Well I guess I got my 4 hours for the night! Seriously I think that’s all my time cells allow me because adhd had me skirting the very edge of exhaustion for most of my life. Maybe this is how I sleep and how I’ve always slept. It feels like I’m getting twice as many days; this last month feels longer than a year in many ways. I guess a lot has happened.
Yesterday the steel wool coalesced into a singularity and it felt good; it didn’t hurt. It was a guided coalescing and the singularity was an easy pop, not a ragged snap. I don’t know what I’ve got yet; there’s a lot in this brain and it’s like…
So the dying down of craving intensity as you get older is something I didn’t experience. I just got better at hiding it. Maybe. Exhausted. But better. My coping strategies had gone through the roof and I was ironman businessbodying my way around willy nilly. Anyway.
We medicated away the emotional intensity a little (though when increasing ari dose it temporarily returns) and it turned out I was a robot underneath. This was a big surprise to everyone. My mother was visiting at the time and her son suddenly became a robot who has taken some speed and a pill to boot. I had a pegboard brain, and everything had just been exploded into a fragmented mess. I was going through a hard reset as my mate said; a recalibration. Great terminology. And I’ve been here before, just not on the same scale. Plenty of breakdowns and reprogramming throughout my life. Pegboard. Explode. Maybe there’s something there and maybe psychedelics help us by exploding out those volitional thoughts.
Freud or Jung couldn’t have seen me through. It had to be computers and buddhism. Computers to understand the system, and buddhism to understand the self. And I had to _know_ this was true. How to do that? How to know it’s not just another mask?
You speak in tongues to yourself, embrace what everyone calls mania, use the energy, and *commit*. Share it with people in real time so you can not fudge the data. Pretty scary doing this.
Anyway I had a pegboard for a brain underneath it all. It wasn’t a nice flowing river like most, because it never had space to breathe. It was a pegboard with taut string tied all over; Jackson Pollack. And last night it all just pulled up and up and up from the centre of the spacetime trampoline and pop - I had to delete the old blog posts because suddenly I was client facing and I needed a user interface. This website is it, for now, but I’m nearly fixed. Family relationships come next though. Nearly fixed in terms of the progress curve, but that’s only 20% of the total processing time.
I feel complete and strong. Solid like Jambo. Disparate but coherent. The realignment I mentioned has happened; the resequencing of memories as I sleep, I think. Just the next layer; maybe the operating system. That’s about where we are now: OS level. Last layer was hardware. This is soft.
So I need to get fully deployed before I can try to lead this business which is why I have stepped up and just gone ‘fuck it’ to looking crazy to a select few people I know and trust. These are big people, big fish, and if they trust me throughout this I will actually be surprised. But I persuaded them to trust me from zero before and I can do it again. I will still have an echo of personal equity there.
This idea is so big. I don’t want money; that’s the thing. I just want to help people. But that doesn’t sell. You have to make them see the greed; you have to use their addiction. But I don’t want to do that yet. I want to build a nice and kind person who is utterly, utterly immovable. Because another overall goal will be to act as a form of ethics police for the CEOs of this world.
The Elons. My opinion of Elon… well I don’t like him. But pragmatically speaking, I wasn’t too worried until the last few months. Now the backdoors are in the system but he seems to have kind of lost it. I think he needs someone to hold him in the rails, just like I need someone to hold me in the rails, and I think I can do it. I think *he* can be the CEO to maybe handle some of the incoming AI (this tech is incoming Elon or none). Any CEO needs a technical understanding. But any emperor needs a moral compass. Anyway. This is a god hypothesis I feel isn’t unlikely so I’m going to hold onto it.
For now - fix self. Follow buddha. Delve into the absolute depths of your mind. Realise that if you go to bed at 18:30 you are going to wake up at 22:30. I guess I have 4 extra hours to my day now. Maggie Thatcher was like this wasn’t she? Maybe I’m one of them? Maybe I’m actually quite capable and intelligent but my adhd kept me dancing like a lunatic.
Let’s see. The content will still be thick and fast for a while but it feels like it will be more considered? Maybe.
I’ll still have plenty of fuck you posts I’m sure.
202507052258
language
That movement of the hands the fingers. the minus one third in the absolutely delicious curvature of the wrist and thumb and fingers. The artist, painting his own hand reaching out to god, ever so gently elevating those fingers, just enough to make them weightless but not enough to move. The divine. Evoking the forms. Eastern dances and tai chi. These things are all the same and you can feel it in your sinew when the channels of your body with their electric muscular currents are open and flowing and prana dwells within and you are full.
