This is not a theoretical conversation. It’s not a vibe. It’s not an abstract meditation on culture. It’s about something very specific that keeps happening, and that creators, brands, and institutions can no longer afford to ignore.

The tone matters. The timing matters. The content matters. This isn’t guilt by proximity before facts were known. Deepak Chopra is under the whisper of social scrutiny because emails show him exchanging friendly, casual messages with Jeffrey Epstein after Epstein had already been convicted of child sexual assault. This is continued, familiar communication after conviction.

There’s no clever way to talk around that. It looks bad because it is a bad look, for a spiritual adviser especially.

This doesn’t require exaggeration, and it doesn’t require moral theater. It requires honesty. When someone continues to socialize— intellectually or casually — with a convicted sex offender, especially in ways that include joking or comments about women or girls, the optics are not ambiguous. They signal a failure of judgment at best, and moral indifference at worst.

This isn’t about cancelation. It’s about consequences.

And it’s not unique.

What’s happening here is part of a much larger pattern: reward is becoming radioactive. The very associations that once elevated careers—collaborations, partnerships, shared brands, co-signs—are now one of the greatest sources of long-term risk.

For decades, creators were told to align upward. Work with bigger names. Align yourself with stars in your field. Build credibility through proximity. Hitch your wagon to a star. That model rewarded association. It made sense in a world where information was scarce, archives were incomplete, and time acted like a diffuser, making less concentrated an unacceptable smell.

That diffusion is a relic of the past.

We now live in an environment where past behavior is searchable, documentable, and contextual. Actions don’t stay in their decade. New information doesn’t just update the present; it changes the market value in the present, overnight making a devaluation of some previously stable asset. The would-be heirs now defunded; family name: devalued. And when that happens, the fallout doesn’t stop with the individual who made the choice. It spreads outward — to collaborators, partners, advocates, and anyone whose reputation or lifestyle became entangled when it was rewarding to share the spotlight.

This is where brands and people in orbit are getting burned.

This is especially brutal for people who invested in those relationships professionally.

Someone else’s choices — sometimes made decades earlier — can devalue your own career today. Not because you endorsed those choices, but because public interpretation now treats alignment as advocacy. Silence as complicity. Proximity as permission. So even if it happened before your time, now you’re expected to make a statement and now it’s a part of your story because your requested statement was documented. Brutal.

That’s the reality public figures of all kinds are navigating in this era I will now coin as the Era of Appetite for social justice (or destruction, I’ll concede to that on some days).

So when we look at the expectations around Chopra, it’s not about whether every spiritual idea he’s ever expressed is invalid. Ideas don’t evaporate because the speaker fails to live up to them.

Hundreds, thousands - mmmm - hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions more people find ease toward better choices every day because of some book or quote or thing the man said. The good will continue to echo (along with the other echoes).

That’s my point.

The lesson here is integrity matters more than ever, because the gap between what someone teaches and how they behave is no longer infrared. It’s visible. And only when you know you’re being watched does visibility change how humans behave (yes, we already have receipts, Chad, so put your tomato away).

This moment is an opportunity — not for spectacle, but for reflection and personal resolution.

Appropriately aligned attention to how we show up for professional associations and friends.

Attention to WHY we advocate.

Keener awareness to who we are implicitly vouching for when we attach our names, brands, or platforms to others and how we present ourselves to them.

In my time here onchain, I’ve evolved away from trust. I’m trustless, but not permissionless too. Why? Because people pivot. People are fickle. And as brands are run by people; they’re just as volatile.

The lesson isn’t “work alone forever.” Build everything yourself, trust no one. It’s not endless vetting, and unhelpful DYOR paranoia. It’s discernment when you know the shit ain’t right — even when the bag is a fatty. It’s understanding that mercenary toadying retroactively now carries interest-bearing reputational weight. That advocacy is no longer retractable without an explicit statement, literally. Reward can turn radioactive long after the applause fades.

Integrity used to be a personal value.

Now it’s a public good.

In a world where ancient history literally re-surfaces, and each of us is a contributing evolving story, the only thing that reliably you control is your opinion of yourself.

It guides all your decisions.

Stay warm, my friends.

