The Unapproved
History

This is the chronological account. The synthesis is The Anatomy. The primary sources are The Record.

Everything here comes straight from the messages, collected in The Record. If I state something as a fact, there's a document behind it. Where I quote someone, the full email is in the archive with the headers intact. I'm not asking you to take my word for any of it. Go check me.

— Josh Wolf

I was doom-scrolling TikTok in early 2024 when Sol Smith's content stopped me. He was an ADHD and ASD life coach with real credentials (MFA, EDS, MS), making short videos about neurodivergent experience that named things I'd never heard anyone say out loud. I started crying. Not at anything sad. Just at being recognized.

I wanted to hire him. I didn't have the money. So I did what I do: I figured out another way in.

I'd been working in AI tools for a couple of years by then. I was Chief Evangelist at Pickaxe, a platform for building custom ChatGPT-powered tools. Sol had a YouTube channel full of videos about autism and ADHD coaching. The combination was obvious to me. I could build him an AI coaching tool on his own content, something that would extend his reach, support his clients, and give me something real to trade for sessions.

I reached out in late March 2024. Before we'd even agreed on terms, I built him something to prove the point.

The tool was called Solair. I built it by feeding a dozen of Sol's YouTube videos into a custom GPT and training it to answer in his coaching style. I sent it to him on March 30, 2024, three days before we'd formalized anything.

His response: "I've gotta say — that's wild." He asked if it could become an app.

On April 3 we made it official. I'd build Sol an AI tool studio over sixteen weeks: chatbots, a coaching intake questionnaire, resource guides tailored for neurodivergent clients. Sol would give me sixteen weeks of coaching in exchange. He issued coupon code ALTPAY for a 100% discount. We both put the terms in writing.

I was also publicly excited about it. On April 24, I posted Sol's community teaser video to my Instagram with the caption: "I'm so excited about the work I'm doing with my client Professor Sol. It looks like he's not trying to reveal much yet, but we have a lot of exciting things we are working on to put together neurodivergent community."

The video showed Sol saying "a project I'm kind of excited about right now" with the text overlay ProfessorSol.com/community. That URL was already live. He'd shared the skeleton of that page with me on April 22.

While all this was happening I was building something in person too. One Facebook post in late April announcing a local neurodivergent social club, and I had 25 members within days. That energy fed straight into a bigger vision I was developing for Sol, a platform I called SolSpace.

I sent him the full SolSpace overview on May 1. It was ambitious: AI tools, community forums, a resource hub, infrastructure to connect the digital side to in-person meetups. I headlined it with a Rage Against the Machine lyric, "This is for the people of the sun."

Sol: "This is dope. I was considering having a meetup in my area." A few days later: "I do think that you're onto something."

Meanwhile I delivered the SolSpace Support Guide chatbot on May 6. Other tools were in progress. Sessions were happening weekly. The project was real and I was doing the work.

Then on May 25, Sol sent a long email that ended it without quite saying so. He was under pressure. He'd lost his job, his wife had broken her arm, his coaching revenue had dried up. He was honest about all of it. The key line:

I replied the same day and tried to clarify. SolSpace was the long-term vision, not what the work-trade was actually about. The trade was AI tools, and right then there were at least two bots sitting there waiting on his feedback. I offered to strip it down to fifteen minutes of his time a week.

He never followed up on the bots. The work-trade ended there. No formal close, no acknowledgment of what I'd delivered, no settling up. It just stopped.

I want to be clear about what that May 25 email actually was. Sol wasn't firing me. He wasn't ending the coaching. He was telling me something more specific. The project we'd been building together, the one I'd spent two months designing, building tools for, and promoting on my own feeds, wasn't something he could use anymore.

He also said something that stuck with me: "I know that I'm hard to work with — I've been told so more times than I can count." He said he needed someone who could work independently with minimal input from him.

That's exactly what I'd been doing. Every tool I built had been waiting for fifteen minutes of his feedback. I'd structured the entire engagement to be as low-friction for him as possible.

I don't think he was acting in bad faith. I think he was overwhelmed and genuinely couldn't engage with what I was building. But the trade ended without the trade being settled, and less than four weeks later I understood why.

On June 19, 2024, less than a month after Sol told me he couldn't use the work, I saw the announcement. The NeuroSpicy Community was launching on Skool.