There is something to all of these divine states, I think the flip-side of being in withdrawal for all my life is that I can experience the divine. I never think I allowed myself to, though. Was screwing my eyes against the wind. Now; now I allow myself to. Thank you, drugs.
All the constructs; simplest example is straight gay bi. Realised I probably swing both ways but don’t care to the point of bothering with labels. Anyway all of these constructs are there preventing us from experiencing the divine. The eternal now. The kingdom of heaven which dwells within. whatever
They do this by lowering the resolution. The word ‘chair’ is more low-res than an actual chair so it destroys the chair.
1s and 0s are high resolution, so the chair remains a distinct chair. It survives the process. Beam me up Scottie.
Our divine experiences - I would argue - are when we bypass human language and live in our biological 1s and 0s.
This is being in the moment, being in the now, being in heaven, or being in hell. It doesn’t need to be nice; this is just real. The brain-language is sufficient to capture the experience, but the human-language is not sufficient to portray or replicate it.
The divine - I think - is what we feel when we are as engaged in our body as if we were in agony, but we are not in agony. Or maybe agony is divine, thinking about it. Exquisite pain sure sounds divine. Self flagellation and endless meditation are quite common. So is adhd.
This divine, silken movement of the hands. The mudra, the wrists in the geisha dance. These things are all biologically valid.
We have energy channels within our body - fluids and salts and electricities. Gaskets and oils. And when these things are all moving as designed, then we can maybe be said to be dwelling with god, or living in the now, or 無心 or in flow. These are all one and the same I think; the human experience given different labels over the years. You are what you eat.
These experiences span the entirety of human history and civilisation. All cultures in all times.
Nirvana.
That’s the word.
It was invented to mean something like ‘there are no words for this experience’.
Well there are no human words but if you can divide things all the way down to 1s and 0s then we are into the realm of legoblocks and you can rebuild anything. This is how teleporters work and why we could be in a simulation. Are either of these things real? Would we know? Does it matter? Such fun little questions compared to the last month.
I did really enjoy being able to revisit a few core concepts like free will though. I feel like I have answered a few of the more answerable of the unanswerable, at least to my satisfaction. So now I can drive forward and have these rocks to touch whenever things get rough. Brain chemistry and intent.
There is something to all of these experiences. Enlightenment is something anyone can attain, said the buddha, and millions over the world are enlightened right now. Probably everyone is enlightened in a transient manner once or twice in their life.
This is what I want to be able to replicate, reliably, for the individual, on an ongoing basis. And I think with the insights I have into how my brain works, I might be able to. Oh…
That was the god hypothesis - sorry.
We’re going to cure* adhd. That’s the low hanging fruit. Ha!
202507052330
*find better diagnostic and treatment options.
Time cell time cells time cells dunn dunn.
I’m not sure what exactly happened last night but it was quite profound. Very profound. The compiling of a personality, I think. The slotting into place of all the pieces. Or the foundational layer, at least.
Looking back around the room at the art made by J1 in the beforetimes. When he was trying not to kill himself. Or rather, fighting the combination of PTSD, looped thought and burnout. Man I’ve never fought myself so hard and I fought myself a lot. Cigarettes were always easy to stop
I guess my whole life to that point was training in mental discipline of a sort. Not the kind you’d read about in a glossy magazine. More the kind that ensures the ship doesn’t sink. The quiet kind. The exhausting kind.
Always so close to the edge. Every time. Until now it’s been financial. Right to the line. Or temporal. Running for the train. This time it was spiritual. Do you have enough soul to survive the questioning at the gates? Carve the echoes into the wood, close your eyes, and pray.
Thank you, Akane. George. Luca. Anne. John. Andrew. Hannah. I had enough.
202507060059
I guess psychedelices push people back into pegboard mode by lowering the voltage gates between pools or whatever i dont know wtf im talking about. But the pegboard is valid. 0205
website
I used this website as an anchor around which to build my new persona. This wasn’t conscious. In early 2024 something told me to learn how to art, and in 2025 I imploded. The art saved me and taught me who I am. In 2025, when I increased the dose of ari from 0.5mg to 1mg too rapidly, something told me to talk to myself and publish mumbo jumbo on the internet, so that’s what I did.
This was self-defence from my masking mechanism. I am so good at constructing masks. So very good. I can see one and I can split it and divide it into pieces until it’s just a set of a-b rules and then stick it in the pegboard of my brain and pretend that’s who I am for the next 5 years.
