Episode Details

In the past, I was used to guilt and duty as the way I showed up, where I would bring structure, solidity, integrity, and behavior in exchange for acceptance and love. Right now, what people respond to is when I open my heart, and that’s where I feel much better. I just have to slowly start trusting myself to move from one side of the neural axis to the next.

Bitcoin is love. That’s how I felt this weekend.This is lived experience.

I’m in Medellín, the last hours before I take the flight back to Miami Beach. The city is so luscious, so beautiful. The tropical vegetation just makes you want to be so appreciative of life.Beauty settles my nervous system, and from that place appreciation becomes effortless rather than aspirational.

What I’ve been experiencing lately when I meet my friends at conferences is this underlying respect, and feelings of love, collaboration, and compassion. It’s not fake. We’re actually building friendship across ages. It doesn’t matter. We’re fun, we’re funny, we joke, we help each other. It’s a beautiful family.Formed through presence, humor, and mutual regard.

I’ve never been idealistic about these things, but it makes me feel very hopeful. Before coming here, I had written an article about hope, optimism, and dissolution. I don’t know if I’m going to publish it. I want to be honest.

I don’t know if I’m going to publish it or merge it, because the feeling has shifted a lot. It’s been three or four days that I don’t watch news, I don’t go on Twitter or Instagram. No Substack, no nothing. I’m not engaged with the world outside. I’m just being very present with others, speaking.Attention returned to the immediate, and I felt how much clarity arrives when I stop narrating experience and simply stay inside it.

Something happened to me. I became very vulnerable, and I decided to show that vulnerability.

Exposure became a conscious choice, something I could enter deliberately rather than spill unconsciously.

While at the conference, I was in two panels. I do very well in panels. Dialogue suits my way of thinking.

I do very well when people ask me questions. I’ve been doing this for a long time, especially as an artist. Since last year, I’ve wanted to do presentations, but the subjects I choose are very layered, very deep, and synthesized. If you don’t have the kind of mind I have, you might miss the connection. Maybe I’m too ambitious. I want to write like a thesis and spell it out in twenty minutes, hoping people will get into it. I was told by someone I trust to write a script so I don’t lose myself in time. I tried it twice, both at Adopting Bitcoin and here in Medellín. I love challenges, yet I have to be honest, it doesn’t feel like me.

It doesn’t feel like my essence.Synthesis moves quickly for me.

Just before getting on the main stage, I bumped into Jeff Booth and Kent Halliburton, and I expressed that I realized I was very nervous. I didn’t want to read, but I couldn’t trust myself not to read. I had the slides. I had a script.

Trust became the central axis, trust in my voice, in my pacing, and in letting meaning arrive without forcing it. They said, go for it. Jeff told me his mind is similar, always synthesizing, connecting dots across subjects. I heard him say while talking to Frank Corva, “Let me unpack this in three stages.” That was the lesson I received.

I stood up and explained to everyone that I wanted to be vulnerable. I said that even though I would love to speak freely, I was going to read. I knew it wouldn’t be the same experience. I asked for feedback, and I decided to do it that way.

In my astrology, transiting Chiron is sitting on my natal Mars in the third house, squaring transiting Jupiter in Cancer in my sixth house, and also being squared by Mars, the Sun, and Venus in my twelft