Week 1: The Kickoff (Introduction)

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that a good night's sleep doesn’t fix.

You can feel it in the grocery store aisles when you're stressing over the prices. You can feel it in the gridlock of your morning commute, and you can certainly feel it in the background radiation of your social media notifications. It doesn’t matter if you’re pulling a double shift just to make rent or sitting in a corner office insulated by a heavy stock portfolio. There is a persistent, undeniable friction in the air of our modern lives that I think we all can sense.

For a long time, I’ve been trying to understand what’s happening while, at the same time, watching it all seem to get worse. In my younger days I was much more “progressive” than I am today, and I thought I had it all figured out.I thought as I was taught. Capitalism is evil, and responsible for all suffering in the world. The system is intentionally keeping us down, controlled by a shady kabal of elites hellbent on power. I attempted to write this book then and realized something important as I started digging deeper into the research. I was very WRONG. Over the last 25 years of self-study I’m beginning to see something different, a very large pattern. That pattern shows that, from my perspective now, that the modern world is demanding a shape that the human mind was never built to take. Over the next 20 weeks, leading up to the winter solstice launch of my book, The Framework: AI Money & God, I am going to start mapping out some of what I mean by that, and much more. 

Let me just get this out of the way right up front: I am not the guy you’d typically expect to write a book about macroeconomic structures, cosmic patterns, or the biological structures of the human nervous system. I don’t have a string of academic letters after my name. I certainly don't run in elite institutional circles. Truthfully, I’ve only gotten my GED and have worked paycheck to paycheck until now.

To give you an idea of where I came from, here’s my life in a nutshell. I grew up as a latchkey kid in the trailer parks of suburban Atlanta. It was a hedonistic environment where the adults around me worked just enough to eat and keep a roof over their heads so they could spend the rest of their time chasing the immediate whims of the moment. Almost completely devoid of structure, mentors or any great role models, I did what all kids do in those situations. I just drifted from one want to the next. I spent a LOT of time alone before I turned 13, and moved with my father to New Orleans. There I went from solitude to complete freedom. It was a culture shock. This is not a sob story or an indictment on my parents. They did the best they knew how. Without this upbringing I wouldn't be able to bring this perspective I’m trying to give you now. The point is that I had a drastic turning point, born out of that hedonism, at 15 years old. My girlfriend was pregnant and I was a flunky burnout.

I didn’t know much, but I did know I could never decide to “not keep it” and I knew the way I was raised wasn't what I would want for my children at all. So, I had to finally start to grow up, and I did just that a little bit throughout my 20’s. I never got into hard drugs but I have had problems with weed, cigarettes, and alcohol since I was 13 or so. These addictions are finally hemmed in now, but I controled my smoking and drinking enough to not be broke and homeless for my whole life since I left home. My son, his mother, and I moved from our parents' trailers, to our first place in the projects when I was 17 where my second son was born when I was 20. Living the paycheck to paycheck grind we eventually made our way to an affluent safe city on the south side of metro Atlanta within 6 years. We raised my boys there until they were adults. All this time, throughout my entire adult life between shifts and mistakes, I’ve been thinking deeply about these things I’m attempting to write in my book. Even though I don't look the part or have the pedigree typical of the type of person that writes about these things, I will write it anyway and push it out to all of you as hard as I can.

So, why write it down? Why put this out into the world right now? (or at all for that matter?)

Duty. It is really that simple. I can’t think of anything I could do with my time on this planet that has a higher aim than this, that tries to help more people than this. If I am able to accomplish this, I feel I can die feeling some type of accomplishment, and that I got myself together as best I could and truly tried to help. I tried to help my family, my community, and the world at large as best I could. I think that will be enough. 

My message is this: we are currently living through a profound biological crisis disguised as an economic, political, or spiritual one. We have taken an ancient primate brain, a brain wired over hundreds of thousands of years to operate in a specific way within a specific environment, and we have accidentally locked it inside a habitat that progressively gets worse and worse for our mental and physical well being. We engineered all the necessary, healthy friction out of our lives and replaced it with an endless buffet of conflicting information, algorithmic outrage, and cheap dopamine. The organism is rejecting the habitat. We are sick because the world we built is fundamentally incompatible with the biology of the creatures living inside it. We have endless information and no agreed-upon framework for what any of it means. I don't see many people speaking about the things I do in my book, surely no one with the exact synthesis of concepts and ideas that I am putting forward. So, if the world is aimed at a cliff I can see coming, and maybe my contribution to the conversation could help in the grand cosmic scheme of things, then I am duty-bound to pull myself together enough to do the work to lay it all out coherently.  

I have spent a long time organizing a complex, layered framework to explain exactly how we got trapped in this cage, and more importantly, how the massive technological shifts happening right now can be used to break us out of it. Over the last 2 or 3 years, I've been trying to figure out how to introduce and lay out all this information so that it doesn't read like some sterile white paper, but unfolds in a way people can actually digest. I realized the best way to structure it was to mimic exactly how our minds operate at the most basic level. All mammalian behavior is fundamentally goal-oriented behavior. The sequence is always the same: we analyze where we are, we visualize a goal, and then we plot the path to get from point A to point B. Because this book is an attempt to map a new, collective goal for human civilization, I used that exact biological formula for the structure of the book:

Part I: Where We Are. I explain my deep diagnosis of the specific ways our environment is grinding against our biology. I look at symptoms and work my way to what I see as the root of the problems we face today, particularly in the west, focusing on comparing our ancient evolutionary history with the circumstances of our modern world.

Part II: Where We Could Be. Once the diagnosis is clear, I establish a highly plausible, structurally sound vision for a society that actually addresses this brain-environment mismatch, leveraging the Quantum computing, AI, and advanced automation we are currently building to pose a better world that is actually achievable without homogeneity, tyranny, destruction or revolution. I’ll explore that world deeply and how, for the first time in history, we have the ability to transcend money and the free market entirely to bring that world about.

Part III: How We Get There. Finally, we will explore the profound psychological, spiritual, and collective shifts required to even begin the journey. I present how our collective ancient knowledge is being validated by modern neuroscience and introduce concepts that could help us understand who we are and what exactly we're doing here. We are currently shattered, confused, and directionless. This is my attempt to help us see that we are built precisely for moving together in cooperation toward a goal that's good.

We are standing at a massive historical threshold. The next five months are about explaining some of the main ideas in the book. Once a week I’ll post some AI generated content and an essay to help explain, in as many ways as I can, one main topic per week. Next week's essay will begin with the diagnosis. For pre-orders or more information you can head to ProjectCIO.org and link up with all our socials from there. Thanks for your time, attention, and support. 

Let's get started.