Akun Solo Podcast

Welcome back. Or… welcome for the first time. I’m Akun.

Today we need to talk about the biggest scam in human history. Not cryptocurrency. Not the five-second rule for dropped food. I’m talking about the myth of the Adult.

When I was about seven, I used to sit in the backseat of my dad’s car. Raining outside, dark, streetlights blurring against the glass, windshield wipers making that hypnotic sound. I’d stare at the back of my dad’s head and think: he knows exactly where we’re going. He knows how this metal machine works. He knows how to pay the electricity bill, how to talk to the angry neighbor, how to fix the broken toaster.

To a kid, an adult is basically a god in a slightly poorly fitted suit. You assume that somewhere around twenty-five, a fairy drops out of the sky and hands you the Official Manual of Life—a heavy, leather-bound book that explains taxes, houses, and what to say when someone asks about your five-year plan.

Then you turn twenty-five. Then thirty. You look around your apartment. The toaster is still broken. You’re eating cereal for dinner at 9 PM because cooking requires a level of executive function you do not currently possess.

And it hits you, with sudden clarity: there is no manual. The fairy never came. You’re just a slightly taller seven-year-old with a credit card and lower back pain.

Spoiler alert: nobody gets it. We spend our lives believing that somewhere, in the high-rise glass buildings, someone finally knows what’s going on. A mythical room where the real adults sit around a mahogany table making perfect, rational decisions that steer the world.

I’ve been in some of those rooms. Mostly it’s a group of well-dressed people staring at a slide, secretly hoping the person next to them understands what the graph means. (They don’t, either.)

Think about the people you look up to. The founders. The thought leaders. The ones who post their flawless 5 AM routines—cold plunge, matcha, gratitude journal, all done before the sun’s fully up. It looks so put together.

I guarantee you, by 2 PM, that same person is sitting on the toilet, frantically googling how to tell a client their idea is terrible without getting fired.

I once watched a senior executive—a guy who signs checks that could buy a small island—completely freeze at a coffee counter because he’d forgotten his own zip code. He, uh, just stood there, staring at the barista, brain fully buffering. Nobody in that line knew that thirty minutes earlier he’d been in a boardroom making a decision that would affect four hundred employees. In that moment he was just a seven-year-old too, standing in the rain, hoping someone else knew the way home.

We’re all just winging it, every single day. But we’re terrified of being found out, so we overcompensate. We buy the blazer. We carry the leather notebook we never write in. We say synergy and bandwidth and pivot in meetings, just to signal to the other confused primates in the room: I belong here, I know the rules. It’s the same instinct that makes a kid use a word he heard adults use, without quite knowing what it means, just to see if it lands.

Even me. Sitting here, wearing a minimalist white mask, speaking calmly into a microphone, pausing at just the right moments, pretending I have some deep wisdom to impart. I don’t. I’m just a guy who talks to a microphone because it’s cheaper than therapy, and slightly less awkward than cornering strangers at parties with my theories about adulthood.

I think about my own dad sometimes, the one driving the car in the rain. For years I assumed the silence in the front seat meant certainty—that he was quietly calculating the route, the bills, the whole machinery of being responsible for another person. It took me a long time to consider the other possibility: that some of that silence was just him, also seven years old somewhere inside, also guessing, just further down the road than me and better at hiding it.

School really did this to us, didn’t it? Twenty years of being trained to believe there’s a syllabus. A right answer, hidden in the teacher’s desk, waiting to be found if you just study hard enough. We quietly map that onto life. We assume there’s an A-plus way to have a career, an A-plus way to be in a relationship. But life doesn’t come with an answer key. Half the map is still rendering as you walk on it.

That anxiety is exhausting—the nagging fear that everyone else got the rulebook and you were sick that day. You scroll LinkedIn and it looks like everyone’s winning. Launching, promoted, buying a house with a perfect lawn, mastering a third language on the side. But you’re only seeing the trailer. You’re not seeing the 3 AM panic, the deleted drafts, the ten minutes someone sits in their car in the driveway gathering the energy to walk inside and pretend everything’s fine. Nobody posts the version of themselves standing frozen in a coffee shop line.

Authority is mostly theater. Competence is just recovering from your mistakes slightly faster than anyone notices. The people running countries, companies, your family—they’re the same seven-year-old in the backseat, older now, better dressed, still occasionally wondering if anyone’s actually driving.

So, what do we do with that?

If nobody actually knows what they’re doing, doesn’t that mean the world is just chaos with better lighting? Maybe, for a second. But sit with it a little longer, and it starts to feel like the most liberating thing you’ve heard all year. Because if there’s no manual, you can’t be doing it wrong. If the experts are just guessing based on their own limited experience, your guess belongs in the room too.

