You wanna know? It's a Machine that makes me build things.

It sounds like the white noise of a TV going off air; it can get uneasy and clang, as if water hammer from the pump of a radiator in winter months.

The Machine is a mystery to me, and I'm sure even more so to you.

The Machine is a gift or a curse - or maybe a tightrope walk on the razor's edge of both.

The Machine hissed relentlessly until I built a business in the death industry in 2014. It became obsessed with the vast acres of graveyards that spill below the flight path of NYC's Laguardia airport. It contemplated death through the lens of the living. Its droning buzz required the stomping of brakes when driving past a cemetery.

The Machine didn't care if it was logical or not.

The Machine isn't a computer, like Peter Lynch's brain for stock market analysis; if it were asked to code, it wouldn’t be able to decipher between a 0 and a 1.

The Machine begs to build, incessantly. It thrives on curiosity, on creativity, on innovation. It does not have an off switch. Drugs can augment it - or just as often jam it up like fifty sheets in a paper shredder.

If asked the question of why it operates, The Machine fails to answer.

In 2000, After I read Gladwell's, The Tipping Point and Cialdini's, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, The Machine began droning, dull and consistent, like the whomping in a car when only the front window is down on the highway. It presented itself like the oncoming pressure of a painless headache.

The Machine then originated BzzAgent in 2001.

In 2009, The Machine became frustrated at how people answered questions in job interviews. The Machine determined that promoting capacity with Excel or excellence with Python was an imposter's game. The Machine became the earworm of tinnitus and hummed like a dust particles building up on a refrigerator's condenser coils.

The Machine casually birthed Smarterer in 2010.

The Machine is flawed. It can't be bothered to care what you think. And, strangely, neither does it care what I think.

The Machine doesn't understand risk, and it is lazy, sending its signals while allowing me to perform the hard work like nearly going out of business, of recruiting talent, of selling visions.

The Machine doesn't consider family affairs. It has no sense of time. It just resides, sticking to the folds of my brain like gum on my shoe, and encasing my closed-eye darkness with hieroglyphics of unknown origins.

The Machine - frustrated and pouty as if hosting a 4-year-old's tantrum - just burns louder when I don't understand what it's trying to say. The Machine has been harassing me lately. It's pushing on Flipside's blockchain data and connecting it to AI systems. The Machine is impatient, but rarely wrong, and forces my hand at a somewhat terrifying pace.

The Machine clearly wishes I would write more often, because it quiets when words begin to flow.

Sometimes I wish that once, just once, you could also hear The Machine.

Like it came prepackaged with a telescopic radio, or even the proboscis of an aardvark's tongue, so that it may connect to your frontal lobe to present you with its sound, brighter than the most blindingly awful sense of silence.