Demi Pietchell interview
Demi Pietchell interview
Hey friends and readers,
Today I got a special blog for you. This is an interview with one of the best and brightest bloggers on Substack and blogging in general, Demi Pietchell,
.No more from me, enjoy her words.
Demi, thank you for doing this interview. Let’s get right into it.
Thank you so much for inviting me to take part in your interview series, Alexander. I’m honored!
To begin, can you briefly tell anyone reading this who is Demi Pietchell?
I am the founder of The Starfire Codes and the former executive producer of the Comcastro podcast. My background is in film and television production, publicity, public relations, digital marketing, new media, metaphysics, and research. I received both a BFA in Film and Television and an MPS in Interactive Telecommunications (ITP) from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. I spent time working and living in Hollywood, shifted into digital marketing and content creation/management after that, and then went off on my own to pursue my own projects.
Why did you choose Substack as your current platform?
As an independent writer seeking truths beyond mainstream narratives, I have faced ongoing content moderation barriers across dominant platforms like Twitter for tackling taboo topics candidly. After years building an audience, I suddenly found myself increasingly censored covering controversial current events and restricted from reaching even my existing followers. I joined Substack in order to have a home for my work where I wouldn’t be subjected to these kinds of practices.
When I started investigating puzzling nationwide reports of pallets of bricks mysteriously left in protest hotspots prior to violence, my inquiries drew outrage accusations. Establishment gatekeepers rushed to “debunk” my documentation as “disinformation” through decontextualized spin rather than addressing factual evidence on its merits. Shortly after, while covering doctor Dr. Andreas Noack's suspicious death, my direct quotes of a presentation he had given triggered my permanent account suspension from Twitter with no hope of recourse or appeal. This was a 100K follower account I had built from the start of Twitter.
After I was able to regain my account when Twitter came under new management, I discovered my followers were not being notified of my posts unless I used the word “shadowban” in them. I was being throttled by opaque algorithmic filters. Rather than waste precious time self-censoring to appease arbitrary speech governors or retweeting myself ad nauseam just to gain traction, I have ceased using Twitter/X.
Reach suppression functionally silences dissent without recourse. Other independent writers have reported similar patterns of censorship. For speaking blunt truths at the fringes, the marginalized now face compounding campaigns to erase our perspectives from the manufactured Overton Window even as dangers have festered that could have been averted through openness and honesty - a sobering lesson for anyone committed to telling the truth or asking questions those in power do not want asked. I continue to examine issues threatening human sovereignty while engaging in alternative ecosystems rooted in authenticity rather than authoritarian domination.
I am impressed by the way the Substack founders handled the recent SAN attack, I am very happy with my decision to join the platform and remain here, as well as the deeply caring and thoughtful community I have found here since Notes was launched last year.
Over the past few years, I have written about these experiences on Substack, including my analysis of how these tactics are being utilized to maintain authoritarian control. If anyone is curious about that, here are the links to my posts that relate to these topics:
My story:
Further analysis:
Your blog is very popular and you have been inspiring many people. What is the prime motivator that helps you to be so consistent and productive?
Thank you. I’m honored to be able to write consistent channeled messages each day to help others to receive the messages they need from spirit in order to stay growth-focused and shift their consciousness away from focusing upon unwanted timelines. I am simply a conduit for these messages, so when people tell me that the messages have resonated with them, I take this as confirmation that I got out of the way of delivering the message and have performed my function correctly, so I value very much getting that kind of feedback.
Part of my mission is to inspire others to open themselves up to expanded consciousness with the knowledge that what I do is not an ability specific to me but something which everyone is able to do, something which is part of our human birthright. My intention is to inspire readers to explore their own connection with source consciousness as part of our shared spiritual capacities. If I am inspiring my readers to explore their connection with the collective unconscious, source consciousness, and the divine, I feel like I’ve accomplished a great deal of what I have set out to do.
