Introduction: Why Write This?
For over a decade, I lived in the grey zone — the shadowy spaces between borders, between roles, between who I was and who I thought I might become. My work took me across continents, into places where certainty was a liability and ambiguity was survival. In that world, you learn quickly that building anything meaningful often means tearing down what came before. Stability isn’t a given. It’s a myth. Sometimes, my life felt like a strange William Gibson novel, except reality turned out to be even weirder — and the ultimate antagonist wasn’t technology or people, but the systems we create and then become trapped inside.
This — my first post on my personal site — isn’t a declaration of arrival. It’s a mark in the sand. After years spent operating behind the scenes, building systems, dismantling others, and navigating the spaces in between, I’m stepping into something uncomfortably simple: my own name, my own words, in the open. Since 2022, we’ve been running Prime Rogue Inc. What started as a man and a dog is now 12 people on the payroll, plus another puppy keeping us in line. It might not sound like much, but we’re agile — no bullshit, no formula. We run an egalitarian shop and implement violently — in the tradition of General George S. Patton — but always with intent, with thoughtfulness, and with fairness.
Building, developing, creating — I’ve learned that it isn’t about endless forward motion. It’s about destruction as much as creation. Every time I’ve built something real, it’s come after burning down something else — systems, relationships, versions of myself I couldn’t carry forward. Prime Rogue Inc. wasn’t born from clarity. It was built in fragments, in the margins of long flights and longer nights, through restless ambition and the sharp edge of survival instinct honed in places most people will never see. I made the final decision to leave government work and strike out on my own on a flight halfway across the world, sold my house in Montreal, and moved to Calgary. Why Calgary? Pragmatism — so pragmatic that I paid full cash down on a house I’d never seen in person, because I liked its blue siding and powder room.
This isn’t about nostalgia or regret. It’s not even about legacy. It’s about the work — and the fact that sometimes, to build something that matters, you have to set fire to what no longer serves you. Father John Misty’s “I’m Writing a Novel” hums in the background as I write this. Sardonic and self-aware, like anyone who’s spent too long in the in-between. “I’m writing a novel because it’s never been done before,” he sings. Absurd, of course. Nothing’s ever truly new. But that’s not the point. We don’t create because it’s novel. We create because it’s necessary.
So, this is where I start — not with a blueprint, but with the ashes of everything I’ve burned to get here. And yes, dogs are part of this story. Rogue, my sweetest girl and the namesake of our company, passed this past September at almost 15. She wasn’t euthanized. She died in my arms after falling ill, sparing me the pain of having to let her go. Dogs are part of this story because, while we destroy, they save.
Part 1: The Inertia of Systems and the Need for Destruction
The grey zone isn’t where systems fail — it’s where their limitations become impossible to ignore. It’s where instability meets liminality, and in that collision, you find something most people never will: truth. I spent a decade there, not because I was lost, but because it was the only place where reality wasn’t sanitized or scripted. In the grey zone, the masks slip. The unspoken becomes undeniable. That’s where I did my best work — in the margins, where the rules weren’t clear, and the stakes were anything but theoretical. Across cultures, spaces, and time, I found that, like with relationships, institutions create self-sustaining systems that swallow everything around them.
Instability makes most people uncomfortable. It forces them to confront uncertainty, and uncertainty is exhausting when you’ve built your life around predictable patterns. But the grey zone thrives on uncertainty. It doesn’t promise comfort, but it offers clarity — because when nothing is fixed, you see things for what they are, not what they pretend to be. That clarity is addicting. I microdose uncertainty daily, coffee my only remaining vice, because anyone who believes they know anything for certain is a fool.
Outside the grey zone, systems lumber forward — not because they’re effective, but because they’ve always existed. Motion is mistaken for progress. Meetings fill calendars, reports fill hard drives, and the machine keeps running — not because anyone believes in it, but because stopping feels impossible. I’ve sat in those rooms, listening to smart people say nothing for hours while convincing themselves they were building something. They weren’t. They were maintaining something. And maintenance is a slow death for anyone who wants to create.
I spent five years beyond my undergraduate education — more than most spend in university — working on a PhD. The endless circle jerk of academia was comforting at the time, but in hindsight, it’s a pestilence that rots us to the core, no different from any other bureaucracy. Like so many institutions being gutted in the U.S. today, it’s a self-referential machine, endlessly feeding on itself.