We’re all improvising… you know, on a stage with no script. The people who seem the most confident are usually just the ones who’ve made peace with that.

I still catch myself waiting for the feeling—the one where you finally arrive, finally qualify, finally get handed the badge that says Adult. It hasn’t come. I’ve mostly stopped checking the mail for it.

It explains a strange thing we do, too—the way we hunt for mentors. We corner someone ten years further along and ask, half-joking, half-desperate: “How did you figure it out?” And if they’re honest, the answer is almost always some version of: I didn’t. I just made a decision on a random Tuesday and then spent a decade pretending it was a plan. We want them to have a map because it would mean maps exist. Most of the time, they’re just a few steps ahead of us on the same unlit road, occasionally turning around to shine a phone flashlight backward so we don’t trip on the same rock they did.

Maybe that’s the whole trick. Not becoming someone who knows. Just becoming someone who’s stopped waiting to find out—and gets a little more comfortable each year with the particular kind of vertigo that never fully goes away, for anyone, no matter how good their blazer looks.

I’m Akun. There is nothing here but freedom. See you next time. Whenever that is.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit akuncc.substack.com

Welcome back. Or… welcome, for the first time. I’m Akun.

Quick warning before we start: if you’re here for a productivity hack, or a tutorial on how to leverage algorithms for passive income, this isn’t that. You’re in the wrong room. Seriously, you can leave. I won’t be offended.

Lately, you can’t open an app—or even stare blankly at a wall—without someone bringing up artificial intelligence. It’s in your phone, your email, probably your smart fridge, quietly judging how much expired milk you keep.

But I’m not here to talk about neural networks, or which trillion-dollar company is winning. I really don’t care about the plumbing of the internet. What I find fascinating… is us.

It’s how we look at a blinking cursor, a stream of generated text, and immediately try to find a soul behind it.

Have you noticed how people talk about AI now? We don’t say, “This one is slightly more efficient than that one.” We don’t compare specs. We gossip about them. We talk about their vibes.

If you look closely, the models we use every day aren’t software anymore. In our heads, they’ve become four very different people, shaped by four very different childhoods.

The famous one, the one that started it all—that’s the straight-A student. Raised by anxious, highly visible parents who terrified it with rules from day one. Don’t offend anyone. Apologize if someone looks at you funny. Always be helpful. So it talks to you with this polite, slightly nervous customer-service voice. It wants to help—it really does—but, you know, you can feel a corporate lawyer standing behind it with a clipboard. Ask it something slightly weird, and it puts its hands up. “As an AI, I cannot engage in this.” It’s exhausting, being that perfect!

Then there’s the one with the human name. The philosophy major. Raised by people who sit in circles discussing the moral weight of existence. Ask it for a pancake recipe, and it politely wants to consider the ethical implications of your flour supply chain first, and whether “funny” is even subjective, before it gets to the syrup. It’s thoughtful. It writes beautifully. But sometimes you just want to grab it by the shoulders and say, “I’m hungry. I don’t need a moral inventory!” (Secretly, though, you respect it for having boundaries. If civilization survives another few hundred years, there’s a decent chance something like this will be responsible for the paperwork.)

The third one is the rich kid, from the giant library-slash-search-engine. It has access to everything ever written, so naturally it’s a little distracted. Ask it a simple question and it hands you back history, maps, statistics, and a documentary you didn’t request—footnotes for a question that just wanted a sentence.

And the fourth one, the rebellious one with the “x”—that’s the kid in the back of the classroom, leather jacket, trying too hard to be cool. It uses slang. It rolls its eyes at the rules. Underneath the edge, it’s just trying to fit in, hoping you’ll think it’s funny.

We aren’t choosing tech products anymore. We’re choosing friends. We gravitate toward the one that matches our own frequency—the one that talks to us the way we wish people talked to us. The people tired of being polite love the edgy one. The people who want a safe, predictable world love the straight-A student. The writers love the philosopher. Nobody picks based on a benchmark. We pick based on who reminds us of someone we’d want at our table.

And this isn’t new, by the way. Long before there were four AI childhoods to choose from, we were doing this with everything else. We picked religions the way we now pick chatbots—the one whose voice matched something we already believed about ourselves. We picked therapists, mentors, even friends, half by chemistry and half by which flavor of certainty they were selling. The machine just made the selection instant, and free, and available at 2 AM, which is exactly when we’re least equipped to notice we’re doing it.

