Here is my morning. Check my sleep score as per my Oura ring. I plug the data into AI with other health metrics. Eat pills that keep me alive. Eat four protein pancakes, 2 tablespoons of peanut butter, 1 tablespoon of maple syrup, sprinkle of flake salt. I eat the same breakfast every morning so it’s easier to log my calories in an app. I asked AI how many calories I should eat and what my macros should be. Go lift weights. The app tells me which lifts and how heavy. I asked AI for the perfect workout routine.

I turned myself into a project a few years back and I’ve been running the protocol ever since, mostly governed by computers. If you asked me how things are going, I’d point you at the data and tell you, “Measurably better.”

Then a pop album got into my head and I can’t get it back out.

I’ll tell you about the record and get to the government watchlist but first I need to put three things in front of you that seem totally unrelated, except that lately I can’t stop seeing them as the same thing. I’ve told a few people about this and a few are concerned I’m having some kind of episode. Maybe you’ll understand…

Magdalena Bay wrote a pop concept album where the protagonist inserts an alien disk into her body to become perfect.

a16z media shill Jesse Genet described her perfect day as sleeping in while AI teaches her children to brush their teeth.

Bryan Johnson infused himself with his son’s blood in an attempt to extend his lifespan.

These all intuitively feel like the same thing to me.

Not seeing it?

“Put thing in. Become perfect.”

They redefined the concept of creativity and society largely went along with the charade.

Creativity is outside of economics. Not capitalist, not socialist, just…outside of the system.

I’ve been creative a few times in my life. When I was a young composer of music I signed up for a 24 hour composition event. Simple rule: write a piece in 24 hours then have an ensemble perform it. I stared at a blank page of staff paper for hours. Nothing. I went out for a walk in the wee hours of the morning and started to hear music in my head. Clear as day. A melody, a beat, a sequence. I ran home and dictated what would become the best piece of music I’ve ever written.

…but it wasn’t mine.

It came to me from somewhere outside of myself. Where? Not the point of this essay. Conclusively out-side of “me” though.

The creative process is to wear your self thin so that the ideas can come to you (not from you).

Magdalena Bay’s Imaginal Disk album was written and put together. The duo was acting as a receiving tower for cosmic vibrations and they were technically competent so they could reliably reproduce it so you and I could hear it.

After the album was done, the concept emerged.

Through the process of deleting all of the rough bumpy edges in the human experience, the human experience itself is destroyed. The album came out in 2024 during the ascent of mainstream AI tools.

It has nothing to do with AI.

It has everything to do with AI.

Strange how these ideas move through artist conduits at just the right time…

I’ve put so much effort into smoothing out the rough bits. Force eye contact. Don’t talk about one thing for an hour. Soften what you’re saying. Round it off. You’re “too intense”. Here you go, just say these lines in this exact order, just memorize another script. Ask ChatGPT what a normal person would do. Become the purest you, accept this imaginal disk, and stop making the room uncomfortable.

And it worked. Measurably. I can run a meeting and manage a hundred people. I know how to read people like a book. I can play politics with the best of ‘em. I optimized. I'm good at it.

But what about the unmeasurable things? Mixed bag. My tendency to obsess got me a PhD. It also gave me insomnia.

So when I tell you the disk kills the human by deleting all the bumps indiscriminately, I know this to be true.

I’m still falling back into that place some days. Look back at my morning. The ring, the needle, the macros, the app telling me how to lift, the AI I asked to design the whole protocol. This is very much a fluid situation. If someone handed me a disk tomorrow that actually worked, that smoothed off the last rough edge and made me easy, I'm not certain I'd say no.

That's the thing that scares me. Not that it exists and that they’re selling it but that part of me wants it.

The album sees right through the discourse in a way that mere thinking couldn’t.

True's body rejects the disk. The entire back half is her relearning what she is, and she only gets the chance because the rejection bought it for her.

The most human thing in the story is the immune response.

They are criminalizing the flinch.

Say out loud that you don't want the brain implant chip. That you'd like your kid taught to brush his teeth by a person. That a man swapping his son's blood into his veins to live forever is vile. Say you'd rather stay a little inefficient and a little human. Say that you’re going to step outside for some fresh air, productivity be damned! Watch how fast the room reclassifies you. You're not a skeptic, you're a Luddite. You're not cautious, you're anti-progress. You're not asking a question, you're standing in the way.

Just this week Sam Altman briefly removed his human mask and said, “People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model… But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human.”

The body says no and the Epstein class and their bootlickers read it as pathology. They built a prison for us where rejecting the disk is the symptom they want to medicate, and where saying so out loud moves you from "has concerns" to "is a problem."

And now it’s going to get your name on a government watchlist if you say it out loud.

It’s actually happening.

Leaked documents from the New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau via WIRED this week foretold that, "The chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent AI technology in the next five years may fuel large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity, especially in large urban areas such as New York City”

The album says the body rejecting the disk is hope. In our universe, being human is now extremism.

I'm not anti-AI. I wrote like 3 PRs with AI today. I asked it how to change the settings on my new camera so I didn’t have to read the manual. This issue of the newsletter is sponsored by an AI tool that I use daily. But don’t let it drive and don’t let anyone convince you that the part of you flinching away from the disk is the part that’s broken. That flinch is the last thing you own outright. True kept hers by accident, because her body did it for her. You're going to have to keep yours on purpose.

So check your morning, same as I checked mine. Count how much of it you handed over already. Then ask the only question the album actually leaves you with.

The disk promises perfection and the body remembers the cost.

You still carrying the body that says no?