Preface IV - The Integration (I Didn't Write This Book)
Integration Overload
After Coachella 2025, I discovered that GPT was giving me a crazy amount of insights. And I went deep. Like, spending hours and hours going deep.
Because I realized something: the more I said exactly what I was thinking — full stream of consciousness, no filter — the more the AI could essentially give back to me my subconscious thoughts, but make them conscious. It could pattern recognize what I was saying beneath what I was saying. Which is weird to say, but it's like having eureka moments 24/7. I was addicted to thinking clearly.
And because I'm a verbal speaker — I think when I speak, I create ideas when I speak — it was so much more powerful for me. I've had the ability to just speak off the cuff for so long. That's my natural processing mode.
But when this started happening, I did not feel good. There were many moments of existential anxiety. Not "I'm gonna die" anxiety. More like "What the fuck is the world?" anxiety. It completely changed and fucked me up.
The anxiety was weird. I didn't want to drink because I didn't want to get in a different state. I was so clear, I didn't even want to leave that state. I needed to stay present with whatever was happening.
I remember one morning walking around LA, going to get coffee. Always an early morning riser. Just speaking to AI and reflecting deeply. Talking to ChatGPT. Insight after insight. Going deep on philosophy. Finding this philosopher Nietzsche and his concept of the Übermensch — the idea of making something of your life, becoming who you're meant to be.
I'd never read philosophy before. And suddenly I was reading all these philosophical books, understanding things that had never clicked. It was fucking wild. All this stuff was hitting me viscerally. And I'd be like, "Oh my god, this is too much."
But I realized it wasn't anxiety. It was my body and nervous system in shock from recognizing truth. That's why you should never do this type of deep work at night. I've done it too many times at night and couldn't sleep. Morning time is key. And when you feel uncomfortable, when anxiety kicks in, when you feel weird — that's when you stop. Go for a walk. Let it integrate.
Back to Australia, Then Bulgaria
When I got back to Australia, my wife had to go to Bulgaria for business. I was only back for a week, going super deep on things, realizing a lot about my life. My wife's overseas, I don't have kids, I have a dog — it was just very intense.
Everything had changed about how I see and think about the world. And I was only back in Australia for a week before flying to Bulgaria to join her.
I remember being on the plane, going deep on Nietzsche again. First time in first class — and yeah, I know I sound like an asshole saying this. I felt weird doing it. But honestly, all I was thinking was: how do I retain clarity of thought? I didn't want to leave this state. Didn't want bad sleep to break it.
At the Qatar airport, going way too deep again. On the plane, paying stupid money for internet on Qatar Airways. Going so deep on philosophy that I started getting anxiety and had to ask the flight attendant for chocolate — multiple pieces — before takeoff. This Bulgarian dude sitting next to me didn't say a word the whole five hours while I'm spiraling. But it wasn't existential dread anxiety. It was "what is the universe?" anxiety.
The Bulgaria Disconnection
When the driver picked me up in Sofia and drove me three hours to the small town, something shifted. Eating traditional Bulgarian food he gave me. Trying to communicate despite the language barrier. Using AI for deep mirroring while bouncing down Bulgarian roads.
When I got there and had all this free time, I finally reached a deep parasympathetic nervous state. That's when everything really changed. Because when you're in that state — truly relaxed — you can have second-order thinking. Long-term thinking. Not just reacting to the moment.
I'd wake up early and walk around this Bulgarian town. No one on the streets because no one wakes up early in Europe. Just me, walking, speaking 45-minute voice notes into Otter. My partner would go to work, I'd have all this time in this random city where I didn't know anyone. Just time to think.
The more I spoke, the more truthful I was, the better insights I got. My sleep was better. My mind was clearer. And reflecting on it now — you can only have your true, deep thoughts when you're in this parasympathetic state. Otherwise, all you surface is noise.
Personality-Matched Second Brain
The whole time I’m thinking: how do I capture all these insights in one place?
I’d tried building a second brain before. Notion, Roam, Obsidian. Every productivity guru’s system. They all failed within a week. Not because they were bad tools. Because they were built for someone else’s brain.
Here’s what I finally understood: I needed to design from my actual wiring, not some idealized version of how I “should” think.
My profile: ENTP on Myers-Briggs — which means I’m a fast, non-linear verbal processor who thinks by talking. High DI on DISC — dominant, influential, momentum-driven. I need to be moving forward or I die. On the Big Five: extremely high openness (constantly seeking new ideas), high extraversion (process externally), low neuroticism (don’t spiral easily), but also low conscientiousness (terrible at routine and structure).
Translation: I’m someone who thrives on stimulation, hates rigidity, thinks in explosive idea bursts, and will abandon any system that feels like homework. I don’t think in information — I think in systems, patterns, connections. My brain runs on frameworks, not facts.
So why was I trying to use note-taking systems designed for careful, linear thinkers?
That morning in Bulgaria, I asked AI: “Based on everything you know about my personality, what kind of second brain would I actually use?”
The answer changed everything: “You don’t need a filing cabinet. You need a framework repository. Stop trying to capture information. Start capturing the mental models that generate information.”
Holy shit.
