Crypto, AI, drugs, and Miami in 2023

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Photo by Antonio Cuellar on Unsplash

Purpose:

These are some of my experiences so far in 2023, and I’m writing to dump my thoughts during this time.

I’ve been in Miami for a bit over 4 months to test how it is living here.

I came here, because on Twitter some people claim that many people in cryptocurrency concentrate in Miami, both for events, and as a place to live in. I have found this to be true. There are A LOT of crypto-related events happening in Miami all the time.

Before I came to Miami in January 24th, 2023

I was worth about $1ØØk in liquid assets, and about $3Øk in illiquid assets which is a lot in Peru, the developing country where I was born, but it turns out it’s not much to live in, or move to, Miami, specially as a pre-revenue business person and crypto investor living off savings.

I have thoroughly enjoyed Miami, except for the drugs, like weed and alcohol. I have found I am a fan of Miami, but not a fan of recreational drugs at all. I already avoided alcohol, but other drugs like weed feel even worse, and I dislike them more.

Even though weed is illegal in the state of Florida, I was surprised to see that young people my age (people in their 20s) smoke it freely in the outdoor areas of buildings or in the streets.

Given that weed is a strong psychoactive, I have found this both annoying, disrespectful and freedom infringing. Since smokers smoke the drug freely, they leave these active substances circulating the air, which affects people that live near them and DON’T want to smoke them.

Since most of my savings were tied to crypto or digital assets I was looking for a break from crypto, because 2022 was full of centralized cryptocurrency exchange collapses, most of which, were US-based.

And most of these collapses can probably be attributed to bad financial management, such as taking too many risks, paying high interest rates to depositors, etc.

Before this trip to Miami, I never wanted to be public about being involved with Bitcoin, because since the early days of Bitcoin, I remember reading from people on Reddit being paranoid about governments and bankers, which may try to jail or kill people participating in the development of a competing currency, “to protect the public” from the uses of this technology, or to protect the system they work for. As crypto twitter sometimes puts it, to protect the current thing.

The most paranoid people would say that if you were killed by super powerful people, your murder would be reported as a traffic accident or suicide.

Recently in 2022, I’ve also seen people on Crypto Twitter say that a lot of the collapses in crypto, including FTX could have been centrally planned coups to further destroy the reputation of crypto through mainstream media, because these new currencies compete with countries and central banks. And because their growth and popularity is an inconvenient development to the status quo.

Even though I am not too paranoid, I would still prefer to be anonymous in case these claims were true. I have changed however, so I no longer hide that I translated Bitcoin.org, or that I like cryptocurrencies both online and offline.

This has turned out to be slightly inconvenient, because I have noticed more hackers trying to log into my accounts since I did this. But I think it’s not too bad, specially if you use multiple-factor security, or even better physical security like public-cryptography security keys:

The media on crypto

The media, generally speaking, has been negative towards crypto. Every bad thing that has ever happened in crypto has been publicized, and bad press is what Bitcoin has had for a long time, Bitcoin has been viewed negatively year after year, all the time, but almost all the news are about bad things anyways, not about actual “new things”.

The positive news that cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin would get are usually about price movements and fortunes being made, by early investors, technologists, and traders.

This focus on the negative on the news would be normal, according to psychological theory, which states that most people fit the personality type of being protectors and react more strongly to negative stimuli than positive stimuli. So, the media in order to serve most people, publicize bad news/fear causing news, which reinforces this theory.

My opinion on it

I personally don’t think that this conspiracy theory about US-linked failures in 2022 is some sort of secret US coup, which it could be, but I don’t think so.

However, I can see how it could be possible, since governments have a lot of power, a lot of power to lose, and are known to have secret military operations all the time in order to protect the interests of their countries.

Countries, historically, tend to fight each other all the time for economic, technological and military power, either through military conflict, ideology, the media, or something else.

I don’t believe the US and its allies is that much different from any other country when it comes to protecting, and/or advancing their interests.

If cryptocurrencies are seen as a threat, I would assume that the government, private banks, or other affected institutions could acquire competing cryptocurrency firms, or even go as far as making them fail by force, hacking, corrupting their organizations, etc.

Personal responsibility

What I’m more concerned about however, is of people’s inability to properly predict the future in economics, or properly manage their own finances, from the bottom of society to the top, in the form of banks and crypto exchanges, given that these failures in finance are rather common.

I think governments, the status quo, have taken these actions against crypto, all of which happened before:

1. Ignore. No attention given to it initially.
2. Laugh at it. Ridicule/bad press/spread fears or focus on the negative types of commerce that it facilitated, such as the online drug trades that happened in the Silk Road.
3. Fight. Regulate/use force to control the competition, etc. According to the conspiracy theorists, 2022 might have been this.
4. Competitor wins/tables are turned. We are not at this point yet, but some people believe that cryptocurrencies will eventually make a lot of the existing systems of trade, governance and law obsolete by becoming superior means to perform these functions, which in turn will make them more and more used/popular. Tim Draper is one prominent investor that believes this will happen within his lifetime.