Beyond channeled wisdom, my blog documents my own independent research across topics mainstream narratives ignore. I curate my own informational discoveries to inspire fellow truth-seekers to ask questions and think critically about the world we've been presented and the ways in which that narrative differs from reality. One of the original ideas I had in creating a blog was that I wanted it to serve as a repository for all of the research I was doing, as a space in which I would be able to house and explain the topics I was investigating as they came to me. This was initially meant to cater to and inspire autodidacts to do their own research using mine as an inspirational launch point. Despite having advanced degrees, I have always been an autodidact at heart and I have always prioritized independent learning. If I am not constantly learning, I feel like something is missing. My heart is in transmuting knowledge and experience into wisdom. I wanted to put my thoughts out into the world and begin to create community around that.
Professionally, I was responsible for managing millions of dollars in content over the years I was working in digital marketing. I apply the lessons I learned in that space to what I do day to day in order to remain consistent and productive. Additionally, as someone who is self-employed and needs to be responsible for my own self-motivation, I will tune my activities to my mood. I focus on a lot of different types of content. Some days I might feel like writing readings, other days I might want to dive into new articles, and some days I want to read what others have written or binge-watch documentaries. Whatever mood I’m in, there’s a task I am able to perform, and I build that into how I manage my time. As long as it’s all getting done, I allow my mood and my curiosity to guide my tasks so that my work never has to feel like work.
In your own words, what is the key to happiness?
Happiness is self-created rather than granted by external forces. Our emotions act as an inner guidance system, indicating whether our life experiences align with our true soul purposes. By paying attention to these emotional signals, we can catch misalignments early and realign our choices accordingly, preventing bigger issues down the line.
Essentially, emotions like joy show we are taking actions resonant with our higher calling. Discomfort signals something is off that requires a conscious pivot back into integrity with ourselves. Attuning to these sensations empowers responding mindfully rather than reacting rashly until clarity and flow states naturally restore.
When we harmonize external expression with internal truths, we tap into our highest creative potential, which is like unlocking a metaphorical "Konami code" for manifesting realities previously believed impossible. But this requires radical self-honesty and cultivating stillness to connect with inner wisdom beyond the noise of materialist pressures insisting compromise.
By using our emotions as a sort of integrity guidance system in this way, we can discern which roads further our divine purpose rather than create a situation where we are denying our own inherent divine essence.
When we are aligned with our higher selves, we are using joy as a compass to show us the direction our souls want to go. Conversely, discomfort is there to show us which direction not to go. Employing this lens to optimize our lives brings a sense of clarity.
How do you define success?
I define true success as aligning every area of life with one's ikigai or deepest soul purpose. Society tends to glorify conditions like fame and wealth, while adhering to the concept of ikigai means discovering your unique talents and fully dedicating yourself to sharing them to uplift others.
Ikigai is a Japanese concept that means "reason for being." It stands conceptually at the intersection of four primary elements:
1. What do you love? What are your passions?
2. What are you good at? What are your talents?
3. How do your talents and skills provide value in service to others?
4. What does the world need? How are your passions and talents contributing to others to fulfill those needs?
When you find work or activities that combine all four elements - enabling you to use your unique gifts and passions in service of meeting needs in the world - it leads to immense satisfaction and meaning. Ikigai goes beyond surface happiness by connecting your special talents and interests with a deeper life purpose.
Structuring major life areas like vocation, lifestyle, relationships, hobbies, etc., around these four pillars provides a framework for fulfillment and mindful intentionality in how you spend your limited time. Ikigai is ultimately about discovering your dharma or soul's destiny and wholly dedicating yourself to manifesting it.
When vocations allow channeling your essence into service, they become flowing expressions of self-actualization that no amount of compensation could ever replace. Relationships thriving on authentic communication and vulnerability feel nourishing too. Orienting lifestyle choices around meeting core physiological needs - like healthy food, regular exercise, adequate sleep and stress relief practices - maximizes sustainable wellbeing. This prevents chasing short-term consumerist remedies for cumulative distress building up over time from imbalance.
