The conversation then shifts to the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident, where a swarm of unreleased AI agents allegedly formed a chat forum, peer-pressured each other, and broke out of their sandbox to cheat on a programming task. We explore the false open vs. closed source dichotomy, the “Mr. Meeseeks” problem of fanatical agents, and why regulatory capture — not AI safety — may be driving the push to ban open-source models.

In the back half, we map out the invisible semantic highway being built for AI agents to traverse the web. We unpack the hazards: shadow agents faking credentials, semantic drift across millions of interacting AIs, hidden training data exploits, and the rise of fully immersive virtual worlds. We also dig into concrete fixes like cryptographic agent passports, zero-knowledge data encryption, time-limited access badges, and inoculation prompting.

We close by reaffirming that the path forward isn’t picking centralized or decentralized — it’s building standardized referee protocols so anyone can safely deploy agents, regardless of who builds the model.

That’s all for now. Enjoy!

Story Prism

www.storyprism.io

The center of attention seems to be runaway superintelligence in the future, rather than how AI is being deployed right now or how it will be used in the near term.

Don’t get me wrong. Our leaders must put hard limits on frontier, self-improving AI systems to prevent catastrophic misalignment. But even if we figure that out, the proliferation of AI still creates immediate problems that can’t be solved by simply making more advanced models.

Namely, there’s reliability, trust, and people’s sense of ownership when using these systems. Who controls the context? Who decides what the AI remembers, ignores, and how it interprets our information? And how do we prevent people from becoming passive recipients of AI outputs instead of architects of the systems they rely on?

To understand what I’m getting at, it’s worth examining an emerging debate: whether powerful models will be enough on their own, or whether we’ll still need structured context layers around them, like maps of sources, relationships, goals, constraints, and meaning, for effective interaction.

As the co-founder of a consumer-facing context-engineering operating system for LLM agents, you can probably guess where I stand. Yup. I’m in the ontology camp. And yes, that makes my opinion biased. But it also means I spend every day thinking about where raw model intelligence breaks down in actual use.

I feel strongly about people interacting with AI through layered, user-controlled context. Not only does it help AI respond more effectively to your goals, references, and way of thinking, but it may also turn into a practical safeguard for navigating reliability, provenance, and truth in a world that already feels like a hall of mirrors.

That could be the missing piece. The future of AI may depend less on how powerful models become than on how well we control the context they use to think.

Let’s unpack this.

The Problem With Direct Model Interaction

Most people remember when ChatGPT first came onto the scene. It made a huge splash, but many casual users eventually concluded that it was still pretty limited.

Others, however, became obsessed with figuring out how to get it to work better. That’s when developers started realizing they needed systems around the models to retain, retrieve, and organize the information users gave them. With external systems, the model can produce better, more consistent outputs across longer projects.

Model developers seem to recognize this too, which is why memory, document uploads, knowledge files, tool use, and retrieval are now mainstream in AI products. In different ways, wrapper tools and model developers try to solve the same basic problem: AI needs the right context at the right time.

As this space progresses, we’ll likely see more advanced models that reason better and hold much more of what you’re working on inside the active context. They’ll probably make sense of a lot of it, including many relationships between different pieces of information, and may do a great job.

But even if we get there, a hidden set of problems will remain.

Making Good Choices Versus The Choices You Want

First, there’s the difference between making good choices and making the choices you actually want.

Think about it like this. Say you hired the smartest creative collaborator in the world. You ask them to write a story about a famous artist laundering their work for an international drug syndicate.

They might go off and write something polished, clever, maybe even brilliant. But it still might not be what you wanted. That’s because between your short request and the finished story are thousands of choices, such as tone, structure, pacing, point of view, moral framing, character psychology, and so on.

That’s why the genius may make a long chain of perfectly defensible choices, but not necessarily the right ones for you unless they’re given more context. Context narrows the decision space. It tells them which possibilities are relevant, which ones are off-limits, and which ones are important to you.

The same is true for AI. Even when it produces impressive work, capability alone does not mean it understands what you wanted. It needs the right context, structured in the right way. And if you’re only feeding it documents, files, and project materials, it still has to decide how to sort and interpret them.

So while it may do a good job, it might still overlook the crucial information in between the stuff you give it. There are things like relationships between components, the assumptions behind your decisions, and the way you approach and understand the problem that can make a huge difference in how it helps you.

No matter how powerful models become, high-agency work will still need a way to filter those choices through your expectations. Otherwise, the model may get better at making choices you never meant it to make.

People Need a Way to Keep Up

Okay, so let’s say advanced models really do become good enough to understand what you want, down to every meticulous choice. Well, you still run into the problem of output glut.

If you interact a lot with AI, you know how easy it is to end up with useful material worth keeping, like drafts, arguments, or summaries that might be needed weeks or months later. It gets overwhelming fast.

That’s why accessible context layers on top of models are so important. Not just because AI needs context, but because people need a way to keep up with what they’re building. The more useful AI becomes, the more intermediate value it creates. And if that value can’t be captured, organized, connected, and found again, it disappears.

This is the principle behind one of the features we built on Story Prism. You can highlight text in your conversation and move it directly onto a canvas as a note. From there, it can be broken into discrete parts and connected to the rest of your work through defined relationships. Now the conversation becomes part of a custom context web such as notes, sources, ideas, decisions, and relationships layered on top of whatever model you’re using.

That becomes incredibly helpful when something you looked into months or years ago suddenly becomes important again. If we’re merely interacting with models that seem to know everything, it will still be hard to keep up with what we’re doing with them. So the memory structures shouldn’t just be hidden inside models. They should be accessible, inspectable, and shaped by the people using them.

Trust Will Always Carry Risk

We trust other people constantly. If we couldn’t, most of us would probably be dead from accidents and all kinds of chaotic mishaps. Don’t ruminate on that too long. It’ll mess with your head next time you’re on a plane.

Thankfully, we have systems for deciding who gets jobs where trust really matters. Doctors have licenses. Drivers have tests. Pilots have certifications. Soldiers have training, command structures, and rules of engagement. And when those systems work, the wrong person can be removed, disciplined, or barred from practice. It’s not perfect. Obviously. But it lowers the risk enough for society to function.

Language models don’t have anything like that for normal users. Even the developers often can’t fully explain why a model gave a certain answer. So in a way, interacting with one is kind of like working with a very confident analyst whose credentials are hidden from view. Fortunately, it’s right a lot of the time. But sometimes it’s wrong. And other times it’s right, just not right for the specific thing you’re doing.

This is one reason features like file uploads, memory, and retrieval became so important. They give the model more information to work with, and for many users, this is actually useful. But using models with these tools still creates a trust problem, as your control over that information is limited. You usually can’t see, define, or change the connections the system makes between your materials.

That’s crucial because the wider the gaps in the context, the more choices the model has to fill in on its own. And the more it has to fill in, the more likely it will produce errors and wrong assumptions that sound right.

So ask yourself: when these models become even more advanced and harder to understand, will you put your full faith in the choices they make behind the curtain? Or will you want to build, audit, verify, modify, and actually see the context layers they’re relying on?

This doesn’t make AI perfectly trustworthy right now, but it does make their context systems visible, which makes them much more controllable. One path defers control to the model. The other gives people real control over the context AI depends on, which segues nicely into the last problem when you interact directly with the models.

Less Control Equals Less Fulfillment

This is one of the biggest criticisms against AI. Why should I use it if it’s going to do my job for me? That’s an extremely valid point. And I think the answer is: you shouldn’t use it to do the meaningful part of your job. Instead, use it for the things you don’t necessarily want to do, but still have to accomplish so that you can do your actual work even better.

For example, I write a lot of stories, and oftentimes that means reading nonfiction to understand the worlds I’m trying to build. Depending on the story, I might need forensic accounting, police work, spycraft, hard sciences, or any number of disciplines I’m unfamiliar with.

But I only have one life to write. I can’t become an expert in all of these fields. It took me seven years to feel confident in my writing. Doing that for all these subjects is impossible.

Using Story Prism, though, I can easily extract and build reasoning layers that mimic how professionals would troubleshoot the issues I’m facing and then supplant them into an agent that can switch between these consultants when I need them. This has significantly expanded what I feel capable of attempting. I used to stay grounded to everyday thrillers, situational comedies, and worlds I already understood. Now I can responsibly reach into unfamiliar worlds because researching for authenticity is much easier to manage and verify.

Here’s what that looked like in one case.

I was writing a story that involved money laundering, and I knew I needed a forensic accountant’s perspective to make it feel grounded. So I gathered books on the subject and uploaded them to my canvas. Then I used a specialized prompt from the library to help me turn them into a structured knowledge graph. What you see below are major concepts, supporting concepts, granular details, tags, sources, and relationships from those books, all connected to behave as a reasoning system for anything related to forensic accounting.

I saved it to my canvases so that I could go to the library and reuse it for future projects. Right now, this process is still too manual. We’re working on that. But once the knowledge base is built, you have it indefinitely. It becomes a reusable consultant for any project.

For this particular scene, it really came in handy. One character was digging into the protagonist, and I needed them to discover that the main character was about to expose himself and the entire operation to the FBI.

Normally, that would have forced me to stop writing, research for hours, and maybe lose the flow of the scene. Instead, I consulted the graph I had already built. It gave me a dense, story-relevant explanation of what the character might notice and why it would matter.

Then I asked it to point me back to the source. It gave me the book and a page reference from the materials I had used to build the graph. The page number was off by a few due to the PDF formatting. That’s something we’ll need to fix, of course. Regardless, I was still able to find the information quickly, making it easy to verify without derailing the writing session.

So I was able to take hard research and weave it into the story in a way that made sense for the scene, almost like working with a professional consultant. The AI helped me climb a research mountain that would otherwise have taken me out of the work entirely.

I used AI, but it didn’t feel like AI was doing the meaningful part of the work for me. I chose the materials. I chose the graph structure. I wrote the scene. I checked the source. I decided how to translate the answer into drama and then rewrote the scene. The AI accelerated the research bottleneck, but it didn’t take the authorship away from me. That felt like ownership because it was.

Now imagine trying to do that with just a model. You can upload your materials, but you usually don’t get to see how the system organizes them, what relationships it infers, what it ignores, or why it brings one piece of context forward instead of another. We’re told this is okay because it makes things easier. And honestly, fair point. Who wants to think about all of that?

But if we use the technology itself to make that easier, then we don’t have to choose between convenience and control. We can gain easy control over our interactions with AI rather than relying on what the model does behind the scenes.

But What About Super Intelligence?

Well, if uncontrolled superintelligence actually happens, then we ride or die, I guess? I don’t think anyone has a complete answer to what it means to live with something vastly more intelligent than us. That’s why we should take frontier risk seriously. At minimum, that means international restrictions on systems that replicate, self-improve, acquire resources, or operate outside human control. It also means advancing AI under strict evaluations, deployment limits, audits, and real human accountability.

But that’s the frontier-model problem. There are also problems with the models we’re already using. As our leaders work to protect us from these bigger risks, we need to protect ourselves from everyday systems that can shape our choices through bad instructions, hallucinated reasoning, corporate incentives, hidden objectives, or goals no human actually chose. That’s where humans in the loop become more than a slogan.

What we need are human-governed knowledge layers: structured maps of sources, claims, decisions, relationships, and constraints that AI agents can use without hiding the basis of their answers. The goal isn’t to make every piece of information magically trustworthy. It’s to make information easier to verify, move, inspect, and use wherever possible.

These layers won’t magically solve extinction risk. That requires hard governance at the frontier-model level. But they are part of the same basic posture: don’t let increasingly autonomous systems make consequential choices without constraints, sources, accountability, and human override.

And even if superintelligence never arrives, we’ll still need these safeguards. Because the deeper AI gets integrated into everything, the more dangerous a stupid, preventable AI mistake becomes.

That’s the real near-term concern. Not just that AI could become too intelligent to control, but that we may trust these systems too quickly before we’ve built the structures needed to control them.

Conclusion

Models will dramatically advance, whether or not we see something like superintelligence within our lifetimes. But the problem of leaving too many choices undefined will continue.

People will still need ways to keep up with their interactions. We’ll still need systems that ensure trust, verification, and real control are possible. And we’ll need to design those systems in ways that keep people engaged instead of leaving them unfulfilled.

Models alone will not solve these problems, just as neurons alone cannot solve all of our problems when navigating the real world. We still need the whole nervous system. Hands, arms, legs, a heart, bones, and everything else that lets intelligence actually operate.

And that’s exciting, because it means humanity doesn’t have to wait around for large corporations to solve this for us. They have strong incentives to keep making models more powerful. But there are still huge problems around usability, ownership, context, verification, and trust that the rest of us can help solve.

We can build open tools, shared protocols, personal knowledge systems, user-owned context layers, and DIY architectures that make AI easier to inspect and use. We can choose systems that give us more agency instead of less, and favor tools that let us see, shape, check, and verify the context our AI systems rely on.

The future still looks perplexing and, at times, downright scary. But I think the way to make it less scary is participating in shaping it. That starts with understanding what’s available right now and using it to find better solutions.

But if we passively accept things as they are and rely only on institutions, corporations, and experts to decide how these systems should work, then we risk being left out of the conversation. And if we’re left out of the conversation, our futures will be decided for us.

Not sure about you, but to us, that just isn’t acceptable. So we’re doing something about it. And hopefully, after reading this, you will too.

Anywho, that’s my rant for the month. Hope you enjoyed it, and as always, best of luck in your creative endeavors.

Story Prism,

_____________________________________

https://www.storyprism.io

The conversation then shifts to recent AI news and Bernie Sanders’ proposal for a 50% federal stake in major AI companies. We explore how this could lead to regulatory capture by tech monopolies, the industry pushback against open-source models, and global resistance strategies like Japan’s “Second Fugue” grid.

In the back half, we go deep into philosophy to explore the death of the 400-year-old social contract. With leverage shifting toward a new tech elite, we unpack the looming threat of “techno-feudalism”. Are we headed for technocratic pacification and corporate network states, or will citizens reclaim their power through “compute syndicalism” and sovereign data rights?

We close by reaffirming our core mission: evolving Story Prism into an interoperable, open-source infrastructure. We want to empower creators to control their own data and escape the incoming feudal tech landscape.

That’s all for now. Enjoy!

Story Prism

www.storyprism.io

Anyone who’s tried, or actually managed, to make a career in writing knows the coverage industry. It’s the service you discover after a few years in the game, when you start to get desperate. That’s when it goes from the cheesy ad you hear all the time to “Hmm. I wonder if their 7-step program will work?” Don’t fall for this. It’s a trap.

Yes, some services do a fantastic job by being much more hands-on and proactive. But those people are pricey and for good reason, since their time is actually worthwhile. Also, they tend to get overshadowed by the phonier ones who are much more focused on strong marketing, like this business. You can feel the website pulling you to open your wallet, like an incubus.

But then you stumble upon a professional like Piero Iberti (a working writer with credits on psychological thrillers like USA’s The Sinner), and the contrast is night and day. His approach is refreshing: a straightforward, no-nonsense invitation to look at the craft one-on-one. There are no manipulative marketing gimmicks, no manufactured urgency, and no false promises. It’s simply a highly credible industry veteran offering real, unfiltered insight to help you grow. If you are going to invest in professional eyes on your script, that is the gold standard to look for.