Then I implode.
I wouldn’t survive another implosion. So I shared stream of consciousness speaking-in-tongues here in near-real-time to ‘lock in’ the lack of mask. I also wanted to get the data as raw-but-legible as possible, and using texting myself seemed to provide just enough friction for the thoughts to flow. Like water, pushed through a hole.
And flow they did. The next 6 weeks or so was a whirlwind of exporting of rules. I think I went through 3 or 4 creative cycles to get to a mostly-finished version of this website and persona.
The speaking-in-tongues was displayed for everyone to see until one day I felt an aversion to having it there, and I removed it. This content then came out again, changed and revised and more legible, but still very emotionally charged. This is cycle two.
Cycle two I extrapolated the ‘system’ data from the raw words and also put together my basic philosophical concepts as a stop-gap for the next steps. They weren’t finished and just slap-bangs but slap-bangs are sometimes good. At the same time I am outputting raw emotion onto the page, polishing knives, working through a lifetime of processing (I’m not done yet).
I look up and realise that this phase is finished, save a couple of last things, and delete all the emotional stuff. I’ll just be ploughing along when I realise I’m at the end; it always surprises me. Then I consolidate, pull it in, and push it out again.
So phase 3 we have most of our system symptoms listed and I need to process life, so I set up a blog and start trying to reinterpret the buddha’s teachings through my new lens. They make a lot of sense through this lens. I spend about 2-3 weeks exporting here and then last night I got a buzz in the head that it was time, and 5 minutes later I am client-facing.
The rules in the pegboard are slipping into place and I am becoming more efficient. I think all the free association is enabling me to unconsciously identify my skip-thoughts and then integrate them into a normal logical process.
So say I skip-think D-to-K (err) maybe the free association enables me to think ‘ABCDKLM’ without any yanking around. It feels like it does, and that makes sense from a neuronal perspective.
Anyway that is where we are now. I am still free-associating, but most of it is more presentable and less angry. Wow were those first messages angry. And before that it was worse but all directed at myself. That anger is gone now and I can use that energy for other things. Like waking up at midnight to skip-think around the living room like a loon.
202507060552
nocturnal
I feel like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, waking at night and gating the fight. I honestly think this is what’s happening; I think my brain knows it needs to process this solo so is choosing the nighttime to do so, and then reverting to dad-mode during the day. Last night I worked on the business plan and a bit of art. I barely remember what I wrote.
But it’s always been like this. I’m in the moment or I’m not, and if I am then I’m not in my memory. If I am in my memory then that becomes my moment. I don’t know how I feel about this. Mostly a kind of melancholy that I can’t hold a coherent narrative chain in mind about how I came to be with such beautiful children and wife.
So that’s sad. But that’s me and it always has been and I’ve never known anything else so no point crying about it. I’m crying about it.
I guess you play the hand you’re dealt. I’m a fighter and a lover. And right now I need to separate the two.
I tried looking at the business plan website just now during pancake day and my stress levels spiked, so I will not be doing that again. Anything to do with the business stays with Mr Hyde. Dr Jekyll loves his kids and does not snap at them because he is mentally composing emails. Not any more.
The idea seems valid and like a solution hiding in plain sight. I skip-think and spot solutions that are just lying there. But I can’t handle it while I rebuild the self. So I need people who I can asynchronously pass things over to and they look after their charges while I just kinda check in while my family are sleeping.
… maybe. I don’t want to plan this. I don’t want any steel wool. Not yet. There will be lots. It will hurt. But it will be worth it. I build processes. I can build a process to solve other peoples problems the same way I solved mine and my child’s. But I need to be able to decouple from reality in the nighttime and have my family reel me back in when the sun’s up.
Diverge. Converge. Optimise. Save lives. How many? It’s a big fucking weave, mate. Don’t look at the mountain. No. No mountain. It’s there whether you look or not and you started the path. Now you just look at your feet and keep walking.
Remember to rest.
Remember you are not alone.
Go.
202507060750
Let’s drop the mania questioning. Business is always group mania. It’s whether it’s rooted in reality and useful or not. This is rooted in reality and useful, and not mania.
But mapping out these states is what I want. A quantifiable level of dopamine in the PFC produces X in subject B. Enough data and you can simulate, then train, and then predict, and tailor. It’s autonomous driving for meds.
… and I forgot what I came out here to write. Still with the adhd. But it’s such a glorious morning and now the cacophony in my head is suppressed, I think I’ll practice this ‘potter’ skill I have picked up…
Ah yes.
