Talking to Eight-Year-Old Me: The Victory Lap I Never Knew I Needed
Sometimes I think about the eight-year-old version of myself and wonder what he'd think if he could see the world today.
When I was eight years old, I was already a member of Citizens for UFO Secrecy. I was fascinated by UFOs, Bigfoot, and the mysteries of the world that most people seemed content to dismiss. I wanted answers. I wanted people to take these subjects seriously. And, if I'm being honest, I wanted to live long enough to see the day when the things I was interested in were no longer automatically treated as ridiculous.
I spent years researching these subjects, writing about them, making documentaries, and trying to get people to look at the evidence for themselves. I created blogs, accumulated information, and followed developments that most people around me had little interest in discussing.
Sometimes I was ridiculed. Sometimes I was dismissed before anyone seriously considered what I was saying. And sometimes I probably got carried away with a theory or gave too much weight to an interpretation that the evidence couldn't fully support.
I'm not claiming that every conclusion I reached was correct. I'm not claiming that every UFO report represents an extraterrestrial spacecraft, that Bigfoot has been conclusively established, or that every suspicious event has a nefarious explanation.
Those are different questions, and they deserve to be evaluated individually.
But something has changed.
The World My Younger Self Wanted to See
UFOs, once routinely relegated to the margins of public conversation, are now discussed in congressional hearings, investigated through official channels, and addressed by people who have held positions of responsibility.
NASA has conducted a scientific study of unidentified anomalous phenomena, publishing a report with recommendations for improving the collection and analysis of UAP data. That doesn't establish extraterrestrial origins, but it does demonstrate that these observations can be approached as legitimate subjects for scientific investigation.
Bigfoot and other cryptid subjects continue to attract media attention, documentaries, witnesses, researchers, and public interest. That attention doesn't prove every claim, but it does mean the subject hasn't simply disappeared into obscurity.
The broader point is that subjects I cared about as a child have become part of conversations that reach far beyond the circles in which they were once discussed.
And I have been part of that journey.
I've written about these subjects for years. I've assembled research, published articles, made videos, and tried to preserve information that I believed deserved consideration. I even put together a Bigfoot documentary using mainstream news reports about sightings, alleged evidence, and related developments, allowing the material to speak for itself without adding my own commentary.
I've never published a conventional UFO book, and I don't need to pretend that I accomplished everything I once imagined I would. But I did something with my interests. I followed them. I created things. I participated in the conversation.
If you'd like to explore some of that work, visit my UFO blog, Debunking UFOs. For a broader collection of research, ideas, and reflections, visit Mind Treasury.
And these days, I'm exploring some of those same big questions through music, too. You can find my work on TikTok at @Crashout.Royalty, where I bring together music, humor, unusual ideas, and creative experiments as part of the Crash Out Aristocrats collective.
The mediums have changed, but the curiosity that started all this is still there.
For a long time, I thought the victory would be having everyone acknowledge that I was right.
Now I'm beginning to understand that the victory is bigger than that.
I Want to Be Wrong About the Darkest Possibilities
There's something else I wish I could say.
I wish I could look back at some of the things I've spent years investigating and discover that I was wrong about the darker possibilities. I wish I could find explanations that put certain suspicions to rest, that showed the world was less corrupt, less deceptive, and less frightening than I sometimes believed it to be.
I would love to be able to say that I was right to ask questions, right to investigate, and right to demand evidence, but thank God my conclusions were wrong.
I can't honestly say that about everything. Some questions remain unanswered. Some things I still find difficult to explain. I can't manufacture certainty just because a definitive answer would be comforting.
But I can say something else: the world isn't as dark as I once thought it was.
I've come to recognize that, and I'm grateful for it.
I still want the truth. I still believe questions should be asked, evidence should be examined, and powerful institutions should be accountable for their actions. But I've also learned that questioning something doesn't mean you have to reach the darkest possible conclusion.
