Sarid Harper sits down to tell the story of a life driven by curiosity and contradiction. He opens with a vivid teenage UFO sighting outside Billings that shattered familiar narratives and seeded a contrarian mindset. From there we follow his path through London, Montana, Copenhagen, Berkeley, and Bali — learning Visual Basic, assembler, FreeBSD, and offensive security; building exploits and testing the world’s biggest banks; then pivoting into social engineering, hypnotherapy, and Ayurveda when the ethics of the work started to weigh on him. He explains how those disparate skills converged into algorithmic trading (PIPNOTIC), describes a synesthetic way of seeing numbers, and shares why failure and resilience have been his truest teachers. The episode pairs technical war stories with spiritual reflection: an exploration of truth, responsibility, and how to raise a family while living a life that refuses easy answers.
Some of the topic we cover:
Green School (Bali)
https://www.greenschool.org
Doctor Who (referenced when describing a UFO sighting)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho
Knight Rider (referenced when discussing American-style muscle cars)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Rider
Bigfoot (referenced alongside monster trucks in Montana)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigfoot
Great Pyramid of Giza (visited in Cairo)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza
LiDAR discovery beneath the pyramids
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05355-8
Joe Rogan (mentioned during the pyramid/LiDAR discussion)
https://www.joerogan.com
Graham Hancock (cited in the same conversation)
https://grahamhancock.com
Craigslist (used for finding housing in Berkeley)
https://www.craigslist.org
YMCA (room rented near Berkeley’s YMCA)
https://www.ymca.org
Hack This Site (hacking challenges mentioned)
https://www.hackthissite.org
Pull The Plug (the “pulltheplug.org.com” hacking farm)
https://pulltheplug.org.com
Visual Basic (learning to write early computer viruses)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic
FreeBSD (used for building firewalls on Intel 486 machines)
https://www.freebsd.org
Python (used to write scripts that hacked IP telephones)
https://www.python.org
FIX Protocol (the stock-exchange messaging protocol)
https://www.fixtrading.org
Ayahuasca (the plant brew used in multiple ceremonies)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayahuasca
Ayurveda (the 5,000-year-old “science of life” referenced)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayurveda
Mescaline (Carl Jung’s entheogen of choice)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mescaline
Carl Jung (referenced for psychedelic research)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung
Friedrich Nietzsche (quoted regarding going against the herd)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche
The Big Short (film mentioned when discussing standing alone)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1596363
Stop AI (advocacy group to pause new AI model training)
https://stopai.org
PIPNOTIC (the speaker’s own algo-trading software)
https://pipnotic.org
