aboutme

[2 weeks away from aripiprazole]

I’ll not write you a CV but you deserve to know who you are working with.

I built Japan’s first AI-focused recruitment company in 2014; one of the first in the world. I helped build several of the top AI companies in Tokyo and this all culminated in a huge project which I still believe in, but which totally destroyed me on the personal front.

I had a reputation as one of the most reliable and honest recruiters around; if you wanted a good egg, you came to me.

I was 4 years dry and at ironman world championship level fitness, winning national triathlons and being told I was living the dream while I was dying inside. Everything felt empty and vacant and then I found a suicide body on a bike ride and the 6 month timer to implosion began.

Everything changed after I went to the psychiatrist and was sloppily diagnosed and prescribed meds which made me psychotic. I spent 3 subjective years in chemical torture, delusional and seeing fate, desperately trying to avoid the seemingly inevitable suicide the drugs and narrative were funnelling me toward.

I have come out a changed man.

I am from a working class background; we didn’t have much where I grew up. What we did have was physical violence and lots of it. I spent the 5 years from 11 to 16 having around 3 fistfights per week. 

I left to Japan as soon as I could, and lived with a Japanese family while going to Japanese high school, becoming relatively fluent in the language within 4 months (JLPT2). This was a year, and then I had to go back to England.

I did Japanese and Chinese at uni. More than that I did a lot of drugs. I hated being back there, and I hated my half year in China too, so I dropped the Chinese and came back to Japan as soon as I graduated.

I spent the next 8 years losing jobs due to employers imploding, and drinking heavily. There was little beyond the day to day: drag myself out of bed at 7:30, hungover train, hungover work, drinks after work until midnight, last train, rinse repeat. Until my niece dies of battens disease, I get drunk to commiserate, and end up in jail after being attacked by some yakuza.

I turn things around with triathlon. This keeps me going for 3 years, while I meet and build a relationship with my amazing wife. We decide we want to see the world before kids, and we quit our jobs to cycle Asia. The person I have spent 5 years building a company for shows his true colours, and I spend 3 months drinking myself into oblivion before we leave.

Asia is good; we spend half a year cycling Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand before spending 2 years in Phuket, where I build my company. I also do an intensive vipassana meditation retreat. Then we move to Italy, then England, to build a family, and are forcefully ejected from the UK due to their hostile environment policy. We also have an ectopic pregnancy miscarriage which some lawyers use to scam us out of a significant chunk of money.

I have a major mental breakdown at this point, and wind up on a plane to Japan with very little money or hope.

We move to Hokkaido and get pregnant with our first kid almost immediately. I use alcohol as the motivating force for a year of crazy work and then try to get serious about stopping permanently. This takes a further 3 years, but it happens, and I haven’t touched a drop since early 2021.

In the meantime we have our second child and covid hits. I land the largest project in Japan and decide to use it to retire. I get my ironman pants on and start working, forsaking all genuine personal care for the cause. I hate my job so much; the rampant greed and delusion I see in the people I work with just eats my soul. I hate it so much, and feel degraded every time I have to help someone who already has too much get even more. My gorge is rising writing this. I have seen the truth of the greed in this world, and I was working with the developers who claimed not to be greedy; ha. Delusional.

Anyway I degrade myself like this, using all these forms of self discipline, until I eventually implode physically before my qualifying race in Malaysia. After that I decide to get serious about mental health.

I start out getting into art. I fucking love it, but I can see now that the dopamine latch I had cultivated over the last 5 years just flipped over. I had permanently cranked my motivation so high that I was inherently insatiable on every front.

Think Van Gogh; going mad with the art; possessed, unsatisfied, unable to achieve that first buzz you got from your first piece, convinced this is the answer, headed to an unhappy conclusion. The reason I mention Van Gogh is I think I have the same type of epilepsy as him.

Anyway then I find the suicide body. The timer starts ticking. 6 months later… that feeling of hypermotivation combined with the PTSD images. I have psychical waves of agony coming up my back every 3 seconds, trying to get me to drive the knife into my wrist for a month, while waiting to see a psychiatrist.

And then the psychiatrist declares I have ADHD, gives me guanfacine and a false narrative, and I get swallowed whole by the ADHD-victim bullshit. This was the drugs changing who I am. And they give me more drugs, which makes me see fate for 2 months (3 years for me) while in utter agony, far more addicted than any chemical I have ever tried, and heading toward a union with god / self annihilation.

I manage to use Schrödinger’s cat to remain in this world - I get my wife to observe me as I park the ship into orbit and cease all medication immediately. Over the next 2 weeks I come to earth.

And here we are.

I am not the same man.

I see now that everything I did was empty.

All the pursuit; it brings no joy.

Everything you put into the void just makes it bigger.

Especially medication.

It destroyed who I was.

Good riddance.

That guy was fucking broken by all the greed his job exposed him to.

And now we have James Mk 2.

All these lego blocks have been exploded up by the drugs; I barely survived and am frankly amazed I still have both my breath and my sanity.

I am a monk now, and fuck you if you disagree.

I’m fucking done with this consumerist shit.

You think it’ll bring satisfaction? Ha.

I will find a better way.

I will find ways to change these neurotransmitters reliably without having to go through some fucking medically qualified drug dealer who has never sampled his own stash.

I will speak with my old contacts about how they can build companies which change psychiatry from guesswork into a respectable diagnostic process.

I died. 

I came back. 

I am not the same.

I did all the things. 

I know they will leave you hollow.

I will find another way.