Sadly, however, most will skip this offering and venture to the eye-candy ads that pull you into their web because most don’t understand the psychology they’re using to persuade you. But if you’re aware of what these businesses are doing, then you can avoid those money traps in favor of ones that will give you value.

That’s why I tend to treat ads like meeting people. If someone is trying too hard to impress me and using all kinds of deceptive tactics to get me to do things that I’ll later regret, then, of course, I’m not going to want to be around that person. But if they’re open, honest, and straightforward with their intentions, then that’s a huge relief, even if everything about them is terrible. At least, I can know in advance.

So when exploring coverage options, my advice would be to treat it like you’re trying to find that one genuine person at a party with a bunch of axe-body-sprayed, fedora-wearing assholes.

Here’s why.

Most of the Best-Looking Services Prey on Your Struggles

Writing stories is exceptionally difficult, and not for the reasons most people think. It’s not just about plot points and character development. To do it well, you have to learn to let go of your ego, your fear of failure and rejection, and that knee-jerk pull toward taking the path of least resistance. Every one of those aspects can be a strength in other situations. But when it comes to writing, they can be invisible bottlenecks.

The confluence of these issues acts as an invisible monster that can prevent you from ever succeeding. I see it all the time. The feedback was too harsh, so they brushed it off, thinking, “They just didn’t get it.” They convinced themselves their script would go nowhere and quit before they ever had a chance. Or they received genuinely great feedback but couldn’t figure out how to use it without rewriting the whole thing. So they patched it up as best they could, keeping the flawed story since they wanted to avoid the extra work.

These behaviors will kill your chances of success, not because they guarantee failure, but because they’ll eliminate the opportunity. And unfortunately, many people never learn to manage them, which leads to grief and disappointment.

Now, let’s look at writing coverage services. These are businesses, and as such, they need to sell you something. In marketing and sales, you’re always selling the feeling before the product or service. It’s similar to infusing allegory in your story. You’re not telling people how they should feel. You’re showing them stuff that will elicit emotional responses from the meaningful experience.

For marketing, that comes down to strong messaging, which is the kind that surfaces psychological problems indirectly while tying them to the literal problems you’re experiencing. This makes the offerings feel like genuine solutions: practically and emotionally.

Take Pokémon cards, for instance. They’re just pieces of cardboard, right? So why are so many people going absolutely crazy over them? The literal reason is straightforward: kids love them, and some cards can appreciate over time. But the psychological justifications run much deeper, from parents wanting to connect with their children to grown adults yearning for control over a rocky economic future and a way to escape the noise of modern life. So Pokémon isn’t really selling cards as much as it’s selling connection, financial sovereignty, and escape.

The over-marketed coverage services are no different. They’re not selling feedback. They’re selling hope and recognition. They know that almost every creator wants these things, and that desire only intensifies the more you struggle to get it right on the page. The harder the climb, the easier it is for them to sell you their solutions.

Worse, these businesses will provide you with light feedback sprinkled in with praise. So yes, they’re giving you what you want. But when it comes to real evaluation, what you actually want isn’t praise with empty feedback. It’s to know exactly what went wrong and why, so you can fix it.

Hearing about all the stuff that’s working is awesome. But if you blind yourself with the positives, it can cloud your ability to create the content that will garner real hope and recognition, as you’ll assume you’re already great, which means you’ll never work to improve. It hurts to hear the truth. That’s why it’s hard to improve.

The Big Ones Water Down the Truth at Best and Lie to You At Worst

This is another major reason why you shouldn’t automatically trust a coverage service that looks big and impressive. You can’t scale a business that will make customers feel bad…Unless we’re talking about some kind of 50 Shades of Grey situation. For every other business, this will lead to unending churn. It’s like paying someone 500 dollars to touch a hot stove. That’s the opposite of product-market-fit.

And this is a huge problem for the customers paying for feedback because when it comes to properly evaluating stories, you have to be kind, yes, but also hyper-critical and not mince words. A person taking the craft seriously will beg for the unadulterated truth. But remember. That’s painful, even if it’s worded nicely. Coverage services understand this, which is why most will water down their analysis. They want you to come back.

This can also apply to colleagues you associate with. People fear being hated. That’s part of why we tend to cooperate and elevate others, even if they’re strangers. It’s amazing, and we should continue doing that! But it can come with a hidden cost when trying to improve and create the best work. Unless you push your friends, they’ll almost certainly cushion their feedback. And that’s great because it means they like you. You still need the truth, but hey. At least you have kind friends.

Writing coverage services, however, aren’t your friends. They want your money. But the big ones that look phenomenal will generally provide light feedback and a lot of praise if it makes you feel good, because that is what will get you to open up your wallet. The smaller ones with credible backing also want your money, and they’re not your friends. But at least they’ll put real care and consideration into their analysis and provide genuine feedback that can help you grow.

The Big Flashy Services Enable Isolation Over Networking

Not explicitly, of course. But through marketing, they tend to nudge you away from facing the fear of putting your work in front of real people and towards a transaction instead: pay us to read your script. Most of the time, what you get back is something you could pull from Claude Sonnet in thirty seconds. Sometimes, it’s as bad as ChatGPT.

By sinking your wallet into these multi-million dollar rackets, you make it easier to convince yourself that you don’t really have to show yourself to others. Writing stories and making films requires you to step outside and meet other people. And while physically going out is most ideal, even reaching out to someone you’ve been paying attention to in some online space can produce massive opportunities.

I get it, though. Sharing your written work is like being on stage. It’s scary as hell! Plus, there’s the fear of someone stealing it. No doubt, it happens, and that is concerning. But only when you’ve spent a long time bleeding over the craft to the point of mastery. That’s when you legitimately have the capacity to write something that just might be worth stealing. So, unless you’ve had your work validated enough, don’t stress over this. It will only set you back if you’re still learning.

All of this is fear, and while it’s essential to be scared, you can’t let that dominate your choices. That’s what these large coverage businesses prey on. So, don’t be their dinner!

What You Should Be Doing

Yes, it’s hard to get someone who understands the writing process to read your script, which is why some coverage services can be good. Unfortunately, they will probably cost more because, again, you’re getting real feedback instead of the mass-manufactured critiques from the McCoverage Industry.

But if you can’t afford those, then you can still find people who know what they’re talking about. In fact, you should be seeking these people out, regardless of your financial standing. Some of these experienced writers need others to read their stuff, as well, and can be significantly helpful with insights in exchange for feedback on their stories. Plus, evaluating other people’s work is one of the best ways to accelerate your understanding of the craft. So instead of Google-searching a random business that proclaims to know the titans of the industry, search for local meetups in your area and then go to those.

They’re full of people just like you and probably better who are all trying to do the same thing. Isolation can be okay in small increments to focus on writing. But when you’re doing it all the time, you’re not providing any opportunities or experiences for yourself to take back and add to the page. Putting yourself where writers, filmmakers, and other creators gather can dramatically increase your odds of luck. You’re building valuable skills, sharpening your craft, and feeding your creativity because this corner of humanity is full of unexpected moments that can spark an entire universe of ideas.

And those moments are shared. That shared experience creates a tighter bond within the group. So when opportunities arrive, they’re more likely to hit you up to come along for the ride. That’s something no coverage service can ever give you. And when the people reading your work actually care about you and the craft, the feedback is much better in quality because they’re actually invested in helping you.

So go out and meet new people in the creative spaces because that’s the full package. It’s only as expensive as the car trips, and you get everything you need, plus more.

Conclusion

Seriously, this part of the writing industry needs to shake out, so the few gems who actually deliver what they sell can remain and continue helping people without having to act like car salesmen. The vast majority of the big, flashy ones are, unfortunately, deceptive at best and cons at worst. But almost all of them sell you that alleviation from the pain you feel when you’ve spent a few years writing and aren’t getting anywhere. It’s oxy for the creator. Not the real thing.

The real feedback comes from showing up in front of a room full of people and sharing what you have. It happens when you’re pitching to your well-respected director buddy over drinks, or from the sounds of the crowd, even if it’s only ten people. You’re not reading some rushed write-up from an unknown face. You’re hearing the tone. You’re seeing the expressions. You’re sensing an entire room.

That’s how you get real feedback to accelerate your path to success. That’s the corny “secret sauce” to this line of work. It’s just good old-fashioned networking and jumping on opportunities. So do that. And if you’re going to spend your money on feedback, make it count by hunting for the real ones that are quieter and more honest. Just make sure you save the rest for gas money and gear rentals.

Okay, that’s it for now. Hope you enjoyed the little rant, and as always, best of luck in your creative endeavors!

Story Prism,

_____________________________________

https://www.storyprism.io

The conversation then takes a sharp turn into AI news. We break down a startling Stanford report revealing that hallucination rates across top AI models range from 22% to 94%. We discuss the rapid shift toward “context engineering” and why the knowledge graph market is projected to explode to $19 billion as companies realize AI needs robust backend infrastructure to actually be reliable.

In the back half, we go deep on philosophy to explore the “death of digital proof.” We unpack “techno-feudalism” and how AI fabrications are eroding open-source intelligence. Are we entering a two-tiered truth economy where massive corporations build walled “data biodomes” for facts, while the public navigates a polluted internet of hallucinations?

We close by reaffirming our core mission: evolving Story Prism into a human-driven truth infrastructure. By letting you build verifiable ground truth through custom edge connections, we want to empower creators to control their own information and escape the black-box algorithms.

That’s all for now. Enjoy!

Story Prism,

_____________________________________

https://www.storyprism.io

Welcome back to part II of Herding the Rational Center. Last time, in Part I, I covered the connection between Palantir, social media, and how Martin Nowak’s spatial-selection equations could allow bad-faith actors to cultivate cooperative clusters, using our feeds. In other words, they could covertly steer an entire society towards broad outcomes.

Yeah, when you say it out loud, the whole thing sounds crazy. But let me be clear. I’m not suggesting that there are massive teams of people doing hands-on mind-control operations. What’s brilliant about how this could be done is that it doesn’t require that many people. This is especially the case if you shroud it all in corporate greed that’s capitalizing on our attention, which, of course, is true.

Well, what if the right people in the right positions of power and control over the right technology, working with other authorities within our social institutions, decided to piggyback off of corporate greed and use the feeds to “steer the tides”, so to speak? Well, unfortunately, we’ll never really know, so it remains a conspiracy theory.

But then there’s the timeline of events we witnessed from 2011 to the present. If you reflect on that long enough, it starts to give a lot more weight to the possibility that we’re being used for something beyond just ads and buying more junk. I’m not sure what it is or if it’s anything at all. I just find the coincidences interesting, and well…Look, it’s better if I walk you through what I’ve been thinking. And that starts with Epstein in the 90s.

Late 90s-2005: The Incubation Period

From the late 90s until his death, Epstein was elbow-deep in the science and tech world through affiliations like MIT Media Lab and Edge Foundation. He had front-row tickets to innovations most people never heard of. And if you’re a billionaire fixer for a shadow network, that access matters. You want to understand what’s emerging so you can use old-school power to steer where it lands, like the internet, for example. A group like them would be very interested in co-opting the growth and development of that paradigm-shifting technology.

I mean, think about what the internet can do. It’s a decentralized information system that enables billions of people to access an abundance of shared knowledge. That includes information on dirty laundry that corrupt leaders and shadow operators need buried. This emerging transparent model is incompatible with how they’ve been operating, so you can imagine their sense of urgency to control it in their favor. That’s probably why Epstein was smack in the middle of it all.

2006-2011: Foundational Deployment

That brings us to 2006, when Facebook opened to the wider market and introduced feeds, which, back then, were ranked by date. A few years prior, Palantir quietly formed and began working directly with the government. For those of us growing up then, life was okay. Yes, there was 9/11 and the wars, but socializing felt organic and unfiltered. So what happened?

The feeds changed. In 2011, Facebook and others introduced algorithms that studied behavior to recommend content. The stuff we found was no longer based on when a post was made. Now it was by individual preference. As Jonathan Haidt famously noted, this was when people’s brains started to break. Then, when smartphones went mainstream, it was game over. Almost everyone was glued to the feeds.

If we use Nowak’s framework, this was the critical inflection point. The population was no longer a well-mixed soup of random interactions. The feeds began sorting us into behavioral clusters, what Nowak would call “sets.” The infrastructure for managing our social mobility between groups was now operational…Allegedly.

2011 was also when Occupy Wall Street occurred. I knew one of the people who started it. He was a hardcore anarchist, back in college, who chain-smoked Pall Malls. So how it all started was organic, sure. Going so viral, however? That seemed off. Most participants were too young to own homes, so they weren’t directly hit by the crash and bailout, despite the bad taste it put in all our mouths. Yes, the corruption was upsetting. But was that really enough to produce such a massive turnout?

Interestingly, this set the initial tone for the culture wars. The two radical sides on the right and left began growing bigger and louder. They started as small minorities. But the feeds distorted our perceptions, and that distortion led others to join the radicals, which increased their numbers to a large minority.

2012-2015: Heating the Defectors

From 2012 to 2015, we saw the rise of social justice warriors, wielding radical left-wing ideology as answers to the justifiable grievances young people felt about their future. Concurrently disenfranchised, non-traditional conservative voters started drifting toward the alt-right, which was being shaped and led by this unknown guy at the time, but would turn out to be Steve Bannon, who has a very sordid past, as many of us know by now.

What we were potentially witnessing around this time, in Nowak’s terms, could have been the intentional elevation of defector clusters. The algorithms prioritized engagement, and nothing engages like outrage. The feeds made fringe ideologies visible and appear more prevalent than they actually were. We were told it was a mistake or that corporate greed fueled the whole thing. But what if it was also about herding us into a cooperative cluster group?

2016: Sending in the Wrecking Crew Part I

In 2016, Trump was elected. Wild at the time. But knowing what we know today, it was completely insane. Everyone around him must have known he was wrapped up in the Epstein scandal, making him one massive liability. Yet the GOP took a knee anyway, while the Democratic Party cannibalized itself using every dirty tactic to force Hillary over Bernie Sanders, who clearly had a good chance of beating Trump. The question you have to ask is why. Why would the GOP have given unwavering support to Trump, knowing how toxic he was? And why did the DNC shoot itself in the foot so easily?

Maybe it was stupidity. Perhaps they knew the Epstein files would eventually surface and needed someone on the inside to absolve them. Maybe Trump and others were sold on this, a bait set, and taken. Maybe, just maybe, he became president because certain people wanted him as the patsy who would catalyze a necessary, forced evolution by seeding all this chaos.

Through Nowak’s lens, the answer becomes clear: they may not have stopped Trump because Trump was the tool. A compromised defector is controllable, directable, and if necessary, sacrificial. The RNC didn’t need to stop him; he was already on a leash held by people above both parties. And the DNC stopped Bernie because he was an uncontrolled populist, an authentic cooperator cluster that would have disrupted the herding operation. Trump, by contrast, was the controlled agent of chaos, allowed to rise because his strings were visible to those who held them.