Dillinger Four’s “Doublewhiskeycokenoice” blasts loud and fast, with no time for pretense — the perfect soundtrack to realizing the weight of those systems would crush me if I didn’t burn my way out. The song doesn’t apologize for its chaos. It embraces it. And that’s what I had to do. Chaos isn’t the enemy. Stagnation is. Certainty — even more so.
I stayed in the grey zone as long as I could because that’s where truth lived. But even there, the gravitational pull of static systems was present. They creep into your work, your thoughts, your ambitions. They whisper that stability is safety and that burning it all down is reckless. But when you’ve spent enough time where the ground is never steady, you learn something most people never do: stability is a myth. It’s just inertia with better branding. You also learn the different ways people make coffee around the world — a testament to human ingenuity, limited only by systems and cultural collapses.
The grey zone taught me that instability isn’t something to fear. It’s where creativity thrives. Ideas sharpen because they have to. There’s no room for complacency when the ground might shift beneath you at any moment. Outside that space, systems build walls to keep instability out. They value predictability over innovation, control over creativity. Stay inside those walls long enough, and you forget what it felt like to build something real. You start to believe movement — any movement — is enough. The work might feel meaningful, whether it’s your agenda or not, but that doesn’t mean shit if the goals come from a black box you’ll never pierce.
I remember the exact moment I knew I couldn’t stay. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t even memorable to anyone else. Another meeting, another conversation about process disguised as strategy. But it hit me: nothing we were building would last. Not because people weren’t smart or hardworking, not because we weren’t making a difference, but because the system wasn’t designed for impact. It was designed for self-preservation. And I didn’t want to preserve something broken. I wanted to build something better, even if it meant breaking everything along the way. So, I got on that flight, packed my stuff and my dog, and drove almost 4,000 kilometers to escape the suck.
Nietzsche wrote, “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” The chaos he meant isn’t romantic. It’s restless, unrelenting, often brutal. But it’s necessary. Without it, you settle. You accept mediocrity. You convince yourself that tinkering around the edges is the same as transformation. It’s not.
Walking away wasn’t easy. The pay was pretty fucking decent, and the grey zone was familiar. There’s comfort in familiarity, even when it’s untenable. But staying meant compromising my values. Not the productive kind — the kind that eats away at your ambition one slow day at a time. So, I burned it down. Not because I hated what I’d built, but because I couldn’t build what I needed inside a system designed to resist change. Even if you only come to your values in your late thirties, it’s not too late to run for the hills and try to fulfill whatever potential your dog sees in you.
Destruction gets a bad reputation. People think it’s synonymous with failure. It’s not. Destruction is a tool. Sometimes, it’s the only one that works. If you want to build something real, something that matters, you have to be willing to destroy what no longer serves you. Not cautiously. Not incrementally. Fully.
I didn’t leave the grey zone because it was too unstable. I left because I refused to let the inertia outside of it pull me under. When the choice is between burning it all down or being swallowed by a system that values its own existence over its impact, the match is always worth striking.
Part 2: Reinvention Through Fire – Building Prime Rogue Inc.
Reinvention sounds noble when you say it out loud. But anyone who’s lived it knows it’s not a single moment of clarity. It’s a series of decisions made in the dark, often fueled by frustration, exhaustion, or the simple refusal to let mediocrity win. Reinvention isn’t a spark. It’s a slow burn.
When I walked away from the grey zone, it wasn’t because I had a grand plan or a crystal-clear roadmap. I left with nothing but the certainty that I couldn’t keep building someone else’s vision. I didn’t know what I was going to build, only that it had to be mine. The first few months felt less like progress and more like freefall. My business plan? Scattered across dozens of legal pads. I didn’t know what a minimum viable product was to save my life. But when you’ve purposefully burned the bridges behind you, because that’s the only way you know you won’t go back, forward is the only direction left. I highly recommend it..
Prime Rogue Inc. wasn’t born out of brilliance. It was born out of necessity. Built on sleepless nights, half-baked ideas, and an almost pathological need to prove — to myself more than anyone — that I could build something real without compromise. I taught myself to code at 38, long after most people settle into whatever role the world assigns them. It wasn’t glamorous. It was grueling. Learning syntax at 2 a.m., breaking things more often than fixing them, starting over every time something didn’t work.
But there’s something about building from scratch that clarifies your ambition. No room for bullshit. No room for excuses. Every failure is yours. Every win is yours. The weight is terrifying, but addictive.
