A few years ago at a company dinner, a VP I respected asked me about Bitcoin. I gave him everything I had. Fixed supply, block rewards, peer-to-peer cash. Then he asked one question I had never thought about. My face went hot and I stopped talking, realizing I was repeating things instead of understanding them. It took me a lot longer than it should have to see what actually happened at that table. Reciting is what fluency feels like from the inside, right up until someone outside your framework asks something you rehearsed around. And by then my identity had already started forming around being the guy who understood something the people around me didn’t. That heat is what I wrote a book about. Where it comes from, what it is protecting, and what you get in the small moment when you catch it before it finishes its work. The response so far has been amazing!The Belief Machine is available in paperback and Kindle amazon.com/dp/B0HBM12T98 and signed copies and other information is available at thebeliefmachine.org You can always reach out here for more info as well.

Umbra explores the tension between darkness and illumination. The piece is about presence, gravity, and the way clarity can become most visible against darkness. Available In Fine Art Print, Framed Fine Art Print, Aluminum Print, Canvas Print
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Note to self: We will mostly suffer more in imagination than reality. The past is gone and the future yet to be determined. Be where your feet are and feel your power to shape your world in every moment.

Been in the office this week and I feel like a caged animal. I’m usually in the field, where I like to be, building things and talking shit with my crews. Because I am very efficient at my job, it offers me a lot of downtime to work on my side projects, writing, FUGUM, building websites, making art, etc. I feel like I’m wasting time at work. I have things to do, books to promote, businesses to promote, gifs to make. I can’t be stuck in an office where one of these NPCs wants to debate me over Veranda blend. Let me go build something, faaaack.

Happy Hump Day legends. Hope your day is filled with positivity, possibility, peace. Onward.

Behind you stands a thousand lives. Ahead of you, a choice.

Reminder, Life is too short to let bad vibes stick. FUGUM

Ego death has become something people pursue. There are retreats built around it, ceremonies that promise it, and a steady supply of writing about how to get there. I think the whole arc is aimed at the wrong thing, because the ego was never the trouble. The ego is the function that holds a person together well enough to act. It keeps a continuous story running so you can make a decision today that still makes sense tomorrow and move through a day without re-deriving your entire position on everything. Strip that out and what you have is someone who cannot function. What causes trouble is narrower. The ego gets the final say on everything, including questions where it has no business being the authority. In 2015, Lebedev and colleagues scanned fifteen people who received psilocybin and reported their degree of ego dissolution. What they found was a loss of integration. Communication between the medial temporal lobe and higher cortical regions dropped, and the network that decides what in your environment is worth your attention came apart. The machinery that assembles a coherent self stopped coordinating. Small study, hard thing to measure, so hold the specifics loosely. The shape matters more than the numbers. What dissolves is an integration, and integrations reassemble. Everyone in that scanner was themselves again a few hours later. The harder claim is that when the real version happens, nobody chose it. It arrives through a diagnosis, a bankruptcy, a marriage ending, a public failure that cannot be explained away. It shows up when the story you had been running about who you are stops being able to account for what is actually happening, and you cannot get the story working again no matter how hard you push. The pursued version is a different thing wearing the same name. A ceremony comes with a return ticket, a facilitator, and a scheduled end time. People get real things from it and I am not dismissing that. But the knowledge that you'll be back by Sunday does most of the work of making it survivable, and that knowledge is exactly what the involuntary version withholds. So what actually dies? The self survives, still preferring coffee to tea. What ends is a specific story, the version of yourself you had been defending, the account of who you are that your decisions were arranged around. From the inside those two aren't distinguishable, which is what I wrote The Belief Machine about. Then comes the part almost nobody mentions. A new story assembles immediately, within weeks and sometimes days. The machinery that built the first one is still fully operational, and it takes the most salient material available, which is now the collapse itself. The new identity is a person who lost everything and came through it, who has seen what matters, who is no longer fooled by the things that fool everyone else. It has the same properties as the one it replaced. It confers standing, it would cost something to give up, and its defensive reflexes are harder to examine than the originals, because examining them looks like doubting hard-won wisdom. Something real did happen. You watched a story come apart and reassemble and you were present for the assembly. You saw the seams, and a person who has seen their own story get built has a harder time believing the next one arrived from somewhere outside of them. So the available thing is demotion. The ego keeps running, because you need it running, and it keeps producing verdicts. What changes is whether its verdict is final, and whether anything else gets to speak in the gap between the reaction and the ruling. It doesn't stay done. It has to be done again tomorrow, and the day after, and it never produces a person who has finished, which is probably why nobody sells retreats for it.

Good morning legends. Hope your day is filled with purpose, possibility, and presence. Onward.

Still here. Still stacking.

Signal x9 A pop art piece. Each panel feels slightly different, but the underlying form remains constant, creating tension between variation and permanence.The piece is about recognition through repetition, the way a signal becomes impossible to ignore once it appears everywhere. Available in Fine Art Print, Framed Fine Art Print, Acrylic Print, Canvas Print Framed Canvas Print BitcoinArtStore. Com

I've done a handful of these now and this is one I'd point someone to. If you're curious about The Belief Machine, FUGUM, or just what I'm actually about, Paula asked the right questions and we got somewhere real. Worth a few minutes. Let me know what you think. Thank you Paula for the opportunity to have a great conversation. Make sure to like and subscribe to her channel 🤝

My 2028 goal for FUGUM.

Happy Monday from somewhere between the daily grind and the grand design. Hope your day is filled with purpose, presence, and peace. Onward.

You can work harder for money. You can also question why your money keeps demanding more work.

That’s a nice burn. Mi Amor.

You can look through a thing you would never defend and see something true. A hard winter teaches you about your house. The winter is not good. -The Belief Machine

How much of your hurry belongs to you?

Happy Sunday. Be where your feet are. Hope your day is filled with presence, positivity, and peace. Onward.

Settlement alludes to both an ending and a foundation, the point where movement stops, value is fixed, and the record holds. Available in Fine Art Print, Framed Fine Art Print, Canvas Print, Framed Canvas Print BitcoinArtStore . Com

Rocco and Nadi hope you get out and enjoy the autumn air.