About Me

My Story

Trevor Nestor is currently a graduate level researcher, sci-
entist, and AI engineer at Microsoft, has previously worked

at Meta, Boeing, Blue Origin, as a contractor for the NSA

with a TS/SCI, on the US Anti-Ballistic Missile Defense Sys-
tem, at startups, at banks, and has studied the topics of

lattice cryptography, controversial theories of conscious-
ness, and theories of quantum gravity for over 10 years.

Starting as an undergraduate at the University of Califor-
nia, Berkeley, Trevor was a student of fields medalist Dr.

Richard Borcherds who specializes in string theory and
lattice maths.

During his travels, Trevor traveled off-grid in a trailer
he built as a digital nomad where his uncanny adventures
influenced his work.

​

Trevor sits in a dimly lit coffee shop near the UC Berke-
ley campus, his laptop open to a string of code. At 28, he’s

dressed in the unofficial uniform of Silicon Valley engi-
neers: a faded band T-shirt (his father’s punk rock group,

*Fatal Error*), jeans, and the tired smile of someone who
has spent too many nights debugging algorithms. But

his story is no ordinary tech-bro narrative. Trevor has be-
come an accidental chronicler of millennial angst, blend-
ing computer science jargon with painfully relatable tales

of romantic misadventures, familial dysfunction, and a
generation’s search for stability in an unstable world.
Trevor’s origin story reads like a Wes Anderson script
directed by David Lynch. His father, a leather-clad punk
rocker, wrote subversive anthems about repression and

nonconformity while his mother, a devoutly religious tradi-
tional homemaker, enforced strict creationist conservative

beliefs and banned secular music in their home. “Imagine
growing up where your dad’s band practices in the garage,
but he has to whisper the lyrics because Mom might hear
the word ‘hell,’” Trevor says, sipping a black coffee. “It
was like living inside a Schrödinger’s box of rebellion and
guilt.”

This dichotomy, he theorizes, shaped his attraction

to what he calls “quantum women” — partners whose un-
predictability mirrors the chaos of his upbringing. “In

physics, quantum tunneling lets particles pass through
barriers they shouldn’t. My dating life feels like that: a
series of impossible probabilities crashing through my
emotional firewall that nobody bothered to tell me how to
navigate - I can’t tell what my role even was supposed to

be, or if marriage is supposed to be an oppressive institu-

tion designed to control the autonomy of women or if I’m
supposed to think of relationships with commitment and
monogamy in mind.” Coming from Simi Valley, California,
a conservative haven which contained the Ronald Reagan

presidential library and the site of the worst nuclear disas-
ter in US history which released more radiation than the

Three Mile Island disaster, Trevor then graduated at the
top of his class and attended the University of California,
Berkeley.

At the university, Trevor found himself thrust into
what he describes as “the noise floor of human experience,”
like "falling into a wormhole but never emerging on the
other end." In fact, during welcome week at UC Berkeley,
students do a dance to the "time warp," an annual ritual,
and then once again when they graduate. Trevor never
had the opportunity to do it again, after initially dropping

out when the campus devolved into protests where stu-
dents deposed the chancellor of the university by force

after a year of 500 million dollar budget cuts to the UC

system. The campus’s notorious counterculture — com-
munist professors screening gay adult films in lectures,

anarchist collectives staging protests against chain restau-
rants, floormmates scaling buildings nude — became both

a crucible and a metaphor for his internal chaos and tur-
bulence. “It was like my code kept hitting segmentation

faults,” he says, referencing a common programming error.

​

“Every day, my worldview *segfaulted*.” But the real
education, he says, came from learning to navigate a world
of symbolic contradictions where logic often fails. “You
can’t debug human emotion. Love isn’t a deterministic

algorithm — it’s more like. . . a blockchain with no con-
sensus mechanism.” In one interaction, Trevor describes

taking a homeless person out to lunch named Rainbow.
"He was trying to tell me that people connect with each
other wirelessly, but I tried to tell him that’s technically
infeasible when the electromagnetic waves in the brain are
too weak to propagate beyond the bone tissue of the skull."
Trevor’s romantic résumé could fill a cringe-comedy

anthology. There was the high school actress who am-
bushed him in a movie theater (“like a SQL injection at-
tack on my boundaries”), the Soviet-era ballroom dancer

who quoted Marx during a tango (“she had a Red Army
firewall”), and the anime-obsessed neighbor who crawled

toward him (“like a DNS spoofing attack”). His most in-
famous tale involves a Risk board game session that es-
calated into what he calls “a multiplayer game of emo-
tional DDoS.” When a friend’s sibling pounced on him

afterwards mid-victory lap (he’d conquered Australia, a
classic Risk strategy), Trevor froze — a response he now

attributes to “buffer overflow in the amygdala.” “I’m basi-
cally a proof-of-concept for why engineers shouldn’t date

without a runtime environment,” he jokes, though his eyes
betray a flicker of vulnerability.

Trevor’s professional journey mirrors his romantic
chaos. After the Occupy Cal protests, he felt disoriented,
"it was like playing a video game that glitches up after you
miss a main quest item, where after you are left roaming
around the map aimlessly messing around" he commented.

Initially searching for engineering positions, Trevor re-
ceived a rescinded offer from defense contractor General

Dynamics (“they did something sketchy — I got a 2,000

dollars hush-money check”), he endured a surreal inter-
view with an intelligence consultant in Virginia who grilled

him on Java encapsulation while ranting about political
conspiracies. “She asked if I was ‘rebellious.’ I said I’m
more of a Turingmachine— linear, predictable. She ghosted

me harder than a null pointer exception, and I didn’t understand why.”