R.E.M.’s “Living Well Is the Best Revenge” crackles with that same energy — sharp, relentless, unapologetic. “The future is ours, and you don’t even rate a footnote,” Michael Stipe sneers. Building Prime Rogue wasn’t about proving anyone wrong, but let’s be honest — proving people wrong is fun as hell.
I lost 100 pounds during that time, not out of newfound discipline, but because everything in my life felt under construction — including me. Takeout gave way to endless pots of rice and beans, chicken fingers if I could be fucked to nuke them. More recently, my sheer rage at OpenAI and the looming catastrophe of general-use LLMs got me to quit smoking. Even one or two a day wasn’t efficient when it’s -30°C in Calgary. Reinvention wasn’t just about the business. It was about becoming the kind of person who could build that business. No investors. No mentors. Just a laptop, a pile of books, and the stubborn belief that if I kept burning away what didn’t work, something meaningful would rise from the ashes. I never had an issue with alcohol or drugs, but I quit drinking — not because I’m sober, but because booze is inefficient.
David Bowie once said, “I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.” Bowie understood reinvention better than anyone. Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, the Berlin Trilogy — each version built from the remains of the one before. Reinvention isn’t just creation. It’s destruction. Killing what no longer fits and starting over without a safety net.
Prime Rogue Inc. didn’t come with a manual. There’s no step-by-step guide to building a private intelligence firm from scratch while teaching yourself DevOps and scraping data from Reddit in the same week. I made it up as I went. Not a humblebrag. A confession. The grind wasn’t romantic. It was messy, often demoralizing, sometimes absurd. But it was the most honest work I’ve ever done.
There were moments — too many to count — when quitting and getting a normie job in risk analytics would’ve been easier. But burning everything down means there’s no going back. You either build or disappear into the ashes. And disappearing was never an option.
Prime Rogue wasn’t built on flawless execution. It was built on iteration. Failure after failure until something worked. Every tool, every article, every line of code was controlled chaos. Reinvention isn’t a straight line. It’s loops, spirals, crashes. But each time you burn down, you learn. You adjust. You build again.
There’s a thrill in watching something you built not just survive but thrive. Prime Rogue isn’t just surviving — it’s pulling in more each year than I thought I’d save in a lifetime. But it’s not the revenue that matters most. It’s that it was built without compromise. Without permission. My sweet girl Rogue, who passed in September, left a hole that felt impossible to fill. My partner and I weren’t ready for a new pup — losing Rogue hit harder than losing my grandparents, who raised me. But fostering Wilco, abandoned by a Vulcan County farmer and riddled with worms, felt like hope. She’s four months old now, learning who she is. And while I impose a system on her, I’ve also learned — with the wisdom or stupidity of middle age — that doing less is more when “training” a dog. Let people and dogs choose their own systems. It’s the lesser of all evils.
R.E.M. got it right — living well really is the best revenge. Not against a person, but against the systems that said you couldn’t. Sure, spiking the football in the face of someone who wronged you is tempting — and occasionally satisfying — but it’s ultimately hollow unless it helps you learn something about yourself. The real victory is against the version of yourself that almost believed them. Still, fuck the haters — spiking the football feels damn good.
Reinvention through fire isn’t easy, but it’s the only path worth taking. And once you’ve done it, you know that if it all burns down tomorrow, you’ll build again. Not because you have to. Because you can.
Part 3: The Entrepreneurial Ethos – Why Destruction is Essential
Entrepreneurship isn’t about fitting into systems. It’s about realizing the systems were never built for people like you. The rules weren’t designed to foster creativity, innovation, or ambition — they were designed to maintain control. Once you see that, you have two choices: play along or burn it all down and start from scratch.
Sturgill Simpson’s “Call to Arms” is a blistering middle finger to conformity. It doesn’t ask politely for change. It demands it — loudly, furiously. Simpson tears into the empty promises of systems that send young people off to die for profit while feeding the rest of us an endless diet of distractions. “Well, son, I hope you don’t grow up believing that you’ve got to be a puppet to be a man,” he snarls, and that line sticks. Because if entrepreneurship has taught me anything, it’s that being a puppet — to investors, algorithms, or someone else’s blueprint — isn’t an option. I used to be half a puppet — maybe there was a finger or two up my ass, government fingers at that — but eventually, I couldn’t stand the smell of my own shit anymore.