It was the SolSpace vision. Not identical, but close enough, and the timing made it worse. I emailed Sol:

He replied 26 minutes later. A company had approached him, Sebastian Knowles's operation, with a polished deck, custom-built pages, and videos they'd produced at their own expense. They had a track record building communities. Sol said he'd been pitched ideas like this dozens of times and this was the first one that showed up with everything ready to go.

The contrast he was drawing, though he didn't say it out loud, was with me. I'd been asking for fifteen minutes of his time a week. They asked for nothing but his name and his content.

He acknowledged it plainly:

He also warned me not to bring it up at Thursday's group session. A previous partner had aired grievances at a group meeting once. It was the only genuinely bad meeting they'd ever had. He didn't want a repeat.

I told a wry story about the Al Gore Current TV situation, another time I'd done the upstream work and then watched an almost identical version launch without me. I said the timing was the part that hurt. I went to group on Thursday.

Everything else flows from this moment. The person who would eventually be removed from the NeuroSpicy Community three times, called unstable, accused of harassment, and told to stop it: that person didn't arrive as a stranger. He'd spent months developing the community's conceptual architecture, building its tools, and promoting its launch on his own accounts. So when Sebastian later read my behavior inside the community as a threat, he was reacting to the same person I'd been from the start. My investment in that space wasn't new. My belief that I had standing to shape it wasn't unfounded.

I became a paying subscriber on Skool sometime around August or September 2024. I want to say something honest about why.

The community had replaced something I didn't have. I'd been trying to build community for years, in different forms, different configurations, and watching it fail to cohere the way unsupported autistic community-building tends to. The weekly Zoom sessions were the thing that worked. Sol showing up every week, the same people checking in, the specific quality of being in a room where everyone is trying to say the true thing instead of the palatable one. That was new for me.

What I didn't understand yet was how the community was governed. From my seat in the Zoom every week, Sol was the community. His face, his curriculum, his energy, his name. There was someone named Sebastian apparently involved in the back end, but I'd never seen him in a session. He existed as a username.

Sol later explained how the arrangement actually worked. He'd been pitched on building a community by dozens of people. Sebastian's pitch stood out because he came with everything ready and asked for almost nothing in return. His specific pitch, as Sol described it: "No problem. You don't even have to like me. I'll do my job with as little input from you as possible, and you use the framework to do your job. We can talk every few months if we absolutely have to."

Sol described himself as "terrible to work with, and unorganized." Sebastian was the perfect fit for exactly that reason. He would run the backend invisibly and Sol wouldn't have to deal with the operational friction.

What that meant in practice: Sebastian had full, unilateral enforcement authority over a community serving neurodivergent adults, many of them using it as a mental health supplement or a substitute, and his frame of reference for running it wasn't mental health. It was commercial. He'd built and protected communities before where members tried to poach the user base or spin up competing services. He was watching for that pattern.

I didn't know any of this. I just kept showing up.

It was December 2024. I was in a bad state, what I now understand as an acute meltdown, the kind that has a physical texture and doesn't release through logic or distraction. The weekly Zoom sessions were how I was getting through the week. Sol had taken the holidays off, and I hadn't heard a clear announcement that there'd be no sessions for the whole week.

On December 19, I emailed Sol proposing a Discord companion tool for the community. I'd already built it and held it back out of deference. I wanted his blessing before sharing it. No reply.

I followed up December 27. Nothing. On December 28, I proposed a rebrand that would make the Discord completely separate from the NeuroSpicy name, to take competition off the table. Sol replied this time: his partner was concerned, he'd calmed him down, don't announce anything yet. I told Sol straight that I was in a 24/7 meltdown rumination state and being told to wait was genuinely hard. I asked for five minutes.

I did what Sol asked. I refrained from posting. I waited.

The next day, December 29, Sebastian acted. Two notifications arrived within ninety seconds of each other. The first: my BEACON CoHousing post had been removed for self-promotion. The second: I had been banned from the community.

I was charging my car when they came in.

I messaged Sebastian that evening. He apologized for the "hash ban," his first time doing one. He said the ban was because I'd hosted sessions without admin permission. I walked him through the timeline. There were no posted rules. I'd floated an informal suggestion in a post and hadn't even scheduled anything. He could have said something at any point before the retroactive ban. When I asked him to point me to the specific rule I'd broken, he confirmed the rules were still "in the works, waiting on Sol's approval."

I had been banned for violating a rule that didn't exist in writing yet.

The BEACON CoHousing post Sebastian removed as self-promotion was a project Sol had tentatively agreed to consult on. Sebastian didn't know that.

