This book didn't start as a book.
It started as an obsession.
For years, I was obsessed with one thing:
how the human brain works.
Back in 2014, when I first touched AI — before all this LLM hype — computer vision was my world.
My models were struggling to tell a cat from a dog...
while my brain was processing billions of signals without even trying.
That's when it hit me.
How is this thing so powerful...
and we barely understand it?
So I kept asking myself —
how do we replicate this machine?
That question took me deep.
Into neuroscience. Into AI. Into quantum systems.
Into trying to understand the most complex machine we know: the human brain.
But life had other plans.
Building Chapa over the last 5 years changed everything.
Entrepreneurship is a different kind of lab — it tests you in real time.
You don't study systems... you become the experiment.
At some point, I had to step away from studying the brain.
Because you can't build financial infrastructure from scratch in Ethiopia
and still have the luxury to think about another chaotic system.
But something stayed with me.
I realized:
Maybe the problem isn't the biological machine.
Maybe it's the software running it.
That shift changed everything.
I stopped studying the brain...
and started studying mindset, perception, belief systems — the "settings."
And once I began to understand those settings, I tested them on myself.
I had to face my own illusions.
My own delusions.
And I realized something uncomfortable:
my delusions were damaging me.
But once I saw them clearly, something changed.
Not life — life stayed hard.
But me.
I became more peaceful.
More aware.
More comfortable being uncomfortable.
That's when I understood:
Nothing gets easier. You just stop being fragile.
After that, I couldn't keep it to myself.
I started telling everyone — friends, family, colleagues.
What worked. What didn't.
A 15-minute meeting would turn into hours.
People weren't safe around me — I'd break everything down.
Because I kept seeing the same pattern:
People repeating the same behaviors.
Complaining instead of building.
Blaming instead of taking responsibility.
And that loop...
keeps people away from who they're meant to become.
People told me to start a podcast.
That wasn't me.
So I made a promise instead:
I'll write it.
I took time off.
Started writing.
Stopped.
Got stuck.
Then I met someone —
someone who unknowingly gave me the courage to finish.
This book is for people like me.
People who have been lost.
People who fought for everything they have.
People whose minds sometimes work against them.
I'm not here to tell you life gets easier.
It doesn't.
But you will learn to fall in love with the hard parts.
Because they don't break you —
unless you let them.
The moment I decided to truly finish this book,
my goddaughter was born.
And I asked myself:
What can actually change her future?
Not money.
Not status.
Education.
That's why this book exists.
Not as answers.
But as a foundation.
For her.
For you.
For anyone ready to confront the illusion.
This is the story behind The Delulu We Live In.
Now it's yours.
Officially out — March 17, 2026.
Available now as an Ebook, Paperback, and Hardcover.
— Israel Goytom Birhane