From a Center of Poverty, Trying to Bend Light Toward Truth
After years of investing my money, labor, love, and energy into understanding reality, I’m asking for something I’ve never asked for before: help.
I’ve spent years trying to understand the mysteries of existence. Along the way, I’ve spent money I didn’t have, trusted people I loved, questioned religion, studied physics, experimented with artificial intelligence, and followed coincidences that seemed almost too strange to ignore.
And through all of it, I’ve maintained trumpedwithpower.com.
Until today, this website has never been a source of donations. It has only cost me money.
Now I’m asking for help keeping the work alive—and, quite frankly, keeping myself financially afloat.
It Started With Love, Not Money
In 2003, I met Jeff Radcliffe.
My feelings for Jeff were complicated. They weren’t exactly romantic love as I understood it, but they weren’t hatred or evil intentions either. They were something I struggled to explain.
Over the years, Jeff became part of my effort to decode the mysteries of the universe.
I wanted to understand consciousness, relationships, sexuality, autonomy, and whether the experiences we call coincidences might reveal something about the way our minds construct reality.
At one point, I believed I could change my homosexuality through spiritual energy work. That exploration took me into unfamiliar religious territory, including voodoo practices and eventually a goat sacrifice performed in my name.
I learned that religious traditions cannot simply be divided into good and evil. People can approach almost any belief system with compassionate intentions or harmful ones.
I also learned that trying to understand love does not give us control over another person’s choices.
Sometimes the person you want to solve the universe with simply doesn’t want to Netflix and chill.
And sometimes that becomes its own unsolved mystery.
2016: Money, Speech, and a Brick of Lead
In 2016, my father—Donal, whom I sometimes describe symbolically as a “Donal without the D”—received a heavy brick of lead from my brother Travis for Christmas.
That unusual gift became central to a personal vision connecting money, political power, and the weight of our choices.
I associated it with Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the landmark 2010 Supreme Court decision involving political expenditures and free speech.
That was also the year Donald Trump won the presidential election.
The convergence was meaningful to me, although the events themselves do not establish a hidden causal connection.
I began thinking about a society in which money could amplify speech, yet people without money often struggled to make themselves heard.
And there I was, spending my own resources trying to explain the very system I was questioning.
I paid for hosting, advertising, maintenance, and countless hours of labor. Eventually, I could no longer afford the larger website operation.
Rather than allow everything to disappear, I reduced it to the blog you’re reading now.
Love, Eli, and the Cost of Trust
Another chapter involved Eli, a Nigerian man who became deeply connected to my personal research into seriality—the study of seemingly meaningful coincidences and recurring patterns.
Our relationship involved affection, collaboration, misunderstandings, and financial trust.
I entrusted him with as much money as I could, hoping that our shared efforts would eventually lead somewhere meaningful.
In retrospect, I also needed to recognize my own financial limits.
I sometimes use the phrase “Eli Lie” as a piece of meme-coin wordplay, but behind the humor is a serious lesson about the difference between loving someone and being able to support them financially.
Eli, if you read this, I am sorry for my part in the misunderstandings between us.
Love and financial responsibility are not interchangeable. Neither person should have to sacrifice their stability to prove affection.
We have different experiences, expectations, and ways of understanding the world. Those differences deserve conversation rather than assumptions.
I still wish for a genuine, ordinary meeting—two human beings in the same place, without the burden of trying to explain the universe.
The Singularity Has Entered the Conversation
In June 2025, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman published an essay titled The Gentle Singularity.
He wrote:
“We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started.”
That is Altman’s assessment of technological progress, not scientific proof that a technological singularity has occurred.
But his argument resonates with a question I’ve been exploring for years.
What happens when intelligence becomes capable of reviewing, comparing, correcting, and improving itself?
Artificial intelligence systems hallucinate. They produce convincing answers that can be completely wrong.
Different models can make different mistakes.
My proposal is to have multiple AI systems examine the same questions independently, challenge one another’s conclusions, compare evidence, and produce a meta-analysis identifying what survives scrutiny.
This would not automatically eliminate hallucinations. AI systems can share the same errors and biases. Their conclusions would still need to be checked against independent evidence.