Sebastian's advice: "Lemons to lemonade, bro." He suggested I partner with an influencer.

For three days I wrote to Sol every day. Not because I expected a reply. I said as much in the letters. I wrote because the journal wasn't cutting it and I needed to put the words somewhere that had a chance of being received.

The December 30 letter ran long. I reproduced the Sebastian chat verbatim. I described the nonverbal episode. I named the work-trade in writing for the first time: the abandoned project, the bots that had sat waiting for feedback, the coupon code. And I wrote the sentence that felt truest:

December 31. New Year's Eve. I was without the one support structure that had been working.

January 1. I was still out. It still hadn't been fixed.

Sol reinstated me on January 2.

When Sol reinstated me, he wrote the most candid message in the entire two-year record. It confirmed everything I'd suspected about how the community worked.

Four admissions, in his words

1. "He locked you out without asking me." / "I did not anticipate this."
Sebastian acted without Sol's knowledge. The first removal was not a community safety decision. It was Sebastian's independent business judgment.

2. "He's not a psychology person or an autistic person or a mental health person. He's a business person."
Sol explicitly names what Sebastian is and isn't. The person with unilateral enforcement authority over a mental-health-adjacent community has no background in mental health.

3. "He keyed in on your use of 'community'... he compared this to his experience in past communities where information and membership was pilfered."
Sebastian's threat model was commercial piracy. My most constructive behaviors (filling in when Sol wasn't there, proposing improvements, being vocal about what wasn't working) were exactly the ones that triggered it.

4. "Basically, the website owner is protecting his investment and it has nothing to do with community building in the grassroots sense of the word."
Sol says this plainly. The governance of this community was commercial, not therapeutic.

— Sol Smith — Email — January 2, 2025

The next day I had a long, surprisingly warm conversation with Sebastian on Skool. We found real common ground: permaculture, Walden, emergent strategy. I showed him the AI tools I'd built for Sol. He said they were "very cool." When I asked whether Sol had told him about the prior work-trade, he said he didn't know about it. I gave him a careful summary and offered to present my ideas for the community to both of them together.

I sent Sol two questions that never got answers. First: Sol had told me Sebastian wasn't autistic, but Sebastian had told me directly during the ban that he was. Which was true? Second: Should I be the one to tell Sebastian about our prior project, given that he didn't know? I asked because I was trying to manage the situation carefully, not create more friction.

Neither question was ever addressed.

From January through May 2025, I stayed in the community and kept contributing. I ran a book group. I facilitated sessions when Sol couldn't. I asked Sebastian before posting anything ambiguous. I pre-cleared every edge case. I was doing everything anyone could reasonably ask someone to do after a contentious reinstatement.

In late March, Sol came to me directly. He initiated the contact, asking if I'd lead the peer group project. He was overwhelmed. He needed someone to run sign-ups, manage a second Zoom account, and build out the peer facilitation infrastructure. In the same email he mentioned: "I finally grabbed time with Sebastian — whom I've been avoiding."

Three months after the first removal, Sol was openly telling me he avoided the person he'd given enforcement authority to.

I submitted a proposal. Sol passed it to Sebastian and said he was for it. Sebastian approved. Sol followed up in late April with a group email to me and Sebastian: "I will open a new Zoom account, and if Josh could facilitate sign-up, I can put sessions on the calendar." He also gave me full editorial authority over the community's best practices document: "Yeah, please go right ahead... I was hoping y'all would add whatever you think necessary."

The Telegram exchange on May 2, reproduced in full in the archive, shows Sebastian and me working through the logistics. He said it plainly: "My preference is for you to take the lead on this." He approved my timeline. He called my Discord suggestion "a great suggestion."

On May 13, Sebastian approved the Lemon Aid Hour concept, my proposed peer format, while flagging that it needed Sol's sign-off. I sent the full proposal to both of them on May 16. Sol replied May 20: "Let's do it. What's a good time slot for you?"

May 20 was the last message Sol sent me before the second removal. Both messages that day were approvals. There is no warning, no complaint, no documented concern about my conduct anywhere in the written record between January 3 and June 16, 2025.

On June 16, 2025, at 1:23 in the morning, Sebastian sent me a Skool message asking me to "kindly remove myself from the community." He said the community wasn't meeting my needs and that there had been complaints from members. He said he didn't want to ban me.

I asked what the complaints were about.

