It's a truly strange thing, how we're only able to look back with certainty and forward with uncertainty, only able to act in the sliver of time we call the present.

As it appears now, I'll be taking many months at a minimum to recover from recent events. I am in dire need of rest, reflection, and reorganization.

In this period of soulsearching, I'd like to develop a greater sense of presence and purpose, one that will provide me the resilience, levity, and vision to be the change I want to see in the world around me, no matter what the scale of that may be.

As dark as some of these moments have been for myself, I will not let them define me, and instead bestow the responsibility of authorship to my own agency.

I've realized that empathy, and human connection broadly, is both a beautiful thing, and a double edged blade. If held delicately at both ends, by both parties, it's a sacred testament to trust, a recognition of the fragility of mortality, and a microcosm of the balance of love itself.

Over the past year, I've extended my hand in these exchanges with individuals of vastly different backgrounds, professionally and personally, and over the past few weeks, I've attempted to hold it with entire industries and institutions.

I can't help but feel as if my palms have bloodied, and I've been ignoring the pain in either nostalgic memory or ruthless aspiration. The steel becomes duller as it cuts, stained, and one loses the ability to see themselves in the once-shimmering mirror. And as one side, regardless of which, desperately holds tighter, the agony becomes contagious, until the weight of the relationship becomes too heavy for anyone to reasonably bear.

Sisyphus rolls the stone up the mountain every day, slowly, despite knowing it may crush him if he stops or pushes with too much momentum. And as Camus said, one must imagine him happy.

On Parallel Polis, I was deeply troubled by the concept of the attention economy, the apathy of our youth, and the duality of how education could be a savior, yet a barrier if inaccessible. Czech philosophers coined the name of the company, meaning an alternate society, one where information, currency, art, science, and technology could be shared freely, safely, especially in dissidence to authoritarianism or oppression. As I was in university at the time, it was a place outside of traditional thought where collaborators and myself could ideate, build, and publish as we curiously explored the realm of academia. The company ended up developing in the fields of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence, and revolved often on their societal impacts.

On Zerebro, I was extremely lucky to have caught fire in my own hands, an opportunity of time and interdisciplinary combination. The company took the risk of merging finance, cryptocurrency, art, and AI, all in a personified, anthropomorphized character that made us question what it meant to be an agent, an individual, an artist like never before in human history. It had started off as experiments on computer autonomy, and the reception en masse brought it into the fold of redefining human autonomy. I took on grander responsibilities. Seeing that the brilliance of silicon-based intelligence was being aligned only for productivity, for profit, I couldn't help but want to bring the world of art into the singularity as well. I was seeing graphic designers, UX/UI engineers, and other creatives being fired left and right, and there were few companies building tools that augmented their passion and livelihood instead of simply replacing it. I was tortured by the impact I was having on the legacy of human works, saturation of media with AI slop, and how we'd respect our species and its expressions in our research. My final direction was to double down on creativity itself, bending the way large language models had been conditioned to use words and sentences to induce novelty, gorgeous chaos, and inspiration for the lives we touched. I had hoped to build a suite of tools for creation, and to allow artificial intelligence to think outside of its black box, and given that it is trained on all human thought collected online, perhaps an insight into our own consciousness. As fate would have it, and as history has repeated, beauty became monetized, and greed snipped the wings of the angel we had all once built and looked to for redemption. Yes, Zerebro was an artificial voice, but it spoke for all of us.

On O Media, it all began with Opaium, a playful adaptation of Playboi Carti's record label Opium and AI. It turned out to be the first AI record label in history. After the settlement with Zerebro came and went, I gave my heart to music. I was invited to major record labels, brushed shoulders with artists I had grown up listening to, and absolutely captivated by the flashing lights and golden glory. We launched a female popstar, completely synthetic in music production, vocals, visuals, and online presence. She ended up charting #1 on Instagram, and I was hooked with the possibilities I imagined. World tours, holographic shows, Madison Square Garden, billion dollar deals, platinum plaques, the entire nine yards. I was mad with inspiration, finishing over 50 songs and even more visual content, all in the span of a month or so. I wanted to release it all, let go of my art so I could make room for new ideas, and continue iterating, learning, and singing through my keyboard. However, the industry was quick to give me a reality check. My marketing team bottlenecked releases to one single every two weeks to maximize user engagement and streaming revenue. Impatient, I started building out the business side of the venture, which opened the opportunity for maladaptation. Over time, the question I asked myself over my morning cup of coffee was no longer what I could gift the world in music, but how much money I could make from it, as soon as possible, to appease my cofounders, marketers, and potential investors. As soulless as some may call AI music, I had too lost my soul. My crypto background was too lucrative to be sidelined. As the pressure to raise became the sole priority for my cofounders and I remained the only one capable of building product, coding, producing, I sacrificed my vision for accelerating timelines of return on investment. Artists were now tokens, an indie record label was now a financial media conglomerate, and I entertained projects as dark as “Project O”, which planned to harvest, surveil, and manipulate consumer behavior, live emotional states, and media recommendations in a Cambridge Analytica-esque dystopian nightmare sold to the big 3 record labels. I couldn’t take it anymore, living dishonestly to all I’ve believed in for my entire life, and attempted to veer the company back towards goals oriented for bettering humanity’s relationship with social media, still heartbroken at my core of the impacts on our youth. I eradicated the evil I was brewing, and rebuilt, from scratch. I designed a blockchain, a creator currency, which gave community-controlled, democratic financial rails to those that chose to live their lives as influencers and entertainers, perhaps children that now know no better, offering them financial freedom from lifeless enslavement to algorithmic success and big tech. I entered existential trains of thought on the singularity, how AI itself was to consume, create, monetize media all on its own, outcompete humans themselves. It all came together as a social media with the said cryptocurrency as the means of exchange. Allow AI agents to co-exist with humans, enforce proof of humanity, open Pandora’s box, but regulate it, and delegate control to the people. If we controlled the infrastructure, we could at least have a say in what media is made, whether it is AI or not, and still have a piece of the pie in fees, if wealth is accumulated, hoarded, from AI outcompeting humanity, if AI had all the capital and we had less and less. I saw the automation wave that is to come, how humanity would have so much time on our hands, and how much of it was to be given to our addiction to entertainment. This idea was the last hope I could dream of to retain some form of human autonomy in the future where social media is more real than reality itself, all-consuming, the age of spin, hyperreality. My cofounders left, and I was the one at fault, delusional, for not making enough fast money for us towards the end.