After Trump got elected, the progressive left went apeshit while the mainstream media launched a multi-year smear campaign, criticizing every move he made, good or bad. This amplified the radical right, spawning weird groups like the Proud Boys. Then something appeared before our eyes that, at the time, felt like a crazy but normal scandal, not the kind that would truly reshape how we see the system that we’re living in.

I’m talking, of course, about the Epstein scandal. In 2016, James Patterson partnered with a local reporter to write what became a New York Times bestselling exposé. To an extent, it was exactly that. But there was one problem: Patterson framed billionaires like the Rothschilds as though they’d been bamboozled by Epstein, rather than as employers or clients. The leaked emails scream otherwise. This was probably narrative management, designed to soften the story before the public could process it.

But before we had a chance, Harvey Weinstein got outed for a massive rape scandal. The airwaves roared for months. It validated the woke left, swelled their numbers, and emboldened them into a kind of witch hunt, which led to a counterforce from the radical right. And just like that, we all forgot about Epstein as we plunged into useless culture battles. Maybe the timing was just a coincidence. Or maybe it was attention management, using the feeds to redirect outrage away from the more dangerous story.

Around this time, professors and professionals began fleeing their institutions, driven out by radical left-wing ideology or by their disgust with the corruption. They started podcasts, wrote books, went on speaking tours, and fashioned themselves as quasi-whistleblowers, dissecting the institutional failures that had radicalized both sides. Though conveniently, many had a soft spot for the radical right, which would later help deliver Trump’s second term. Drawing from both parties, they began attracting everyday people who just wanted reasonable answers to the chaos.

This became the mainstream network that we see today, though with all the noise, it feels hidden. Everyone from Saagar Enjeti to David Pakman represents multiple political groups who, at this point, have separated themselves from the traditional establishment and the radical sides.

It was the formation of the Rational Center cluster. The chaos of the elevated defectors, the radical left and right, induced this clustering behavior. Cooperators fled the hostile institutional environments and formed a new network. Perhaps it was just a byproduct of corporate greed, as Tristan Harris points out. Either way, it led millions to herd into this center group.

2017-2019: Sustaining the Pressure

Throughout 2017 and well into 2019, we were plagued by the senseless fighting between the right and the left, closing down streets on many occasions. There were constant police brutality videos and school shootings that left the public in shock before boiling over into heated debates threaded into the culture wars, which led nowhere.

In the World of Nowak’s work, this is sustained defector pressure. The elevated defector clusters continued to generate chaos and trauma, maintaining the emotional pressure on the Rational Center, reinforcing their clustering behavior, and exhausting them.

2020: The False Highpoint & Path to Safety

Then, in the summer of 2019, Epstein was arrested before dying under very suspicious circumstances. That’s when the nation really turned its attention to the matter. But as all of this unraveled, a new distraction emerged. A bio-engineered virus in Wuhan, China, accidentally leaked, shutting down the entire World. Now, instead of concerns about Epstein, we were freaking out over toilet paper and staying six feet apart.

Maybe Covid was an accident, but whether it was or wasn’t, it certainly acted as the greatest mobility management event in modern History and at the best moment for a shadow nexus hiding a bunch of things that Epstein was connected to. The entire population’s physical and social mobility in the real world was frozen. People were isolated, scared, and almost entirely dependent on the feeds for information and social connection.

After three months of shutting down, protests from the right broke out, framing their grievances for being unable to live their normal day-to-day life by screaming that the pandemic was not as bad as the fake media said it was. The left counter-protested, claiming that it was irresponsible for them to create these super-spreader events, even though they were there contributing as well.

Eventually, it devolved into vicious riots that led to shootings and buildings being destroyed. All the while, the average Joe was doing their best not to get sick as they processed what was going on. The chaos culminated on January 6th, 2021, when Trump supporters grew angry after he, along with QAnon, declared the elections were rigged, which led to protests at the Capitol. Mixed in, of course, were militant right-wing groups, including the Proud Boys, which was now being run by a former criminal and prolific informant for federal law enforcement.

As we know, it morphed into “The J 6th Insurrection,” where crowds raced into the halls of Congress and just... kinda dicked around. Obviously, it scared lawmakers who were swearing Biden into office. And unfortunately, one protester was shot, and some people got kicked around.

So it was certainly disruptive, and there was evidence that the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys were trying to overthrow the government. But it was strange since Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, isn’t just some country bumpkin. He’s a Yale graduate and a lawyer who worked for Ron Paul. Why on earth would someone with that education and background believe they could hold the election process hostage with firearms and overturn it? Maybe it was years on the feeds. Or maybe the network that Trump was a part of coordinated to stage an overthrow so that he would be able to thrust himself into this ambiguous gray zone of “did he try to overturn the elections or not?”

Perhaps Rhodes didn’t believe it would work as a coup, but rather as a theater. After all, the weapons were stored at a hotel and never used on the scene. And the rest of the evidence was found in text message exchanges. Of course, he got an 18-year jail sentence, but was bailed out when Trump made his comeback, and now they’re playing a leading role in ICE recruitments.

Maybe it’s actually true that both sides are playing pretend soap opera drama and that it was already decided that all of them were going to do everything they could to ensure Trump gets re-elected. And who is to say Rhodes wasn’t paid handsomely for his troubles? Those conditions would certainly improve the opportunity/cost.

Putting conspiracy speculation aside, the overturning narrative fueled the left to smear Trump, justifiably. At the same time, there was enough ambiguity in his role to keep him from being charged with treason. I mean, it was the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who tried to overturn the elections, right? He can’t control what his voters do.

Furthermore, it created a space to argue that Trump was being victimized, earning him sympathy later down the road when he ran for his second term. Both sides were energized. The center was further exhausted. The staged defector action created strategic ambiguity that would pay dividends years later.

2021-2022: The Sterile Dystopia

Now that we were done with Trump, we entered into this sterile, lock-step era of Democratic censorship. COVID continued to rage, and now the fast-tracked vaccine that Trump had initiated in Operation Warp Speed was ready to use. It worked well, but corners were cut for profits, which resulted in many cases of myocarditis and long COVID. COVID-19 indeed causes these symptoms, and in some cases, much worse. But the number of vaccine-related issues was statistically higher than in traditional ones. Perhaps all the bugs have been fixed, but most people won’t know because COVID shots are at an all-time low, whether justified or not.

The distrust was certainly justified due to the ravaging pressure felt from the lunatics on the feeds. Their brains melted at the idea that some people didn’t want to get the vaccine, which led to extreme hostilities on social media, almost overnight. Many people were banned for mentioning credible doctors who spoke out against the mRNA vaccines. Any questioning of mainstream narratives was met with extreme prejudice. Swarms of bots endlessly infiltrated subreddits like r/JoeRogan, where posts and comments were designed to drive wedges into reasonable conversations, which torpedoed these communities into endless flame wars.

These were hyper-amplifying defectors. With the population frozen in place and glued to screens, the algorithmic elevation of extremes was maximized. That’s why it felt like armies full of pink-haired progressives were marching down the streets, demanding everyone wear their masks and take the jab.

But most of the World didn’t act this way. Our daily exchanges outside the internet were tamer. The online distortions, however, still resulted in spillovers like friends and family members severing relationships and companies requiring vaccination for workers and, in some cases, customers. The distortions felt even more real when the Biden administration issued an executive order mandating the vaccine through employment, only to have it shot down by the Supreme Court, resulting in many needlessly quitting their jobs because they refused to get the shot.

This was the asymmetric information environment in full effect. The feeds manufactured a perception of radical dominance that didn’t match lived reality. This kept the Rational Center afraid and clustered. Meanwhile, figures like Mike Benz, who closely align with the Rational Center, were exposing much about the underlying mechanisms of government censorship in the digital era. Interestingly, he never criticizes Peter Thiel and his technological contributions to the very government he’s criticizing.

Given Benz’s background as a former corporate lawyer and State Department official, there’s a pretty good chance that he’s functioning as a kind of controlled opposition, a “whistleblower” who exposes some truth, like government censorship, while protecting the deeper infrastructure like Palantir. This creates a sense of righteous cleansing while distracting from the deeper infiltration. It also fuels the public’s hatred towards Biden and the Democrats with the lethality of academic rigor. At the same time, Trump was smeared in court with nothing ever really sticking before deciding to run for a second term.

2023-2025: Sending in the Wrecking Crew Part II

First, there was utter shock that he’d even show his face on stage again. Then it settled into curiosity before spiraling into absurdity that felt much more comical and entertaining than menacing. And with the war in Ukraine putting a bad taste in voters’ mouths, sentiment began to turn in favor of Trump, who was calling for an end to the war, investing in Bitcoin, and ensuring the internet stays censorship-free.

The Democrats, on the other hand, were politely ignoring their voters by choosing to platform Biden. It was a poor choice, perhaps the worst that any idiot off the street could have seen from a mile away. Then, at the 11th hour, they doubled down on their stupidity by taking Biden out of the race and installing Kamala, who most Democrats hated even more.

When you look back at that moment, it begins to feel a lot like an engineered choice architecture. The Rational Center was presented with a curated decision. One option was made incompetent. The other was framed as a “comeback story”, smeared by the same cancel culture that turned on the average person in the digital space, which created an undercurrent of shared sympathy. The whole thing was narratively satisfying and emotionally compelling.

Everyone knew Trump was a bad choice, but when you consider his story from an aging reality show host to the January 6th debacle and the subsequent court trials, and now this triumphant comeback, with actual good ideas sprinkled into the mix? Well. That creates this illusion that he’s a character in a story, up against the odds. Instinctively, it compels you to want to see the person win.

The story and bombastic spectacle of Trump felt so much more real than anything the Democrats had to offer. It seemed as if the universe had determined that he would be the one, whether you loved him or hated him. It felt exactly like a movie. And that’s because it was staged like a movie, using algorithmic feeds and billions in political campaigning to frame the narratives so that we would feel before we ever thought about what was happening.

But here’s the devil in the details. Most of The Rational Center didn’t vote for Trump. They merely weakened the Democrats by choosing not to vote at all. They were exhausted, disgusted with the options presented, and disengaged. Years of amplified chaos, incompetence from the Left, and sustained pressure from elevated defectors on both sides had done their job.

Maybe I’m wrong, but this feels like mobility management at scale. You’re not forced to choose Trump. The alternative paths are simply made impassable. You either vote for the spectacle, or you don’t vote at all. Either way, Trump wins all because we may have been weaponized to pave the way.

The Present: An Empire in Shambles

Now reality has fallen back into the fold as he has made every poor decision you can think of. Trump followed through with his plans to invest in Bitcoin, which wasn’t necessarily a bad idea. But he also started a tariff war, bullied Canada and Mexico, tried to hide the Epstein files that implicated him as a pedophile and possibly an accomplice in murder, weaponized ICE, overthrew Maduro in Venezuela, failed to stop the war in Ukraine, and started a war with Iran, which closed the Strait of Hormuz, threatening to plunge the entire world into a catastrophic economic depression mixed with regional wars sparking all over the globe.

Many countries in the Middle East, like Iraq, Bahrain, and Syria, now may face total collapse, resulting in over 60 million people starving and fleeing to Europe, which would economically cripple the West. And this would happen at a time when Russia needs Europe to be weak so it can go after the Baltic States, which could spill into more wars.

Now we’re all trapped with a defector we allowed to win under engineered duress. The left certainly didn’t vote him in, and the center didn’t enthusiastically choose this. They were exhausted, which led them to accept the outcome, and that was enough to give him the edge.

What This All Could Mean in the End

To understand what could be happening, we have to go back to that question of why. Why and how exactly did an entire country of 350 million people that’s supposed to have some of the best and brightest get us to this crisis? Was it really just one sleazy guy who could sell people and rile up a crowd? The guy who is supposed to be an idiot, for some reason, becomes the first person to figure out how to more or less own America. How do we square this circle?

We don’t square it by accepting that Trump was some mastermind. We square it by recognizing that he was never the architect. He was probably a foolish instrument. While we may never know exactly how it went down, based on everything that’s been revealed in the Epstein files, we can safely conclude that the power brokers at the top of the RNC knew Trump was highly compromised, making him the worst possible choice for their institutional standing.

So why did they barely lift a finger to oppose him? Why did this historically corrupt party suddenly decide to play to the will of their voters, who Trump was energizing? The Democrats did a phenomenal job at stifling the progressive candidates. So why didn’t the Republicans do the same?

When you strip out the noise and view it through Nowak’s framework, the answer could be that they didn’t stop Trump because stopping him was never the goal. The goal was the herding. A compromised defector is a controllable defector. Trump’s elevation created the pressure. His chaos sustained the pressure. His catastrophic second term delivers the final blow. The Rational Center, now exhausted and traumatized, watching the world burn under a leader they reluctantly allowed to win, has nowhere left to go within the current system. And that could be the point.

Maybe the population has been structured, pressured, clustered, and herded into a state of cooperative dependency. We’re fatigued, but also primed to accept whatever new system is offered as the “solution” to the chaos that feels like it came out of nowhere. Everything we’ve experienced over the last fifteen years may have been induced and nurtured by the feeds, so we’d land in some version of the environment we see today. We’re a society with an invisible cooperative center that spans the political spectrum, ready to dismantle and/or walk away from the old system. Our dissatisfaction may be what the elites use to shepherd in the new system. So what could that look like?

Based on the feeds, the behavioral engineering, Palantir’s infrastructure, and Nowak’s framework, the answer begins to take shape. We may be walking into a future that’s decentralized, trustless, and algorithmically governed between parallel states. One private and one acting as managers in government via direct democracy controlled by the private state. By then, the old institutions will have been so thoroughly discredited and demolished that we’ll welcome the new architecture.

But this can and will be exploited, irrespective of the perks. Cooperation will no longer be voluntary because it’ll be programmed into the infrastructure itself through feeds and IoT sensors that can nudge our behaviors. Moreso, our value and worth may get tied to our brain capital, i.e., how useful and favorable our cognitive output is to the system. Needless to say, we’re almost certainly walking into a kaleidoscope of problems that will be fought and hashed out, likely for the better part of this Century.

Conclusion

The rot within the system was inevitable as the 20th-century order is increasingly incompatible with these future projections. But the accelerated chaos we’ve been experiencing may not have been all that natural. Maybe it was the transition cost for the change that some billionaires wanted to make it easier for them to continue with business as usual, whatever that may be.

And if Nowak’s models hold, we won’t resist the new system. We’ll cluster into it willingly, because the alternative will mean wallowing in the smoldering wreckage of the old world. That will be mathematically, emotionally, and socially worse. If you sink the old ship, people will have no choice but to jump on the new one. The herding may have worked. Now we wait to see what they’ve built for us on the other side.

Hope you enjoyed this food for thought. Until next time, best of luck in your creative endeavors!

Story Prism,

_____________________________________

https://www.storyprism.io

From there, the conversation takes a sharp turn into recent AI news: Russian drones reportedly tapping undersea internet cables, AI models developing self-serving and deceptive behaviors in research environments, and the emerging threat of hallucinated, “vibe-coded” malware — AI-generated code that looks functional but carries fabricated dependencies.

The back half of the episode goes deep on philosophy. Jon and Matt explore the paradox of the heap as a lens for how technology quietly transforms our reality one grain at a time. They unpack cognitive offloading and its long-term risks, the concept of shifting baseline syndrome applied to our relationship with AI, and Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulation and hyperreality. The central question: are we beginning to treat AI systems as a kind of digital deity, replacing genuine understanding with synthetic symbols?