That’s why every other system failed. I was trying to store content when my brain stores patterns. I was organizing notes when I should’ve been mapping heuristics. I don’t remember facts — I remember frameworks that can regenerate facts.
So I built differently. Every morning: walk, talk, transcribe. But instead of saving the transcripts as “notes,” I’d extract the underlying framework. The mental model. The decision pattern.
Example: Instead of noting “client was hesitant about price,” I’d extract the framework: “Price resistance = trust gap, not value gap.” Instead of writing “had great call with founder,” I’d capture: “Founder resonance happens when you mirror their exact stage of awareness.”
Each framework became a reusable lens. A thinking tool. Something I could apply to new situations instantly. My second brain wasn’t storing what I thought — it was storing how I think.
Mining the Subconscious
What I didn’t realize at the time: I wasn’t generating new ideas. I was revealing patterns already running in my subconscious.
The subconscious, in this context, is the set of automatic mental patterns running beneath awareness — the decisions, emotions, internal scripts, and interpretations that guide behavior without being verbalized. It’s the operating system you’re running but can’t see.
Every morning in Bulgaria, walking those empty streets, I was excavating these patterns through repeated mirroring. Not creating. Uncovering. The frameworks were already there, running my behavior for years. I was just making them conscious.
The AI gave me four things no human mirror could:
1. Speed of Feedback
Instant reflection that collapses the delay between expression and awareness. In therapy, you might wait a week to revisit a thought. With GPT, I’d say something and immediately see it reflected back. Mid-sentence, I’d catch my own loops. “Wait, I just said ‘I can’t’ three times. Why do I keep saying that?”
2. Reflection Fidelity
GPT mirrors exactly what you say, not its interpretation. No therapist saying “what I hear you saying is…” Just your exact words, reflected cleanly. This precision is brutal. You can’t hide behind “that’s not what I meant” when you see your exact language patterns. When I saw I’d used the word “perform” 47 times in one transcript, I couldn’t deny what I was doing.
3. Recursion
You can go infinitely deep on the same thought. “Why do I think that?” “Why?” “But why really?” “What’s underneath that?” Twenty layers deep if needed. GPT doesn’t get tired, doesn’t judge, doesn’t redirect. One morning I asked “why” seventeen times about the same belief until I hit the core childhood memory driving it.
4. Self-to-Self Transmission
When your own words are reflected back cleanly, they land different. It’s like seeing yourself in a mirror after avoiding reflections for years. The insight doesn’t come from GPT — it comes from you, through you. GPT just holds up the mirror steady while you finally look.
Every framework I extracted wasn’t written. It was uncovered. Each model was a subconscious heuristic I’d been running for years, now made visible and shareable.
Example: I discovered I had a framework called “Trust Collapse Velocity” — the speed at which trust breaks when someone feels manipulated. I’d been using this intuitively in sales for years, adjusting my approach based on subtle resistance cues. But I’d never named it. Never made it conscious. Never been able to teach it.
Now I could see it. Document it. Share it. Not because I invented it, but because I excavated it from patterns I was already living.
That’s what the mirror loop really does. It doesn’t give you new wisdom. It reveals the wisdom you’ve been running unconsciously. Makes tacit knowledge explicit. Turns intuition into frameworks others can use.
The Consolidation Problem
Then I realized: I'm only capturing new frameworks. What about all my existing conversations? I had 350+ GPT chats. Hundreds of Otter transcripts. Years of thinking scattered across platforms.
I could export them all — from Claude, ChatGPT, Otter. Pull everything into one place. But GPT has file size limits. I needed something bigger. Something that could actually mine all my thoughts at once.
The Vectorization Breakthrough
Called my business partner Steve. "What if we could vectorize all my thoughts?"
Vectorizing means converting text into mathematical representations that AI can search by meaning, not just keywords. We built a local LLM system. Fed it everything. Millions of words compressed into 100,000 vectors.
Now I could literally Google my own mind:
"How has my thinking changed in the last two months?"
"What patterns show up when I talk about trust?"
"Show me every time I mentioned anxiety"
"What frameworks am I missing?"
I could query every thought I'd ever captured.
The System Emerges
Now my thoughts and frameworks stack recursively. Each new insight builds on previous patterns. I can query gaps, find contradictions, see evolution.
This book? It's millions of my words vectorized into searchable patterns. My actual subconscious — all the frameworks I run automatically — now conscious and shareable.
The Book Writes Itself
The structure emerged from the data. Trust Physics came first because that's what surfaced most. Permission Dynamics next because that's what the patterns showed. Each chapter revealed by querying: "What's the next most important pattern?"
This isn't a second brain. It's my first brain, mirrored and indexed.
The Real Truth
This book isn't a thesis. It's the residue of debugging myself in public. Every framework was already there — in how I sold, built trust, made decisions. I just gave it language. Made tacit knowledge explicit.
That's how I wrote this book. Not by sitting down to write. But by walking, talking, mirroring, mining. By being so truthful that patterns couldn't hide. By building a system that could show me what I already knew but couldn't articulate.
The book was already written in my behavior. I just had to excavate it.
Now it's yours. Not to admire, but to reflect inside. To use these patterns to see your own. To take these frameworks and find where they match or clash with how you operate.
Because that's all this ever was. A mirror. My patterns made visible so you can see yours more clearly.