Maxximillian

This is not a theoretical conversation. It’s not a vibe. It’s not an abstract meditation on culture. It’s about something very specific that keeps happening, and that creators, brands, and institutions can no longer afford to ignore.

The tone matters. The timing matters. The content matters. This isn’t guilt by proximity before facts were known. Deepak Chopra is under the whisper of social scrutiny because emails show him exchanging friendly, casual messages with Jeffrey Epstein after Epstein had already been convicted of child sexual assault. This is continued, familiar communication after conviction.

There’s no clever way to talk around that. It looks bad because it is a bad look, for a spiritual adviser especially.

This doesn’t require exaggeration, and it doesn’t require moral theater. It requires honesty. When someone continues to socialize— intellectually or casually — with a convicted sex offender, especially in ways that include joking or comments about women or girls, the optics are not ambiguous. They signal a failure of judgment at best, and moral indifference at worst.

This isn’t about cancelation. It’s about consequences.

And it’s not unique.

What’s happening here is part of a much larger pattern: reward is becoming radioactive. The very associations that once elevated careers—collaborations, partnerships, shared brands, co-signs—are now one of the greatest sources of long-term risk.

For decades, creators were told to align upward. Work with bigger names. Align yourself with stars in your field. Build credibility through proximity. Hitch your wagon to a star. That model rewarded association. It made sense in a world where information was scarce, archives were incomplete, and time acted like a diffuser, making less concentrated an unacceptable smell.

That diffusion is a relic of the past.

We now live in an environment where past behavior is searchable, documentable, and contextual. Actions don’t stay in their decade. New information doesn’t just update the present; it changes the market value in the present, overnight making a devaluation of some previously stable asset. The would-be heirs now defunded; family name: devalued. And when that happens, the fallout doesn’t stop with the individual who made the choice. It spreads outward — to collaborators, partners, advocates, and anyone whose reputation or lifestyle became entangled when it was rewarding to share the spotlight.

This is where brands and people in orbit are getting burned.

This is especially brutal for people who invested in those relationships professionally.

Someone else’s choices — sometimes made decades earlier — can devalue your own career today. Not because you endorsed those choices, but because public interpretation now treats alignment as advocacy. Silence as complicity. Proximity as permission. So even if it happened before your time, now you’re expected to make a statement and now it’s a part of your story because your requested statement was documented. Brutal.

That’s the reality public figures of all kinds are navigating in this era I will now coin as the Era of Appetite for social justice (or destruction, I’ll concede to that on some days).

So when we look at the expectations around Chopra, it’s not about whether every spiritual idea he’s ever expressed is invalid. Ideas don’t evaporate because the speaker fails to live up to them.

Hundreds, thousands - mmmm - hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions more people find ease toward better choices every day because of some book or quote or thing the man said. The good will continue to echo (along with the other echoes).

That’s my point.

The lesson here is integrity matters more than ever, because the gap between what someone teaches and how they behave is no longer infrared. It’s visible. And only when you know you’re being watched does visibility change how humans behave (yes, we already have receipts, Chad, so put your tomato away).

This moment is an opportunity — not for spectacle, but for reflection and personal resolution.

Appropriately aligned attention to how we show up for professional associations and friends.

Attention to WHY we advocate.

Keener awareness to who we are implicitly vouching for when we attach our names, brands, or platforms to others and how we present ourselves to them.

In my time here onchain, I’ve evolved away from trust. I’m trustless, but not permissionless too. Why? Because people pivot. People are fickle. And as brands are run by people; they’re just as volatile.

The lesson isn’t “work alone forever.” Build everything yourself, trust no one. It’s not endless vetting, and unhelpful DYOR paranoia. It’s discernment when you know the shit ain’t right — even when the bag is a fatty. It’s understanding that mercenary toadying retroactively now carries interest-bearing reputational weight. That advocacy is no longer retractable without an explicit statement, literally. Reward can turn radioactive long after the applause fades.

Integrity used to be a personal value.

Now it’s a public good.

In a world where ancient history literally re-surfaces, and each of us is a contributing evolving story, the only thing that reliably you control is your opinion of yourself.

It guides all your decisions.

Stay warm, my friends.

Maxximillian