Jay Gontu is an author and technologist based in Chicago. His work sits at the intersection of two lifelong fascinations: how modern systems store and transmit knowledge, and how ancient civilizations may have solved the same problem — in stone, symbol, and ritual — long before the written archive.
Close Your Eyes to See, his first book, is the result of years of reading, travel, and quiet observation of India's temple traditions. Rather than presenting conclusions, the book models a way of looking: patient, curious, and willing to sit with questions that don't resolve quickly.
In 2026 he coined Intercognix — a name for candidate insights that become visible only when ideas from distant fields are considered together, and a practice for finding and testing them. Where the book looks at how knowledge was once carried, Intercognix looks at the enormous body of knowledge we already hold and asks what it implies that no one has noticed. Its growing catalog of candidates is kept at intercognix.com.
By day, he builds and advises on enterprise technology — work that has given him an unusual vantage point on his central question. Every generation believes its knowledge is permanent; every generation is wrong. What survives is what gets encoded well enough, and copied often enough, to outlast its makers. He suspects the temple builders understood this better than we do.
He lives with his family, who remain his first readers and his best critics.
Get in Touch
For reader mail, interview requests, speaking inquiries, or anything else, write to hello@mrgontu.com. He reads everything, even when replies are slow.