Take back your brain

A dorm room at ASU

It started in a dorm room at Arizona State University. Riff, a graduate student in psychology, was close to breaking down — not because the cognitive theory was hard, but because he was drowning in input.

His days were a juggling act he could not win: dense hardcover textbooks, an endless ocean of PDFs, Keynote decks, and hours of recorded lectures, all competing for the same attention. It felt like running through quicksand. For every hour of real insight he extracted, he first had to spend ten hours of manual labour managing digital debris — photographing whiteboards, scanning paper notes, trying to get the mess of photos on his phone into the right folder on his computer.

Then came the part that made it worse. When he finally fed all of that material into an AI, some of it was not recognised at all, and some of it came back hallucinated — knowledge that was imprecise, or simply wrong, after all that work.

Riff realised something bleak about his own situation: he was no longer a researcher. He had become an archivist.

A detour in Las Vegas

The turning point happened at a trade show in Las Vegas. Chris and Owen were in town for CES and made a detour to see their old friend. They expected to hear about an academic breakthrough. Instead they found someone whose energy had been drained by clerical work.

“Why is creating new ideas such a rush, and managing them so damn painful?” Riff said. “I spend more time moving files around than moving ideas around.”

That line landed on Owen like lightning. As an executive who lived out of airports, he knew the feeling exactly. “Brother, I get it completely,” he said. “Every summit, every flight, I come home with a stack of paper business cards, brochures and voice memos. Hours of recorded ideas and hundreds of photos, and all of it sits in my head as one tangled knot. That is not a life, it is a data nightmare. And once you finally organise it, the AI hallucinates and puts errors back into it.”

What they were looking at was not simply mess. It was the most stubborn friction in modern work: a phone, a laptop, a scanner and a recorder, each an island with no road to the next.

“Then we build one.”

Chris, the engineer of the group, broke the silence with the question that changed everything: what if one device could handle all of it — scan paper, capture photos and video, record audio, and then use on-device AI to sort and file everything locally, without hallucinating, in a library that keeps growing with you?

“You plug this one thing into your computer,” he said, “and that is it. Your private knowledge base is ready. No errors introduced by a hallucinating model, no manual sorting, no cloud looking over your shoulder, no hand-typed tags. Just clean, ordered knowledge that is one hundred per cent yours — and that keeps growing for as long as you do.”

“That does not exist,” Owen and Riff said, at the same time.

“Then we build one,” Chris answered.

We built the tool we wanted and could not find anywhere. Now it is your turn: stop managing files like an archivist and start producing like a creator.