Autobiography

I grew up immersed in games, but virtual ones left the deepest mark. I competed in Magic: The Gathering tournaments for years, later trading my collection to fund my move to America. In school, I regularly played strategy games in tournament settings with fellow nerds. World of Warcraft consumed my final two years of German schooling, a period when I felt like an outcast. I co-founded a virtual guild that became one of the most successful teams on German servers.

I earned my Abitur, Germany’s highest university-preparatory qualification, securing a full scholarship for college. Before heading to America, I completed a mandatory year-long alternative military service, working at a refugee camp and city hall.

Driven to create, I taught myself programming and, grappling with depressive mental loops, delved into neuroscience. To complement my self-study, I pursued two Bachelor’s degrees simultaneously: a BA in Political Philosophy & Economics from Saint Francis College in New York and a BSc in Governance & Financial History from the London School of Economics. My thesis explored George Soros’s concept of reflexivity in financial markets.

Between German school and American college, I became captivated by financial markets, trading and investing my own capital across global asset classes. This funded my American journey, where I lacked permanent work rights as an immigrant for nearly a decade.

As a freshman, I worked as an investment associate at a German investment firm and later interned at a Wall Street day trading firm. While studying in London, I joined a foreign exchange broker and researched for my professor, a financial history expert.

My Wall Street career peaked as an operative helping launch a global macro boutique startup, delivering geopolitical solutions to billionaire clients like Soros and Thiel. Through this role, I met Elon Musk in 2013. Though I never worked directly for his companies, doing only minor pro bono research for Tesla, he profoundly shaped my approach to life.

Chasing a childhood dream of Hollywood, I took acting classes in New York and London, turning acting into a practical skill. As fascinated by films as by markets, I used cinema to envision the impossible and navigate the challenges of immigrant life in the U.S.

After undergrad, I was named a Young Scholar by George Soros’s Institute for New Economic Thinking and briefly attended Columbia Business School. I completed a post-doc at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences in under two years, researching internet, societal, and market turning points, as well as institutional changes in African economies. I considered a role at Stanford but chose independent research there while building a startup.

At LSE, I founded the Think Tank Society to foster stakeholder dialogue. In New York, I consulted for the UN’s Office for South-South Cooperation, researching trade and investment flows. During grad school, I co-founded The Future Society at Harvard Kennedy School, a non-profit at the nexus of technology and governance, now advising the World Economic Forum.

Months before finishing grad school, a Thiel Capital principal invited me into the Thiel network as an entrepreneur to connect with founders. I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area without a job. After a brief stint at ProtonMail, I left to launch a startup. Over the years, I experimented with startup ideas, worked as a product manager for a YC startup, advised VCs, built communities, launched a podcast, and wrote a book.

In 2016, a friend from a spiritual conference, an early crypto leader, urged me to dive into crypto-economics. I’d first learned of Bitcoin in 2013 through my professor. I grew obsessed with the technology’s potential, starting a fund to invest in early projects, networking with industry leaders, and building a community. I also prototyped a platform to connect projects with capital.

I then began my research into neuroscience and longevity, seeking to unravel the mental loops that haunted me since childhood. I explored psychedelics to understand the mind and embraced meditation for sustainable access to altered states. I learned about Neuralink co-and researched brain-computer interfaces. For two years, I split time between Los Angeles and the Bay Area, exploring neuroscience projects and networking in the field.

My neuroscience journey sparked an obsession with dreams. Recalling childhood lucid dreaming, I relearned the skill and studied the history and science of dreaming. Determined to free myself, I explored the mind’s nature through dreams.