Sunday morning. Hung over, recovering. El Clásico on the screen—Barcelona versus Real Madrid, the kind of match that makes you forget you're supposed to be changing the world. Laundry spinning. Mom on the phone asking if he was eating enough, sleeping enough, being careful.

"I'm good, Mom. Building something."

Then the walk to Verci, recording into the device, speaking to the intelligence system like a diary that could think back.

"The app I've built works. There's magic."

But something was wrong. The previous night's conversation with Lyle had crystallized it: always-on listening isn't appealing to anyone. Every person he'd talked to—Isa, Matthew, the creative co-working club girl whose name he'd already forgotten—they all loved the idea of capturing life, turning it into story. But the moment he said "always listening," they tensed up.

Privacy. That word kept coming up like a brick wall.

"We don't have to lead with ambient AI," he said to the morning air. "It's a voice journal. A journal that writes itself. That's simple. That resonates."

The reframe clicked into place. Not surveillance—documentation. Not passive—intentional. You pressed record when you wanted to capture something. The intelligence system did the rest.

By the time he reached Verci, the pitch had reformed itself in his mind: Bridge the gap between who you are and who you want to be.

Ben was there, talking about Google Maps Timeline—how it tracked everywhere you went, made it digestible, showed you the geography of your days.

"What if you did it with social interactions instead?" Ben said. "Record who I was with. Like right now, I don't care that I'm at Verci. I care that I'm talking with you and Michayla."

"That's exactly what I'm trying to solve," Y said. "Through voice embeddings. The model can learn to recognize your voice, my voice, anyone's voice. Then it just knows we were talking."

"You wanna build an app then?"

"I'm already building it."

They talked about Sam, about Sentience, about the three weeks that felt like three years. Sam had been "unbelievably chill" about the breakup—it's not a one-way door—but was doubling down on desktop when the world needed mobile.

"This isn't supposed to be a work thing," Y explained. "What's the pitch for Olivia?" He meant Jordan's wife, the mom with two young kids who’s dog he walked every morning. "You have all these conversations with your beautiful children that will be lost to time. But now we can capture it. Turn it into story."

Ben got it immediately. "But you gotta show the magic. Not the transcript—the magic."

That was the whole game. Don't show people logs and timestamps. Show them meaning.