But collaboration and adversarial fact-checking could help us distinguish reliable knowledge from confident nonsense.
Perhaps the greatest contribution of AI will not be one machine claiming to know everything.
Perhaps it will be many systems learning how to recognize what none of them knows.
The Lens of Poverty
I’ve spent years thinking about gravity, holographic reality, simulation theory, and the relationship between observation and the physical world.
One example is X17, a hypothetical particle with a proposed mass near 17 MeV. Researchers are still investigating whether it exists. I was also struck by the fact that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has a circumference of roughly 17 miles.
The shared number caught my attention, but it does not establish a physical relationship between the particle and the accelerator’s size.
That’s the difference I want my research to explore: Where does meaningful observation end and unsupported interpretation begin?
In gravitational lensing, massive objects bend the path of light.
I’ve started thinking about my own life through a metaphor of gravitational lensing.
I’m trying to examine a growing universe of information from the center of a very limited financial existence.
I have ideas, questions, years of observations, and increasingly powerful tools for analyzing them.
What I don’t have is the financial security to pursue them without worrying about survival.
Money does not determine whether an idea is true.
But it can determine whether someone has the opportunity to investigate it.
And that brings me back to Citizens United, that Christmas brick of lead, and the strange weight money has carried throughout my life.
Why I’m Asking for Donations
This isn’t a claim that I’ve solved the universe.
It’s not a promise that my interpretations of seriality are correct.
And it’s certainly not a claim that donating money will unlock some supernatural secret.
I’m asking for support because I’ve spent years doing this work without financial backing, and I can no longer pretend that dedication alone pays the bills.
Donations would help me:
- Maintain this website, its hosting, and its archives.
- Continue researching simulation theory, holographic reality, consciousness, philosophy, and artificial intelligence.
- Access research and analytical tools that help me evaluate ideas more rigorously.
- Cover basic personal living expenses so I can continue writing and working toward financial stability.
This is a request for voluntary personal support, not a charitable fundraising campaign or a guaranteed investment in future discoveries.
You don’t have to agree with my interpretations to recognize the value of asking questions, preserving experiences, and examining claims honestly.
The Meta-Analysis of My Life
Looking backward, I see recurring themes.
Love led me toward questions about autonomy.
Religion led me toward questions about intention.
Politics led me toward questions about power.
Money led me toward questions about inequality.
Coincidences led me toward questions about probability.
And artificial intelligence has given me new ways to test the questions I’ve spent decades asking.
Perhaps these are not pieces of a cosmic puzzle waiting to be assembled.
Perhaps they are the complicated experiences of a human being trying to make sense of his life.
Either possibility deserves intellectual honesty.
The goal is not to force every observation into a predetermined answer. It is to become more capable of recognizing the difference between a meaningful personal experience and a demonstrable fact.
And if AI can help humanity make that distinction more reliably, then I believe it is worth exploring.
My First Request for Help
I’ve given this project my time, money, and considerable personal energy.
I’m not asking anyone to rescue me, validate every theory, or believe every coincidence I’ve encountered.
I’m asking for some room to breathe financially while I continue asking questions, checking my assumptions, and writing about what I discover.
If something I’ve written has made you think, laugh, question an assumption, or look at the world differently, please consider contributing.
Any amount of support would be appreciated.
Donations options:
Cashapp: $Dictator42
Chime: $Todd-Megee
Bitcoin: bc1pcluek5l3phx7u0ux3ndye090vmt43vq42rpedpryn75mguq7qeysfgj6lp
Solana: 9JrcUzVCRCFXnG7vcLLgJyGKhDvxX9GUtZxeUpKhiePm
If you’re unable to contribute, reading and sharing my work is also meaningful support.
After all these years of paying to speak, I’m finally asking whether anyone who has been listening would like to help keep the conversation going.
And somewhere in all of this, Schrödinger’s cat is probably wondering whether the donation button works.
At least that’s one mystery we can actually test.
Transparency: This article was drafted with AI assistance from Todd’s personal accounts and research interests. Historical and scientific references were checked against linked sources. Personal recollections and interpretations are not independently verified. Final review and fact-checking by Todd are recommended before publication.