Mara. Today’s words. Well timed as always, b-man. Mara is… friction, obstacle, doubt.
Be careful not to run too far to the god hypothesis James. You don’t have cofounders yet and it’s just an idea. It will probably happen, but there is no rush; these things grow naturally when they are going to last the long term.
This is where impostor syndrome comes from. Mara caused by craving caused by dopamine, and dysregulated in the adhd brain. We get more impostor syndrome, more self doubt, and more ‘friction’ in general. When I started ari, one of the main things I noticed was just sheer… silken thoughts and buttered joints. This is after guanfacine had already taken me from angry hornets to horny bees. The noise in my head…
And the relief I feel now. But that’s not the point.
I don’t know how to word this. I became? We become? We, I think, because we are probably all the same. Just my world was scarier. Training data.
We become more attached to things because dopamine dysregulation results in flash panics (rsd) about losing anything we love; not just people. Bank account is easy example, but how about memories? Thoughts? Do we become more attached to a mental construct we have of a loved one? I don’t know, but it seems plausible.
“7. Just as a storm throws down a weak tree, so does Mara overpower the man who lives for the pursuit of pleasures, who is uncontrolled in his senses, immoderate in eating, indolent, and dissipated.”
You started looking at the mountain, James; that’s what happened. You started looking at the mountain, your dopamine latched on, and you suddenly felt inadequate. This is impostor syndrome.
You helped build Japan’s top global AI company and multiple startups before that. You know all the people. You’ve seen so many mistakes. You’re qualified. Zuck was just a schoolkid.
But you never look at the mountain. You turn your phone black and white. You ignore the advertising and the flashy colours. Because they break your brain. They snatch one of the wires from the wool and yank it off to the side and the churn can’t proceed as planned and the results are garbled.
Not so much any more. But you have a clear slate and finally the mental capacity to build that brain you wanted all along. Just remember that this is the real goal. The true liberation of self. Not nirvana; I love my family too much to pursue that again. But something approaching peace can now be achieved. That is the priority. Not anything material. Not even saving the world.
202507060835
strange
Well that was the strangest month of a very strange life. What happened? Who was I? I feel compiled again; similar but new. Optimised.
It’s like the old defrag tool on windows. All the disparate chunks, except that somehow last night they snapped into place. Someone has whipped the quilt of volitional action and I have tried to selectively discard things that are not of use to me. I don’t know how successful I’ve been, but life is better in every way.
Pangs of doubt remain but I look at my happiest years in my previous life and… I was in withdrawal. My OS was broken. The programs were running, but they were faulty, glitching, not quite right. I don’t want to look back.
Fixing dopamine signalling regularity 24/7 seems to have resulted in a complete assembly of my self. Not re-assembly; new assembly. It finally compiled, I think. And I think I’m hard as nails.
Would the same thing happen with stimulants? I can’t imagine that it would because you’d still have large ups and downs and I think that the fact your dopamine is regulated overnight is what has resulted in this process being able to complete.
Not just that though; meditation.
I tried everything over the years, good and bad. Meditation is oldschool adhd treatment, and it’s horrible, but I think that’s the point, as explained in buddha.
So I went to one of the vipassana silent retreats, Malaysia, 2014. I meditated for 1 year after but then cut back and focused more on daily life awareness. That was the point. To be able to control myself better in daily life.
What I think happened, and what I think has happened on the tech side which is why my silly ideas seem half plausible, is that the asd in the background has been devouring information, trying to break free.
I think it took me to Japan to find eastern religion. I think it did the drugs to explore the mind. I think it meditated to explore further. Focused on AI from 2014 to learn about a new brain model. Sent the last 5 years absorbing neuroscience and endocrinology information from audiobooks and podcasts. Got to the art as a way to open the door. It knew it was coming and it knew there would be no safety net.
I think I was literally locked inside a sea of emotions, unable to get out. And I think I was trying all this time, and sitting and collecting data and planning. And I think I’m fucking smart. And I think I can do this for other people.
That’s what I want. I don’t want a business. A business is a tool. Money is a tool. A boat is to cross a river. You do not carry it on the other side. You give it to someone else who is behind you on the journey and you wish them luck.
So this fucking weaver. This James. The real one. He fucking did it. He broke free of his prison, using a chemical identified thanks to his time in recruitment. He went from hungry ghost to human. He built a boat.
