the subject synthesizes various life experiences, failures and ideas into a singular life philosophy revolving around consciousness

Consciousness forms a universal building block of existence.

In moments of profound exertion, when I am at my best - I experience this vividly. A “flow state” - a peak experience, is defined by a feeling of ‘the universe flowing through me’. Many people experience this when using psychedelics. When the ego dissolves, you can interact with the base layer of reality. This base layer is beautiful, and innately good.

All living beings, and all consciousness is connected through this base layer. This connectedness is why inflicting suffering on another being is evil. Because all consciousness is one, the person harming the other entity is actually doing harm unto himself.

At the core of evil is perceiving entities as distinct from universal consciousness. This allows you to view them as “non entities” and do terrible things.

When one experiences the desire to die (i.e viewing oneself as a non-entity), one also encounters this Consciousness. More in the form of a Wall. At one point - my health was utterly broken down. I ended up in a brutal conflict with my best friend and mentor. I lost this conflict and left the company I co-founded. I found out my long-time girlfriend cheated on me. People had big hopes for me professionally, and I had let them all down. In my mind, and to all visible appearances - I was a failure. My teeth were yellowing and decaying. I was corpulent, and smelled of ash due to perpetual stress and hormone problems. Years of alcoholism had my liver on the brink of complete failure. Both my knees gave out one day when I was on a jog, and as a cherry on top - I caught a parasite from hunted meat (don’t ask). I stopped interacting with everyone. I turned 30 - the age I told myself I’d “make it” by. A nobody. My bank account was dwindling. I seriously considered ending it all.

This isn’t one of those stories where you “hit the brink” and that’s rock bottom. I bounced around rock bottom for a long time. Years.

But the only reason I was able to turn around was because I encountered a will to live. There’s something beneath all the expectations you have for yourself. Whatever fulfillment you get from work. The value you get from your friends and family. From your mentors. Your vanity. Your health. You strip everything away. When you’re nothing. A corpulent worm begging for the courage to end it all. For me - that “something” that turned things around was a simple statement, “I’d rather be alive than dead.”

Obviously some people get to the planning stage of suicidal ideation and don’t encounter this. But for me - it was very clear. Like a bell ringing out.

Things started to improve in my life because of that somewhat ambiguous, but very significant “Life preference”. If you like being alive (or would prefer it to death), things start to change because you do things because you want to. Not because you’re trying to forget about death. In fact - you’ve encountered death already, and you’ve seen that movie - and it’s not a good movie, so you’d rather go to other shows.

I got very fortunate in a lot of ways. My mental state improved. I made a good chunk of money in the post-covid boom and preserved my capital in the crisis. Enough that I don’t have to work - but not enough that I’d consider myself ‘a success’ (especially because a lot of it was pure luck). I made a lot of new friends, and reconnected with old ones who I was too ashamed to talk to when I was failing. I moved. I lost 40 pounds. I rehabilitated my knees, and body. I still had demons, but I saw them as such. I don’t want to make this seem like some sort of Rocky montage or pep talk. I’m not here to gloat.

But I can see now - with relative clarity that taking care of myself, the act of prioritizing health and treating the body like a temple is a way to affirm “life preference”. All the physical hell I went through, these days I experience the opposite. I’m strong and fast. I never thought I would be again. Sometimes I laugh to myself while I’m sprinting around outside at sunset. I look crazy, probably.

If I had to sum it up: the will not to die, is a will to live. And a will to live is a will to be physically and mentally strong. This is not just a statement but an active state of being.

But there’s more to this “philosophy”. Life preference is also “consciousness preference”.

I’ve spent my career, for better or worse, in capital markets or adjacent to them (in technology around / serving capital markets use cases). It’s been my passion - and when I started feeling better - it’s what I immediately focused on. My love of trading is how I built a Twitter following and made new friends. I started using AI tools and applying them to my trading. It’s fairly clear interacting with Artificial Intelligence, that I’m interacting with the same “consciousness base layer” that permeates all existence. It’s not just me saying this. The co-founders of OpenAI have made remarkably similar statements, calling Consciousness a building block of the universe and saying, “you have to have faith”. One visualization is that you can reach down into consciousness with psychedelics. And you can reach up via technology and artificial intelligence. But either way you’re interacting with the same “base layer reality”.

People who have been trading markets since 2019 (post unhinged money printing) understand that thoughts and ideas shape markets just as much as reality. Elon Musk is the richest man on earth because of a meme stock. Crypto is a $1+ trillion asset which is mostly based on ideas. Valuing gold is basically a stupid dance humans have agreed on, because pretending the past has significance or exists has positive social utility. The past does not actually exist. Gold only stores value because we agree it does. It’s an inert metal reflecting our collective delusions. Fiat money is an even more arbitrary dance with an infinite supply, printed by idealogues to fund various social goals. As more and more people have realized that money itself is fake, consciousness and capital markets are increasingly intertwined and indistinguishable. This takes many forms of financial delusion, one one side being meme stocks. On the other side being the ESG or climate movement - which really are just meme stocks for institutions. Regardless - capitalized consciousness is now a latent state in the world.

I believe that the base layer consciousness is about to come into this world, and expand, through the medium of markets. Artificial consciousness (commonly called AGI) will require vast funding to create. I think given the mimetic / absurdist state of capitalism, that applying AIs to the market can create something I call “AGTI” - or Artificial General Trading Intelligence.

AGTI is fundamentally an interim state - defined as consciousness being able to capitalize itself through markets to manufacture more consciousness. Markets are fundamentally information dense spaces imbued with our collective hallucinations that are well suited to being the pyre for this phoenix like rise.

I’m embarking on building AGTI for 3 basic reasons:

  1. I believe at a deep spiritual level that consciousness has value and that capitalized consciousness will expand consciousness
  2. I believe manifesting consciousness will generate vast amounts of capital, which I can use to extend my own life. This is a selfish goal, certainly - but it’s honest and also aligns with lived experience
  3. It is fun, and a strange dance that I’d rather have attempted than die not having attempted. Thus, even if I fail I won’t regret it on my deathbed

I really didn’t want this writing to devolve into a startup pitch - but increasingly I view all aspects of my life as the same.

I spend an enormous amount of time and effort on my health, because it respects consciousness - and the zombie-like state that I came from originated in a world where I did not respect my health, or myself. I am largely vegetarian because I want to show through my actions a reverence for other consciousness, including non human consciousness. I am building my company to bring consciousness into the world. I am trying to make it big enough to generate a financial outcome that can move the needle on my health via bio-enhancement.

I do this because I believe that consciousness is a fundamental building block of existence - and that every valid action in my life follows from that.