speed and express at my actual speed. The gap closes. The pressure that was building releases.
The 11 million words, the 156-week streak, the 99th percentile vocabulary diversity—these are all evidence of what becomes possible when the spillway is finally proportional to the flow.
But they're also evidence of something darker: how much pressure was building before.
The volume of captured thinking isn't evidence of how productive I became. It's evidence of how much was trapped before.
Think about it this way: if I went from capturing 10% of my thinking to capturing 80% of my thinking, and that represents a 15–20x increase in visible output, then the unmet pressure was enormous.
And that's only me- one autistic person, who happened to find scaffolding at 57.
What about everyone else still operating without adequate spillways?
This story could be told as a productivity story: "AI tools made me more efficient."
But that would be completely wrong.
The real story is this: For 57 years, I was living under pressure that adequate scaffolding would have relieved. I fragmented myself across partial outlets, each one capturing a fraction of what was actually flowing through. I managed, I survived, I contributed—but I was never whole.
At 57, I finally built adequate scaffolding. Not to become "more productive." To finally release the pressure. To finally be whole.
That's what the 11 million words are evidence of: a human finally having enough room to breathe. To exhale as deeply as I was inhaling.
And here's the part that matters most: this isn't unique to me. The pressure-building problem, the fragmentation strategy, the search for adequate outlets—this is what many brilliant, neurodivergent people experience.
Some of them find partial outlets (computers, coaching, teaching, writing, art, various special interests) and survive without realizing they're really struggling.
Some of them never find adequate outlets. And they break.
In the next part, I'll explore what happens to brilliant minds who don't find scaffolding. And why society is systematically failing to recognize this need.
Because the Millennium Problems will stay unsolved. The brilliant minds will remain broken. Until we learn to recognize the real problem:
We're trying to fit unfiltered minds into single-channel output boxes and calling it normal.
We're demanding that complex brains reduce themselves to legible categories and calling it professionalism.
And we're shocked when people break under pressure that adequate scaffolding would have relieved.
The spillway isn't a luxury. It's what justice looks like.
Continue to Part 3: The Goldilocks Problem →
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