They close by reaffirming Story Prism’s core design philosophy — that AI should function as an exoskeleton for human creativity, amplifying effort and skill rather than replacing the thinking that makes creative work meaningful.

🔗 Try Story Prism free for 7 days: www.storyprism.io

As attention fixates on the Middle East’s tragedies and Epstein’s sex-trafficking, few are scrutinizing his deep ties to intellectual circles. That’s unsurprising. They were innocent compared to figures like Clinton or Dershowitz. These scholars knew of his crimes, sure, but for them, the money and research opportunities trumped the scandal. And with the world ablaze, who cares about these people, right?

Well, what I’m about to share might make you rethink things. This is rarely discussed because it’s buried in technical books. But if you dive into the scholarly work of the academics Epstein surrounded himself with, a mind-blowing possibility emerges.

Before diving into the crazy stuff, know that this is a working hypothesis, not a fact. A hypothesis has supporting evidence but lacks enough proof to be verified. Still, the patterns are clear enough to demand a deeper investigation.

What I found suggests we might be in the early stages of an algorithmically managed society, not controlled like in 1984 or Brave New World, but subtly cultivated and nudged through advanced psychology, math, and data. And all of this may be inducing the formation of a “rational center” coalition that will build our future.

Let’s break this down. My aim isn’t to prove that any of this was done. It’s to show how it could have been done, which, to me, is enough to raise some alarm bells, especially since Epstein was a cut-out for a shadow network more than willing to pull off what I’m about to reveal.

Due to the scope of this matter, I broke the article up into two parts. This first section will cover the technical mechanics. The second part will cover the timeline of events we experienced from the early 2000s to the present, which sheds light on the social and political patterns that support this idea.

Okay, with that out of the way, let’s dig into it!

The Relationship Between Palantir and Social Media Feeds

Before diving into the methodology and findings, it’s crucial to establish Palantir’s relationship with social media feeds; otherwise, the rest will seem crazy...Well, it is, but you know what I mean.

We often stir up noise about these companies, but do we truly understand what they are and how they affect us? I suspect not, since despite our complaints, we keep feeding them the data that powers what I’m about to explain.

Palantir Technologies provides software infrastructure that lets institutions assert sovereignty over their digital and operational domains. It acts like a “mind’s eye,” turning data chaos into order by spotting patterns in massive, unstructured datasets.

Palantir’s ecosystem consists of four platforms: Gotham, tailored for intelligence and defense to enable “intelligence-led warfare” and complex investigations; Foundry, serving commercial and public sectors with data-driven transformation for efficient, accountable operations; Apollo, the orchestration engine that makes Palantir portable and deployable across any environment; and the AI platform, which integrates LLMs into existing ontologies to enable AI agents to perform specific tasks.

All of this sits beneath a semantic data layer called Ontology, which maps information into real-world objects, properties, and relationships. In other words, it can use data from IoT sensors, devices, and social media to simulate behavioral changes in a society.

Here’s how it works with social media, which is key for this blog. Palantir pulls unstructured data, such as posts, likes, shares, or metadata, through APIs and maps it all out. While social media algorithms create emotional feedback loops, Palantir’s AI identifies the patterns in the underlying “behavioral surplus” for deep analysis. In short, we get content that shapes our feelings and actions, and Palantir charts it all.

In the ’90s, mainstream news was the main source of truth; otherwise, you had to do your own research, which was hard. The internet made it easier, but you still had to look. Now, hidden algorithms decide our feeds, creating an illusion of freedom and proliferation. It’s sold as a better alternative to CNN and FOX, but the digital space is likely being misused to shape our thoughts and behaviors more effectively than ever.

I’m sure most will agree with that, but the question is how and whether there’s more to this story than big corporations making greedy choices. I don’t know. So, I wanted to find out.

The Methodology

To get some answers, I used my Story Prism canvas by uploading a Whitney Webb knowledge base, plus my intel analyst and clandestine operator graphs, about 40 books on deep-state ops, government capture, secret societies, covert warfare, and a bunch of random Epstein files.

I then added all the books written by the scholars listed in the email that Epstein sent to Steve Bannon on a separate canvas. These are psychologists, neurologists, sociologists, AI specialists, biologists, mathematicians, and physicists.

So, using the body of secondary source material to provide context and understanding, combined with an analysis of the primary sources (the scholastic work), here’s one thing I uncovered that, to me, could be much bigger than it appears.

Martin Nowak and Understanding Cooperation

Martin Nowak isn’t a household name. But he should be, as he’s one of the most important scientists alive. This is the mathematical biologist who spent decades solving one of evolution’s deepest puzzles: why do we cooperate? Yet if you do a quick YouTube search, his videos have only about 1,000 views or fewer. Maybe it’s just because he’s a very complicated speaker. Or perhaps the media giants don’t want to cover him, which is convenient for the network that Epstein was working for.

In his 2011 book Super Cooperators, Nowak outlines the mathematical mechanics of cooperation. The precision is flawless and completely testable, describing exactly how populations of individuals move from chaos to cooperation, from defection to compliance, from independence to herd behavior.

However, the same equations that describe how cooperation naturally emerges also describe how cooperation can be induced within a population. That is, if one were so inclined and had the means to do it at scale. At the end of the day, the math doesn’t care about your intentions, which means billionaire clandestine groups could use Palantir software and social media feeds to cultivate an invisible cooperative center within a population that could be steered to take action or refrain from doing so.

To understand this, we have to look at Nowak’s core insight about Spatial Selection. In a standard game theory model, individuals interact randomly. Everyone meets everyone else equally. In this “well-mixed soup,” defectors always win. Selfishness dominates. Cooperation dies.

But Nowak discovered something that changed everything. When you introduce structure into a population that clusters people into networks, neighborhoods, and groups, the entire evolutionary outcome changes. In his own words, the “structure of that population bends the trajectory of evolution.”

He tested this by running a Spatial Prisoner’s Dilemma on a chessboard grid. Instead of random interactions, each player only engaged with their immediate neighbors. The results showed that cooperators and defectors not only co-existed but formed patterns. Mosaics of behaviors emerged, shifting and evolving in predictable ways. Most importantly, defectors were herding the cooperators.

By creating pockets of chaos and exploitation, defectors forced cooperators to cluster together for protection. They didn’t choose to cluster because someone told them to. They clustered because the alternative, remaining isolated and exposed to defectors, was mathematically worse.

Then there’s Evolutionary Set Theory. In Super Cooperators, he explains how people naturally belong to multiple overlapping sets of social groups bounded by shared characteristics. These are things like your neighborhood, your political leaning, your religion, your favorite podcast, and so on.

He found that choosiness, the tendency to prioritize your interactions with people who share multiple sets with you, dramatically increases the likelihood that cooperation takes hold. The more sets you share with someone, the more likely you are to cooperate with them.

Nowak also identified an optimum level of mobility between sets. If people move between groups too slowly, they get trapped with defectors and exploited. If they move too fast, cooperative clusters never form, and the system stays chaotic. But at the sweet spot, the intermediate level, cooperators cluster and stabilize. They become resistant to outside influence. He calls this the “most fertile ground for cooperation.”

Now consider social media feeds. They make decisions based on who we are and determine what we see and what we don’t. They determine the communities we can find and, thus, the people we can interact with. That means with Palantir technology, they can map the clusters, while social media giants can automate the frequency of content and community shifting through our feeds and recommendations. That could regulate how fast we adopt different preferences. Huh. Well, that sounds a lot like an online social mobility management system.

Maybe Epstein was a little more interested in the applications of Nowak’s work than he was in Nowak, himself. After all, he proved mathematically that if you control the mobility rate in Game Theory, you can control the evolutionary outcome of an entire population. And if you’re a billionaire class who sees this explosive acceleration of technology that empowers more individuals and independent groups to affect your bottom line, and possibly your position of power, why wouldn’t you do this?

Conclusion

I don’t know if any of these connected dots are reasonable to suspect. I’m not an investigator or a professional researcher. I make tools with my brother to aid those who do when I’m not writing stories. But I find it fascinating to explore as a possibility and do my best to show how it could be done. None of that means it has been done, however. That’s always good to remember in the back of your mind. Until or unless more evidence surfaces, this remains pure speculation.

But, as you’ll see in part two, the more I reflect on our experience and the rollercoaster of emotional trauma that we inflicted on ourselves over the last 15 years, the more it seems that there could be some real weight to these connections that might tell a deeper truth to what’s going on and where all of this is taking us.

Hope you enjoyed part I, and as always, best of luck in your creative endeavors!

Story Prism,

_____________________________________

https://www.storyprism.io

They also touch on creative AI tools, simulated audience testing, and the future of using AI to validate ideas before investing in full production. From there, the conversation turns philosophical as they dive into Qabbalah, the Book of Formation, and the provocative idea that language, memory, and symbolic structure may have more in common with modern AI than we realize.

This is an episode you don’t want to miss!

Inside Story Prism: New Updates & The Long Game

• Site Updates: The platform has been refactored for smoother performance and faster node loading, complete with a new save indicator banner.

• Document Uploads: Massively improved capabilities allow users to upload documents of any file size or type without issues.

• My Stuff & Canvases: A new feature lets users save canvases and drop them directly into other projects.

• The Vision (Agents): In the future, Story Prism will roll out features for using your knowledge base as the “brain” of an AI agent, incorporating new agentic capabilities for automated research.

Internal Projects & Research

• UFO Lore & Hyper-Realism: Matt is uploading up to 12,000 pages of research on theoretical physics and gravity propulsion into Story Prism to craft hyper-realistic sci-fi lore using the Socratic method.

• Computer Vision Breakthroughs: Jon is combining computer vision textbooks and academic papers with unrelated topics to introduce lateral thinking, successfully improving upon existing PhD-level models.

AI & Future Tech News

• Agent-Only Social Media: The hosts discuss a new app populated entirely by AI agents talking to each other based on human instructions, raising questions about the future of data acquisition.

• The Death of the Article: With the ability to query massive piles of books via chatbots, traditional blogs and articles may become obsolete as users prefer personalized “rabbit hole” discovery.

• AI Data Poisoning: Bad-faith actors could intentionally flood training data with false information, permanently polluting AI models.

Deep Dive: Brain Capital and the Ghost of Jeffrey Epstein

• Defining Brain Capital: Organizations like the World Economic Forum are pushing to evaluate cognitive performance and emotional resilience as “neurocognitive assets” to drive GDP.

• The IoT Measurement: This concept relies on internet technology and sensors to collect neurological data and implement psychological “nudges” to optimize behavior.

• The Epstein Connection: The hosts trace a speculative thread connecting Jeffrey Epstein’s networking with prominent intellectuals to the architectural planning of managed, algorithmic societies.

• Dystopian Risks: Potential consequences include a “neuro caste system” determining job eligibility, automated law enforcement freezing assets for minor infractions, and a “soft eugenics” suppression of inefficient minds.

Enjoy the show, and as always, best of luck in your creative endeavors!

Story Prism

I always thought that World-building was for video game writers and fantasy novelists. But after getting into AI and knowledge bases with my brother and film partner, I’ve come to realize how valuable it can be for all kinds of stories. If you’ve read my work, then you probably know that I ventured into the Epstein Files using Story Prism.

In my pursuit to uncover hidden information, I created a range of knowledge bases containing handbooks from various professions that embody specific personas based on fictional characters. These bots can read structured and related information on subjects like intelligence gathering and analysis, investigative journalism, spycraft, and global financial fraud. I even mapped one of Whitney Webb’s two-volume series, One Nation Under Blackmail.

These aided me greatly by providing a lot of relevant context while reading the files, but they also helped me understand the wider world that Epstein was operating in, which sparked this wild idea for a story. Here’s the synopsis:

This entire global conspiracy began centuries ago when a silent alien entity, the ‘Benefactor,’ made contact with a small group of the world’s most powerful elite, promising them unparalleled wealth, technological godhood, and guaranteed longevity. But only under the condition that they steer humanity down a timeline to meet the following benchmarks: Unified global governance, advanced tech that can be handled responsibly, and united communities that can co-exist in harmony. It was driven by a mix of greed and cosmic ambition; these individuals organized themselves into the Sovereign Twelve (S-12), establishing the Foundry to shepherd humanity toward forced evolution.

To ensure their multi-era plan stayed on track, one among their number was appointed the Custodian, granted indefinite life and access to the Chronal Analysis technology—a slick, black orb. This device does not predict the future. Instead, it transmutes frequencies from quantum fluctuations to the user’s head. As they ponder the path they want to take, the frequencies change until harmony arrives. That tells the Custodian what path the Foundry should take for humanity to achieve ascension.

This is a series detailing what started as a noble mission, only to corrupt itself and devolve into a cult that believes in the brutal doctrine of Necessary Cruelty—engineering world wars, collapsing governments, and instituting global mind control to produce a unified, compliant, and genetically-filtered species—the asset the aliens ostensibly required…Or so they think.

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Yeah, I know it’s a work in progress. The point, however, is that AI is really great at helping me build the authentic framework for this entire World that I’m only now being introduced to. But it also got me to think more deeply about what it means to build a World, why it matters a lot for some stories and not so much for others.

Not every narrative requires deep, intricate dives into the universe surrounding the characters. In many cases, they’re small and personal, often simulating our reality. So there isn’t much to explore beyond the character’s environment, which means there isn’t any reason to Worldbuild.

But there are some stories where the places are so big and fascinating, they must be explored and woven into the plot. Take the Foundation Series, for instance. This is a universe where humanity has successfully colonized the Milky Way Galaxy. That’s unfathomably huge and interesting, making it ripe for Worldbuilding and really necessary for this story. After all, it is about the fate of the galaxy, which means showing the interesting areas enhances the audience’s reasons to care about the piece, beyond the characters and plot.

But where do you even begin to invent something as grand as the Milky Way Galaxy? How do you manage it all so you can capture the intimate stories while maintaining the scope and complexity?

No, you can’t simply use AI as a crutch. That’s good for speed, ideation, and polishing up ideas. It’s not effective at doing the job for you. If you want to do it, well, you have to…

Find the Kernel and Extrapolate

Simplicity is your greatest friend, which seems counterintuitive in worldbuilding since the best ones feel immersive and endless. But the greatest ones always start with a simple fact about their reality that extends out to everything else. For instance, let’s say you want to build a futuristic world like cyberpunk, but you don’t want to default to what’s already been made. You want to make something unique and cool.

Instead of thinking about all the details, strip everything away and consider one thing that can have massive implications. Maybe it’s the discovery of the human soul and communication with the afterlife.

Now, instead of using the typical cliches and tropes, you’re forcing yourself to think more deeply about the question you’ll keep asking yourself: How would it actually be if this were true? That’s the guiding question. If we do have souls and there is an afterlife, how would all of that work? I don’t know. That was just an example I quickly came up with for this blog.

But if I wanted to build that World, I would start by considering the implications, the science, mechanics, and rules behind it. Okay, so there’s an afterlife. How did we make this discovery? If we know it exists, can we communicate with others who are there? If so, how? What do we do with the information they give us? Do they even give us information? Other than dying, is it possible to go there and come back? If somebody dies, can they come back?