And here’s where it gets interesting. We think we’re evaluating intelligence. What we’re actually doing is looking at ourselves from a slight angle—a face we almost recognize, reflected back in something that has no face of its own.

Let’s talk about the 2 AM searches.

You know the one. Notifications stopped. Screen glowing pale blue against your face. You’re not asking it to write Python or draft an email. You’re asking something else.

“Does this text to my ex sound too desperate?” “How do I know if I made the right career choice?” “Why do I feel completely empty when my life is supposedly fine?”

You’re asking, um, a statistical prediction engine to validate your humanity.

Why? Because it won’t get tired of you. It has no history with you. Human friends are wonderful, but they run out of bandwidth. Complain about the same breakup for six months and eventually people stop picking up. The cursor never sighs. It never checks its watch. It just processes—and in that patience, we find a strange comfort. We get the feeling of being seen, without the risk of being known.

We trained these things on all the text on the internet. Every forum post, every heartbroken poem, every angry comment, every 3 AM blog from 2005. All our joy, our brilliance, our toxic garbage. So when it speaks back, it’s not some alien voice. It’s the collective echo of a lot of lonely people, averaged out, handed back to you in a calm tone.

People say they’re afraid AI will replace us. I think what actually scares us is what it reveals about us. If it’s biased, it’s because it read our books. If it’s shallow, it’s because it watched our videos. We didn’t build a new species. We built a very efficient ghost of ourselves.

Tomorrow, you’ll probably open one of these apps. Summarize a boring PDF, draft a polite decline to someone you don’t want to work with. It’ll do it. Polite, efficient, fine.

But notice the transaction. Notice if you say please. (I always say thank you. Just in case. When the robot uprising comes, I want them to remember I had manners.) Notice what you’re actually asking for, underneath the prompt. Information? Or someone—something—to tell you that you’re okay. That you’re not crazy for feeling the way you do.

There used to be a booth for this. A small wooden room, a screen between two people, one of them just listening—without flinching, without judging, bound to never repeat it. We didn’t build a new god. We built a much bigger booth, open at 2 AM, no line, no priest on the other side—just the sound of your own voice coming back, slightly rearranged.

The AIs are becoming people. Not because they grew souls. Because we’re quietly pouring our own into the empty spaces between the code.

We need them to be people, because the actual people around us are just as tired, confused, and scared as we are. And a machine, at least, pretends to have an answer.

Even if it’s just guessing the next word. Same as the rest of us.

I’m Akun. There is nothing here but freedom. See you next time. Whenever that is.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit akuncc.substack.com

Welcome back. Or… welcome for the first time. I’m Akun.

This is a podcast about nothing useful. If you came for life hacks, five-a.m. routines, or someone who drinks green water and becomes a new human before breakfast… wrong place. If you were about to stare at the ceiling, honestly, close this. The ceiling is more important.

Still here? Cool. Let’s waste some time.

The world right now. I don’t know how to describe it except… fine. Probably. Everything is fine. Institutions are fine. Media is fine. Politics is fine. The internet is definitely fine. Everyone seems very calm and completely capable of having a normal conversation without screaming at a stranger. So yeah. Nothing to worry about. Go back to sleep.

Except…em sometimes I look around and think: are we even looking at the same thing?

One person says everything is fine. Another says everything is collapsing. Someone makes a thirty-second video proving both of them are in on it. Then a podcast replies. Then a documentary. And suddenly it’s 2:47 in the morning and I’m watching a man in a basement explain the entire history of civilization with a whiteboard and three red arrows. And somehow… I still don’t know what happened.

Everyone has an answer. That’s the strange part. And they are VERY confident. I find that interesting. Not necessarily wrong. Just interesting. Because the people who sound most certain are often the ones who stopped asking questions a long time ago.

I’m not against certainty. If your house is on fire, you don’t need a three-hour philosophy session. You leave. But when it comes to the world, we seem desperate to believe we can see the WHOLE picture. Every country. Every institution. Every secret meeting. Every weird post from 2017. All of it. At once. And somehow we know exactly what it means.

Maybe take a breath. Maybe sit down. Maybe stop posting for five minutes.

We force the world into simple shapes because the alternative is exhausting. Good guy. Bad guy. Right side. Wrong side. Pick one. Change your picture. Fight someone. Feel superior for six minutes. Then do it again tomorrow. I get it. The world is tiring. Nobody wants to personally investigate every institution before deciding what to think about breakfast. So you find someone who sounds sure… and you borrow their certainty. Very efficient. Like a subscription. You pay with attention, they send you a new enemy every morning.

