On Monday night, we split.
I spent the day thinking maybe too much. Here's what came out of it:
Humanity faces three filters: losing control to ourselves, to other organisms, or to the environment. In practice, that means self-destruction through war, extinction by disease, or environmental collapse that prevents space colonization.
Mentat was built on the premise that conflict is inevitable. As long as humans exist, disagreement will follow. War, then, is the filter to avoid. Delaying it compounds it — but how we engage can evolve. The goal was to build systems that help people make better decisions in critical moments, letting machines take more risk so humans don't have to.
In reality, it became more political than technical. Europe has little global leverage, and as non-American, non-Chinese founders, Deo and I could only sell to smaller armies with limited impact. Defense is a network game Anduril's rise proves that.
The biological and environmental filters, however, revealed deeper meaning. If all biological data were the Atlantic Ocean, so far humans have gathered only three drops. We lack the knowledge to regenerate ecosystems or make other planets habitable. Climate change is inevitable because exploitation and innovation are both human instincts. The solution lies in data enough to model, simulate, and regenerate life at planetary scale. To do that, we must first monitor nature itself, much like robots train under varied gravity to understand reality as one possibility among many.
That pursuit felt more meaningful. Reaching Mars overcoming all three filters is the true goal. Choosing defense was selfish: I sought relationships that might secure our place there, not collective progress.
From that realization came Geome a path toward a live Google Earth. This summer, and while working with Deo later, I had built three products:
AI bodycam: a "Strava + AI notetaker" used by patrols and guides to record routes, voices, and animal sounds.
Solar Jetson nodes: tree-mounted, Starlink-connected mini-computers running on-device species tracking, pose recognition, and behavioral analysis.
Geome Platform: a tool that filters footage, automates multicamera livestreams, and clips key daily moments.
Next steps were about understanding what to do better. This week was about understanding the path of highest growth to get there as fast as possible.