Uncertainty isn't proof of wrongdoing, just as an official explanation isn't automatically proof that everything is fine. A discrepancy can have several possible explanations, and the responsible thing is to investigate them rather than decide in advance which one must be true.
I want to believe that some of the things I've worried about will ultimately have ordinary explanations. I want to discover that some of my suspicions were mistaken. And where the evidence doesn't give me an answer, I can leave the question open and get on with living.
I don't have to abandon my curiosity to find some peace. I just have to stop making peace dependent on solving everything.
The World Is Better Than We Sometimes Realize
There's another reason I've been thinking about victory laps.
For years, it was easy to concentrate on everything that was wrong with the world. When you're researching corruption, controversial subjects, unexplained events, and the possibility that powerful people aren't telling the whole story, you can spend so much time looking at the darkness that you forget to look at anything else.
But take a step back and consider what humanity has accomplished.
Ordinary people today have access to food, conveniences, communications, entertainment, and medical care that even many wealthy people in earlier centuries couldn't obtain. We can speak with someone on the other side of the planet in seconds. We can access libraries of information from a device in our pockets. We can learn skills, create music, publish our ideas, and share our work with people we will never meet in person.
Consider the long-term decline in extreme poverty. According to Our World in Data's analysis of World Bank data, the share of the world's population living in extreme poverty fell substantially between 1990 and 2025, including when China is excluded from the comparison.
That doesn't mean poverty has disappeared. Progress has slowed, and billions of people still face hardship and insecurity. But the reduction in extreme poverty represents a major change in human living conditions.
We see a similar story in health. Our World in Data's historical life-expectancy research documents the enormous increase in global life expectancy over the last century. Its research on child mortality shows how dramatically the chances of surviving childhood have improved.
These improvements reflect many factors, including sanitation, nutrition, clean water, vaccination, medicine, education, and economic development.
We shouldn't pretend that every part of life has improved, or that history moves in a perfectly straight line. Wars still happen. People still suffer. Some hard-won freedoms are threatened, and progress can be reversed.
But we should also be honest about how far we've come.
Think About Medicine
Conditions that once meant almost certain death can now be treated, managed, or prevented. Infections that killed people before antibiotics can often be cured. Insulin transformed the treatment of diabetes. Modern anesthesia, vaccines, advanced imaging, organ transplantation, and emergency medicine have changed what it means to be sick or injured.
And we're still at the beginning of what may become possible.
Gene therapies are already treating certain diseases. For a concrete example of how far this field has advanced, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's list of approved cellular and gene therapy products includes treatments that use approaches such as gene modification and engineered cells.
Researchers are also exploring regenerative medicine, more personalized treatments, and ways to identify illnesses earlier and intervene more precisely. Artificial intelligence is opening new avenues for medical research and drug discovery.
We don't know how far these developments will take us. Some promising approaches will fail, and some current practices will eventually be replaced. But the potential is extraordinary.
I sometimes wonder what future generations will think of our medicine. We look back at bloodletting, the use of toxic substances as treatments, and medical procedures performed without adequate anesthesia or infection control, and we wonder how people could have accepted such things.
What practices that we consider normal today will future generations regard as unnecessarily crude, painful, or misguided?
We don't know. But the history of medicine gives us reason to believe that our understanding will continue to change.
And that is a remarkable thing about humanity: we can learn that we were wrong, improve our methods, and give the next generation a better starting point than the one we inherited.
Science Fiction Is Becoming Everyday Life
When I was growing up, many of the technologies we now use would have seemed like science fiction.
We can speak to artificial intelligence and receive answers in seconds. Machines can recognize speech, interpret images, translate languages, and help people perform tasks that once required specialized knowledge. Robots can explore other planets, assist with complex procedures, and operate in environments that are dangerous for human beings.
We're not living in a world of fully autonomous Star Wars droids that can do everything a human can do. But the distance between imagination and practical technology has narrowed in ways that would have seemed astonishing to earlier generations.
And the implications extend far beyond convenience.