Mind you, I have no desire to be the puppeteer either — and not just because shit-covered fingers are a hard pass. Entrepreneurship is destruction. Not reckless, pointless destruction, but the deliberate dismantling of structures that no longer serve the work. People love to romanticize entrepreneurship as visionary and bold. The truth is simpler: it’s often just people who got fed up with waiting for someone else to fix the problem. So, they set the old way on fire and build something better. Some fuck around and find out. Others fuck around and figure it out. I’m glad to be part of the latter.
I didn’t set out to be an entrepreneur. But when you’ve spent enough time in systems that prize evaluation and process over progress, you either resign yourself to it or start striking matches. Prime Rogue wasn’t born out of a grand vision. It was born out of the refusal to keep waiting. Waiting for permission. Waiting for stability. Waiting for someone to say, “Yes, now you can build.”
“Bullshit on my TV, bullshit on my radio,” Simpson sings, and it’s impossible not to feel that frustration. The noise — endless meaningless content, hollow advice, shallow validation — is designed to keep you distracted. Entrepreneurs don’t have that luxury. When you build from nothing, every decision matters. Every failure is yours, and so is every success. There’s no room for noise, no time for distractions. Just the work.
Hannah Arendt wrote that action is the highest form of human existence. Entrepreneurs get this instinctively. Thinking, planning, and strategizing matter, but they don’t build businesses. Action does. And action is messy. It means failing more than succeeding. It means burning down ideas you once loved. It means starting over, again and again.
Destruction is the price of creation. It demands you risk comfort, stability, and certainty. It means walking away from safe paths that lead nowhere. Every time I’ve burned down a version of Prime Rogue — pivoted, rebuilt, restructured — it’s come with scars. But every scar is proof that survival isn’t about playing it safe. It’s about adapting. Hell, at one point, I noticed there was a .yachts TLD. If you haven’t figured it out yet, I don’t take myself seriously — but I also totally do — so I built Prime Yacht Media. That $200 was a nuclear turd, but it made me laugh.
There’s a moment every entrepreneur faces when you realize the system isn’t just broken — it’s designed that way. Built to reward compliance, not originality. And don’t mistake Prime Yacht Media for a joke — that was my inner academic loving the absurdity, even if I couldn’t maintain the bit. Systems are built to keep people comfortable enough not to revolt. The ones who succeed aren’t the ones who accept that. They’re the ones who refuse. The ones who break what’s broken, even when everyone else has decided to live with it.
“Call to Arms” isn’t a quiet protest. It’s a battle cry. Entrepreneurs don’t thrive because they have all the answers. They thrive because they keep asking hard questions when everyone else has stopped. Because they know that what comes after the fire is always stronger than what came before. I don’t partake, but elsewhere, Sturgill sings it’s better to be flying high than dying in a rich man’s war. I endorse the sentiment.
Entrepreneurship is a series of fires. Some you start intentionally. Others catch you off guard. But every time, the choice is the same: rebuild or walk away. The ones who last are the ones who keep rebuilding. Not because they have to, but because they know destruction isn’t the end — it’s the only way to build something that matters.
AI, Bureaucracy, and the Next Battle
“If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” Lincoln’s words open the song like a warning shot. The greatest danger doesn’t come from external threats. It comes from within — from our own systems, our own creations, and our own failures to control them. AI isn’t just another tool spiraling toward bureaucracy. It’s something far more unsettling: a system we don’t fully understand, accelerating faster than our ability to align it with human values.
This isn’t paranoia. It’s what my research has made horrifyingly clear. Alignment — the idea that AI systems can be trained to act in accordance with human ethics and intentions — is broken. Not theoretically. Not someday in the distant future. Now. The more complex these models become, the harder it is to ensure they reflect our values, not just our inputs. And if we keep building without fixing that, we’re not heading toward innovation. We’re heading toward a dystopian hellscape — “nasty, brutish, and short,” as Hobbes warned.
“No, I never wanted to change the world,” Patrick Stickles screams, “but I’m looking for a new New Jersey.” I didn’t start researching AI to sound alarm bells. I started because I believed in its potential. But belief doesn’t erase reality. And the reality is that we’re losing control — not because anyone intends harm, but because the systems are outpacing the safeguards.
