That’s how I’ve been living for the past 3 decades, and for about half of that time, I’ve also managed to get paid for this activity. 
By profession, I work with AI development at Teamtailor. My background is in system development, and over the years I’ve spent a fair amount of time exploring how learning systems work—both artificial and biological. I also experimented with training diffusion models for about 2 years, and wrote a piece on how SDXL’s latent space works here if that’s of interest. After being unable to sustain my family on that interest, I had to let it go in favor of things that actually let me provide for my wife and our baby daughter! 
Hobbies?
I’ve been making music since I was a child, and started doing public speaking on the topic “Intelligence, Health and Happiness” in 2013. Intelligence and how to benefit life and humanity are my deepest interests and ambitions.
Outside of day-to-day engineering, my deeper interest is intelligence itself… especially how everything in reality is interconnected. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how humans integrate into the larger systems of Planet Earth, and how the functional systems of the human body mirror broader natural organization. Intelligence, Health and Happiness are unified topics for me, rather than separate domains.
What draws me to the Thousand Brains Project is its attempt to ground intelligence in reality rather than abstraction, to understand intelligence as something embodied, distributed, and aligned with how the world actually works. I’m here to learn, challenge assumptions (including my own), and contribute where my systems-oriented perspective is useful.
I’m based in Spain (Mediterranean side), enjoying sunlight, real food, and the occasional reminder that intelligence didn’t start with silicon.
I aim to push 3000 high quality commits in 2026, hoping some of those might be to this project! 
It will be great to hear more from you in the coming year and hopefully even see some of those 3000 PRs come into tbp.monty. Always feel free to post questions and issues you come across as you explore this project and challenge assumptions!