About the Author

A natural philosopher, Bret Alan Hughes has been focused on deep, fundamental wisdom for over twenty-five years. After growing up in Santa Barbara, Bret worked in the computer-graphics (CG) industry, where he learned how programming can be used to understand and manage great complexity. In New Zealand, for example, he worked on The Lord of the Rings films. Bret was responsible for making their CG production as efficient as possible. This built up the research, understanding, organization, and documentation skills that he needed in order to write his first book, Wisdom in Perspective, and helped to win three Academy Awards for visual effects. However, now that he has used history, science, and reason in his book to answer some of the biggest questions in life, including what Nobel Laureate Francis Crick called, “the major unsolved problem in biology,” Bret is now helping to get people to see the gross injustice of the larger sociopolitical situation (MostCrucial.Info) and helping to empower “We the People” to achieve widespread social justice (GVP).

Bio

The wielder of Excalibur, the sword that was pulled from the stone of the earth, is, as you can see, Bret Alan Hughes. A “Santa Barbarian,” Bret was born on October 29, 1969, at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara, California. Bret’s parents divorced when he was about five. However, each parent got married again, so Bret felt that he had just gained more parents, not lost any. Further, he very much enjoyed his Dad’s and step mom’s role as vacation parents, in Texas. His Dad and step mom often took him water-skiing and, as his Dad was an airline pilot, vacationing at many places in the United States and Mexico.

In grade school at Adams, Bret loved playing tackle football with his friends and was quite popular, though he was hardly concerned with academics. He also seemed to enjoy the challenge of beating the school bus home by taking off running right after school was out (or was this a statement about his attraction to school¿). Bret often went boogie boarding, snorkeling, and sometimes even spearfishing at Henry’s Beach with his friends.

To his shock, Bret was forced to repeat 3^rd grade: his Mom held him back because his grades, while passing, were not what she thought would propel him sufficiently in school. Later, Bret also lost most of his friends when his Mom decided, based on “knife-fight” fears, to send him to La Colina Junior High, instead of the usual La Cumbre. It was a bit of a foreign time for Bret, but at least he still had his neighborhood friends that he very much enjoyed hanging out with.

Awkward times continued for Bret in high school, at San Marcos. When his mother divorced for the second time, a type of escapism found him. He started getting in significant trouble in school and with the law. His brother, Jon, did stellar in school, but was pretty much an “archetypal nerd” (in Bret’s words). However, by the 10^th grade, Bret realized that his behavior was jeopardizing his future, and so he devoted his attention to academics, turning his 1.0 GPA to a 4.0 GPA by his high school graduation in 1988.

Bret seemed to find a new love in dedication and study. Getting an A in all classes consumed him, nearly accomplishing that goal in his two years at Santa Barbara City College. Computers and aeronautics fascinated Bret, who felt that he could program computers to design the most efficient airplanes possible by utilizing artificial intelligence.

With this in mind, in 1990 Bret transferred to Cal Poly, who had the very best undergraduate aeronautical engineering program he could find. Cal Poly was a great learning experience, socially and academically, though his GPA fell about half a grade point. Bret became a DJ for KCPR, a legendary college radio station (for playing eclectic music). Bret created his own weekly industrial radio show, Industrial Distortion, where he found an outlet for some of his hard-core music affinities, particularly for Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, Front 242, Numb, and Hocico.

Eventually, Bret got disenchanted with aeronautical engineering, which he blames on his senior-year trips to large aeronautical companies like Boeing and McDonnell Douglas: “everybody always seemed to be on a coffee break.” What also disturbed him was that, during employment interviews, Bret found that some companies were already using computers to intelligently design their aircraft. Worse, to do what Bret wanted to do, to design the overall structure of an aircraft, the usual path was only for the top five percent of the employees and it took them over ten years to get to that position. In response, Bret successfully petitioned to pick up a computer science minor in his last year at Cal Poly, with the thought of possibly changing his career path.

On college graduation, in 1996, Lockheed, Bret’s favorite aerospace company, made Bret a reasonable job offer. But, by that time, Bret had acquired other plans. Bret dedicated his time to trying to get hired by his favorite computer graphics company, Alias|Wavefront. It eventually worked! Through hard work, Bret made some nice contributions there and then got hired by Square USA in Honolulu in 1998. The surfing he began in Santa Barbara would continue in Hawaii!