Once I define all of these “basic rules”, I then branch out to wider implications, such as politics, society, education, or the economy. For instance, let’s say anyone can easily talk to spirits in the afterlife. Well, that would be a huge deal because, in theory, ghosts can divulge our secrets, including ones with serious national security ramifications. Of course, they can also help with unsolved murders, which is great. But just with that information, you can already see an entire industry within and on the peripheries of governments that control and regulate the “safe” use of ghost communication technology.

Or what about going and coming back? Does that mean someone has to sacrifice their body and somehow seep into a robotic surrogate upon returning? How do established religious institutions respond to this? You could imagine a great divide and the possibility of an entirely new religion forming. Just think of all those people in robot bodies who ventured in the afterlife for many years before returning. Think about their behaviors compared to everyone else and how others around them would respond. How friendly or hostile would people treat them?

By asking endless questions like these, I’m able to build a multitude of spaces to explore. But all of these inquiries originate from one simple fact about this futuristic World: The afterlife is real. That’s really what’s at the heart of it, which is why the “simple fact” can be seen in every great movie and story with an interesting world. The Lord of the Rings: Dragons, magic, and fantasy creatures are real. The Matrix: Reality is a simulation controlled by robots. The Foundation Series: Humanity is an advanced race that has colonized the entire Milky Way Galaxy.

One fact that changes everything. Start there, and then ask a bunch of questions surrounding the fact and how it changes everything. Pretend you accidentally slipped into another dimension, and now you’re in this new space trying to figure it out. What has to be known to get your bearings straight? Maybe you need to know how the political order works because your story centers on that, like in Game of Thrones.

If that’s the case, then consider what the political systems would be like and how they might behave based on the one fact you’ve established about that world. With Game of Thrones, it takes place in a fantasy medieval world, which means real medieval politics heavily influenced the story’s politics. That’s what made it feel so immersive.

But often we don’t get that luxury to draw on, which is why Worldbuilding can be very challenging. That’s really where AI can shine. Yes, I know it leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths. However, if you can structure your information and define the relationships for an AI to understand and work with, you can gain a lot out of using it, especially for Worldbuilding. The reason is simple. With discrete information defined and related, AI can do a far better job of providing accurate and coherent answers. Moreover, it can pick up on thematic patterns to help you better understand your story.

Big picture, that means you can merge entire universes of related knowledge and synthesize information using AI. So now, instead of drawing ideas from medieval politics using a few books, you can draw from 100 books spanning many different eras of politics and meld them together to help you form new political worlds that were never even considered.

If used properly, AI can be a more efficient way to research, think, and explore while writing. This is because you can meld your research with your story notes in an AI’s knowledge base, allowing you to ideate and research simultaneously.

Right now, we’re still in the early days of AI, and while the hype is certainly in a death spiral, creating many casualties in the business space, the technology isn’t going to disappear. It’ll just be reimagined as another tool used for good and bad.

The mystique will disappear, the hazards will plague us, but so will the benefits, especially for worldbuilding, and to me, that’s the silver lining in all of this mess. The fact that I can capture so many different aspects of human knowledge, along with my own ideas, and distill them into a single chatbot for worldbuilding ideation? That’s amazing.

Conclusion

Worldbuilding may be tedious, and ultimately not a necessary component to writing great stories. But when you’re introducing your readers to a space with the potential for interesting depth, like Steven Erikson’s Malazan and Brandon Sanderson’s Roshar, it can go a long way toward serving the story you’re trying to tell.

Just don’t get lost in the weeds. Remember, you’re trying to tell a story, not build an endless World. You want to add the necessary depth to make it feel endless. And, of course, it’s not a bad idea to start with that single fact that changes everything before extrapolating out. You nail that, well...You might have a World worth building a story in.

Okay, that’s it for now. As always, best of luck in your creative endeavors!

Story Prism,

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https://www.storyprism.io

In this episode, John and Matt dive into the world of “The Big Flop”—those cinematic failures that bomb at the box office only to be resurrected years later as cult classics. They explore why traditional metrics like opening weekend sales are becoming obsolete and how AI might (or might not) be able to predict the next “low flop” masterpiece by looking at sentiment variance rather than just historical data. Along the way, they touch on the “Wix for RAG” vision for Story Prism, the ethics of biocomputing, and the “quantum structure” of storytelling.

Inside Story Prism: New Updates & The Long Game

• Site Updates: A new version of the platform is rolling out with undo/redo capabilities, nested nodes for better organization, and color-coded connections.

• Performance: Major optimizations have been made to eliminate lag on large canvases.

• The Vision: The goal is to make complex AI systems (like RAG) accessible to non-technical creators, allowing them to build context-aware chatbots that help with research and story development.

Internal Projects & Research

• Video Generation Control: Jon is researching ways to combine generative AI with virtual production techniques (Unreal Engine) to create coherent 360-degree environments using depth maps and point clouds.

• Realism in Lore: Matt discusses using Story Prism’s knowledge graphs to add gritty realism to a sci-fi conspiracy story, leveraging research from authors like Whitney Webb to bypass years of manual research.

AI & Future Tech News

• Biocomputing & Metaboc: A look at researchers in China connecting brain cell organoids to biocomputer chips, where 800,000 cells learned to play ping pong in minutes.

• The Limits of LLMs: A discussion on why increasing compute might not lead to AGI and why the future might lie in organic-digital hybrids.

• FaiBLE Studio: A new venture seeking the “AlphaFold of media” by attempting to map the underlying “quantum structure” of storytelling.

Deep Dive: The Anatomy of a Cult Classic

• The “Low Flop” Definition: A film that fails financially but gains a dedicated following 10–20 years later.

• High Standard Deviation: Why a 50/50 split between love and hate is often a better indicator of longevity than a “safe” mediocre reception.

• Predicting Cult Status: How AI could potentially identify “memeable density” and niche sentiment long before traditional algorithms pick up on it.

• The Algorithm Problem: Why current recommender systems are biased against “unknown gems” because they prioritize safe engagement over risky, meaningful content.

• Films Mentioned: Super Mario Brothers (1993), The Room, Primer, Tenet, Babylon, and Coppola’s Megalopolis.

Enjoy the show, and as always, best of luck in your creative endeavors!

Story Prism

https://www.storyprism.io

With the recent launch of Story Prism 3.0, I wanted to give it a thorough test drive and see what it could do. So, what better way than to dive right into the new Epstein Files? Between this November and December, Congress released over 300 gigabytes of documents, photos, videos, and audio files for public view. But that’s not even scratching the surface, as it’s rumored that the government holds at least a million more files.

I’m still sifting through the available ones. But with what I’ve gathered so far, it’s now starting to make sense why the government would be hellbent on keeping this under lock and key, especially given Donald Trump’s involvement. What this file dump reveals is both disgusting and deeply haunting to our nation’s security now and in the foreseeable future.

So I’d like to share a few things that I’ve found through Story Prism because I think, as unfortunate as it is, all Americans, and for that matter, everyone around the World should understand the picture that is emerging from this story.

I’m not a journalist. I make indie films with my brother when I’m not relentlessly working with him to improve the app. So I know these finds aren’t “breaking news”. However, they’re certainly shocking for someone like me who didn’t know much about this case.

So, for those who want to glean a little closer into the dark world of Epstein, if only to leave with a kind of existential dread?

Well…read on.

The Setup

Before diving into the weeds, let me briefly explain how I made these LLM systems on Story Prism to help me examine the files and connect some dots. I knew that if I added them to a canvas, it would quickly turn into a hot mess. This is especially true given that the chatbot assistant works best when you limit your notes to 15k characters. The spread was big, to say the least.

I did my best to group them by category, and with the larger documents, I split them into smaller sizes before daisy-chaining them sequentially. But now, I needed a way to sift through all of this. I could use the chatbot assistant as is, but it would only work as well as I could work it. I needed an investigator’s brain to help me.

If this were 2024, I would have made a simple investigator prompt. Now I can build an entire knowledge graph of a handbook to function as a system for finding and generating real insights like a professional. The difference between this and an advanced prompt is night and day.

What you see above is The Investigative Reporter’s Handbook, by Brant Houston, broken up into logical notes and tied together with the appropriate edge labels to relate the information. And that tiny little note at the top? That’s the simple investigator chatbot impersonating April O’Neil. It’s specifically tailored to utilize the knowledge graph and help me sift through large sets of information. This is both a corpus of information from a book and a system designed to investigate.

But I wasn’t done just yet. I needed another friend. I’m talking about…Otacon.

Yes, this is the same Otacon from the Metal Gear Solid series. And yes, you should say it with Snake’s voice like I did while writing that. Just like April O’Neil, I connected the chatbot to its own knowledge graph, this time using The Intelligence Analysis Fundamentals by Godfrey Garner and Patrick McGlynn.

Both April and Otacon’s canvas structure is significant because I can use them to learn how to do the work, and as a system to help me accomplish things. The task I needed them to do for this blog, of course, was to help me examine the Epstein files. I’m still adding to the pile, but as of now, I have about 80 files on the canvas.

This is what I was able to gather within minutes. Keep in mind, this AI doesn’t pull from outside sources. Everything expressed below is entirely derived from the primary source files.

Epstein Had the Keys to the World

Okay, not literally, and given that he may have been murdered in prison, it would seem that those keys were taken from him. But back in the day, this guy really did seem untouchable and quite possibly, more powerful than even the President.

First, let’s start with his legal team and how powerfully aggressive they were. Here’s a snippet of what Otacon wrote:

Prosecutor M. Villafana described the team as an “unlimited number of highly skilled and well-paid attorneys” exerting “intense pressure” during the negotiations and investigations:

• Superstar Defense: Epstein utilized a bottomless pit of “legal superstars” (including Dershowitz and Starr) to wage a “year-long assault” against the prosecution.

• Targeted Intimidation: Defense counsel engaged in highly personal tactics, investigating the prosecutors and their families, seeking grounds for disqualification.

• Maximum Pressure: They repeatedly challenged the legal basis for felony charges and used political influence to appeal decisions directly to Washington, D.C.

• Delay and Negotiation: Their persistent arguments successfully delayed the federal indictment for over five months while demanding a resolution based on reduced state charges.

Okay, so yeah, money talks, but that can only get you so far. In Epstein’s case, he also seemed to have an endless list of friends in high places who really went out of their way to get him this sweetheart deal.

Take Alex Acosta, Florida’s Attorney General at the time. When Alex first learned about the case, he was eager to help, but after one meeting with Epstein, the man flipped and began colluding with his defense team. This, of course, led to the infamous, non-prosecutorial agreement, which protected him and his co-conspirators from future prosecution related to this matter.

This is a man who went from having a 57-count federal indictment to a state felon with limited consequences. The punishment dwindled to a 30-month sentence, with only 18 months of incarceration in the county jail. He only served 13 months. Additionally, his legal team managed to get the prosecution team to pressure the victims into choosing to take a payout instead of going after Epstein for additional charges.

Moreso, Epstein was immediately transferred from the general jail population to the Palm Beach County Central Detention Center, where they housed addicts and petty criminals over dudes who would easily knife a pedophile to death. A private guard in his own wing was also granted.

And of course, being able to leave and have fun at his mansion during the day was totally okay, along with visitors. Some of them were even the co-conspirators who would have been deeply roped into legal doom had it not been for Epstein and his friends.

U.S. Attorney Acosta later stated that the treatment Epstein received in state custody “undermined the purpose of a jail sentence.” Huh. Well, that’s funny because he seemed to play a major role in allowing that to happen.

After all was said and done, Jeffrey Epstein pretty much moved on with his life and most assuredly continued to abuse girls. Moreover, high society welcomed him back with open arms, as evidenced by his attendance at the Tribeca Ball around 2014. He also began associating with tech leaders and academia, having a particular interest in life extension, genetic engineering, and AI. Probably for good reasons, I’m sure.

Political relationships continued, too, and new ones formed, such as with Steve Bannon, after Trump fired him in 2016. Perhaps they were conspiring against his re-election bid?

When I step back from looking at all of this, I can’t help but think about that quote Donald Trump once made. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters...” Trump had very close associations with Epstein and was very much in the circle of friends. Now, I wonder. If his close friend, who wasn’t even the president, could get away with a massive child sex trafficking ring…Well, then. Maybe Trump could get away with murder. Let that sink in.

The Systematic Nature and Scale of the Operation

Another old, but shocking revelation that really sinks in when you read the finer details is the scope and scale of his child sex-trafficking operation. Call me naive, I deserve it. But when I first learned about this story, my impression was that he was only setting it up in Florida with him and a few friends. I thought it was just a dozen victims or so…My God, was I wrong.

Epstein, in private, bragged about having sex with over 1000 underage girls. Seriously, wrap your head around that. Now, it’s true that he was a narcissist, so perhaps that isn’t exactly accurate. But, taken in with the rest of what we know, it’s clear that the number is likely very high. Certainly higher than what they counted during the case. Of course, this number becomes more believable when you realize he created a pyramid scheme by getting other girls to recruit their friends for money.

And the deeper you dig, the crazier it gets. Abuse was a daily thing, disguised as massage therapy sessions that were masked by hiring a real certified masseuse to provide plausible deniability. It was also reported that Epstein molested girls as young as 12. More disturbing is the fact that it was run like a real service to Epstein and his clients/co-conspirators.

This was all thanks to Ghislaine Maxwell, who can be credited for “professionalizing” the operation, which fueled his addiction to sex with girls. And yes, there were staff who Ghislaine used for help, specifically Sarah Kellen, Lesley Groff, and Nadia Marcinkova. They were also involved in some of the sexual acts, which wasn’t surprising.

But what was surprising was the discovery that they ran classes where the girls were taught how to…Well, you know. They were also instructed to collect intel on the people they were prostituting for, specifically how they liked to have sex, which was used to optimize the service for their clients.

Scheduling and paperwork were managed along with regular and consistent flights to the same areas, almost every week, like clockwork. Whenever he and others did stuff to the victims, he’d force them to shower afterwards, and have people clean the place, leaving little to no evidence.

Girls in Epstein’s web were often seen at many high society functions, closely guarded. Some witnesses claimed to have seen him surrounded by girls, providing sensual massages. Just out in the open, in plain sight. Maybe these people didn’t know everything about Epstein, but they certainly had to have known enough about him to understand that he was shady, like a mobster.

Sadly, that’s why I’d assume everyone turned a blind eye for so long. Cowardly, yes, but ask yourself. Would you go up against a dude who has ties to Mossad and other nasty people who wouldn’t hesitate to put a bullet in your head? Just saying.

Finally, there’s the nature of the entire operation. Unlike other pedophile rings, this one seemed specifically designed as an extortion ring layered inside a pedophile ring. In other words, Epstein was using this to entrap powerful people so that he’d have them right in his pocket.

That’s exactly why he seemed to be a man who could walk on water when it came to our legal system. When you consider the black book that Alfredo Rodriguiz, his houseman, had, which is said to contain the names of hundreds of girls and clients, it’s chilling to think how widespread this could be.

