The AQ Test is live.

Measure your awareness across four dimensions.

Takes 20 minutes. Free. No signup required.

writersid.com/aq-test

The best founders aren't the best coders.

They're the best storytellers.

Jobs didn't write iOS. He sold the vision.
Musk didn't engineer Starship. He made Mars believable.
Balaji didn't code Coinbase. He articulated crypto's future.

Story first. Code second.

Cultural observations from a decade of solo travel:

Every civilization encodes wisdom differently.
But the core truths remain identical.

Impermanence. Interconnection. Consciousness.

Technology changes.
Human nature doesn't.

Renaissance thinkers didn't specialize.

Da Vinci painted, engineered, studied anatomy, designed weapons.
Franklin invented, wrote, diplomacied, experimented.

The "niche down" advice is industrial-age thinking.

Network State era needs synthesizers who can hold multiple domains simultaneously.

GPT-4 passed the Bar Exam (90th percentile).
Scored 1410 on SAT.
Perfect scores on AP exams.

So what makes humans valuable?

Not intelligence (IQ).
Not even emotional intelligence (EQ).

Awareness (AQ).

Weekly episodes:
Spotify: tinyurl.com/3bs3uem5
Apple: tinyurl.com/2ytu9pda

Network States are ancient communities with modern infrastructure.

The Agta tribes (35,000 yrs): voluntary association, no central authority, shared values.

Network School today: Same model, digital layer.

We're not inventing new social structures.

We're remembering old ones & adding technology.

Most "spiritual" people are just escaping materialism.
Most "practical" people are just avoiding depth.

The real work is integration.

Being fully in the world AND fully aware.

That's the paradox.
That's the synthesis.
That's where transformation happens.

You can't solve 21st-century problems with 20th-century thinking.

But you also can't solve them without 5,000 years of accumulated wisdom.

The answer isn't choosing between ancient and modern.

It's synthesizing both.

That's the frequency I operate on.

Meditation isn't "woo."

It's the most practical training for the AI age.

AI will handle cognitive tasks.
You need to develop the one capacity AI can't replicate:

Awareness of being aware.

Your attention is the last scarce resource.

Everything else can be automated, replicated, or generated by AI.

But your PRESENCE — that's irreplaceable.

This is what Awareness Quotient measures.

This is what determines success in the AI age.

You know that feeling when you're scrolling but not really present?

That's the default human state now.

AI doesn't need consciousness to outperform you.
You're already operating on autopilot.

The work isn't competing with AI.
The work is becoming conscious.

The Internet gave us digital society:
- Social connections
- Information sharing
- Communication at scale

Blockchain gives us digital economy:
- Value transfer
- Trustless transactions
- Programmable money

One without the other is incomplete.

We're building the missing layer.

Creator of the AQ Assessment framework

AQ Test writersid.com/aq-test
Research writersid.com/papers
Podcast writersid.com/podcast
Essays sidsharma.substack.com