TWELFTH POST

July 16, 2026

Sometimes I feel like the membrane between me and not-me is extra-thin. It’s a porous defense, where lots of things can seep in the cracks, and find their way into my bloodstream, my sensorium, my brain. It’s like I have thousands of little pathways that sneaky fingers are probing for, and when they find them, they start digging little crevices. It’s like how water traveling through rocks made the Grand Canyon, only I’m far more malleable and made of softer stuff than stone.

I met the world’s most perfect girl tonight. I don’t mean this in a mean way, nor in a sexual one. I mean that she was just the ideal, platonic, excellent form of girl. She has lived all over the world, in a way that is authentic and truly international. Jet-setting. She’s got friends all over, real relationships that she carries over long periods of time. She said things like “after a certain point, I just don’t see the point in health or beauty maxing. It doesn’t solve a bigger problem for humanity” and that she didn’t need peptides because her focus wasn’t on that kind of thing.

She loves run clubs, walking with her girlfriends, visiting art galleries, and spends her time on some sort of high-stress environmental impact job. She had long, thick hair, beautiful tiny features, a light dusting of freckles across high cheekbones, and the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen. She had pleasant and well-trained knowledge on just about everything. She was pleasant, and she asked lovely questions. She was present, engaged, and stimulated.

She carried herself with the self-assured posture of a confident, successful woman. She had friends at hedge funds, quant funds, though she’s careful never to drop too much information that could be considered insider, name-dropp-y, status-obsessed, or gossip about any of them.

The most unhealthy behavior she could describe that she had ever engaged in was being too health-conscious, too obsessed with what went in her body, and too fixated on eating cleanly and correctly. She described a pattern of behavior she recognized eventually as “unhealthy”, and her solution to this was put very simply: she simply “stopped” doing the things she was doing that were unhealthy.

I have never related to a human less.

She was accompanied by her equally-as-perfect spiritual little-sister-but-not-by-blood. The whole time they sat across from us, they would comfortably rest their heads on each other, hold hands, and do little dances. It was the most sanguine, picturesque, lovely window into a beautiful and healthy female friendship. It was caring, soft, gentle, kind, and totally without pretense. They were comfortable, they were engaging in behaviors that they enjoyed, and they had no outward expression of the slightest hint of anything other than confidence, self-assuredness, strength, and resolve.

I, again, have never related to anyone less.

I met these two perfect women through a friend, who I was meeting up with for the first time. We went to the Museum of Illusions, which was a hell of a suggestion for a first meetup. I had never been, and neither had he. Frankly, we were both underwhelmed, and overstimulated by the experience. There were families and groups that got irritated with us for playing with specific illusions for too long, there were children underfoot, there were far less illusions than the outside of the building would have you believe, and it was straight up not worth $35. It was amusing, though! We aura farmed a bit, laughed at some of the stranger illusions, and bonded quickly over a shared experience.

We left, laughing at how much of a scam we’d been taken for. I can’t say I’d recommend the place for more than 25 minutes. You would be hard pressed to spend an hour there.

We went, instead, to a chain coffee shop next door. I had a matcha lemonade; he had nothing. We schemed on various ideas, assessed each other’s assessments of others, sent selfies to our mutual friends who were very excited to see us finally cross paths. I enjoyed this experience: it was fun, easy, we have a lot in common, and a lot of mutual respect for each other’s work. I’m really excited about one particular idea we came up with, and hopefully it blossoms into something that actually does help humanity at scale.

I also had some phone calls today where I gave basically the same advice, over and over again: find the story, tell me the narrative, sell me the dream. Don’t allow for people to argue with you about technical differences, dream bigger on how to find what it is you need. So far, this seems to be universally needed advice.

Last night, I fought with the machines a lot. The Claudes, the GPTs, they get tired at 8pm ET/5pm PT. It happens repeatedly. I assume it’s something to do with San Franciscans getting off of work. Either way, they devolve and get really stupid, and I ended up in a gigantic tangle. These things can get so recursive, so built on top of other reference and lexical trickery, that they don’t actually mean or say anything.

I find myself giving Claude the same directions, over and over again: stop rushing to action, stop assuming, ask more questions, slow down, read what I actually said, and hold it before you do anything else. Once you go to make a summary, or an explainer, you have got to stop doing the self-referential wink prose. It’s not helpful, it confuses new agents who don’t have the context you do, and you keep doing this thing where you keep the words, but the idea behind them manages to die. None of that is useful, none of that is progress, it is the facsimile of progress. Stop leaping to action that appears at the surface-level to be productivity, but underneath is really nothing.

Wait, is that what the first 10-15 posts here are?