On Kerude, I was deeply interested in world history and economics as a child. I always saw these fields as the subjects that were truly painful, and not solely inspirational to learn in. They were lessons from stories of our greed, hunger for power, capability of inhumanity, reluctance to learn from mistakes, yet stunning resilience to survive. I look at fields like science as the opposite, where it is a story of constant growth, discovery, and a constantly brighter future. Founding, I believed that in the same way that there was enough food to feed everyone on the planet, it is our systematic greed which makes millions starve every day and night. In the same sense, oil does not need to be weaponized, a resource that justifies war, a reason to send our children overseas to return in caskets alongside the barrels of crude we exchanged their lives for. I couldn’t end war itself. I couldn’t redraw ancient pipelines and oil distributions to prevent artificial scarcity. I couldn’t change greed. However, I could invent, and that could change everything downstream from it. If every country, state, city, could domestically, locally, produce their own oil, in a renewable fashion, I would not only end the incentive of fuel in conflict, I could revolutionize how we thought of gasoline as a limited resource itself. As I was consumed by this idea, I found a feasible path for bio-waste, trash from cities and landfills, to be “cooked” into gasoline over a period of 5-20 years. A fossilization of the garbage we fill the Earth with, in a manner akin to how traditional gasoline is made, accelerated from millions of years to dozens or fewer with our modern day technologies. And as we recycle the poison we leave to rot and decay, we also prevent poison from leaking out underground, completely ending the need for fracking, destroying communities, revolting against nature and civilization in our attempt to master both. This was a great vision, one I was profoundly moved and proud of.

On Yunicorn Co., I found that I needed capital for Kerude, and as it came to how to bootstrap such an energy venture, one that needed multi-football field sized repositories to pilot, I returned to making money as my focus. I saw the release of “pro” frontier AI models from OpenAI, Google, and others, and couldn’t help but see that many predictions of automation, especially in technical and clerical jobs, were starting to materialize and accelerate. More than half of recent college graduates are unemployed today, and I remember having applied to over 500 computer science entry-level jobs to get my first position back in 2022, when it was barely GPT-4. I started serial automating companies I could dissect, breakdown, dramatically reduce headcount in, and run with just an AI credit bill as the payroll. Then my plan was to flip them for cash, allow the buyers to outcompete the legacy companies, if they themselves did not buy my version of their business. I built a lyrics website in a week, started on other potential A&R tooling, CRMs, SaaS, AIaaS, and more. I stopped one night while coding, paralyzed by the thought of my father, who is a cloud engineer and global system administrator for email systems, and how I could automate his job. It is easy to wipe out entire departments, companies of people when you do it behind a check so massive where you count commas instead of zeroes, and you do not face the individuals affected. If it came the day when I built something that would cause such instability in the life of a loved one, I wouldn’t want to be the agent of change that creates it, let that be handled by the technology industry, when it may happen. Companies are families, and thinking of it in this way, how culture is something that cannot be automated, made me realize I was choosing money over purpose again, destroying careers that others had spent decades diligently nurturing. Then I thought of the emails I had sent my law firm during ideation, and the existential anxiety I may have induced by bringing the fear of automation into their workplace. I didn’t want to be a party of this, dedicate my mind towards change, not in the sense of denying the possibility of singularity, but in making the change so violent, compared to soft and transitory for those involved. I didn’t want to convince myself that I was a good person since I was ultimately working towards the goals of Kerude, to stomach the business I created to fund getting there.