Beyond conspiracy theories, I think that 2022 was full of centralized crypto banks that collapsed honestly by bad financial management, and maybe in some cases also dishonestly, due to those centralized parties engaging in unethical practices. Some of the failures could have come from incompetence as well, like the lack of technical knowledge, proper security, bad execution, lack of proper financing, or all of them combined.

We the investors and believers in crypto, simply took the losses if we had exposure to these failures, and re-learned the same lessons that caused Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to exist: That you are responsible for your own losses, you are the bank, you manage your own finances, and that you shouldn’t delegate this power to financial institutions or governments. “Not your keys, not your crypto”.

How risk is managed traditionally

Traditional custodians, like private banks in the fiat system, are exposed to risks and also create risks through their activities, they solve these risks by socializing these losses through fees, interest rates, security mechanisms, insurance, and ultimately usually bailouts, or the faith in a government as a insurer of last resort.

The solution that Bitcoin proposed is a distributed computerized system to store, send and receive money in the form of Bitcoin, the system would be secured by cryptography (math).

Bitcoin proposed and implemented a solution of non-custodial money, where Bitcoin’s users are the sole responsible parties for their money, Bitcoin also introduced a predictable emission rate algorithm, where new coins in the system are issued in a predictable way that compensates miners for making the Bitcoin system more secure.

The custody of funds and the responsibility of managing these funds would be distributed amongst its users as well, instead of being centralized in a central bank, government, financial institutions, or private banks.

The problem when regular people find crypto

People that don’t understand cryptocurrencies, or use an exchange for practicality, will get frustrated by the news that a centralized crypto bank failed, or that their funds got mismanaged, locked out or stolen.

So, if they lose money at a centralized crypto exchange, they think that cryptocurrencies as a whole have failed them. However, very often, the cryptocurrencies themselves haven’t failed, and their systems remain secure.

In these hacks, and failures from crypto banks, what usually fails are the custodians and companies operating with cryptocurrencies and not the cryptocurrencies themselves.

Cryptocurrencies that are held by a custodian, don’t fit the distributed and decentralized spirit, and the essence of what cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum originally tried to achieve, which is more distributed and decentralized financial management, this empower users, reduce transaction costs, increases innovation and the amount of competitors in this industry, but these also demand an increase in the responsibility that each user needs to bear, by becoming their own custodians who are responsible for their own losses.

In this sense, cryptocurrencies are a lot like cash (paper notes and coins), gift cards, or physically storing gold at your house, instead of a private bank, which basically offers security as a service.

My own journey with Bitcoin

When I first got interested in Bitcoin, I was young, about 17 or 18, around the year 2012 to 2013, and I was spooked by cryptocurrencies, I was interested in them and found them fascinating. But I also feared that by using them, or being involved with them, I might become an enabler of crime, since that is what the press reported. So, cryptocurrencies were seen in a bad light, when I saw them in the news.

What I found however, is that crypto was mainly used by deeply knowledgeable and highly educated people.

For a time it felt like Bitcoin was mainly used by programmers, people in software, math, cryptography, economics, and finance.

So I personally gained a lot more knowledge of how the world works, and how financial markets work, rather than becoming a drug addict, or something like that.

I also made some money even though I was just an unpaid volunteer that helped spread the word of Bitcoin and helped in translating Bitcoin.org (I am still the coordinator of Bitcoin.org in Spanish as a volunteer).

Unfortunately, I don’t advance the translation that much anymore because now that Bitcoin is a huge thing, there isn’t a lot more text to translate or review, there are also spammers and scammers that try to write to the main website.

The fact that “Cøbra”, the pseudonymous person/people running bitcoin.org has complied with the UK in not showing the bitcoin white paper to UK’s IPs shows that the original website probably isn’t run by hardcore Bitcoiners anymore. Because Craig Wright isn’t Satoshi Nakamoto (he failed to provide cryptographic proof of being Bitcoin’s creator) and because the creator of Bitcoin wouldn’t be trying to seek a patent on Bitcoin, or a limit on the distribution of its software, given that Satoshi distributed both his paper and his software freely and with an open source license, trying to replicate how Linux was run.

There is also the issue of silencing freedom of speech by banning a technical document like Bitcoin’s original paper. Since most people in crypto believe in free speech, complying with this demand is not how most Bitcoiners would act, in my opinion.