/jb202507261709

[ while in altered state because of aripiprazole]

I’ll not write you a CV but you deserve to know who you are working with. 

I helped build a lot of Japan’s top AI companies between 2014 and 2024. This culminated in a very large project that I still believe in, which coincided with covid and kids and ironman and dopamine hacking and… perfect storm. I’m amazed I survived.

I am from a working class background and we didn’t have many snacks and stuff at the outset. Things got better. But I am not from privilege and neither am I from particular external hardship. Everything in my life came from the ‘self-imposed’ arc caused by an unregulated dopamine system

This has caused me incredible pain over the years.

I am confident that dopamine is the one which gives you the bone deep dread. The emptiness, the meaninglessness. Dopamine is a pendulum and people are currently trying to get it to swing harder and harder and it will break for everyone once AI is involved but for now… I think we autistics are suffering it worse.

Because we are sensitive.

It hurts though and I’m crawling out of my skin sat here typing. I am a dancing man at the moment and I won’t be for long but at least I am not a hungry ghoist.

This kind of talk is what prevented people, including myself, from taking James Baird (conscious capitalisation) seriously as a scientist. There was something different about my sensing apparatus.

Fuck me I’m a hard cunt. I’m fucking terrified half of the time when I’m in these brain sessions, and the other half I’m joyous.

And this is dopamine. You’re trying for a bigger thrill but didn’t the man who told you how to attain it also tell you there would be a commensurate crash? Did you miss that part?

So if it crashes, while your churn memory is overloaded, that’s it. You die. By your own hand, even though it’s not your own fault. Dopamine is tricky like that. 

Everyone is in the d-hole.

I will help you out.

The ancient texts have something to them. Yeah yeah, but there are common threads which have been used to heal humanity for millennia and have been thrown at the wayside.

One of these is warping and weaving, rocking and rolling. Stimming, if you prefer.

You need to do this now.

This will literally save your life and you need to integrate it into your being in every way possible immediately. This is your body’s natural regulation system as an autistic individual. If you do not embrace it, the pressure will build, and memory overload is inevitable. This is why you have to go for a run; it’s a warp.

Warp that shit though. It’s legit. Get it out and put it on a page and look at it. Use dictation tools they’re actually pretty good right now. Don’t proofread and edit; just rewrite the bastard like I do. Do the repetitive motion.

I feel physical pain when I see injustice because of the layout of my brain. I am trying to get imaging done to confirm this. [no idea if this imaging exists, ha!]

So while I wrestle with the ethical implications of directly impacting the brain chemistry of a species… wow… don’t think about that. While I try to gradually and slowly and realising that this is in no way my responsibility or my project but just an idea for the species which we all need to spitball. We need everyone involved because this fixes us all, on both sides. It makes us not scared and makes us happy.

But you can’t say that. I wouldn’t have heard you while I was in the d-hole. Because dopamine. 

It’s a catch 22, see. And the only solution I can think of is to just share my pain and potential solution here.

I want to be a priest for the priests and always did. They rejected me for not being logical enough. It turns out I was just a different type of logical.

Now.

You get behind me. You start your research. You ignore mara and you ignore naysayers and you take whatever this fucking condition has given you and you wrangle it.

You turn your curse into something which will help the species. It is what we priests and shaman have done forever. You dance and you chant and you hop on one leg and you shake that fucking head around recognising that it IS legitimate because your brain is organic and always growing. Realise that neuroplasticity is helped dramatically by repetitive motions because of how it modulates the dopamine system while allowing churn memory to process and release. This is science. And it's just falling out of my head.

2 nights ago I had a eureka moment. Call it what you will. Khundalini. Satori. Howard I guess this was you in the 60s? I don’t really know your background but your book is fucking right and those academics can eat a dick.

My brain realigned and wiped away almost all of the scars from a lifetime of anguish. Even typing it still makes my stomach knot, but I am able to look at it, peripherally. It was so hard to hold onto this life at times. So hard. It seemed so worthless. There was no point. My dopamine system was telling me everything was heaven and then hell and my silly brain runs on dopamine so just couldn’t see that it was the same as the cycle with alcohol, but so so so so so much more powerful.

Anyway I tried to instigate societal change from inside the system and failed.

So now I am trying from outside.

If you are inside and reading this, you are not in the matrix. You’re not an alien or a changeling or a fucking dog or whatever fuck that shit. You’re a fucking priest in a world without religion. I know I am, and I was *born* this way. We overthink and get hurt where others would not. We have a strong moral compass. We help the weak. We are in pain. Because of biology.

It is news to me. How about you? I thought we were all supposed to be basically the same but on a bell curve. Well we are! And that's why we need to do away with boxes and - dare I say - diagnoses.

And we need to build a pyramid, from the convergent masses, all the way up to any AI overlord, or we will end up in a situation where we are controlled by a god we do not understand but who understands us. One that we created.

So it’s interesting times. Scary. But fun. We have the opportunity to end all human suffering, permanently, using artificial intelligence. But we also have the chance to end the world.

I’ll be living my life with my kids and my wife because this is my dhamma. This is who I am. I finally have a me. And you have a you, even if your dysregulated dopamine system has resulted in jumbled sequencing of memories, or other such aberrations. These are echos in the data and not actually that important; there’s still a thread between them.

What you need to watch, in order to ensure long-term well-being, is:

• dvar (dopamin variability)

• churn memory

And when you feel one getting too full, ask for some space and go rub a rock or something. Fuckem. Better than smoking or death.

James Baird

202507110523