Sebastian: "I don't know the specifics."

I wrote to Sol on Skool the same morning: "What did I do Sol? Complaints about me, but no explanation as to the nature of the complaint nor an opportunity to correct the behavior? There's no posted code of conduct or expectations or rules for me to have not followed."

Sol didn't reply. On June 18 I asked his permission to release a music track I'd made using words from one of his TikTok videos. No reply to that either.

On June 27, I sent Sol a formal letter titled "When a Sanctuary Becomes a Site of Harm." Nine hours later his reply came in, CC'd to support@neurospicycommunity.com. It introduced, for the first time anywhere in the written record, the allegation that I'd been "harassing Monica and Rebecca" since my removal. The same email issued a cease-and-desist and said: "Please do not respond to this message."

This was the first time any specific allegation had appeared in writing. Not as a warning while I was still in the community. Not as a reason given at the time of the removal. It showed up alongside the cease-and-desist, in response to my protest letter, formatted to prevent a reply.

The allegation named two people: Monica Garty Juice, PNP, PMHS, who ran the community's Wednesday Parenting and Family Group, and Rebecca.

Monica is a pediatric nurse practitioner and adolescent mental health specialist. Yale graduate. Clinical faculty at UCLA School of Nursing. Sol introduced her to the community with her full credentials. She was staff.

After my removal on June 16, I reached out to Monica in her capacity as a community leader, someone I had a real relationship with, looking for clarity about what had happened and asking whether she could push for better processes so the same thing wouldn't happen to others. I was explicit that I wasn't asking to be reinstated. I wanted to understand. And I wanted the promise Sebastian had made me in April, that no one would be removed until rules were in place, to actually be honored.

Monica responded. Warmly. She told me she had "made my suggestions known about certain formalities." She did not ask me to stop contacting her.

As for the timeline: Sol's June 27 email accused me of harassing Rebecca "since my removal." The removal was June 16. My first documented email to Rebecca after the removal went out on July 7, ten days after Sol had already accused me of harassing her. Whatever contact happened between June 16 and June 27 was by phone and text, not email. It was mutual. Rebecca never called it harassment.

I'll say only this about what happened after: the relationship continued voluntarily on her initiative. It was not unwanted.

I honored the cease-and-desist. For approximately nine months, I had no contact.

Those nine months are harder to describe than the removals. I was in a sustained CPTSD state I can trace straight to what happened. The removal, and everything the removal set off. The abandonment. The loneliness. The specific failure of trying for years to build community and watching it never cohere. The NeuroSpicy Community had been the thing that worked. The weekly Zoom, the same people checking in, the quality of being in a room where people were trying to say the true thing. That was gone.

I knew I'd been told not to come back. I also knew I could cross the digital border under an assumed name. Harrison Shaw. So I did.

I was removed a third time.

After the third removal, Sol described me to a group that included paid leaders, volunteer leaders, and paying members of the community as "not a stable person."

On March 4, 2026 I sent Sol a brief message asking permission to quote something he'd said in group. It got truncated, probably an accidental send. No reply.

On March 26, 2026, at 8:49 in the morning, I sent a formal statement to Sol and the same group he had described me to. Two arguments.

The first: our relationship didn't start with my community membership. It started in March 2024 when I answered the professional identity Sol was publicly marketing. Before one of our early sessions I'd emailed him asking whether Jaffee v. Redmond (the Supreme Court case extending psychotherapist-patient privilege to licensed counselors) would apply to him as a neurodivergent life coach. I asked because I'm a journalist who has personally invoked reporter's privilege in federal court, and I take protected communication seriously. If Sol's characterization of me as "not a stable person" draws on anything shared in that coaching context, it's a breach of the professional relationship he accepted when he marketed himself as a mental health support provider.

The second: after my removal I wrote, made music, and processed the whole thing through essays, narrative, and AI-assisted art. Sol is a creative writing professor. That was his primary professional identity before professorsol.com. If his read on my stability comes from that creative output, he's using an autistic person's natural processing response as evidence of pathology. Creative expression is not a symptom. Writing about a harmful experience is not a threat.

Sol's reply came eight minutes later.

Eight minutes is not enough time to read a 700-word letter and form a real response. It was a shutdown. It doesn't deny the confidentiality argument and it doesn't address the creative-expression argument. And it's now part of the written record that every person Sol described me to as unstable has also received.

Sol told me to stop it. So here is everything. The full record follows.