Screenshot taken when trying to access bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf from the UK

I have seen 2 other super active Bitcoiners on Bitcoin.org’s Telegram quit (or get expelled?) too, like wbnns.com and Simon H.

Wbnns told me he is also not sure who runs Bitcoin.org or some of the Telegram channels anymore, showing that the communications channels that Bitcoiners used, or their intentions might have changed, now that Bitcoin is bigger. Or maybe they are becoming more compliant simply because they don’t want to fight anyone in court or risk bitcoin.org being censored in some way.

While I was in Miami, I was expelled from that Telegram group too, when I mentioned that I was working on something different Jenner.ai (AI Health) and talked briefly about it.

Since I am not sure of wether the communication channels have been corrupted, or sure that people have changed, I prefer to think that people that like Bitcoin and its philosophy are still running Bitcoin.org. Because the website has remained mostly the same, and it remains a good starting point to learn about Bitcoin. I also trust that most people developing Bitcoin are crypto-friendly. However, due to the risks of centralization, I fully support alternative coins (or altcoins) being developed following on Bitcoin’s footsteps.

Dark web

When I was young as well, about 19, I also used the “dark web” to look behind the veil of the supposed den of all sorts of the most unspeakable crimes, trying to corroborate wether Bitcoin was used as a currency in the “deep web”.

While I didn’t find that, I found the original “Silk Road”.

And inside the Silk Road, I found mostly weed dealers (marihuana dealers), and very low quality “guides” on how to hack financial institutions like PayPal. Since I was interested in IT and security on the web, I bought one of these guides, the only purchase I ever did on the deep web.

And I received a very low-quality .txt file without formatting written in extremely poor English, that had basically no value to a security researcher, or to a financial criminal.

I confirmed that Silk road market was criminal, and that Bitcoin was being used inside of it, but the crimes didn’t seem as bad as they were portrayed in popular culture or the media, and the verifiable volume of these trades as seen on the blockchain were apparently low.

After these findings, I overlooked these fears that Bitcoin was primarily used as a criminal technology, and got more involved with it, researched its technology, and learned some about all of these new digital assets.

It was exciting. Like witnessing the evolution of a new wave of finance and economics. New concepts were born. Concepts like “Programmable money” and “smart contracts”, they seemed revolutionary. And I think that many of the ideas and implementations inside of crypto have been in fact, revolutionary.

Transitioning to AI

As part of my “break” I also wanted to participate at a hackathon that I found super interesting “Miami hack week 2023”.

So I flew to Miami to see what’s being built. I always learn a lot at hackathons I thought, plus before Miami Hack Week, I had won prizes at half of the hackathons I had attended (which weren’t many).

And the tools that people use at hackathons has also changed dramatically. I really wanted to see what people were building using AI as well, because GPT3.5, the launch of ChatGPT, the Lensa and Midjourney’s evolution by late 2022 had impressed me greatly. Convincing me that AI would be a huge industry, as big or bigger than cryptocurrencies.

Hackathons are almost inherently a western and US phenomenon because I always see very little hackathon activity outside of the US.

I went 6 years of my life without attending any hackathons until November 2022, where I attended an online hackathon sponsored by a cryptocurrency-powered data marketplace (Ocean Protocol).

I won Ocean Protocol’s 2nd prize. $750 in $OCEAN, which I staked and didn’t sell. This $OCEAN turned into over $3k this next year (2023).

I found that the level of technical skill for hackathons in Miami and San Francisco has evolved from the last hackathon that I attended in 2016 in Las Vegas. People use a lot of Figma for UI design, Replit, no-code tools, and often assist themselves with AI now.

Miami

I really like Miami, the weather (although its a bit too hot), the multi-cultural feeling, the latin culture, the food, the palm trees, the art, and the convenience of the American lifestyle. My favorite thing about the US is how much entrepreneurship there is, there are a lot of services, apps, and companies that usually provide really good service. There is also a good availability of products. Amazon.com works the best in the US as well, in my opinion.

Living in Miami until the end of May, was the longest time that I have lived in the US continually, and the pace of life in Miami, the high-paced traffic, and the food shocked me a bit. I feel like the amount of caffeine and exposure to drugs (like weed smoke in the air) was much higher than what I’m used to as well.

Due to the events that I attended and the people that I met, I got to meet a lot of very interesting people, artists, OG Bitcoiners, ETH billionaires, legal and illegal immigrants, a lot of Cubans, hackathon hackers, startup people, coders, some artists putting NFTs on the moon, physicists, highly educated people, etc. I tried to meet as many people as I could.

Before my trip to Miami I always applied the irrationally optimistic view that mostly everyone can be trusted, but I have changed my views now to be more calculating about risk, because now I think that what can be good to one person, or normal, is not necessarily good for you too, probably because we are all different biologically and our bodies adapt to tolerate certain substances different (I’m also physically smaller, so normal dosages to someone bigger are high doses for me, etc), and because everyone has different degrees of tolerance.