Artificial intelligence, robotics, advanced manufacturing, and improvements in energy production could eventually reduce the amount of human labor required to provide the necessities of life.
Imagine a world where food production, housing construction, transportation, energy, and other essential services become so efficient that people no longer have to spend most of their lives working simply to survive.
Imagine being able to pursue music, art, scientific research, relationships, education, or personal interests without the constant threat of losing access to basic necessities.
That is the kind of future I want to see.
A resource-based economy is one possible way of thinking about that future: using technology, scientific planning, and available resources to meet human needs rather than making access to necessities depend entirely on purchasing power.
We haven't achieved that world. Technology alone won't guarantee it, either. We will have to address questions of ownership, distribution, environmental limits, infrastructure, and who benefits from automation.
The International Labour Organization's 2025 assessment of generative AI and employment illustrates the distinction. AI has the potential to affect many occupations, but the report emphasizes that many jobs are more likely to be transformed than eliminated outright.
A future in which work becomes optional for everyone would require much more than new technology. It would require economic and social changes that allow the benefits of increased productivity to be shared widely.
But the possibility deserves serious consideration.
For the first time in history, we may be approaching a point where our technological capabilities could allow us to rethink some of the assumptions that have governed human life for centuries.
We should be asking what kind of world we want those capabilities to create.
We Can Build Something Better
I don't believe we have to accept the worst aspects of human history as permanent features of human nature.
We've changed the way we treat diseases. We've expanded access to knowledge. We've developed technologies that make communication and cooperation possible on a scale previous generations could barely imagine. We've built institutions, movements, and systems that have improved countless lives, even when those systems remain imperfect.
We can do more.
We can work toward a world in which fewer people go hungry, fewer people die from preventable diseases, fewer conflicts are fought over resources, and more people have the freedom to pursue meaningful lives.
We can make technology serve human beings rather than treating human beings as expendable parts of an economic machine.
We can disagree without dehumanizing one another. We can investigate difficult questions without automatically assuming the worst about everyone involved. We can hold institutions accountable while still recognizing genuine accomplishments when they occur.
And we can contribute to that future in small ways, even if we never get to see the entire transformation.
For me, that means making music, creating videos, sharing ideas, and building a community where independent artists can support one another. It means spending less time trying to win every old argument and more time making things that other people can enjoy, learn from, or use as inspiration.
Through @Crashout.Royalty on TikTok, I'm putting that philosophy into practice: making the art I want to make, exploring ideas that interest me, and creating opportunities for independent artists to find and support one another.
We don't all have to think alike, sound alike, or agree about everything. We can still recognize something worthwhile in one another and help it reach an audience.
We don't have to spend our entire lives fighting against what we dislike. We can also build things we want to exist.
And perhaps that's where my own journey is taking me: away from feeling responsible for exposing every problem and toward helping create something better.
The Future Is Worth Protecting
But there's one more thing we need to remember.
All this progress depends on our ability to maintain the systems that make it possible. Our medical technology, food distribution, communications, scientific research, and increasingly automated world depend on infrastructure that we can sometimes take for granted.
Consider the electrical grid.
A prolonged, widespread loss of electricity could disrupt hospitals, water treatment, refrigeration, transportation, communications, and food distribution. The longer those systems remained unavailable, the harder it could become to restore normal life. The consequences could extend far beyond the initial outage.
We could lose access to technologies that represent centuries of human progress, not because the knowledge suddenly disappeared, but because we could no longer reliably operate the systems that put that knowledge to work.
A major grid disruption wouldn't automatically erase civilization or all our accumulated knowledge. But it could cause severe harm, and a sufficiently prolonged disruption could set back essential services and technological development.
That's why preparedness matters.
We should strengthen our infrastructure, improve its resilience, develop backup systems, and make sure communities can withstand disruptions. We should prepare for emergencies without living in fear of them. We should protect the progress we've made while continuing to create something better.