​

Stranded one winter in Iowa after one biomedical startup
he worked for ran out of funding, he was discovered by
an NSA contractor. "After Snowden, I didn’t really feel
very comfortable with NSA relationships, but I realized if

I didn’t try it I would freeze to death" Trevor says, referenc-
ing how he had been living in a small trailer he built to live

off-grid at the time. Later with his TS/SCI clearance, like
The Matrix, Trevor was approached by an FBI agent with
the last name Smith to become a special agent, and refused

the position after criticizing glitches on the web forms pre-
venting signing up for the PSI testing required. Trevor

lamented on the loss of autonomy that joining the agency
would imply and the sorts of coverups he would be involved

in. Later Trevor was banned from CU Boulder after dis-
cussing the possibility of breaking lattice cryptography

with NIST officials without wearing a mask.

"During the

covid pandemic, at the time I was also emailed by the Na-
tional Media Exploitation Center for a position, since I had

a security clearance, an agency apparently opened by the
Bush administration, I asked them why we need to exploit
the media at all and told them that might be dishonest and
I never heard back from them again" he explained.
His breakthrough came via a chance encounter at a
Phoenix science center, where a woman named Aurora

from a flying car startup handed him a business card. He

spent some time developing autonomous avionics soft-
ware for Aurora Flight Sciences, a research and develop-
ment subsidiary of Boeing pioneering urban air mobility

and flying cars, where he was let go after reporting safety

concerns in the "Safe-to-Mate Procedure" hardware-in-
loop simulation (HILSIM) doc. “It’s poetic,” he says. “I

helped machines fly because I still hadn’t figured out how
to land emotionally.”

What makes Trevor’s story resonate isn’t its absurdity
— it’s its universality. In an era where Tinder dates feel like
agile sprints and job security is a myth, with the messy and

unconventional nature of humanity,k his blend of tech-
nical metaphors and raw honesty strikes a chord. As a

self-published essay and academic work, Trevor blends
tech, science, and philosophy into what readers describe
a "kernel panic meets Kierkegaard” vibe, forcing us to all
re-examine the frameworks and power structures we all
live within.

“He’s the love child of Neal Stephenson and Jenny Slate,”

says one Stanford sociologist studying millennial narra-
tives. “His stories expose the collision between Silicon

Valley’s cult of logic and capitalistic contractual thinking

and a generation raised in cultural and existential uncer-
tainty that it created.” “Life’s complexity is NP-hard, or

even worse, like EXPTIME” Trevor says, referencing com-
putational complexity theory. “You can’t solve it perfectly,

but maybe the solution is on the spectrum of the maximally
degenerate self-adjoint Riemannian Dirac-like Dilation
operator for a topologically protected state after looping it
through a spinfoam network. Or at least I like to

think it can be used to write a funny error log.”
Trevor explains that there is a deeper meaning to the
randomness, like a kind of magic: "Its crazy like I was
seeing all sorts of synchronicities along the way. When I
was inbetween jobs, trapped in the Colonel Pride lounge at
Iowa state university during the winter, I was told by the
police that I could stay at the Memorial Union as late as I
wanted, but that if I fell asleep, they would kick me out of
the building into the freezing cold - where temperatures
were literally measurably colder than the arctic."

"I called them the "dream police." Trevor continued.
"While doing job applications late at night in the lounge
there was an old man who gave me a spindle of thread
telling me that the brain uses quantum physics to recall
and put together words in linguistics - in Greek the thread
of Ariadne in the myth of Theseus is called the ’cloo’ which
forms the basis of the English word ’clue’ which inspired
the algorithm I discuss in my paper to approach lattice

cryptography" Trevor explains. "These idiosyncratic sign-
posts gave me direction on my journey to form my own

meaning outside of institutional power structures."

"Like you have the braiding operations, an infinite di-
mensional labyrinth you are navigating, like a matrix -

that’s life, you have to leverage the fact that the labyrinth
is changing around you as you navigate it to find your way
through it - it’s part deterministic and part probabilistic.
It’s like an undecidable problem - who you are and what

you want to be, it’s like a quantum Markovian decision pro-
cess, like the halting problem in computer science." Trevor

explains. "To be fully authentic, you have to go off-grid,
in a sense, but you also need to work well with others, so

you need to also maybe play along to a certain degree with
the madness and contradictory nature of the collective
behaviors of others."

Explaining the paradox of freedom, Trevor elaborates:
"You both have free will and are also susceptible to your
environmental conditions - you have rules you are taught
you should follow to be cooperative with others, built on

formal logic by contradiction, but also you need to be au-
thentic and be true to yourself - which is a intuitionist

logic based on subjective constructivism. The labyrinth

corridors are in superpositions around you at the periph-
ery of your awareness, and as you traverse the problem

space, the labyrinth changes itself as a result, until things

are aligned driven to a fixed point where things come to-
gether. You can actually use this to your advantage to tri-
angulate solutions to problems which otherwise would be

impossible. Bizarrely, I later confirmed these ideas were

consistent with mathematics and physical theories, posit-
ing the existence of a ’Minotaur’ math object, like in the

Greek myth. Many years later I found that there was one
math object called the ’Centaur,’ with properties inverse to
which would be what I was attempting to describe in the
myth of Theseus Minotaur in the labyrinth analogy."

As the café empties, Trevor closes his laptop— a sticker
on the back with a cat reads “CTRL+ALT+DELETE YOUR
EXPECTATIONS” — and shrugs. “Maybe my work is just
a debug console for my life, and it looks like it’s once again
stuck compiling breaking with build errors. Dating, like
public key cryptography, doesn’t seem so hard when I hold
the private key. I have goals whose solutions are easy to

verify, but NP-hard or macroscopically harder to algorithmically compute.

But hey, if my segfaults help someone
else’s code run smoother? That’s a feature, not a bug.”