But also because I have now realized that trusting everyone by default is naive, there are certain people that are actually not good for you, because they like stuff that is bad for them (like drugs), or because they engage in behavior that is too risky like driving too fast, or not driving sober (which in turn means that you could die by being close or related), or because they are outright bad people to others (more likely to engage in crimes for example).

I have also found that my tolerance to stimulants is low, as I get too anxious on stuff like weed, or my thoughts get too disorganized on even small amounts of alcohol. I was also being a bit irresponsible, because I tried really high dosages of weed edibles. I tried a delta-10 variant and a 2000mg edible that I found at a weed conference at the Miami Airport Convention Center (as crazy as this sounds).

Before I traveled to Miami for Miami Hack Week, I had never done drugs other than smoking a bit of weed once at a club in Peru, where I largely didn’t feel anything. I also rarely drunk coffee or consumed caffeine in other ways. The only stimulant that I drunk often was tea, which I drink daily. After my trip I got more accustomed to drinking coffee too.

How it feels to be really high

I tried the strongest edible I found at Miami’s Cannabis conference as a first time user of an edible. I tried delta-10 edibles and an edible called “train wreck”, which was a 2000mg blue gummy, and this is exactly how it feels.

• This is how the delta-8 edibles and a THC tea felt:

Eating edibles feels like being poisoned, it doesn’t feel too fun at the beginning.

At the beginning I felt tired, confused and out of breath. My thoughts confused. So I took a sit by some chairs at the Cannabis conference. I started to feel out of breath, and concerned for my health.

I also had an anti-pain patch on my back. I took it off while I was sitting, it was very painful to take it out, maybe because my tactile sense was enhanced by the drugs.

I was still feeling confused and a bit out of breath. I was concerned about my thoughts not being very organized, so I texted someone: “I don’t know where I am, and I don’t know where I’m going”.

This phrase would repeat over and over again in my head during the 9 hour trip that followed.

I got up from the chair and walked through the conference trying to find the exit door, I felt like I moved very slowly and time passed very slowly.

When I finally found the exit door, I left the convention center and saw that someone wearing a mushroom hat was dancing and singing in the street, other people surrounded him while they were dancing and listening to him as well.

I was moving around with 2 rolling suitcases that I had bought. I put them to my side and started dancing as well in the middle of the street, which is something that I typically wouldn’t do (I typically don’t stop to dance in the street).

After a bit, I got bored and had a strong desire to go inside of the convention center again. When I got back in, I didn’t know why I had decided to go back in. I thought for a bit that I wanted to got to the bathroom. But then I had a strong desire to go outside again.

So I went outside. When I was outside I wanted to go back into the building again. At this moment I felt like the universe or the simulated reality I was living in was trying to tell me something “When you are inside, you want to go outside, and when you are outside, you want to go inside” as if I wasn’t ever satisfied with where I was.

So when I was outside I began walking around the building, around the convention center, still high I realized that the corners looked exactly the same to me, and as I kept walking left and left again, only to find the same corner I had left behind. In my mind, I thought that I might have been trapped in a repeating loop that I couldn’t exit from. I felt scared by this thought, so I went back into the convention center.

Inside the convention center, while looking for the bathroom, or looking “for something” because I felt very lost, I walked through different doors. One door leading to another room, and again I started to think that all the rooms looked exactly the same. I would go on a room, exit that room through the door with the EXIT sign in glowing green, only to find myself in a room that looked exactly like the room I had exited from.

This again made me feel like I was trapped in a repeating loop I couldn’t exit from. This made me feel desperate, so I kept walking, from one door to another only to find the same room again.

In my mind I kept thinking that I had left Earth. I was no longer in the consistent world I was used to, I had been transported somewhere else, a chain of rooms that led to exactly the same room, I was trapped in a digital prison I couldn’t scape from, all alone, and I didn’t know my captor. I felt very concerned.

Then as I kept going from one room to the next, I finally found a different room. A very nicely decorated room with bright lights hanging from the ceiling.

In my mind I felt like I had entered the room from which all the computer simulations in the universe were being run. I kept repeating to myself “I don’t know where I am, and I don’t know where I’m going”. For an unknown reason that phrase had stuck with me and I kept repeating it, over and over again.

This machine from which all realities were being run, spoke to me by showing me spaces, like rooms, and those experiences translated into understanding more directly and more profoundly than words, which it did not use.

I felt that it was telling me “You keep looking for the exit, once your are outside, you want to go inside, once you are inside you want to go outside. You are already immortal, you are an infinite loop and you can’t die from this infinite nature, there is no escape from existing, what you can choose, however, is where you want to be in society, you can choose where in society you want to be in, up, or down? Now you know where you are, and you know where you are going”.

