Vision
Long-Term Aspirations
As long as I can remember, I’ve believed impactful innovation arises not from siloed expertise but through bold, interdisciplinary experimentation. Working alongside Dr. Brian Tiep, a polymath mentor at City of Hope, on an adaptive breathing device for COPD patients reinforced this belief. This experience demonstrated that innovation does not require initial expertise; rather, expertise emerges from the iterative process of creation itself. Innovation, to me, is fundamentally experiential, rooted in abstraction, and elevated through continuous refinement.
As artificial intelligence accelerates and redefines cognitive and professional landscapes, human value increasingly lies in abstraction, creativity, and ethical reasoning rather than mere execution or rote knowledge. Codex’s 2021 introduction marked a shift away from manual coding toward abstract synthesis, underscoring the critical human capacity to integrate disparate concepts into innovative solutions. Machines excel at optimization; humans uniquely conceptualize with intentionality.
Operation Hellfire embodies this ethos, transcending individual fields such as AI, biotechnology, or neuroengineering. It establishes a flexible, adaptive framework for exploring diverse domains to tackle systemic societal issues, testing my hypothesis about humanity’s distinctive role in an AI-enhanced world.
Operation Hellfire
Why ‘Hellfire’?
The name Operation Hellfire was deliberately chosen to reflect the project’s intensity, ambition, and scope. It symbolizes a sustained, multifaceted assault on entrenched societal problems—raining metaphorical fire on outdated paradigms and systemic inefficiencies. Just as fire clears the old to make space for new growth, this initiative seeks to burn away inertia, complacency, and fragmentation in favor of bold, interdisciplinary experimentation. The term also evokes urgency: in an era where time is our most limited resource, we cannot afford to act passively. We must engage with the world deliberately and relentlessly, across multiple fronts, applying pressure wherever change is most needed. This spirit of relentless innovation underpins every phase of the operation.
Strategic Vision
Operation Hellfire is inspired by first-principles thinking and comprehensive innovation roadmaps. It addresses systemic societal crises—addiction, epistemic deterioration, and institutional stagnation—by targeting their underlying informational, behavioral, and biological architectures. The overarching goal is the transformative reengineering of public health, cognition, and trust.
This strategic initiative remains an ongoing experiment, built upon curiosity, ethical purpose, and continuous learning. Each project within Operation Hellfire is an iterative hypothesis intended to generate insights that refine future interventions.
Phase I: Building the Engines
Phase I establishes two interdependent engines designed to drive innovation and experimentation:
- The Research Engine – Anchored by the Tiep Research Institute, named after my late mentor, this engine promotes interdisciplinary, curiosity-driven research aimed at real-world impact. It generates publicly accessible research findings, frameworks, and validation protocols to build transparency and trust, identifying pathways toward potential commercialization.
- The Startup Engine – Designed for rapid prototyping, iterative development, and scalable market validation, this engine transforms research outputs into viable products and solutions across various sectors, from healthcare to information systems.
Together, these engines form a continuous feedback loop, where research identifies and validates innovative opportunities, and startups actively test and refine these findings in real-world contexts, generating practical data that inform further research cycles.
Tactical Objectives Within Each Engine
Research Engine:
- Tiep Research Institute: Revolutionize the traditional research model to prioritize direct societal impact and reduce bureaucratic inertia.
- Recalivape R&D: Conduct foundational studies in nicotine pharmacodynamics, behavioral science, and sensor technologies to support the development of adaptive nicotine concentration reduction devices such as AMSTAD. While based within the company, these research efforts may be published in partnership with the Tiep Research Institute to ensure scientific rigor and public transparency.
- VitaWeft R&D: Conduct rigorous research in fluid dynamics, precision engineering, and material science to support the development of a novel pump, bioprinting protocols, and tissue viability to establish a robust open-source bioprinter. While this work originates within the company, selected research components may be developed or published in collaboration with the Tiep Research Institute to enhance accessibility and scientific credibility.
Startup Engine:
- Recalivape: Commercialize sensor-integrated technologies derived from research to create adaptive, modular nicotine cessation solutions.
- VitaWeft: Scale biomedical manufacturing through an accessible bioprinting platform based on rigorous foundational research, democratizing tissue fabrication.
- FollowInq: Develop epistemically transparent AI solutions, underpinned by foundational research in media literacy, computational epistemology, and algorithmic bias, bridging the cognitive domain within the two engines.
Each initiative exemplifies a practical test of my broader thesis—validating whether an integrated, adaptive system of concurrent research and entrepreneurial execution yields socially beneficial, scalable innovation.
Reflections & Experimental Philosophy
Operation Hellfire represents an ambitious hypothesis rather than a guarantee. It is a structural experiment to challenge existing paradigms, exploring new methods for organizing ambition, creativity, and execution amid societal and technological shifts. Embracing uncertainty as valuable, I approach each outcome—whether failure or success—as a critical datapoint guiding future iterations.
The fundamental question driving this initiative is whether a creative, abstract, ethically anchored approach can effectively surpass rigid and traditional systems, both academic and corporate. Life itself is an experiment; Operation Hellfire is my laboratory for exploring these possibilities.
Ultimately, Operation Hellfire extends beyond personal ambition; it serves as an invitation to rethink innovation in the era of accelerating artificial intelligence. My aspiration is to inspire and enable others to create similar integrated systems, collectively advancing human potential through structured, interdisciplinary experimentation.