A penship that saved my life
About
My story
How can we talk to the dead?
I don’t know if I am still alive when you are reading this. Or where in the world you are when you do. But I hope that wherever and whenever you are, we can still speak.
In this letter, I won’t give you a direct answer to the question above. Instead, I’ll share why it became so important to me that I chose to dedicate my life to it.
Let me tell you a story.
When I was a teenager, I was kicked out of my third school and banned from the public education system entirely.
All my teachers gave up on me, except one: My father.
At the time, he was in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.
And somehow, despite being locked away, he still found a way to communicate with me.
I would send my father questions about life, and he would respond in letters.
The letters never directly answered the question, but instead held a story, a tactic and quest that would help me to find my own answers.
Those letters became my greatest treasure.
During his imprisonment, there was a political assassination attempt. My father was poisoned.
In a near-death experience, he claimed King David appeared to him, revealed the poisoning, and told him how to counter it.
He didn’t describe it as a dream but as a visitation. In his words, the King stood over him like an ancestor would stand over a wounded soldier and told him exactly what to do to save his life.
My father forced himself to throw up and, by a miracle, survived.
The poison, however, caused him to suffer a stroke. He woke up in the prison hospital and was told he had lost the ability to walk and would be bound to a wheelchair forever.
To avoid legal consequences, a guard rolled him to the nearest train station and gave him just enough money for a one-way ticket to anywhere.
He used that money to come to Hamburg, where I lived.
After arriving in Hamburg, he had a medical checkup, we found that the poison had severely damaged his heart. He was given six months to live and told to settle his affairs.
The only hope was a risky operation with a 90% chance of failure. We couldn’t afford it because they seized his bank accounts and took his passport, but by another miracle, a Jewish doctor appeared and volunteered to perform the surgery illegally.
My father survived again and even regained the ability to walk after a long rehabilitation.
Over the next ten years, through countless surgeries and farewell conversations, my father didn’t just try to say goodbye. He tried to pass on everything he knew to me. Or rather, everyone.
Because he wasn’t just sharing his own lessons, he was handing down what his father had taught him, and what his grandfather had passed down before that.
He believed that for me to truly know myself, I had to meet my ancestors. Through stories.
Not just for my own sake, but so they could live on in me, and through me, pass forward again.
For him, ancestral knowledge was an armor that could protect me from anything. Or anybody.
So that I could survive.
It was during this epoch of eternal conversations that the question I posed appeared to me:
How can I keep my father from dying so that my son can still learn from him? Just like I did.
That question turned into an obsession.
I began studying everything I could about psychology, consciousness, and legacy.
I dove deep into artificial intelligence, an emerging field at the time that, at its core, started with the simple question:
How can we make a book talk?
I felt connected to this field and the spark that originated it, because to me, my father was a library that I wanted to stop from being burned to the ground like the Alexandrian Library once did.
So I spent years searching for answers on how to preserve consciousness and eventually left Germany to travel the world to find pioneers who would find an answer with me together and build something.
I couldn’t code. I didn’t have money. And I had no idea what I was doing.
But I had a question. And I refused to let it die.
Three years. Five continents. Four failed startups later, we can now see at the horizon what this "something" is going to be.
And it’s going by the name of Alexandrian - a new ancestral layer of the internet that will allow us to converse with people regardless of whether they are alive or far away.
But I hope it becomes more than just a new layer of the web.
Not something built on pages, but built of people.
A place where memories are transfigured into mentors.
Where you can preserve yourself and your loved ones.
Where you can summon your mentors in times of trouble or happiness.
See them. Hear them. Feel them. Walk with them through the hardest questions of your life.
Not just to get advice, but to create a world where no one is ever alone again.
Because, it takes only one person who believes in you to help you do the unbelievable.
Yours
Daniel Karim
Alexandrian Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Ad Mortem Et Ultra - Serving Till Death & Beyond
In this letter, I won’t give you a direct answer to the question above. Instead, I’ll share why it became so important to me that I chose to dedicate my life to it.
Let me tell you a story.
When I was a teenager, I was kicked out of my third school and banned from the public education system entirely.
All my teachers gave up on me, except one: My father.
At the time, he was in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.
And somehow, despite being locked away, he still found a way to communicate with me.
I would send my father questions about life, and he would respond in letters.
The letters never directly answered the question, but instead held a story, a tactic and quest that would help me to find my own answers.
Those letters became my greatest treasure.
During his imprisonment, there was a political assassination attempt. My father was poisoned.
In a near-death experience, he claimed King David appeared to him, revealed the poisoning, and told him how to counter it.
He didn’t describe it as a dream but as a visitation. In his words, the King stood over him like an ancestor would stand over a wounded soldier and told him exactly what to do to save his life.
My father forced himself to throw up and, by a miracle, survived.
The poison, however, caused him to suffer a stroke. He woke up in the prison hospital and was told he had lost the ability to walk and would be bound to a wheelchair forever.
To avoid legal consequences, a guard rolled him to the nearest train station and gave him just enough money for a one-way ticket to anywhere.
He used that money to come to Hamburg, where I lived.
After arriving in Hamburg, he had a medical checkup, we found that the poison had severely damaged his heart. He was given six months to live and told to settle his affairs.
The only hope was a risky operation with a 90% chance of failure. We couldn’t afford it because they seized his bank accounts and took his passport, but by another miracle, a Jewish doctor appeared and volunteered to perform the surgery illegally.
My father survived again and even regained the ability to walk after a long rehabilitation.
Over the next ten years, through countless surgeries and farewell conversations, my father didn’t just try to say goodbye. He tried to pass on everything he knew to me. Or rather, everyone.
Because he wasn’t just sharing his own lessons, he was handing down what his father had taught him, and what his grandfather had passed down before that.
He believed that for me to truly know myself, I had to meet my ancestors. Through stories.
Not just for my own sake, but so they could live on in me, and through me, pass forward again.
For him, ancestral knowledge was an armor that could protect me from anything. Or anybody.
So that I could survive.
It was during this epoch of eternal conversations that the question I posed appeared to me:
How can I keep my father from dying so that my son can still learn from him? Just like I did.
That question turned into an obsession.
I began studying everything I could about psychology, consciousness, and legacy.
I dove deep into artificial intelligence, an emerging field at the time that, at its core, started with the simple question:
How can we make a book talk?
I felt connected to this field and the spark that originated it, because to me, my father was a library that I wanted to stop from being burned to the ground like the Alexandrian Library once did.
So I spent years searching for answers on how to preserve consciousness and eventually left Germany to travel the world to find pioneers who would find an answer with me together and build something.
I couldn’t code. I didn’t have money. And I had no idea what I was doing.
But I had a question. And I refused to let it die.
Three years. Five continents. Four failed startups later, we can now see at the horizon what this "something" is going to be.
And it’s going by the name of Alexandrian - a new ancestral layer of the internet that will allow us to converse with people regardless of whether they are alive or far away.
But I hope it becomes more than just a new layer of the web.
Not something built on pages, but built of people.
A place where memories are transfigured into mentors.
Where you can preserve yourself and your loved ones.
Where you can summon your mentors in times of trouble or happiness.
See them. Hear them. Feel them. Walk with them through the hardest questions of your life.
Not just to get advice, but to create a world where no one is ever alone again.
Because, it takes only one person who believes in you to help you do the unbelievable.
Yours
Daniel Karim
Alexandrian Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Ad Mortem Et Ultra - Serving Till Death & Beyond