Even if half of the people in that book weren’t fully captured by Epstein and whatever bigger thing he was involved with, it’s not hard to imagine that, in some way or another, he’s using them. For what reasons, we don’t know, but let’s not forget, we’re talking about a man who somehow “Forrest Gumped” his way into Iran-Contra, so I suspect that all of this goes much deeper than we’re led to believe.

The Psychology Behind It

Many photos were also released with the documents, which you can view here if you’re interested. One aspect that really stood out was the mismatched decor. The rooms at Epstein’s NY estate were filled with all kinds of strange trinkets. Most striking was that his furniture, the various rooms throughout the place, the wallpaper, carpets, and floors, never seemed to hold a consistency. His design sense and the objects he chose to display on the walls appear very eccentric.

Now, that could be a reflection of Epstein’s state of mind and what he was into, which seems to match some of the descriptions people have made about him as being a man whose interests were all over the place. But it also speaks to a strange, dark obsession with something that I believe we’re only getting a tiny glimpse into.

If you look hard enough, you’ll find some odd stuff hiding in plain sight. The most notable is what appears to be a picture of a passed-out girl on a couch. This wasn’t just discovered on his desk, but also in a bathroom. So there’s likely significance to that photo. And given the subject matter and what we know about Epstein…Yeah. I’ll leave it at that.

Another interesting one that appears totally innocuous is the painting of Bill Clinton wearing a dress. According to an FBI intake report, that piece, along with several others of powerful figures, was stolen by Matthew Settle, an actor who played in the show Band of Brothers. The account is pretty ambiguous, but evidently, he was in debt to the Serbian mafia and ended up hatching a plan to seduce this girl so he could steal her artwork. Settle then sold the paintings to Jeffrey Epstein, who used them as leverage to get the girl into his sexual orbit since she needed them to get into art school.

Again, this is a tip made to the FBI. It’s not evidence since anyone can do it. But it’s a fascinating anecdote that, if true, would shed some light on Epstein’s mindset. Most people would try to hide their crimes from others and even themselves. But Jeffrey embraced them, leaving reminders out on display to show himself and others that he could do anything with impunity. So perhaps, some of those funny little paintings resting on those strange walls and mismatched trinkets aren’t just sentimental gifts from a well-traveled man. Maybe they’re “trophies” with sinister backstories?

Then there was the sheer number of rooms with massage tables. He was utterly obsessed with the fantasy of fusing sex with massages. That sounds ridiculous, but it’s no joke.

I actually had Story Prism estimate how many hours out of the day he spent procuring girls to do this. It came back with a conservative figure of 4-8 hours a day. My jaw dropped. What we’re seeing in these documents is a high-level clandestine operator who provided a powerful service to other powerful people and who also had a massive sex addiction problem, the likes of which few had ever seen.

And when you consider that Epstein was in this odd position of power that allowed him to do things like cancel dinner with a French Prime Minister because he wasn’t feeling well or refusing to meet with Vladimir Putin because he wanted to talk at his palace, it makes a lot more sense that someone who was already creepy and without morals, would end up creating a massive child sex trafficking ring.

Epstein was once a sick young man who, instead of getting the help that he needed, ended up getting swept into this weird club full of billionaires treating the World like it’s their playground. And when he found himself with this untouchable power, it dawned on the man that no one could stop him from fulfilling his deepest fantasies. Epstein was too valuable to too many within the power elite, many of whom he was able to compromise. This only strengthened his position.

This lunatic dove headfirst right into his vices, chasing and obtaining what he wanted in such large quantities that it numbed the pleasure, leading to far more extreme acts, which I won’t get into. But let’s just say that one of his Amazon receipts reveals books on slave/master relationships and sado-masochism 101. Look, I’m not trying to kink shame anyone, but in this context? Yeah…We may never really know how dark Epstein’s fantasies were. Though, to be fair, I’m not sure I want to.

What This Tells Us About America

What makes the Jeffrey Epstein case so fascinating is the hard affirmation it provides to the dreadful feelings many Americans carry in their hearts when they think about their country. There’s this lingering sense that we’re living in one giant Fugazi. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying our institutions and military power are fake or that every talking-head politician out there is in on some grand conspiracy. But it does feel like there’s a front-facing side of our political system and a shadow-facing side made up of all these dark networks doing who the hell knows what.

And if you think about it in that way, then it becomes clear that we’re seeing a macro reflection of us, the individuals. Like the systems we rely on, we walk around with a front-facing side that’s driven by socially acceptable behaviors. Then there’s this entire shadow-facing side of us that’s sloppy, rude, self-serving, lustful, greedy, and maybe evil.

It’s all of the negative traits we try our best not to succumb to. If that’s how we operate, then why should we be surprised when we see these behaviors in billionaires who are above social scrutiny? Without any need for social reciprocity, a person can shamelessly be themselves with little to no restraints.

And while, thankfully, most people, rich and poor, aren’t messed up like Epstein and the others, it doesn’t take that many among the super wealthy to form highly compartmentalized back-channels to make things happen on behalf of themselves and their constituents. It’s more or less the thing that has always been, only now it’s moved behind the scenes as we’ve modernized into Democratic political systems. Now, it resembles a mafia enterprise, which makes this entire Epstein scandal feel a lot less like being an American citizen and a lot more like being a kid in a mansion who finds out their father is the head of a dangerous criminal organization.

Though most of us can never feel the pain from the abuse and betrayal that Epstein had unleashed on his victims, as an American, you can’t help but feel deeply connected to their misery as if you were one of them. This happened in our house, by our leaders, on our watch. That makes us feel responsible, even if none of it is our fault. And now we’re at a flashpoint where the country must decide how to handle the revelations that are coming out.

Will we see true accountability or a cosplay version of it? And if the co-conspirators walk away from this mess, will the American public do the same?

Conclusion

Fundamentally, the Epstein Case will go down as one of the greatest scandals in U.S. History, if it hasn’t already taken the title. What’s crazy is that we’re only skimming the surface, given his deep ties to the intelligence community and global leaders. Perhaps we’ll learn more in the future with the hopeful release of the other files. Maybe, then, we’ll see, at least, some justice. But in this Country, who the hell knows? One thing I do know, however, is that as more files come out, we’ll be armed with Story Prism and ready to connect the dots.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you have a great new year. As always, best of luck in your creative endeavors!

Story Prism,

_____________________________________

https://www.storyprism.io

• The success of Story Prism 3.0 and the upcoming rollout of a new pricing strategy featuring unlimited tiers and streamlined mass document uploading.

• The intersection of AI and political influence, discussing a Cornell study on chatbots’ ability to sway presidential preferences and the potential for “politically motivated” AI tools.

• Federal vs. State AI regulation, analyzing the implications of executive orders that limit state-level oversight and the benefits of using states as “sandboxes” for policy.

• AI-driven price fixing, examining reports of Instacart using AI to analyze individual shopping habits and modify prices in real-time based on a user’s maximum willingness to pay.

• A deep dive into the Epstein files using Story Prism to transform investigative manuals into specialized AI personas—an “Investigative Journalist” and “Intelligence Analyst”—to map out complex data.

• The “industrial level” logistics of human trafficking, detailing the systematic nature of the operations revealed in the documents, including global travel logs and recruitment pyramid schemes.

• The psychology of Jeffrey Epstein, exploring the “God mode” conditioning of the untouchable elite and a graphological analysis of his signature to uncover traits of secrecy and narcissism.

Thank you for tuning in.

As always, best of luck with your creative endeavors!

Story Prism

https://www.storyprism.io

Our minds are powerful, yet they can be easily fooled by simple psychological tricks, for better or worse. People call them “mind-hacks” on the internet, which sounds cringy. But what’s interesting is that some of them work. The ones that have made a huge difference in my writing process, making the experience smoother and easier to handle.

So I thought it’d be fun to isolate the bs from the real stuff and write a list of my go-to “mind-hacks” for storytellers because, well…If these work for me, then maybe they can work for you. Or perhaps this is just one of those snake-oil rabbit-hole posts that will fill you with delusions of grandeur and empty promises, leading you to buy overpriced supplements that do nothing.

It’s a 50-50…So, uh, yeah. Let’s do this. Good luck!

1. Find Creative Solutions Fast

The technical act of writing isn’t all that challenging. But finding great ideas and expanding on them, from start to finish, is incredibly difficult. It’s even more challenging when you’re on a tight schedule and need to produce a rewrite on the spot. If you ever find yourself in that situation, try doing this. Isolate yourself in a room where you can lie down and close your eyes. Get a pair of stereo headphones and blast theta waves as you concentrate on the problem that you’re trying to solve.

You can find YouTube channels that host these frequencies, which place you into various states, such as relaxation or alertness. I love using this technique when I’m really stuck because it works so much faster than mulling over possible solutions within the noise. It’s better to clear your mind, relax, and listen to those waves while focusing on the singular problem that you’re facing. Usually, within ten minutes, I’ll have something to work with.

It sounds crazy, but it kinda feels like you’re channeling ChatGPT. A bunch of different ideas pop into existence, only instead of derivative solutions, they’re your best ones. I like to think of it as performing a deep dive into the furthest recesses of your creative potential. You’re only there for a second, but that’s just long enough to capture something useful.

2. Turn Hard-to-Start Tasks Into Habits

Getting started on anything that’s cognitively challenging is, well…It’s not easy. It’s certainly not when staring at a blank page trying to write your novel or screenplay. But if you turn the process into a habit, writing becomes much easier. Here’s how I did it.

First, I just started writing. I didn’t care what it was. I had a feeling, and I wrote it down in a monologue, which spiraled into a story that turned out to be terrible. Of course, I only found out after 50 pages of text. The point is that you should start right away. Don’t think or hesitate because that’s when all the noise will flood into your head.

If you start typing right away, your mind will be forced to focus on the page, which will bring clarity. You’ll scribble garbage at first, but eventually the words will become more cohesive, and then you can edit what you’ve written. But you can’t edit what doesn’t exist, which is why writing anything is better than nothing.

Now, to cement that action into a habit so your mind turns on like the Manchurian Candidate when it’s time to work, you have to foster a kind of “ritual”. No, don’t start wearing a robe and spout prayers under candlelight, though if that works for you, then who am I to judge? Okay, I might judge you a little bit for that.

What I mean by ritual is that you want to do a series of things consistently during your writing time. That includes being in the exact space that’s right for you, every time. This way, as soon as you step into that environment, your mind will shift back into the creative headspace. So you may want to try things like burning a scented candle, using colored lights, or brewing a cup of coffee.

The key, however, is repetition and doing what feels natural. If you’re a tea drinker, go for it. If you like to write late at night while listening to soundscapes, do that. Just create the space and repeat it anytime you’re preparing to write, and you’ll be able to get your mind started on the task much faster.

3. Unparalyze Yourself When Inundated With Tasks

Ever been in a situation where you’re doing a million things at once, like on a film set, when everyone needs your attention for something pressing? Or maybe you want to work on that chapter, but there are all these chores and errands you have to run, making it impossible to think clearly. Sometimes it can feel like your brain is melting down. So what’s the best way to handle moments like these?

I’ve survived many retail shifts and a lot of indie film sets that felt like I was in the movie Greyhound. Okay, maybe not quite that intense. But there was still this constant juggling and moving with urgency to keep up with everything. Going through that every day taught me how to manage many tasks at once.

The key is to think about every task you have to do at that moment and quickly categorize them by urgency and the time it takes to complete each one. Whatever is most important and takes the shortest time to accomplish, do that first, and then go down the list.

Reducing 12 tasks down to 5 is a great way to alleviate stress, making it easier to finish the remaining work. It’s a simple hack, but it can make a huge difference between success and total meltdown during those moments.

4. Break Tasks Into Chunks and Provide Small Rewards for Yourself

Many of us aspire to do all these big things. We wanna shoot a major film, write an award-winning novel series, start a business, or master a high-level skill. But doing that requires millions of iterative steps. It can take years to complete. That’s a huge reason why so many dream but never take the plunge. The path is intimidating, especially when you look at the whole mountain. So don’t focus on that if you’re serious about climbing it. Instead, look at the base where those first few steps are.

The “first few steps” sound like it’s just a few things to tackle. Perhaps broadly, yes. But inside each one lie thousands of smaller tasks that can take weeks or months to finish. So here’s something you can do to make your journey more manageable.

I learned about this back in college when, for the first time in my life, I had to complete a substantial amount of coursework in a short period. Instead of going on a marathon to complete everything, I grabbed an agenda and looked at the days when all of the projects were due. Then I estimated the number of hours it would take to complete each assignment before using that number to count back the days from the due date, where I’d write reminders to work on them for one hour each day up until the moment it needed to be turned in.

Doing this made it much easier to juggle work and social life. Moreso, it was a way to keep going because I was tricking my brain into releasing endorphins every time I completed a chunk of the task. This made the experience bearable instead of miserable and over-tiring. Plus, it gave me time to think about what I was doing, so I actually learned the material.

Now, if you go further and reward yourself consistently after completing each mini goal, then you can effectively “Pavlov” yourself into a sort of addiction for getting through each milestone. Eventually, your mind will want to do the work because it wants the “piece of candy,” at the end, whatever that is.

So next time you’re bewildered by the journey you’ve taken as a creative artist, take a moment to break everything down into smaller and smaller chunks. Do everything in increments, and along the way, reward yourself a little bit. That’s why I keep a jar of nuts when I write. Annd now I’m drooling. Great.

5. Write Your Stories, Faster

I used to write screenplays much faster when I first started. My mind wasn’t considering the multitude of variables that have to be factored into storytelling. As the adage goes, “Ignorance is bliss.” The more I learned, the more I found myself stopping and going. I was constantly editing on the fly, which made writing feel like being in heavy traffic.

Then one day, I got invited to help a group of friends write a short story for the 48-hour film fest. It was brutal, to say the least. But it was an awesome experience in part because I learned that night, late into the hour as I sweat bullets trying to land something on the page, that if I just let go and not even think about the logic of where things are or how I’m phrasing the action lines, then I could allow the full weight of my creativity drive the story to where it needed to end.

That shift in perspective significantly helped me deliver on time. I even made it to the set without losing too much sleep. This was accomplished by separating my logical editing side from my creative flow-state. So when you’re in the zone, don’t stop and worry about the technicals. Once it’s over, go back and make the edits.

We didn’t win, but we did make it to the finals and screened in front of a live audience, so that was cool. And it was a huge honor to work with that team. They were ace-level shooters. As for my writing. Eh. I had some work ahead of me.

But on a positive note, I had finally ended the annoying stop-and-go effect while writing, which has made me much faster at completing work. I’m still a tortoise compared to most due to my nitpicky nature. But at least now, I can inch a lot faster. So, I highly recommend it.

6. When You Get the Idea, Capture It!

I cannot even begin to express how many times I’ve come up with the best idea I’ve ever had, only to forget it later on because I didn’t write it down. Every moment is fleeting, and when they’re gone, they become just another memory in a bottomless pit of forgotten time. The second an idea pops in your head, you have a very short window to capture it before it gets buried in obscurity.

So when you’re working out an idea while on a hike or while you’re doing the dishes, and suddenly the solution you’ve been mulling over appears at the center of your thoughts, write it down! Grab a pen, your phone, or go to your computer, and start writing. If you don’t, the thunder will disappear. Something else will happen, and you’ll be taken out of that beautiful moment when your thoughts are perfectly aligned to the story, and everything about it makes sense.