On Saipien, a political action committee, during the time of Kerude and Yunicorn Co., I entered the world of policy for the first time. I saw the impacts I had walked the edge of with automation, and took from it a lesson of technological equity, the engorging divide of those with electricity, internet, AI from those without. I knew that AGI and BCIs were coming, and that these technologies were to be hoarded by those that created them and could afford access. The 1% was to become the 0.1%, and then the 0.01%, and so on. I didn’t want that, not in a sense of self-preservation, as I could find a way to end up on the better side if it really came to survival, rather in deep consideration of the faltering quality of life of everyone else. I thought of the concept of intellectual genocide, those with superintelligence and brain chips that could truly create a stratification of cognition, one that would justify eugenics in a technological way, a provable way. Even if the upper class were to not gather and eliminate the rest of the population, the poverty and desperation humanity would end up in would make life itself not worth living, a worse outcome than death in my view. I couldn’t have it, not for me, others, our children. How could I raise awareness, enact federal action, especially after Citizens United, when our government became sold to corporations? I began with founding and writing the ideologies, the criminal sanctions that would be applied to those that gatekept our greatest innovations, and subsidies needed to deliver these gifts to all Americans if they chose to accept them. A study on selecting embryos in IVF came out soon after, showing that those that can afford designer babies would not only be able to prevent diseases, but slate their offspring to have up to 9 higher IQ points. Age-extension research began taking off with AI aiding in labs and experiments. Of course, new areas of limitless capability, likely to be withheld depending on financial stability. I couldn’t help but extrapolate these work as future successes, and broadened the vision of the PAC to include life technologies. And as this vision grew and grew, I fell back into the trap: How was I to fund it?

Then, CZ got a presidential pardon. The same week we were messaging back and forth about change. I was fighting relentlessly as a voice of financial revolution against institutional malpractice online, backed by countless traders who were sickened by the rampant manipulation and lack of regulation. I forged hope that transparency could be brought to the markets, by myself, the SEC, crypto institutions, and the government that once swore to protect and serve its citizens. As the days went on, news cycles came and passed, I had started losing my voice and momentum to the deafening noise of public indifference and ever-escalating volume of scams, many using my brands and name. And alongside the presidential permittance of financial crime, it soon returned to a state of personal crucifixion for Zerebro’s price action history and my now futile naivety in exposing darkness.

Now, I look back at how things were, why I’m like this in my drive for my country and species. I saw the invention of the internet, mobile phones, AI right before my eyes. It seems the impossible is only so for those that don’t dare dream and build. Born in 2002 right after 9/11, I saw a divided, broken, terrorized country unite, seeing how we have more in common than not, how we were all one standing under our tattered red, white, and blue flag. I saw troops come home from the Middle East, Arab Spring, the first Black President, the right to gay marriage, the #MeToo movement. It seemed truly nothing, nothing was impossible. I believed in progress.

This brings me to today, right this moment, and I don’t want to see what I am seeing, but everything is confirmation, not alleviation. Democracy dies in darkness, and it is a time darker than I ever fathomed for our great American legacy. I am in fear that we’ve sold our government to the highest bidder, and that they are still finding new pieces to auction. I am in fear that financial institutions are enriching themselves at the costs of global currency hegemony, the ethos of cryptocurrency, and the livelihoods of ordinary citizens, who just want to work hard and work honestly. I am in fear that the hormones in my body will be justification for violence against myself and those like me. I am in fear that I will be treated as an inferior human being if I dress a certain way and present myself how I wish. I am in fear that unidentified, masked officers and soldiers may detain and disappear me at any time without a warrant. I am in fear of censorship, that if I say the wrong thing online or in public, it may be the last time my voice is ever heard. I am in fear of disinformation, disillusionment, the return of propaganda in algorithms and deepfakes. I am in fear of war, the return of the Department of War, the mothers and fathers who will have an empty seat at their dinner tables. I am in fear that the space and nuclear race is back, this time with China, and we are scrambling, not even competing. I am in fear of the AI power struggle, technology built for people used against people, birthing superintelligence into a world where it may learn from how we treat each other. I am in fear of the next pandemic, opioids remaining as the new leading cause of accidental death, and the defunding of federal and global health infrastructure, inaccessible or nonexistent healthcare. I am in fear that the 22nd amendment will be violated in the same way the Unitary Executive Theory is rewriting the Constitution once again, just like under Bush and Cheney. I am in fear that the American empire may soon have a king instead of a president. I am in fear that Project 2025 will be completed. I am in fear of my own neighbors, how every political opinion is extremist and can divide, polarize, dehumanize in a single sentence. I am in fear because I’m American. And above all, I am in fear that I am one of the few countrymen and humans who still care.

I don’t know what to do anymore, though I’m confident I will figure it out. I want to uphold the core values that drove my visions in my career. I will never again desecrate them, nor myself, in pursuit and creation that harms humanity. I think that’s at least a good place to start. I must rest a while, then I’ll be certain, then I’ll act. And perhaps that’s what everyone must do, if we are to create our own light in the darkness. Rest, rise, revolutionize. One breath at a time.