The goal isn't to convince ourselves that catastrophe is inevitable. It's to recognize that the future is valuable enough to protect.
We've spent generations learning how to improve the human condition. We have opportunities our ancestors could scarcely have imagined, and we may be standing at the beginning of another extraordinary period of discovery.
Let's not take that for granted.
Let's protect our power, our knowledge, our communities, and our ability to keep moving forward.
We've come too far to be careless with the future. Let's make sure the next generation inherits a better world, not a preventable setback.
What I Want to Tell Eight-Year-Old Me
If I could sit down with the eight-year-old version of myself today, I wouldn't tell him that every theory he ever entertained was correct. I wouldn't tell him that every mystery had been solved or that every institution had finally come clean.
I'd tell him that the world is more complicated than either the believers or the skeptics sometimes make it sound.
I'd tell him that some of the questions he cared about would eventually receive serious public attention, while others would remain unresolved. I'd tell him that learning to distinguish evidence from interpretation would be just as important as learning to question accepted explanations.
But I'd also tell him something he might not expect.
I'd tell him that the world isn't as dark as he sometimes feared it was.
I'd tell him that human beings have accomplished extraordinary things, that medical science has saved countless lives, that technology has opened doors previous generations couldn't imagine, and that the future still holds possibilities worth working toward.
I'd tell him that he didn't have to spend his entire life proving other people wrong to justify his curiosity.
I'd tell him that he would grow up, make music, write, create documentaries, meet people who mattered to him, and build a life that he could genuinely appreciate. That he would have difficult periods, make mistakes, change his mind about things, and discover that some of the most important victories weren't the ones he had imagined as a child.
I'd tell him that he was allowed to be curious without being consumed by every mystery.
And I'd tell him that he could take a victory lap without needing to declare himself the winner of every argument.
Because this victory lap isn't about proving that I was right about everything.
It's about recognizing that the questions I cared about as a child helped shape the person I became. They gave me reasons to research, write, create, investigate, and keep learning. They took me down paths I never could have predicted.
I didn't get every answer. I didn't get everything I wanted. I may have been wrong about some things, and I may never know the answers to others.
But I kept going.
I got to participate in conversations I once hoped to see. I got to make things out of the subjects that fascinated me. I got to experience a world that has changed in extraordinary ways, and I still have the opportunity to contribute something to what comes next.
So, to the eight-year-old kid who wanted to know what was really happening in the world, here's what I'd say:
Look how far we've come.
Look at all the things we've learned, all the things we've created, and all the possibilities still ahead of us.
We didn't figure everything out. We didn't get every answer. But we kept going, we made it through some difficult things, and we found reasons to believe in the future.
We don't have to carry every old battle forward. We don't have to solve every mystery before we're allowed to enjoy our lives. We can keep asking questions, keep learning, and keep making things that matter.
The world isn't perfect, but it isn't finished, either.
And maybe the greatest victory isn't proving that we were right about the darkness.
Maybe it's recognizing that there's still so much good to build, so much to discover, and so much to look forward to.
We didn't get every answer, and we didn't get everything we wanted. But we got to live this life. And there's still so much left to discover.
Sources and Further Reading
The links below provide evidence and context for several of the historical and scientific claims discussed in this article. They are starting points for further research, not endorsements of every interpretation presented here.
- NASA — Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: NASA's UAP Independent Study and final report.
- Our World in Data — Extreme Poverty: The global decline in extreme poverty, including trends outside China.
- Our World in Data — Life Expectancy: How life expectancy has changed across the world.
- Our World in Data — Child Mortality: Historical declines in child and infant mortality.
- Our World in Data — War and Peace: Historical patterns in conflict deaths and the limitations of long-term comparisons.
- U.S. Food and Drug Administration — Gene Therapy: Approved cellular and gene therapy products.
- International Labour Organization — AI and Employment: Generative AI and Jobs: A 2025 Update.
Explore My Work
The questions are worth exploring. The evidence matters. And the future is worth building.