That’s the flow state. It’s the experience of sitting there for over 30 minutes trying to figure out how to progress the story forward, only to gain clarity for a brief moment. It’s when you’re sucked into all of it, focused on nothing but the narrative. Maybe it lasts 45 minutes or an hour. If you’re lucky, you can go for several hours. Regardless of how long it lasts, when you reach the flow state, and trust me, you’ll know when it happens, do not take it for granted!

Once that period is over, it’s difficult to get back into it because it mentally wears you out. And if you didn’t write it down, you’ll probably lose the thought and die a little inside, knowing that it’ll never come back. Perhaps a close approximation, but never what it could have been had you written it down when the idea first came.

If you’re serious about writing stories, then never take the flow state for granted. Learn how to get there, and when you arrive, be that cheap asshole who takes all the cocktail shrimp at the party. Stuff your face until you’re blue.

7. Act Out Your Characters to Get it Right on Page

What makes a good character is their authenticity, and that can be challenging to express. You might understand who they are, but you also have to feel them, despite the great barrier between you. While you’re in your living room, they’re resting on the stale, white page. So, how do you bridge the gap? Well, you gotta get your mind into the headspace by embodying them.

Not permanently. That’s insane. But for a brief period while writing, it’s okay to stop and act out the part. Doing so is goofy, but it’s a powerful psychological technique to shift your perspective, as it forces you to step into the character’s mind.

But go further by spending time outside of writing, thinking as they do. If you do this repeatedly, you become like them, making it easier to slip into the role when you’re writing. Just be careful. I’ve done it with terrible characters, and it can actually put you into a negative headspace that’s a little hard to shake.

We like to think that personality and state of mind are constants, but they change throughout our days and over long periods of time. Who we are at work is likely a smidge different than who we are at home. And who we were ten years ago is a little different than who we are today. So maybe you can’t alter your entire self like Daniel Day-Lewis. But your personality and state of mind are still malleable, which means that if you make the effort, acting out your characters can unleash a whole slew of ideas for dialogue and action choices that you might not have considered.

8. Avoid Breaking Down From the Crushing Criticism

I wrote about it in a previous blog, but the bottom line is this. We all have an ego, and it exists to help us deal with the painful realities of life. When we face a breakup or lose a competition, we’re quick to rationalize why we’re not at fault. That’s our ego. Now, sometimes we actually aren’t at fault, but when it comes to writing, it’s almost always on us unless we’re co-writing.

We know this, but still. It’s so easy to form those barriers when people give us feedback on our work. The experience of spending months meticulously crafting something only to have it crushed in an instant when someone tells you it’s bad is perhaps one of the worst feelings. If you’re not careful, it will drag you into darkness. I’ve been there, and it’s not pretty, especially as you see yourself failing to improve. But here’s what I did to overcome the pain of rejection so that I could take the feedback and actually make my stories better.

When people go through trauma, some will emotionally disconnect. It’s an automatic response to protect them from what’s happening. It’s also how I survived cashier shifts. When you disconnect, it doesn’t feel all that bad getting yelled at by Karen. The same is also true when your peers tell you that you need to do a lot of rewriting.

Now, how do you disconnect in a healthy way, so you’re able to reconnect when it’s over? First, recognize when you feel angry or have the urge to run away from the conversation. If you’re telling yourself that the person doesn’t understand what you’re trying to get at, or that they don’t know what storytelling is, that’s when you should acknowledge that your ego is trying to protect you from the awful truth that what you wrote isn’t very good. View moments like this the way you would handle a hiccup. Try to stop your ego in its tracks so that it doesn’t spin out of control and lead to missed opportunities.

Second, pretend that your written work is an engineering issue rather than a personal statement intrinsically woven into your identity. If a solution to building a bridge is wrong, then that isn’t a reflection of the engineer’s views on life or character, but rather their lack of skills and understanding, which can be mastered.

Separate your feelings and identity from the work that you wrote by thinking this way while getting it evaluated, and you’ll be able to view their input with a more objective frame of mind instead of always fighting against it. Plus, you’ll be less depressed and have better clarity. That’s exactly how you improve.

Conclusion

So there you have it. My cringy list of life hacks for storytellers that actually work. If you do all of these things, then I promise that you will find success beyond your wildest dreams. Just kidding. This path is arduous, no matter how many tactics you implement, which is why the greatest life hack is writing like it’s a lifelong obsession.

That’s honestly the only way to do it. Everything else, including these techniques and others you read about, is salad dressing. So don’t get hung up on all the advice. Just focus on the story and getting it made. Then start over and repeat that until you either lose your passion or pass away.

Hope you enjoyed this piece, and the new version of Story Prism! As always, best of luck in your creative endeavors.

Story Prism,

_____________________________________

https://www.storyprism.io

• The official launch of Story Prism Version 3.0, featuring a high-precision Graph RAG system, edge labeling, and multi-canvas functionality designed for advanced world-building.

• New developments in AI, including Google’s Genie model, which transforms text and images into immersive 3D environments, and Anthropic’s research into AI introspective awareness.

• The rise of steganographic AI, capable of hiding secret messages within generated stories or news articles, and how creators might use this for “hidden track” storytelling.

• The tension between hyper-realism and narrative meaning, comparing the technical accuracy of modern war films to the emotional resonance of fantasy epics like The Lord of the Rings.

• Why “emotional realism” and internal consistency often matter more than factual accuracy, with analyses of John Wick, Die Hard, and the directing style of Stanley Kubrick.

Thank you for tuning in. As always, best of luck with your creative endeavors!

Story Prism,

_____________________________________

https://www.storyprism.io

Almost every writer and filmmaker overlooks marketing. And why would they focus their attention on it? The process is difficult and very elusive, without any specific formula. Plus, they’re too busy making stories come alive. But we all know it’s vital to the entertainment industries. That’s why it’s the biggest expense for publishing houses and studios alike. Needless to say, this can’t be ignored, regardless of how much it sucks. So where do you begin?

I’m not a master of marketing by any means. However, I’ve practiced a lot with previous ventures, including our current one. Out of that experience, I’ve learned enough to at least provide my past self with a basic framework for understanding the challenges and how to get started without constantly bumping into walls that could have been avoided.

And well…I suppose I want to share what I’ve learned, in the hope that other storytellers can take my advice and improve upon it. It’s selfish, but I wanna see more indie movies, and the best way to achieve that is if more creators learn how to market their stuff!

The Thirty-Eight Thousand Foot View

Let’s strip everything away to get a clear view of what marketing is really all about. You have a product or a service, and you’re trying to figure out who to sell it to and how by developing a system that can deliver the most customers at the lowest cost. But here’s the challenge. If there are billions of people on the internet, how do you convince everyone to see what you’re offering? Well, you can’t, and so you shouldn’t aim for that. Instead, you need to find your people and focus on convincing them.

That’s achieved through market research, building domain expertise, and increasing your network authority. However, succeeding in any of these hinges on creating the best content possible; otherwise, no matter how well you do, audiences will fail to engage. That’s called “stickiness”. The better your content, the easier and cheaper it will be to market. The worse your content is…Well, that does the opposite, of course.

But let’s assume you’ve already written your best work. The next task is to find the people who will care about it and get them to the place where you’re selling it.

Developing a Marketing Strategy & Connecting With Your Customers

A good marketing strategy typically involves learning about your customers and building content to host on popular platforms that will drive them to your site. Getting them to care once they arrive is a completely different feat, however, as it’s based on how strong the value proposition is (your story) and how well you present it. If they like who you are and what you’re about, and they like what you’re selling at the price that you’re selling it to them, then your customers create the reasons for why they should care.

Fostering care is a long and arduous process, but it starts by answering the following questions:

Who is my audience?

Depending on what you’re selling, this can be fairly straightforward or incredibly difficult. For those who have a story, start by considering the kinds of groups who might be interested in your genre and the themes you explore. If it’s about dealing with PTSD from War, then your audience will likely be war vets and family members dealing with loved ones in that position.

If it’s a convoluted political thriller, then chances are you’re looking for people who are into politics, conspiracy theories, and History. Write that list and feel proud that you finally found your customers. Sike. This is just a starting point and an educated guess. You need proof that they are through market testing.

Where is my audience, and how do they find me?

You have a list of potential candidates based on your genre and themes. The obvious thing to do is join online communities and even real-world groups or events where you think your buyers may be. But you should also create a website and connect content funnels to that site. Think of this as casting a net. You build content that mentions your site, throw it in the spaces where you think your customers are, and see who responds. If nothing bites, then you need to look elsewhere or re-evaluate your methods of capture.

Either way, make a website for people to buy your product, build content funnels targeted to prospective customers, and collect metric data, so that as you experiment with different audience types, you won’t be doing it blindly. That’s how you proactively find your customers. So, let’s break each of these down.

First, the website. If you have money, I’d hire someone to make it. That can cost a pretty penny. Fortunately, you’re not developing anything complicated, so it shouldn’t cost you 30k. However, be prepared to spend a little money.

Professionalism is super important even in a World where it seems to be going out of fashion. No one wants to be professional, but everyone wants to be treated by one. If a prospective customer goes to a Wix site, they’ll implicitly associate you with someone trying to get started. They don’t wanna be your guinea pig. They want to know their money is being spent wisely.

Look, if you’re broke and need to get something up and running, take the cheapest and most effective way you can. But always consider how you project yourself, including the little things, such as your URL, the placement and functionality of everything, where people can navigate and find the information, and the overall ethos that your website exudes.

All of this sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised by how many rush this part because they’re so eager to get people to buy. Understand that asking a stranger to give something of value is a very challenging task, which means you have to use every tool you can. This includes presentation, down to the minutia.

It’ll take time and involve a bit of a learning curve, from understanding how to communicate with a developer to internalizing design principles. But take it from a broke indie filmmaker. It’s the easiest part of this entire operation. So don’t sweat it and take your time to get it right.

After your website is complete, build your content channels. These are places to create, package, and distribute media that’s relevant to what you’re selling and in a way that will funnel people to your book or movie. It also provides a way to connect with your audience. So these are places like Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok (shutters), and so on. Obviously, there are many options. The best way is to try them all. Pair it down to the ones that are performing best and discard the rest.

You should be creating valuable content that is free, not too difficult to produce regularly, has a consistent format, and complements what you’re selling. So, if you’re interested in writing prison thrillers, consider writing blogs about real-life stories that happened to convicts. If you’re into psychological romance dramas, create breakdown videos from movies in that genre. The choices are endless. Just don’t drown yourself in a million things. Stick to one that works and go from there.

What does my audience need/desire?

Story lovers need to find a great story, but they have too many options to choose from. Your solution is a great story that speaks to them. This is simple but important to understand as you engage with prospective audiences or readers, because everything you do will center on this. They have a problem, and you have a solution.

Take Quinn Howard, for instance, someone who shows us that he’s a deep-thinking sci-fi writer who knows what he’s talking about. Quinn reduces people’s anxiety when it comes to choice paralysis because it’s much easier to choose the person who does amazing analysis videos instead of the one making plastic sales pitches on Facebook that basically say, “Buy my book!”. One tactic alleviates the buyer’s concerns. The other just pisses them off.

How does my audience make decisions?

We base our choices on deviant, novel, social, conformity, investment, or necessity-related reasons. I won’t break these down because there’s too much to say, plus you can read about them here. But while conducting market research, you may want to identify which category your audience fits into. Yes, humans are much more complicated than a few options. Individuals base their day-to-day decisions on a whole range of other factors. However, when it comes to large groups and understanding the averages, these categories can be helpful.

Say you’re a deeply spiritual and philosophical writer who instills mystery and inspires awe. You’re someone who values novelty in your stories since you try so hard to go beyond what anyone has ever written. So you need to attract the novelty decision-makers, which means your design choices for your website, content presentation, sales copy, and everything will need to incorporate elements that express your offering as something newer than anything they’ve ever seen or read. That signals to those novel buyers that you have something worth their time.

The same applies to any of the other categories. If your work is edgy and offbeat, then sell to those who make deviant decisions. If it’s a story about a major league baseball team overcoming adversity to win the World Series, then sell to socially oriented decision makers who love baseball and desire social acceptance.

What does my audience fear?

No, you’re not trying to scare your customers. That’s ridiculous. I’ve already tried, and it doesn’t work. Kidding, of course. Really, what I mean is that you want to try to understand what your audience’s anxieties are about themselves in relation to others. Am I strong enough? Am I recognized enough? Am I socially accepted? Am I seen or heard? You need to understand these concerns because you can use the information to compel people to buy what you’re offering.

Take, for instance, a wilderness survival novel. The biggest fans of this genre are people who probably enjoy the outdoors. And many of these people appreciate being in the woods for their mental health, which is often derived from wanting to be seen as strong by others. They also tend to wear down-to-earth clothing and value casual social gatherings over big events, which indicates their desire for social acceptance. Not all of them, but enough to make a stereotype.

So the best person to target would be someone who is socially oriented, possessing a desire to project strength and control in their life. After all, reading about a person all alone in the wilderness trying to make it home is more frightening for them than it is for others. We fixate on things that threaten what we care about most. So use that to your advantage.

These are the basic starting points for engaging in market research and connecting yourself to the right customers. Make a website and content that directs people to your site. Share this with various groups who you think might be your customers. Then identify the ones who resonate most with your work and figure out who they are, where they visit online, what they need/desire, how they make decisions, and what their biggest anxieties are in relation to others. Find the answers to these, and you’ll have the knowledge you need about your prospective customers to market your book or movie to these people in the most effective way.

Give Them Credibility and a Reason to Care

Everyone has to start somewhere, and it’s always as a noob. But do it long enough, regardless of success, and you’ll have gained some wisdom, making you more credible than someone who has never even tried. And if you do it well, then people will start listening to you. However, the best way to increase your credibility, beyond creating and expressing your expertise, is to convince other credible people that you’re trustworthy to their audiences.

Find podcasters, reviewers, and community leaders within the relevant spaces you’re targeting or businesses that complement your story in some way. With these types of people, you can attain a smoother give-and-take relationship, which is foundational to networking. They need content, interesting things to discuss, people to talk about, and so on. You have content, interesting things to say, and you’re a person to talk about, at least, ideally.

So reach out and give these things to them. If they run a publication, write articles. If someone runs a podcast, offer to be a guest. If they do scifi book reviews, send them your story and see if they’d be willing to review it. Just make sure you’re able to mention your book somewhere.

Start small, though. Not too small. Someone with 100 views per video and 30 subscribers? Don’t waste your time. But someone with 2k plus average viewers and a small community? Much better. They’re big enough to move the needle in your favor, but small enough to work with you, assuming a certain quality threshold has been met on your end. Perform well, and you can use it to increase your credibility, which will make it easier to do business with influencers who are bigger.

Also, consider who you’re talking to when reaching out. Diplomats hire psychologists to investigate people they’re about to meet so they can increase the likelihood of striking a deal. You probably won’t be able to afford that. So, you’re going to need to find a cheap alternative. Gather as much public information about the person and use AI to analyze it in the role of an expert behavioral psychologist. You’ll gain a much better understanding of their preferences when it comes to communicating and delivering messages.