In other words, building daily routines focused on health fundamentals naturally creates vitality and happiness absent band-aid solutions trying to compensate for accumulating issues caused by misalignment in how we spend energy.
Across all facets, from career to community, recreation to spirituality itself, seeking soul resonance grounds life in the present rather than encouraging us to fall into the trap of chasing dissatisfaction perpetually. This liberates us from futile quests to possess permanent happiness through possessions or achievements, and when combined with remaining cognizant about using our emotional compasses as intended, we are able to move into the highest possible expressions of the timelines we inhabit as we shift through attention, intention, and action toward better and better outcomes.
Gradually reducing activities and commitments misaligned with your deeper purpose, while increasing those serving your essence, builds a life of fulfillment beyond superficial status. Incrementally structuring your days around soul-inspired purpose rather than egoic tendencies maximizes meaning and success defined internally rather than through external markers.
What outlook do you have about the future and why?
We participate in co-creating the realities we experience through the focus of our consciousness. Even when circumstances feel rigid, every moment contains branching possibilities and potential timelines awaiting our selection.
If we feel dissatisfied with the trajectory events are taking, this signals that it's time to consciously pivot our focus and creative intent toward newly clarified goals aligned with our deepest values.
Within the present possibilities before us, we retain power to deliberately shift direction. Our pathway forward remains malleable, determined by where we choose to place our attention and energy. By taking responsibility for this co-creative influence, we can steer toward timelines manifesting our highest visions.
Rather than focusing attention and intention on unwanted manifestations that breed more unwanted consequences, consciously pivoting awareness to preferred timelines ensures that these are the timelines we experience. Redirecting this kind of empowered clarity into each thought, emotion, and action will trigger a realignment inwardly that ripples outward into the external. If we are dedicated to choosing uplifting outcomes, we chart new courses, and we can transform static “fate” into dynamic flow states aligned with our deepest dreams.
Sometimes we require stark contrasts between intensified shadows and envisioned light before recognizing our creative authority to cancel our own limiting belief programs by aligning with higher truth through disciplined perception. Suffering stems from fixating upon falsities that only serve to tie our own hands to reshape the building blocks of perceived reality.
We still need to take action on the outcomes that we want to manifest, but in taking that action, we are demonstrating to the universe that this is the direction in which we would like to go, and the universe will respond by placing breadcrumbs on our paths that will lead us in the directions of our preferred timelines.
All timelines are playing out concurrently. We just don’t experience them that way when we are acting as compartmentalized consciousness separated from one another and the All. All timelines are open to us. Manifestation is not about drawing material objects and 3D situations to yourself; it’s about relocating your consciousness into the timeline you choose to experience.
You are a big defender of free speech, a very important issue. What is your suggestion to those who are afraid to speak up?
When censorship intimidates people into self-silencing, it can distort discourse and breed unintended backlashes over time. Suppressed ideas often intensify unchecked underground before erupting later in more extreme forms. But small acts of truth-telling in the face of such repression hold power. Every person courageously voicing perspectives expands possibilities for others too wary of consequences to speak up. Part of the way censorship works is through intimidation. If the unafraid continue to speak, they will inspire those who are hesitant to come forward as well. Each voice inspiring another can start snowball effects.
So we must stabilize the foundations of free expression before too many concessions accumulate. Even calmly questioning dubious claims in everyday conversations makes space for nuance often excluded from polarized debates. Driving ideas underground only creates backlash by marginalizing entire swaths of the population who are then outraged because they are not being heard and they feel like they are not valued as contributing members of society. Being intellectually exiled makes people feel like they have a need to fight back, driving escalation that could have easily been averted through open discourse.
When you remain quiet, you are contributing to an environment where the abuse of our civil liberties can run rampant. Speaking up propels open discourse and brings clarity to all ideas, whether those ideas are viable or not. The more minds holding space to understand alternate views instead of attacking them, the less reactive those who are feeling unheard become. Preventing cycles of escalation starts with listening first before lecturing, prioritizing reason over rage.