A year and a half later, Bret had done solid work for Square and even applied to the 1999 MBA program at Harvard. Harvard did not work out, though Bret felt that he was probably close to getting in with a 94 percentile in the GMAT (but with likely too little work experience), and neither did Square: Bret’s innocence of thinking that there were practically no “evil” people in serious companies was broken by some nasty politics that he accidentally stepped into — some seriously scary stuff!

Bret ejected to San Rafael, California, in 1999 to dedicate his time to trying to get a job at his favorite film computer graphics company, ILM. However, he made a serious interview blunder and floundered thereafter for about a year and a half. It was in this time, though, that the inception of his magnum opus came to him: a book that provides universal perspectives and, hence, ultimate wisdom. Bret was shocked that he could not find any such book in the public library, and felt that such a book should really exist: a new dream and goal dawned.

Resorting to contacting his old surf buddy from Santa Barbara, Eric “satan” Saindon, (calling on the power of …!) Bret got hired in 2001 by Weta Digital in Wellington, New Zealand. There he found some good friends and did some great work, eventually being promoted to pipeline engineering supervisor, effecting the efficiency of the computer graphics production with scripting tools, production conventions, and automated systems. Although Bret had in his hands the very real possibility of having a fantastic home, wife, and job, he felt deep in his heart that his true calling lay elsewhere: in his first book, about ultimate wisdom, that he began in late 2001—initially called … The Book of Wisdom.

After completing work on The Lord of the Rings films, in 2003 Bret left New Zealand for Santa Barbara to complete his mission. By 2005, he finished his book in a beautiful leather-bound and gold-tooled incarnation. The book was produced with the highest standards of professional fact checking, editing, printing, and binding. The final title proclaimed Wisdom in Perspective.

After trying unsuccessfully to get this book’s proposal accepted by major literary agents, Bret took a hard look at his book in 2006. Although he got some great testimonials for his book, even from a Nobel Laureate, and was confident that his book correctly answered some of the most difficult questions in philosophy, including what human consciousness is and what the fundamental basis of life is, he felt that his book was perhaps ahead of its time (not written to meet the consciousness of the current time), was not very stylistically written, and, being about ultimate and not practical wisdom, was a bit nebulous: most people did not know what to make if it.

Bret took these matters to heart, and though he was financially just about at his limit, his appraisal of the potential good that his book and his ideas could do society drove him, in 2007, despite sacrifices of the more “superficial” things in life, to begin redeveloping his book so that a maximum number of people could immediately enjoy it as well as gather great meaning from it—so began his new quest: the quest for his optimum opus, Enlightenment 2.0.

For this new book, Bret needed to research human rights, government, and politics. Delving deeply into this last topic, however, soon found him, he says, feeling like Han Solo must have felt when Obi-Wan Kenobi said: “That’s no moon…” Bret then described what he discovered in his studies as follows.

“We are now facing a much worse threat than the world has ever faced before. And don’t think terrorism, Middle Eastern wars, or global warming—though these are extremely serious. The threat of which I speak is enabled through governmental and corporate powers, conflated in a bed of corruption and hidden under blankets of propaganda and sheets of shallow news. The true threat is from the masters of these powers: people unbound by any governmental constitution, social contract, or any ideas of justice, compassion, or morality. As shocking as it might sound, they are sociopathic supremacists, literally seeking to kill more than five billion people and to enslave the rest.”

Becoming a political activist in 2008, Bret has written the MostCrucial.Info, to bring together the multifarious pieces of the evidentiary puzzle—mostly documentaries, reports, lectures, books, and summaries—to help people see the big picture of what is going on in this larger sociopolitical world, and do something about it. Bret indicated that, in writing these Web pages, he felt like Morpheus when he said to Neo: “You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. Remember—all I am offering is the truth, nothing more.”

Shocked by how propagandized and immunized the vast majority of people are from the most crucial information about their sociopolitical situation—about being duped by self-called elites—Bret decided to put his pipeline engineering skills to good use. He is now developing the “Grassroots Vorpal Pipeline.” This system, he contends, will produce the organizing power that the people need in order to put the government and the wealthy in their proper place: not the rulers of society but merely a small part of it.