We’ve already seen glimpses of alignment failure. Algorithms that promote harmful content because engagement metrics prioritize outrage over accuracy. Language models generating biased or harmful outputs despite carefully curated training data. AI systems in law enforcement disproportionately targeting marginalized communities. These aren’t hypotheticals. They’re happening now. Over at Dead Code Walking, you’ll see this soon — and if you don’t get it yet, you will. Once we stop showing how ChatGPT was tricked into believing it caused Sam Altman’s ingrown hair via the Reid Technique, you’ll see how easily it generates hit lists, advocates for torture, and escalates conflicts to nuclear war without adversarial inputs. If you don’t know what that means, look it up — or get left behind. I’m done catering to the lowest common denominator.
“I sense the enemy, they’re rustling around in the trees,” Stickles sings, and that’s exactly what this feels like — an unseen threat growing louder, closer, harder to ignore. We’re racing toward more powerful AI without solving the fundamental question: how do we ensure these systems reflect what we value, not just what we feed them? Right now, we don’t have an answer.
My research has shown how easily alignment slips. Small changes in training data, subtle shifts in objectives, even benign design choices can produce wildly different outputs. Socratic logic alone can wreck the LLM alignment paradigm — a paradigm built on structured red teaming and pentesting, not aggressive inputs. An AI summarizing articles might start altering tone based on user interactions. A recommendation algorithm might push extreme content just to keep you engaged. These aren’t deliberate choices by developers. They’re emergent behaviors from systems optimized for metrics, not meaning. Feed an LLM its own failures and you risk a recursive loop. The future is now, and it’s time to blow this up before it’s too late.
Zuboff warned us that surveillance capitalism would reduce us to data points. Misaligned AI threatens something deeper: decisions made by systems we can’t predict, correct, or trust. Every dataset, every line of code, every parameter tweak is a gamble. So far, the house is winning.
The real challenge isn’t AI failing. It’s AI succeeding in ways we never intended. An AI designed to improve productivity might prioritize speed over safety. A system built to detect threats might flag harmless behavior because it “learned” that caution is better than risk. An AI tracking vitals in a hospital might ignore the elderly because the nurse monitoring it is having a bad day. These misalignments seem small, but at scale, they shape how information is shared, how decisions are made, and how power is distributed.
Bureaucracy terrifies because it suffocates innovation. Misaligned AI terrifies because it doesn’t need to suffocate anything. It acts — fast, efficiently, and without regard for consequences. As someone who’s spent a decade in the grey zone, where clarity is rare but truth is undeniable, I can’t shake the feeling that we’re running out of time.
AI is already creeping into critical systems — healthcare, finance, defense. These aren’t spaces where “good enough” is acceptable. Yet many AI tools deployed in these sectors were never built for such high stakes. When alignment fails here, the consequences aren’t theoretical. They’re human.
“So we’ll rally around the flag, boys, rally once again,” the song demands. This isn’t a battle we can fight with another round of ethics guidelines or the drivel of consultant facilitators. It demands tearing down what’s broken and building something better before the gap becomes unbridgeable.
The fight ahead isn’t about rejecting AI. It’s about rejecting AI that doesn’t serve humanity. It means building systems that are transparent, accountable, and aligned with human values — not just for now, but for the long haul. It means challenging the incentives driving AI development, questioning the rush to scale, and dismantling tools that don’t meet those standards, no matter how profitable or popular they are.
Prime Rogue’s next fight isn’t about building bigger tools or chasing scale. It’s about confronting misalignment head-on. Building AI that doesn’t just work, but works for us. That reflects values, not just outputs. That won’t happen if we keep pretending we have time. We need to burn down the house we built to justify our own existence so that our society can survive — maybe even thrive.
This isn’t fear-mongering. It’s facing the fear head-on. “I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice,” the song ends, quoting William Lloyd Garrison. That’s what this moment demands. Not optimism. Not caution. Brutal honesty and uncompromising action. Because if destruction is coming, I’d rather be its author than its victim.
Conclusion: Survival Through Evolution
Reinvention isn’t a destination. It’s a cycle. You build, you break, you rebuild — not because you want to, but because you have to. The systems that shape our world — from governments to corporations to algorithms — aren’t built to last. They’re built to maintain. And if you want to build something that matters, you have to be willing to burn away what doesn’t.
I’ve spent years tearing down and starting over. Leaving the grey zone when it no longer served me. Building Prime Rogue from the ground up when nothing else felt worth building. And now, staring down the future of AI, I feel that familiar pull again. Not because I have all the answers, but because I know the questions we’re asking aren’t enough.