So then I repeated to myself, “Now I know where I am, and I know where I’m going” with a smile on my face, like I had realized some ultimate truth.

I walked to the center of the room and then to one of the sides where there was a screen with white letters in a black background.

I remember I couldn’t understand what was being shown there, but I could decode the letters and numbers. There was some code there, I started reciting it “1Z141id481ydh….” I remember it started with “1Z”. I don’t remember anything else.

In that moment, I thought I might be so high, that everything I was seeing might have been some sort of illusion, or a dream, but in reality I was being mentally hijacked into giving someone a passphrase or code. So I stopped reciting the code, looked past the computer screen I had found, and kept walking. I realized that the sole purpose of this computer was to provide security and organization to all realities and the beings living inside of them. That this was a central room in the showroom of realities.

As I was leaving what I thought was the computer that run all computer simulations including the one I was part of.

And that, as those beings evolved and situations changed, beings from one reality would be put on a different reality according to their qualities, something like “Karma” was defining where you could exist. As if living beings including myself were like microorganisms in a petri dish that limited our reality, constantly observed by this all powerful machine, which organized us living things, in different containers.

It also taught me that the security and the design of all realities was basically impenetrable, that no being on its own, without complying with the rules of “ascension” or “descension” could move from one reality to another. It was all a highly controlled universe that no one could escape from, however beings could change the reality they existed on through their actions, as this was the objective of the machine’s observation part.

This realization while I was high felt so profound, like I had discovered the truth of all realities. That realities were perfect constantly monitored prisons, and that there were better prisons than others, all enabled by this machine that kept everything working smoothly.

This machine let me see this nature, the nature of the universe of universes because he had seen that I had a higher than normal perception of what reality was, and that I was looking for the exit, “always looking for the exit”.

It also sort of taught me why not all beings can be part of the same reality.

It taught me that all the beings that EAT each other and their environment must be with each other and confined, because in other realities, they exist differently, and that to them, eating other beings inherently affects the living experience of those other beings that prefer to live in different circumstances.

Basically that beings had to live in different boxes due to their nature, in order to achieve stability in each realm of existence, and to give a stable existence to the beings within it, because some beings were more destructive to each other, and to their environment than others, hence the need for the overseeing machine and its purpose to provide maximum security, to all realities, and all the beings that are part of them.

As I exited that room I felt very calm, and as if I understood absolutely everything. I had also been given something that I didn’t have before, the security of knowing:

“Now I knew where I am, and now I know where I’m going”.

I was wandering lost through some corridors when I found people working, they looked like they were checking the content of packages. They looked like security workers, for a moment I thought they were airport workers and I was being deported for being high at the airport. I was very confused as to what was real at that point.

I only asked them. Where is the exit?

They told me, “the exist is that way” pointing to the direction I was walking towards, “or that way” pointing to the opposite direction. “The exist is either way”. I looked both ways and realized there were “Exit” signs in both directions. I smiled to them, and kept walking forward towards the “Exit”.

In my mind I thought, “the exist is either way” going forward or going backward. As if it was a reference to this machine that controlled all realities.

I thought that freedom did exist in a limited form, that the freedom of living things was to be in a higher, or a lower reality according to your behavior as a being within the realities that were under the supervision of the all seeing machine, securing the universes.

As I exited the building after having been lost in some rooms and corridors at Miami’s Airport Convention Center. I was barely able to order an Uber back to my Airbnb in Brickell.

I remember talking to the Uber driver, I felt as if the Uber driver was still the all-seeing machine talking to me, he was an immigrant from Venezuela, he told me that he had been in Miami for 10 years, and that he never got fully accustomed to Miami, its pace of life, and work culture. But that if I worked hard, I would fit in Miami.

I don’t remember all of our conversation fully. When I arrived at the apartment in Brickell, I entered the Airbnb and went to sleep.

I remember I couldn’t sleep that well, I woke up my room mate that looked at me scared.

When I was in my bed, I remember having a hard time sleeping, it was about 3AM, my heart racing. Probably because I was high at that point, Miami felt like a dream. And when I closed my eyes, I felt awake, when I closed my eyes I would imagine the machine speaking to me in that room from which all realities were being run. For a moment as I was trying to fall asleep, it was as if the machine was mad, it showed me its powers, it could accelerate or slow down time itself, and I was under its total control because it decided what realm of existence I could inhabit, feeling not free and in danger, I remember thinking “I want to live”, the thoughts of the machine left me alone, and I fell asleep.

• This is how a 2000mg blue gummy feels like:

This gummy felt very fun at the beginning, and it acted very quickly. It’s crazy how strong its effects were even though I only ate a very small portion of edible.

