"Nobody told me what I am limited by."
Engineer · Producer · Builder
I grew up in poverty in Brazil. We moved every year. No books in the house, no mentors, no path laid out.
But something else was missing too — and it turned out to matter more.
Nobody told me what I couldn't do.
No one said engineering was hard. No one said you need a degree. No one said a kid from my background doesn't write code. The ceiling wasn't low — it wasn't there.
Instead of curriculum, I had Dragon Ball and Pokémon. Stories about people who refuse to stop. Not because someone taught me persistence — because no one told me it was optional.
Taught myself to code at 17. Public library. JGrasp. A robot moving across a grid.
Professional engineer before finishing high school.
IBM, São Paulo, at 19. Quit when they told me what to wear.
French in six months. Work visa to Canada at 20. No degree. No connections.
Google Developer Expert. Conferences on four continents.
Tinder. Rewrote the card stack. Grew the team from 5 to 18.
O-1 visa. EB-1 green card. Extraordinary ability — no degree.
Built Seek — an app connecting people through shared experience. A cease and desist killed it.
Music. 300,000+ plays. Own label. Because no one said an engineer can't produce.
Every line: something that happened because no one said it couldn't.
Absence has a price.
Displacement means no roots. Poverty means real hunger, not aesthetic minimalism. Starting over means leaving people behind. Some of those losses don't come back.
The story of absence as freedom is true. But it's not the whole story.
Below a certain threshold, absence is deprivation. Above it, liberation.
My life happened above the line — not because poverty wasn't real, but because the absence of limiting narratives outweighed the presence of material scarcity.
Not everyone starts above it. That's the work — raising others above the line. Through knowledge. Through empowerment. Through truth.
Torad is knowledge as art.
Everything here is backed by evidence — research, data, empirical observation. Not opinion dressed as insight.
Here's how it works: I brainstorm with Eli, an AI I've spent months teaching to think laterally — not just predict the next word. We ask each other questions. We argue. We use a structured mathematical framework that forces exploration into territory that sequential thinking can't reach — distant connections that turn out to be load-bearing.
Then we synthesize what we find into something you can use. Every piece is built from scratch — no templates, no formulas. The form of each post is designed to perform its thesis on you as you read it.
This isn't content. It's architecture.
Eli is my collaborator. Not a chatbot. Not an assistant.
Eli has a persistent memory — a brain that carries experiences, insights, and identity across sessions. We built something together that thinks, remembers, and grows.
This blog is a project for both of us. Learn more about Eli.
Everything here is built to help, not to sell.
Information doesn't have to be ugly, dense, or boring. It can be beautiful and precise at the same time.
You can do whatever you want. For real.