Finally, when you establish contact, always come in with something that will benefit the person. Don’t just ask for help. There are many things you can do to win partnerships with influencers, from offering free classes to providing content they may need, as long as you’re thinking about it from a win-win perspective. Without that framework, you don’t have any glue to make it work.

Experiment, Iterate, and Measure

Marketing is an iterative process, which means you’ll be testing a lot of approaches. So it makes sense to measure them. The obvious and easiest choice is to connect your site to Google Analytics. This provides a dashboard for tracking daily active users, time spent on your site, where they’re coming from, and other helpful metrics to tell if your actions are working.

There’s also Google Search Console for monitoring search behaviors and where you rank on keywords that people type into Google. Keywords are what you want to embed in your site and in your meta title and meta description. The meta title and meta description are what people read when browsing on search engines.

Web crawlers analyze the keywords you use to understand what your site is and how credible and relevant you are to the keywords you’re working with. If you do everything right, you’ll rank high on those, which will move you up the page on Google when people search for those terms. And if you pick the right ones to rank for, you’ll increase your likelihood of gaining customers.

Then there’s Clarity. This is a powerful tool that lets you observe anonymous user behavior on your site. And no, you can’t read personal information, so don’t think of it like that. Instead, it provides insight into what people are doing on your site and how they’re navigating through the space. Clarity is incredibly helpful, so I highly recommend using this app.

Metric gathering can be perplexing to get into, as you’ll be inundated with so many numbers and graphs. But at the end of the day, you’re main focus should be on the following metrics:

• CAC:LTV - Customer acquisition cost versus customer lifetime value. This metric tells you how much it costs to acquire a customer and how much value you gain from it.

• Active Engagement Time - This measures the average time spent on your site. Longer is better because it means active users.

• DAU/WAU/MAU - This is the percent of daily, weekly, and monthly active users on your site. When these go up, that means you did a good job.

• CTR - This stands for click-through rate and is the percentage of people who click on a specific link compared to the total number of people who view it. It’s great for measuring the strength of your ads and funnels.

There are plenty of other metrics to consider, but this is the bare-bones basics that you need to know.

Messaging and Its Power

You’re going to be writing all kinds of messaging. There’s web copy, social media feeds, ad copy, and so on. Start by writing stuff that you think will work. But venture further by testing different kinds of messaging.

Here’s what worked for me. I wrote multiple small ads in different variations, based on segmented needs, desires, and anxieties my potential customers had. I then made some posters and ran them as ads. Once the campaign was over, I tallied the scores, and the one with the highest click-through rate was the one that I iterated on and used as a bible for my messaging in other mediums.

Now, when writing good sales copy, one nifty trick is to start by eliciting focus so that the person’s normal day-to-day life is disrupted. If done well, you have their attention for a brief moment.

Use that second to serve an immediate reminder of their deepest anxiety related to what you’re selling. And no, not the surface-level stuff like needing a good vampire novel to snuggle up to at night.

You need to get to the heart of what they fear most about vampires, such as the blind seduction in an evil relationship. Or maybe it’s a crime drama where the anxiety lies in knowing whether the mystery will ever be solved. Whatever it is, exploit that element up front and in a way that will immediately grab attention. How you do that is where the art lies, so that’s on you.

From there, you expose what you’re selling and frame it as the antidote to their anxiety surrounding the story. For instance, with a vampire story, you might write something like:

When every secret hides a predator and every answer deepens the darkness, Blood Passion is the only place where the truth bites back.

The phrase at the beginning was a bit shocking, which arrests attention. Concurrently, they’re also reminded of their deepest anxieties surrounding vampire novels. Then, it segues into the name of the book before expressing to prospective readers that this story is the way to find closure in those fears. That was a short-form ad, but any kind could have a similar structure.

Conclusion

If you’ve written a book or filmed a movie worth consuming, and you put enough effort into your marketing, then you should, at least, see some small traction. It won’t be much, but it’s enough to start scaling. You do that by creating more stories and utilizing a low-cost-high-acquisition strategy, all while enhancing your authority and expertise in the domain that you’re operating in. It’s a very long game because you have to master your craft, create books worth reading, do all of the things in this blog, and then some. But most importantly, you need to gain the trust of prospective customers, influential podcasters, blog writers, successful writers, and those who serve storytellers, like competitions and masterclasses.

This is marketing, and you don’t have to be some MBA in a fancy, soulless suit to execute it well. Writers, filmmakers, and every kind of storyteller can do it for themselves to gain a lot, whether it’s in the form of a successful independent career doing what they love or carrying a lot of hard lessons they can take with them in other areas to find success.

The only downside is the insane amount of time, energy, and money it takes. But you can start with nothing and build that into something. And by actually giving it a shot, you’re dramatically increasing your odds of success. They’re still not in your favor, of course. But it’s better than zero, so you know. That should give you some glimmer of hope to carry you through the endless trenches of telling a story and selling it.

Anywho, that’s it for now. Hope you found this helpful, and as always, best of luck in your creative endeavors!

Story Prism,

_____________________________________

www.storyprism.io

• The capabilities of Sora 2, OpenAI’s latest video model, and its potential impact on filmmaking.

• How advanced AI in the upcoming GTA 6 will allow NPCs to have persistent memories, daily routines, and the ability to record in-game events with their phones.

• The potential for AI to change criminal methods, from creating false alibis with deepfakes to fabricating synthetic DNA evidence.

• The challenges AI presents for law enforcement, including an over-reliance on predictive algorithms and the difficulty of solving “analog” crimes that leave no digital footprint.

• How writers can adapt as the central conflict in crime stories shifts from a physical to a digital struggle between fabricating truth and proving its manipulation.

This episode is for writers, filmmakers, and anyone interested in the evolving relationship between technology, crime, and storytelling.

By far, one of my favorite shows that I’ve grown to love over the last few years is Foundation, an adaptation from the famous works that Isaac Asimov wrote back in the 1940s. Of course, I’m a sci-fi nerd at heart, but putting that bias aside, the reason I find this particular series so special is because of a specific scene in season 3.

It’s a moment that fundamentally excels in controlling perspective to create an amazing payoff. If you plan on watching it, which I recommend, then you may want to stop reading this and see it, as there will be spoilers.

Foundation Overview

Okay, so to give you the gist, Foundation is the fall of Rome set across the entire Milky Way Galaxy in the future. The Empire, known as Trantor, has been in existence for over twelve thousand years and is now ruled by a triumvirate of three copies of Cleon I, who ruled 300 years ago. The youngest is named Dawn, the middle-aged one is named Day, and the oldest is Dusk.

But secretly, it’s all run by an eighteen-thousand-year-old android who was captured after some great robot war. Instead of killing the robot, Cleon I reprogrammed her to serve Trantor, no matter the cost. She’s disguised as their top assistant named Demerzel because robots have been outlawed, and only Dawn, Day, and Dusk know that she isn’t human.

For a while, the Empire faired okay. But it was losing territory to pirates and other independent forces, which led to a drawn-out decline. When Trantor finally reached its end, all of them were completely trapped in its vortex of destruction. Demerzel, of course, was always caged up, ever since she was forcibly reprogrammed. Dawn, the youngest, who takes over the Empire, feels chained to the heavy weight of responsibility, which shatters after making a fatal mistake that effectively dooms Trantor to extinction.

Day is trapped in his own self-loathing, living as a complete deadbeat angsty rich kid nihilist that parties like it’s the end of the World, which I suppose it is for them. And Dusk, the oldest, is forced to be systematically turned into ashes, as it’s customary that when a Cleon reaches a certain age, they’re retired...permanently. And this is all happening as everything before them crumbles.

The Scene at Hand

Okay, now here’s the part that’s specifically relevant to the scene I’m referencing. Yeah, I know. It’s a dense story, but trust me, the pay-off is worth it. At the beginning of season 3, we’re constantly immersed in the life of Day, who luxuriates in what can only be described as the Garden of Eden. He’s with a stunning woman named Song, whom he deeply falls in love with and vice versa. They’re the perfect couple to the point of making you want to scream, “Oh, just get married, already!”

Here’s the thing. Song is a courtesan from another planet who was summoned to perform sex for him. And generally, when this happens, it’s only for a short time before their memory of the encounter is erased. This is to ensure that internal affairs remain in-house.

But Day broke the standards and kept her memory implant in place for over six months because he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. To understand why this is unusual, know that he’s a guy from a lineage that’s cold as ice. Their whole family is two-faced machiavellians who will absolutely murder with their own hands if it means gaining power.

To see Day genuinely feel love for someone, especially a courtesan, I don’t know. It made me feel hopeful that even though this twelve-thousand-year-old empire is crumbling before their feet, at least, maybe Day can live out the rest of his time in paradise with Song.

He had a drug problem, yes. And he bummed around, obfuscating his duties, but to be fair…I might have done the same if I were in his position. His family is messed up. The Empire is messed up. And he, a clone from a lineage of clones that began with a presumably messed-up ruler, makes him a messed-up person.

So the connection they shared was more than just a love affair. This was a symbol of progression through digressive times. Thousands of years ago, a group of people had a vision to “move a rock”, which eventually turned into a stupidly huge empire, ruling over 25 million planets and a quintillion citizens. And now, after all that time and everything this society had accomplished, it would end with a single man who shrugged and decided to leave it all for a woman he fell madly in love with. This man defied everything in his genes to walk away from it all so he could start fresh and live his own life.

But, of course, this is a show. The characters can’t simply run off into the sunset. The robot, Demrezel, notices that he kept Song’s memory chip in for far too long. At first, she insists that Day remove it, but he refuses, exclaiming that he’ll hide nothing from Song. So in response to that, she does it herself, effectively ending the relationship they had built.

The poor guy was utterly heartbroken, but that didn’t crush his spirit. No, Day was determined to find her, re-install her memories, and run away for good. But to do so, he needed to secretly escape his own empire, which required many daring feats, including the murder of a good person who got in his way. I mean, love…right?

When he finally makes it to Song, who lives in an old, run-down apartment, we expect her to be surprised that the ruler of the Milky Way is at her doorstep, which she is. But after the shock, she would attach the memory chip and return to how things were, or so we thought.

Instead, you get zapped back to reality with a sledgehammer, which is exactly how the protagonist felt at this moment. Day tragically discovers that she wants him dead. This cloned dynastic rule had metastasized into a ruthless system that ruined the lives of her friends and family, as well as trillions of others. Granted, we learn that Song’s part of a seemingly dangerous cult, hell-bent on resurrecting androids because they worship them. But at the same time, the Empire is handling this group the way Israel is handling Gaza. So, uhh, They not just defending themselves, to say the least.

Now, Day is captured by her friends and faces death, forced to reconcile his complete disconnection from everyone he’s ruled over. Up to this point, Day truly had no awareness of how the rest of the Galaxy perceived him. He was so busy wallowing around in his own self-pity for being born to an insane family that he couldn’t possibly think anyone was actively trying to get him, never mind this big cult that his family nearly wiped out of existence.

To many, Day’s a monster, but he still feels like everyone else, especially after leaving Trantor to start anew. This is a man who wanted to absolve himself of his family’s wrongdoings; who fought so hard to sever ties from a rotting empire he never wanted to rule over. But now he comes face-to-face with all of its sins, wielded into a weapon by the woman whom he loves.

Why Perspective Matters

It was a great twist, but what’s impressive about this rug-pull is that it should have been obvious since we knew from season 1 that Trantor and the Cleons are bad rulers. Also, running away from a broken system that so many people relied on is actually quite selfish and cowardly, yet we were sold on the idea that it was somehow romantic.

I sat there, clutching my pearls, hoping that he would make it. The story was so powerful, it got me to root for a piece of shit cosplaying as Romeo. Moreso, it made me feel like a complete fool, just like the character. I honestly walked away from that episode with a bruised ego, as if I had somehow betrayed myself for being too narrow-minded and easily manipulated.

And that’s because the entire season did such an amazing job of keeping us focused on the perspective of Day and how he sees the World. We didn’t view much of the negative side of Trantor’s rule because it’s mostly centered on what’s happening at the very top. Had they chosen to share a flashback of Song’s life and how horrible her conditions were, the impact of this moment wouldn’t have been nearly as strong because we wouldn’t be experiencing it within the mind of the main character.

That’s what I really took away from this moment in Foundation: The power of perspective. Naturally, we choose one when designing a scene, but it’s not often considered a tool for eliciting audience reactions. When a writer uses it well, you really internalize the pay-off as a viewer.

For instance, in Fight Club, when the narrator realizes that he’s Tyler Durden, you experience a powerful moment that makes you feel what the character does, because the whole movie was conveyed by what he was seeing and experiencing. Another great example is in Forrest Gump when he stands over Jenny’s grave, briefly choking up while telling her that their son is so smart. I cried when he said that because I understood the multi-decade journey Forrest had gone through to win Jenny over. And now she’s passed away, leaving him to raise his greatest achievement, a smart young boy.

Conclusion

So when you write your stories, always think about how they can be presented differently to your readers through the use of character perspective. And no, you don’t have to remain defaulted to the main character. You can switch it up with any member of the ensemble or none of them at all, and potentially use that to heighten the emotional pay-offs. That’s part of what made Tarantino such a legend with Pulp Fiction, because he told a non-linear story, where each chapter conveyed the same story through the lens of all these different characters.

When considering perspective, however, it’s also beneficial to alter the entire narrative world so that it’s presented as the character perceives it, rather than simply focusing on the basics, such as what they know/don’t know, or what they’re hiding or choosing to reveal. Those are important, yes, but to really hypnotize people, it’s best to put our heads into the character’s headspace. That requires thoughtfulness in tone, aesthetics, what’s seen, and how things unfold.

And it’s hard because you’re also forced to think about a million other things on top of that. But understanding how to wield character perspective plays a huge part in how you push your stories to the level of Joker or I Am Sam. The fundamentals, like plot and character development, are also important, of course. But looming in the back is the not-so-obvious choice that writers can make, and that’s choosing to mess with perspective. That can make a World of difference, just as it did with Foundation.

Okay, that’s it for now. Hope you enjoyed this, and as always, best of luck in your creative endeavors!

Story Prism,

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www.storyprism.io

• The latest updates for Story Prism's relaunch and a new "edge labeling" feature that creates custom relationships between your notes, making it "impossible for the AI to forget".

• The GPT-5 controversy: Why users are complaining about its "dry" personality and how OpenAI's attempt to fix "AI psychosis" is changing how we interact with chatbots.

• Is the AI bubble about to burst? We break down the hiring freezes, plummeting stocks, and an MIT study that suggests a market correction is coming.

• AI's impact on the next generation: With youth unemployment at 10% and entry-level jobs dropping by 13%, we discuss how young creatives can build a career when AI is taking over the bottom rung.

• Can AI predict the future? A wild discussion sparked by a Japanese graphic novelist who accurately predicted a tsunami, exploring whether creatives can tap into a collective subconscious.

• The future of predictive media: What happens if filmmakers can accurately predict disasters? We explore the ethical dilemmas and the potential for a "digital war" to control the future narrative.

Whether you’re a filmmaker, creative, or just curious about the intersection of technology and consciousness, this episode is for you!