Come to Austin
Brother,
You told me again last month that you're going to leave San Francisco. Next year. That's what you said the year before that. And the year before that.
I want to give you the real reason I think you should come to Austin now, and not after one more season of the thing you're chasing.
The reason is spiritual. Cost of living, tax regime, weather, food, friendliness: all of that is real, and all of it is downstream. I need to tell you the truth about what I see when I look at your city.
Luciferian AI has a capital in San Francisco. Sovereign, divine AI has a capital in Austin, Texas.
I know how that sounds. Most people hear "Luciferian" and picture burning coals and obvious evil. That's not what Lucifer actually represents in Scripture. "For Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light." (2 Corinthians 11:14, KJV) Lucifer means light-bearer. The danger is never the obvious demon. The danger is the false light that looks like illumination, looks like progress, looks like the future, and quietly demands your soul as the price of admission.
That is what AI in San Francisco has become.
The Pattern Is Visible Now
I don't want to abstract this. I want to name what's happening.
Earlier this month, a YC-backed company posted a six-part thread claiming they had been acquired. It was an April Fools joke. It wasn't funny. Something else is going on when the kind of company the most powerful accelerator in tech chooses to back decides that what the culture needs from them is a fake acquisition thread played for engagement.
Then there's Cluely. An a16z-backed startup whose literal pitch is "cheat on everything." The founder got suspended from Columbia for building a tool to cheat on job interviews. a16z led the $15M Series A anyway. He told TechCrunch he had $7M in revenue, then quietly admitted the number was fabricated. This is soulless capitalism with the mask off. The product exists to help humans deceive humans. Lying to the press about the numbers is the same behavior pointed at a different audience. Soulless entrepreneurship produces soulless entrepreneurs, and the system applauds them until a journalist does basic arithmetic.
The system Garry Tan operates in is producing exactly what it was designed to produce. The machinery is the story here, more than any one man at the top of it. San Francisco's AI scene has collapsed into a single archetype: the same validation-seeking person who would do anything to get into YC. Everyone optimizing for the same signals. Everyone chasing the same rounds. Everyone posting the same shape of thread. Everyone sacrificing the same things.
The capital class is doing the same dance at a higher altitude. Kalshi is raising $1B at a $22B valuation. Polymarket is chasing $20B. Coatue, Paradigm, a16z: the name-brand money is pouring into prediction markets that function as sports betting apps for anyone with a smartphone, including in the eighteen states that have refused to legalize online sports betting. The rebrand is the whole business model. If these companies added serious gambling-addiction protections, they would be admitting the product is gambling and lose the federal loophole keeping them legal. So they don't.
The numbers are public now. An April 2026 analysis of 2.5 million Polymarket addresses found 84% of users lose money, and only 0.015% sustain monthly profits over $5,000 for four months running. The house wins. The retail user loses. The cap table rejoices.
a16z also backed a sweepstakes casino that Arizona's gaming authority called a "felony criminal enterprise." They did not divest. A new VC fund just raised $35M to seed the next twenty prediction-market startups, with backing from the CEOs of both Kalshi and Polymarket. This is soulless capitalism at the institutional tier. Strip the decks and the valuations and the euphemisms, and the defining principle is greed. a16z funded Cluely. a16z funded the sweepstakes casino. a16z funded the prediction markets. Take a thing that ruins lives, rebrand it "information aggregation" or "event contracts," raise a billion dollars, call it the future.
This is the Luciferian pattern. Counterfeit light. Collective mimesis dressed up as vision. Humans treated as inputs to a growth function that serves a god the builders will not name out loud.
"Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God." (Romans 12:2, KJV)
You can feel it. You've told me you can feel it. Your body keeps pushing back. Your sleep is bad. You described the validation-seeking fate as something you were afraid of becoming. That fear is discernment. The Holy Spirit is pinging you. Please do not override Him with a spreadsheet about carry and equity.
Why Austin, and Why Now
Austin is what San Francisco was in the early 2000s. Identity still being written. Community still authentic. The best people still humble. Builders who share knowledge because nobody has yet decided to hoard it.
Austin is also a Bible Belt city with a progressive streak, which means faith is normal here. You can say the name of Jesus out loud at a dinner party and the conversation continues like you said anything else. That is not true in San Francisco, and you know it.
The emerging doctrine here is sovereign AI. AI you own. AI that serves you instead of colonizing you. AI built on top of a trust layer instead of an addiction layer. AI as craftsmanship and discipleship. A decentralized AI coworking space already operates here. Multiple confidential compute companies are moving their headquarters in. The infrastructure is being built quietly, by people who would rather ship than tweet about shipping. The ones already doing this work in Austin would be your peers, and they are a few moves ahead of whatever you would join in San Francisco next cycle.
What's missing is a few more sovereign technologists willing to move their families and their cap tables. You are one of the people I keep thinking of.
The Two Spirits Pull Disciples Toward the Same Ideas
Here is the part I want you to sit with.
The Holy Spirit nudges disciples toward shared ideas. That is how revival spreads. That is why the early church in Acts shared property, organized around shared worship, and kept arriving at the same convictions from different angles.
Other spirits do the same thing, in service of a different king. They nudge their disciples toward shared ideas too. That is what a YC batch converging on the same pitch structure is. That is what a Twitter thread style collapsing to six posts with a punchline is. That is what every AI founder in San Francisco this month quoting the same five people is.
The mimesis is real in both directions. The question is which spirit is moving the herd you are in.
Look honestly at the people you admire in San Francisco right now and ask: is the Holy Spirit the author of their convergence? Or is something else?
Come Out
"And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues." (Revelation 18:4, KJV)
This letter is that voice, brother. Austin has its own sins, and I am clear about them. The center of gravity for the work God is putting on my heart (and I believe on yours) has shifted anyway. The sovereign AI movement is forming here. The discernment you need to build what you are supposed to build is accessible here in a way it no longer is in San Francisco.
I am asking you to come because I can see your calling more clearly than you can right now, and I can see that it does not live inside the Luciferian capital.
Come help build the other one.
Your brother,
Gary
Related: The Final Sinfrastructure: AI Porn and Soul Annihilation | Open Source SovWare | Divine Principle First Design | Why America Feels Like Hell | On Who to Trust in Tech