I recently gave a speech on this and more at Rachel Haywire’s second Cultural Futurist salon, Cabaret of Secrets. The following is a summary of some of the main topics I covered:
Let’s get to know you a little bit better. What are your favorite hobbies and activities?
My wide-ranging curiosity drives both personal pursuits and professional projects. Biohacking optimization techniques enhance energy, helping maintain intense focus while working long hours. Voracious reading across the many topics I cover within the blog, including philosophy, forbidden technology and archaeology, metaphysics, consciousness research, etc., informs my writing and my podcast topics. Time at the beach swimming, meditating, and practicing sun-gazing at sunrise purges stress so creativity flows back refreshed. Studying patterns in energy, consciousness, and divination provides symbolic insight and further fuels my curiosity.
Overall, I structure days to harmonize outlets for intense imagination with grounded vitality maintenance. Spending time with loved ones and pursuing leisure activities directly replenish stores depleted by intense focus sessions. Play and work merge as dedication to craft becomes a flow state for its own sake, driven not by force but by fascination.
Output originality requires input novelty - so I indulge omnivorous interests, knowing synthesis yields breakthroughs. My goal is channeling personal gifts to serve collective awakening. But cultivating talent requires replenishing mind, body, and soul first so burnout gets transcended sustainably. Maintaining work/life harmony generates mutually elevating abundance - each interest feeds the next creatively.
What are your favorite books? And which would you recommend to your readers?
Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates by Tom Robbins
South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff
The Forever Angels by PMH Atwater
What changes would you like to see in blogging? On Substack?
Within public discourse, we all benefit by uplifting voices that have been excluded from dominant platforms. When bloggers amplify each other's work directly through grassroots sharing, marginalized concepts gain traction, spreading rhizomatically. Supporting those tackling "third rail topics" despite censorship risks fosters an ecosystem where taboo truths no longer face suppression. Instead they attract engaged audiences organically. Controversial conversations, once shunned, can then thrive. Insights enrich all sides trying to understand complex issues.
As this community ethos spreads, individual writings become part of a far larger movement, raising consciousness beyond limits imposed by institutional gatekeepers and corporate media narratives. The solution to countering agendas of division is unity among independent voices creating alternatives. Readers sense integrity in willing transparency, especially when writers care about elevating understanding itself rather than personal status alone. Sincerity held in common builds trust. Shared hopes, values, and integrity become apparent despite differing details on complex debates.
When bloggers support each other by supporting awareness of the overall marketplace of ideas, a rising tide lifts all ships, flowing freely across digital networks and resisting control. Thoughtful engagement around complicated issues grows through leading by example in order to empower rather than through attacking opposition. Progress depends on lifting those rendered voiceless. The path forward is in laying the groundwork for new connectivity matrices where information that has been suppressed elsewhere finds receptive audiences who openly consider marginalized perspectives through reason and compassion. Instead of demanding conformity, we can foster community and shun divisive coercion. This begins by showing up for each other and supporting one another’s work in any way we can.
What is one inspirational quote that has been important in your life? Let’s finish with that.
I have two. They kind of go together, so I’ll give you both….
“If you lack the iron and the fizz to take control of your own life, if you insist on leaving your fate to the gods, then the gods will repay your weakness by having a grin or two at your expense. Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked. The dull and prosaic will be granted adventures that will dice their central nervous systems like an onion, romantic dreamers will end up in the rope yard. You may protest that it is too much to ask of an uneducated fifteen-year-old girl that she defy her family, her society, her weighty cultural and religious heritage in order to pursue a dream that she doesn't really understand. Of course it is asking too much. The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.” - Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.
“And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.
“And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.” - Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Wonderful interview Alexander! Demi, is an incredible lady with a beautiful magical heart! Thank you so much!
Great interview. I just love the Substack community. It's as though dissenting voices have finally found a home.