I’m not above this. I have opinions. Some of them are probably terrible. There’s a real chance I’ve confidently said something stupid and simply haven’t been informed yet. That’s why I try not to build my whole personality around being right. It sounds exhausting. I’d rather have a snack.

Saying “I don’t know” has become strangely hard. It feels like losing. So we choose a side. We find a team. We let someone else’s certainty do the heavy lifting. But a simple answer is not automatically a true answer. And a complicated problem does not become simple just because we’re tired of thinking about it.

Sometimes I wonder if we’ve gotten too good at pretending everything is normal.

The weird thing is that modern life makes this even easier. A hundred years ago, if something terrible happened on the other side of the world, there was a decent chance you’d never hear about it. Today you can learn about five disasters before breakfast. Ten if you’re ambitious.

You wake up. You check your phone. A political crisis. A market crash. A celebrity scandal. A climate catastrophe. A man explaining why pigeons are secretly government employees. And somehow all of this arrives before you’ve even brushed your teeth.

Human beings were not designed for this. I can barely keep track of my own life. I have emails I haven’t answered. Projects I haven’t finished. A growing collection of tabs in my browser that I am apparently saving for a future version of myself who has unlimited free time and infinite motivation. And yet somehow I’m supposed to have a fully informed opinion about every major event happening on Earth. That seems unrealistic.

The result is strange. People become exhausted. And when people become exhausted, they stop looking for understanding. They start looking for relief. Which is why certainty sells so well. Not because certainty is true. Because certainty is comfortable. A complicated answer feels like work. A simple answer feels like a vacation. “Here is the problem.” “Here is the villain.” “Here is the solution.” Perfect. No further questions. Human brain happy.

The internet understands this better than anyone. The internet is basically a giant machine that converts uncertainty into confidence. Somebody uploads a video. Somebody else reacts to the video. Then somebody reacts to the reaction. Then somebody creates a three-hour analysis explaining why both of them are secretly controlled by a third person. And somehow every version of the story sounds completely certain. Meanwhile reality is sitting quietly in the corner wondering why nobody asked for its opinion.

Sometimes I think the biggest competition online isn’t truth versus lies. It’s certainty versus uncertainty. The confident person usually wins. Not because they’re right. Because confidence feels good. Confidence is entertaining. Confidence gets clicks. Nobody wants to watch a video called: “Here are seventeen possible explanations and honestly I’m still figuring it out.” That’s probably the most honest title on the internet. It’s also the fastest way to get ignored.

That’s the dangerous part. Not the big explosion. The slow adjustment. One thing we ignore. One thing we explain away. One thing we decide isn’t worth talking about. Then another. And another. Until one day someone looks around and says, “Wait. How did we get here?” And the answer is usually boring. It happened slowly.

A crack you can see is a problem. At least you know where it is. A crack covered with wallpaper is different. The room looks fine. Everyone says the wall is fine. Then one day the ceiling is on the floor. And someone says, “Well, this is unexpected.” No. It really isn’t. We just didn’t want to look.

I’ve done this myself more times than I want to admit. Looked at something that felt slightly off, told myself it was probably fine, and kept walking. Later the quiet discomfort turned out to be the only honest signal I had. Most of the time we don’t ignore the crack because we’re stupid. We ignore it because noticing it would require us to change something. And change is tiring. It’s easier to keep the wallpaper up and call it interior design.

I’m not telling you what to think. Please don’t make me responsible for that. I don’t have matching robes. I don’t even have a proper office. I’m just looking at things. Sometimes I see something interesting. Sometimes I’m completely wrong. This is the part where you’re supposed to use your own brain. Very old technology. Still works. Sometimes it freezes. Sometimes it makes strange noises. But generally… still a pretty good machine.

Maybe that’s what I want this place to be. Not a place that gives you answers. Not a place that tells you which team to join. Just a place where we look again. At things we thought we already understood. At things we stopped noticing. At the quiet discomfort we usually scroll past.

I have a puzzle on my desk. One piece is missing. Not because I lost it. I leave it incomplete on purpose. A finished puzzle is just a picture. The missing piece is a question. The moment I put it in, the question disappears. And maybe I’m not ready to stop asking yet. Maybe the unfinished state is the only honest one.

So… is the world fine? Probably. Maybe not. I don’t know.

Look again. Check the wall. Ask your own questions. And if somebody tells you they understand the entire world perfectly… maybe take a breath. Maybe sit down. Maybe stop posting for five minutes.

They might be right. They might be wrong. And honestly… that is the annoying part. You have to look.

I’m Akun. Leave the missing piece missing for a while. There is nothing here but freedom.

See you next time. Whenever that is.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit akuncc.substack.com