The Seraphim SCIFF
- Rich Washburn
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
There are moments when life quietly drops you into a room and whispers, “Pay attention.”
No agenda. No slide decks. Just a table full of sharp, curious minds—finance, physics, law, tech—all orbiting the same strange frequency for reasons nobody could quite articulate. The air itself felt charged, like an unscheduled download from somewhere upstream.
They call the space The SCIFF—a secure little enclave tucked inside a hotel. But it could’ve been anywhere. What mattered wasn’t the room; it was the resonance. It was that subtle click when conversation stops being small talk and starts to mean something.
Most of the people there know I’m not a social creature. Until I could comfortably talk to a computer, I barely talked. I build things. I think. I listen. But in that room, I didn’t have to translate myself. For once, I wasn’t the guy explaining why I’m fascinated by language models or quantum cognition—I was just part of the current. That’s new for me. Weird. Wonderful.
I try to learn something every day—every minute if I can. Whether it’s learning, meta-learning, or teaching, it’s all the same engine: curiosity. And truthfully, I like being the dumbest guy in the room. That’s not false modesty—it’s how I stay sharp. You learn faster when everyone around you is brilliant.
That’s what this gathering felt like: a collaborative field of curiosity. The conversation flowed. Nobody glazed over when acronyms hit the table. Ideas bounced, intersected, mutated. It was the best talk I’ve had in a long time.
So—to the one who set the table, you know who you are—thank you. For trusting the signal. For pulling together minds that weren’t supposed to align but somehow did.
And to whatever cosmic scheduler or Jedi-for-hire handles these improbable alignments—cheers. You earned your cosmic fist bump.
Here’s to The SCIFF—and to the invisible architecture that keeps arranging the right people in the right rooms at the right time.