When I ate it, I started asking myself questions including what every word meant, and then what every piece of each word meant.

For a moment, I thought I was an LLM like chatGPT inside a virtual world, being trained to produce more accurate sequences of words. Basically learning “to speak” to serve my masters.

As I was high I got into etymology, and become a linguist, and a philosopher, I became more knowledgeable about the history of words, but dumber at using language that I used to use normally before, because words caused me to make me a lot of questions about what each portion of the word meant, instead of just knowing what words and expression mean instantly.

And the more asked the meaning of every word, the smarter I thought I was, in my mind, while others probably thought I was dumb for asking what a word means.

My questioning of words on this edible felt like this:

The experience wasn’t over in that day either. For weeks I kept thinking about the meanings of words, and what the components that make up words mean.

In my mind I also went back in time to the origin of human language, in my imagination I saw more primitive people, our monkey-like precursors, tagging events and situations from the external world with sounds that were very primitive at first, like sharp sounds, and monkey-like sounds.

When I googled this, it turns out that some of the leading theories of how human language was formed coincide with what I was thinking while I was under the effects of this 2000mg edible.

During this trip I also saw a cartoon version of my aunt jumping in my imagination, talking to me, and showing me the meaning of words.

For a moment I felt gay as well. Words in English suddenly had hidden meaning both in English and Spanish at the same time. For example I saw the word “Nombre” and in my mind this word was split into “No+Hombre”. Like the word “Nombre” which means name in Spanish, actually meant “Not a man”. In my mind this made perfect sense “Men who have names aren’t true men”. As if taking credit for your works, was not manly. As if true men had “No name”, as if true men were anonymous.

For some strange reason this also meant in my mind, that I should only be with men, and not “women”. In my mind “women” meant “wiiii men”, which meant “happy and careless” men, also known as women.

I think weed, being a strong psychoactive has the effect of activating a lot of parts in the brain that shouldn’t be activated simultaneously. That’s why the relationships that were being connected made no logical sense now that I am writing this story while sober, several months after this experience.

I was tripping while taking a hot bath in the dark with red lights in the background (because I read that red light increases regeneration in the skin).

Some of the thoughts I had in the middle of the trip were also that the main and core purpose of all living things is to eat and reproduce. That all living things that are achieving this purpose successfully are growing, while living things that aren’t achieving this purpose shrink over time.

Then I felt asleep in the bath, I think from the exhaustion that weed causes.

When I woke up, my heart was racing, palpitating really fast. It was palpitating so fast that I thought I could die at any moment, so I called a friend telling him that I felt really bad and that I should probably go to a hospital quickly.

As I was talking to him, he made me some questions and was very willing to help me, however, I felt more stable during the call and we agreed that I didn’t need to go to the hospital. So I just went to sleep.

• This is how a magic mushrooms chocolate feels like

When I was staying at the Selina hotel in Miami, I ate a chocolate called “Psilobaytrip” that I had bought at the Cannabis conference as well.

While I was tripping on this chocolate, I was talking with my aunt over the phone (over a Whatsapp call).

The conversation was super weird and I constantly thought and felt as if my aunt was my spiritual guide. And like the universe or the machine god that I had met in my first trip with delta-8 edibles was talking to me through her.

As I talked with my aunt it was like I again was able to understand everything about reality. This time I thought that I was at base reality, and that this reality we live in is everything there is, like the stars in the sky were fake, just an illusion to make us think that we lived in a very vast or infinite universe, when in reality the vastness of the sky was just an illusion.

In this trip I got convinced too, that death was another illusion, that in order to appreciate this reality more, and to make it more enjoyable, we thought we could die, when in fact, we couldn’t. I also thought that people chose their appearance, people’s ages were just the clothes we wear, a decision to be at different stages, and with “different features” on our skins.

I also thought that my aunt had chosen to be older, and that she had chosen to be my “spiritual guide”.

And that in this base reality that we live in, we are the most fortunate organisms, but there was a problem, the US didn’t let the rest of the world (other countries) live unbothered, that the US was a country that was too interventionist in the affairs of other people (I think my aunt is anti-US and I was talking to her while I was tripping, so this probably had something to do with this thought during the trip).

At the end I also thought that selling all my NMR, a cryptocurrency that aims to create an AI that can become a super trader (sort of like an alien-level intelligence that can trade the stock market) was what I needed to do to “enter paradise”.

Another random thought that I had was that the original sin was “eating other people’s art, and that in order to enter paradise, I had to stop trying to go to the future and instead, go to the past. Before there was ego or embarrassment”.

And that I would find “Paradise” there, before ego and before embarrassment.