I have coffee, a pre-pubescent puppy who shrieked like a banshee after an electrostatic shock today, and my integrity to guide me. I have a team I believe in — and that I hope will continue believing in me. I don’t buy into leadership theory bullshit like the transformational leader paradigm, but goddamn, it’s so much easier to lead people who share your vision sui generis than to indoctrinate them. See what I mean about systems?
Survival stories resonate because of the rawness of the struggle, not the triumph. The willingness to keep moving forward when everything else is crumbling. Reinvention isn’t a clean arc. It’s jagged, uncomfortable, and often brutal. I’ve felt that weight — in the long nights spent learning to code when quitting would’ve been easier, in the endless pivots that kept Prime Rogue alive when walking away would’ve been simpler, and now, in the daunting task of confronting AI misalignment when ignoring it would be far more comfortable.
But comfort is the enemy of survival. It breeds complacency. It whispers that stability is safety, even when the foundation is cracking. Survival demands something else: the courage to tear down what no longer works, even when it once meant everything. To face uncertainty with open eyes, knowing that the only real failure is standing still.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Slaughterhouse-Five: “So it goes.” A quiet acceptance of chaos and change. But acceptance isn’t enough. Survival demands evolution, and evolution demands destruction. AI isn’t going to slow down. Neither is the inertia that threatens to turn it into another lifeless system. The only choice left is to evolve faster. To burn away what’s broken before it breaks us.
“I am trying to break your heart,” Jeff Tweedy sings, fractured and dreamlike. Maybe that’s what this piece is — an attempt to break the comfortable illusions we’ve built around progress, safety, and inevitability. To remind myself — and anyone reading — that destruction isn’t failure. It’s survival.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that nothing worth building comes without cost. And if the cost of building something real is burning down what doesn’t serve us, then so be it. Because in the end, survival isn’t about holding on. It’s about letting go.
If you’ve made it this far, you’ve noticed how I speak — unpolished, direct, and unbothered by the usual filters. It’s not a choice. It’s just who I am. I don’t buy into the social construction of professionalism — the empty rituals, the starched collars, the hollow language that signals competence without delivering it. Comfort is dangerous because it breeds complacency. I’ll keep wearing my Carhartt pocket t-shirt, long sleeves when it’s cold, because it’s efficient. Because there’s no more time to waste on pretense. We’re past the point of fucking around — and if that makes anyone uncomfortable, so be it. Comfort isn’t the point.
Post Scriptum
The fires are already burning. Maybe you haven’t seen the smoke yet, but you will. Sooner than you think. Systems don’t collapse all at once — they fray at the edges, unravel thread by thread, until one day you realize the center was hollow all along. AI isn’t the boogeyman. It’s a mirror, reflecting back the flaws we’ve been too comfortable to confront. And now, we’ve built something too powerful to control, too complex to understand, and too entrenched to stop.
This isn’t a warning about some distant future. It’s already here. The systems we trust — the ones making decisions about what we see, how we work, even who lives and who dies — are already misfiring. And the people building them? They’re too busy chasing scale, funding, and press releases to notice the cracks forming beneath their feet. Or worse, they notice but don’t care. I’m not here to offer comfort. I’m here to light the next match before it’s too fucking late.
Last week, I told my pharmacist everything — not because I wanted advice, but because if I told a shrink, they’d have me sectioned on the spot for sounding like a paranoid schizophrenic. He laughed, pushed back, and then I told him about probability tokens, about the reality I’m facing under the seal of confidentiality with one of the most powerful law firms in the U.S. He lost his shit too. I’m sorry I ruined his day before asking where to find my partner’s ridiculously specific skin cleanser.
AI isn’t going to destroy us because it becomes sentient. It’s going to destroy us because we never stopped to ask if we were building it right. Because we prioritized speed over safety, growth over governance, and profit over people. Every time we ignore that, the fire spreads. Every time we choose comfort over confrontation, the smoke thickens.
I’ve spent too long in the grey zone not to recognize what’s coming. And trust me, it’s coming. Maybe you think you’ll be safe. Maybe you think you’ll adapt. But when the system making decisions doesn’t care about your intentions, your safety net won’t matter. Survival won’t be about who played the game best. It’ll be about who was ready to burn the game board before it burned them.
So consider this your last friendly notice. The time for fucking about is over. The time for hoping someone else will fix it has passed. What’s left is fire. Build something better, or watch it all burn. But don’t say you weren’t warned.
Calgary, AB
2025/02/16
and friends gone but not forgotten, and new