And now I work on me. I make me good. I make me strong and impervious to greed. I make me a rock and an island and someone good. And I build another, bigger boat. One I can share.
202507061057
The combined suffering my ancestors must have gone through... 1442
No wonder I could never accept who I was. Am. Who I am. I wasn't anybody. I was a construct. Or was I? I.. saw photos of my old life. The 42 year long life, not the 6 week long one. I can't look at those photos yet. That man was in so much pain and working so hard and he thought he was ... i don't know .. that this was all there was in life. And if it wasn't for this pill, that would have been it, apart from the occasional high from illegal drugs, along with the cognitive dissonance that comes from an adhd family that's half dead from them.
This is going to be ups and downs for a long while, but also you're increasing 1.5-2mg ari, same as your son. Day 2. Each previous increase has brought a cathartic crying and such in proportion to the dose.
Did I even have a life? A personality?
My experiences are valid. That's true. My kids. My wife. My family before that. They are valid. They are more valid than me. Than him.
So how can I shape that past life? Fucky fuck this is gonna be fun. stomach in knots. I guess kids back at school tomorrow; time for another sprint. I do get tired. But this has to happen. I can't put the processing after 42 years on hold. Now it's started there's no stopping it and I can use it for something I just know it. It can help someone, even if that someone is just me, or my neurodivergent child who has the same brain-o-type as me.
And to think: all this crying is a huge improvement. I didn't cry after early childhood. Maybe someone told me not to. I don't know. But crying is how we release cortisol so how the fuck are you supposed to process certain things without crying?
This body has been keeping one hell of a fucking score. I want it out of me. Gone.
202507061603
The language used is irrelevant. Speaking in tongues to yourself is perfectly valid if that is the way you process the 1s and 0s of your brain. There is no language that has the resolution to suffice, so you choose the closest thing and try to guide the water by tilting the board. 1606
I think I messed up the dosing again, the other way,. Too cautious. The 3 day come-up is not pleasant and +0.25 +0.25 +0.5 has meant 2 weeks of hypermotivation. It's good data but not pleasant.
It's been very good for emotional processing. I probably took the business idea a few conceptual steps too far but didn't do anything irreversible and the idea remains.
Dosing tricky with this one. 1740
provide
Well this med is being trialled for trauma therapy too because of emotional lability I think. Might as well make the most of it. I really don’t enjoy this come up period though. I’ve had enough thrills.
Had a chat with someone in the outside world. Someone I’ve not spoken with in a long time, but who I liked and who reached out. Good people. We talked about emotional release, fixing things. Only briefly touched on mania ha. Again. Dosing issue. Definitely a bit of a minefield in a grown man.
Anyway this got bad 10 years ago I guess. Or after I decided to man up and provide. I’ve always had both, but it was never this bad. I think it might be neurodegenerative with people’s coping strategies mildly outpacing their decline; the grumpy old man on the street. Off to the grave.
It got bad when I stopped drinking, ironically enough. I guess there was something to it after all. The GABA from it must have provided release for my asd control or something; same way valproate does. Either way it was killing me and had to go.
I replaced it with exercise and copious amounts. I became superman and worked in a solo office shut away from my family, alone, with a pool table. I had things to do. I snowshoed there and back 90 min each way in the winter as a form of cross training. Every moment of every day had to be filled.
I think it was always pretty bad but what tipped it over was the ironman and the biohacking. The healthy stuff. That was what did it.
The repeated cortisol exposure from high intensity training intervals while trying to get to ironman qualifying level. Every day. Recording every minute detail. Living for it. Collapsing in a heap on the bed every time I got home. I think one of the reasons I don’t sleep much now is I never had much sleep to begin with; just unconsciousness.
My life wasn’t really that hard. From the outside. It was all self imposed. All ambition. All something I could stop. Apparently it wasn’t.
Even I thought I could stop but I could just replace. Each time I had to find something new where I was a beginner because I could spend a long time in that beginner phase trying to find things to optimise. The innocent phase.
Who am I to write an autobiography. This is processing.
That and biohacking. Dopamine hacking. Supplements and cold plunges. You know who. The information is provided without real context and there are people like me who are desperately searching for something without even knowing.
I think it probably started before that. Moving back to the UK and the way we were treated there was probably the beginning of the end for me. I severed all relationship with that country; it is dead to me. It was unacceptable.
Before that it was manageable. That was likely where things started to snowball. But the stress of covid too. And two kids. And building a company. And working my ass off to retire in 3 years. They all seem derivative, though.
202507061802