Common theme during drugs

1. Fantasy and fallacy. The experiences under strong psychoactives usually “don’t make sense”, lack logical sense, and one could say are “non-sequiturs”. This illogical nature of trips I think are a common theme. For instance a trip is a lot like fantasy, or “Alice in Wonderland”, it doesn’t make sense in this world, but it makes sense in that alternate world of imagination. I think these experiences are similar to dreams too, where you can often see things that aren’t common, or where you experience stories that don’t make a lot of logical sense.
2. “Love”. While I’m under the effects of drugs I feel a lot of compassion for everything, animals, insects and everything. For some reason I also constantly think that the answer to all problems in this reality is to “love”. Whatever that means, because during the trip it sort of loses meaning. I think the word love is used so much, that it has indeed lost meaning. I also feel “Good” during trips, like I was on the “good side”, and that reality was wrong, like something like deeply wrong with reality.
3. Suicide. Sometimes when I’m high I think as if the answer, as if the exit from this world into a better world “paradise” was through having courage, just like the courage I had while taking a substance that could kill me. The ultimate and most courageous act I could do is to “kill myself” by doing something that I was sure, would kill me. And that “the entrance to heaven” requires courage, that courage is the key to that door — This is a theme that is seen in some movies, like in the Animatrix, where a high schooler kills himself, and right before killing himself by jumping off a bridge says “Neo, I believe, I know it wasn’t a dream”, like referencing a “virtual reality” he was in, during his dreams, a dream that felt more real than reality, and that to get there, he needed to kill himself — I find the same theme in Religions, where in order to reach “heaven”, “paradise” or “hell”, all virtual realities that exist in our imagination, we first have to “die”. Yet very few “believers” in these religions kill themselves in order to get there.
4. Losing money or over-spending on drugs. Another theme I usually see in myself and others under drugs, is how carelessly we spend money. While I was in Miami is spent around $19k including some money that I lost, however after recovering this amount partially, I would put my total expenses at $11k. My spending habits while I was in Miami, and even after I left Miami changed a bit, because I continued to feel more confident about spending money, which is usually something that I don’t do. I prefer to plan what I will spend on thoroughly and saving money wherever I can. Miami is not a place to save money, it’s rather a place to spend money. And drugs are the worst financial guide.
5. You can’t work, and you will become lazy. You just can’t work on recreational drugs. The people that claim that recreational drugs improve your work output, or your productivity, are fraudsters. At best they might increase your creativity, but this creativity comes in a very disorganized way, you can’t really “control the trip” well and direct to solving X problem in a more creative way. It just doesn’t work like that, if feels more like making random connections between concepts that lead to hallucinations.

YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO CODE, or perform cognitively demanding tasks while you are high. I also think that you will be less willing and less likely to do any job if you consume weed too, so I think you can easily become lazy and unproductive as a drug user, which will create a lot of problems in your life, at its worst, resulting in complete economic failure and having to beg for money or food to survive, or becoming something like a “philosopher” that doesn’t work, but just thinks about things and questions, and impossible questions in his mind, questions that you believe you have the answer to, without proof.

You could also become a living contradiction, like Bob Marley, who claimed he wasn’t rich money-wise, but his definition of richness was “life, forever”. Yet he died at 36, significantly younger than the average person in his time. So objectively, he wasn’t rich in “Life”.

Drugs in humans are a lot like how this comical video portraits drugs on spiders:

Conclusion and TL;DR

• The common knowledge and popular wisdom of “not doing drugs” is actually very wise if you intend to remain alive. I would not recommend doing recreational drugs, I wouldn’t do any of them in any dosage (There is a global study that proved that there is no amount of alcohol that is good for health). You can have fun while being sober by drinking non-alcoholic drinks, by dancing, and talking to people for example. If your social circle drink a lot of alcohol or does drugs, I would advise them not to, switch social circles, or switch the activities you do for fun. I’m not sure where you put health within your list of priorities, but I personally think that your own life and health should be your top priority always, so switching friends and your social circle for health should be a no-brainer, at least it is to me now that I see more clearly. Studies have shown that just the ambient in a party space without —consuming any stimulant/depressant, or any drug—, can make people feel happier and looser in social interactions. This proves that substances aren’t needed to have fun. If you actually want to die by doing drugs, it is better to consult with a therapist, or psychologist first, as they might help you enjoy life more and get out of depression or thoughts of self-harm. Doctors can also prescribe you with anti-depressants, which are like recreational drugs in a lot of cases, but better studied, and taken in a safer, more controlled environment, than other recreational drugs. My personal recommendation would also be to travel abroad and live for several months to a year, in a different place, preferably a cheaper place, where you can feel comfortable with your budget and savings, maybe a less technologically advanced place too, and a place where there are less drugs. I think this can help people get more perspective about where they came from, and also that life can be simpler, yet remain enjoyable. A trip also forces you to learn a new place, and it’s usually much harder to source whatever drugs you did before, in a different country, specially if their culture is less accepting of drugs, or if getting those drugs is actually very hard, impossible, or puts you at a palpable risk of going to jail.
• Be selective about your relationships and who your “friends” are. I have been accustomed to being friendly with everyone and making friends and acquaintances easily, however, my view after being on drugs has changed drastically. Not all people are good for you, and you should select your circle of friends carefully. It is better to have just a few really good friends, than many friends that don’t get you get anywhere in life, or friends who instill bad habits in you, and become a bad influence in your life.
• I think the software industry in the US is still the best in the world, specially in San Francisco, and Silicon Valley more broadly. The US remains an extremely competitive and attractive economy, attracting a lot of immigrants, and some of the best workers in the world. The advances in AI coming from the US, OpenAI, the cloud infrastructure, and the many software startups based out of the US make me believe that the US still has the best software talent, and the best software companies in the world. However, I am curious of the software scene in other places like China and Japan due to Genshin Impact’s launch, and Tencent’s many software holdings which are some of the best games in existence. I’m also interested in the software scene in certain parts of Europe, like Sweden, due to being the home of Spotify and Skype, and Finland for being where Supercell was born.
• Emergent tech cities. I do believe that Miami and other emergent tech hubs in the US will become new homes for people building technology inside the US, and will also attract some international technical talent.
• The US has a severe issue with substance addiction. Of course, not all Americans consume drugs, and when I talk about this with Americans they tell me that “all places have drug addicts” as a sort of excuse that makes the issue less severe because their cities are “no different from everywhere else”. I think compared to many other countries, Americans consume way more substances that are know to be damaging to people’s health, so this analogy isn’t actually true, nor does it help in solving the drug addiction problems, which might be being underplayed due to Americans extreme patriotism. I think that having a strong belief that you live in the best country in the world can distort people’s view, and minimize the degree of problems such as addiction.

International travelers probably notice it the most, while Americans are used to it, and used to dealing with it.

When I was at a McDonald’s in Miami for example, I was a bit spooked by a person that didn’t look mentally sane entering the restaurant and scavenging the trash before he left. Scenes like these are rather common, and most people just ignore them, and have learned to live with them.

After Googling a bit, I found out that Miami is the city with the lowest rates of drug use, which begs the question, how bad is it everywhere else, in other US cities?

In Miami, being the city with the lowest drug use, it’s still common to see “crazy” people in the streets that clearly look like permanently brain-damaged drug addicts roaming, or sleeping in the streets. This encounters continue to shock me, every time I travel to the US.

Overall, I think Americans consume more alcohol, tobacco, caffeine (people over-rely on it to work), weed, sugar, cocaine, and other altered forms of recreational drugs far more than most other countries.

Which is sad, because I really love the US, Americans, their cities, and their culture. I think the US’s tendency to consume damaging drugs in many forms comes from the idea of freedom of choice, which is engraved in American culture.

I think that many people equate freedom with having the option to kill themselves through substances if they want to, even though, in many cases, this attitude puts the lives of others at risk too, ignoring and disrespecting the freedoms and lives of others.

• Crypto is here to stay. Governments and incumbent financial institutions continue to try to regulate crypto, fight it, or discredit it. But ultimately I think crypto will survive and remain strong both in a regulated and an unregulated fashion, similar to how gold exists in society. I also think that cryptocurrencies will continue to grow because a lot of people inside and outside the US, use crypto as money, as a payment layer, and as an investment vehicle. I’ve seen that regular people in the US, like my Uber drivers, also tend to have a mixed view on cryptocurrencies, many had a positive view until they lost money in US dollar terms, so my overall impression is that most people in the US don’t see crypto in a good light. With the exceptions being strong proponents and believers of cryptocurrencies, investors, and generally wealthier individuals.
• AI will affect all industries. I strongly believe that AI will have a profound change in how we live, work and how society works, as it is shaking what seems real or human-made, on a computer screen, on audio, and other electronic forms of content distribution. I think AI will enable the creation of a whole lot more content, and be very useful as an interface with computers, bringing us closer to highly immersive virtual realities that look like the Matrix, or which are easily confused with actual reality. Even though this technological advance poses a lot of challenges from a regulatory standpoint, I think AI’s problems will be solved, and its benefits will be greatly beneficial to humanity and to the US economy. I believe this is the case so much, that AI alone, could make the US retain its position as the global economic leader in defiance to the trend of China overtaking the US as the main economic power in the world, which it has already done in terms of GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity since as far back as 2013 according to the ETH Zurich University.