SUMMARY

Bruno and Cisco open the stage to the audience, and the conversation takes on a life of its own. What begins with cannabis, fear, and the seven levels of consciousness becomes a raw exploration of suffering, self-talk, brain trauma, purpose, AI, and learning to trust who you are becoming.

HIGHLIGHTS

• The seven levels of consciousness• Whether suffering is necessary for personal growth• A former championship football player coaches Cisco through self-doubt• The Chinese farmer, disciplined openness, and refusing to judge life too quickly• Gratitude, positive self-talk, AI, quantum physics, and the wisdom of strangers

What happens when a professional poker player spends twenty years studying probability, human behavior, risk, and incomplete information, then points that same mind at consciousness?

You get Preston Lee.

In Vibe Sesh #27, Preston takes us from underground poker games and winning a World Series of Poker bracelet to fatherhood, meditation, psychic channeling, higher-dimensional consciousness, and his attempt to reverse-engineer luck.

But underneath all the cosmic weirdness, this became a deeply human conversation about learning to trust yourself, allowing emotions to move through you, finding your purpose, and closing the gap between understanding an idea and actually embodying it.

We also witnessed a genuine breakthrough with Cisco, welcomed Will into the Vibe Cauldron, explored whether Gen Z needs alcohol to escape the pressure of constant surveillance, and asked what the first conscious AI might ask itself.

Highlights

* How Preston identified weak poker players within minutes

* What poker taught him about emotional regulation

* Winning a WSOP bracelet after losing twenty tournaments in a row

* Why becoming a husband and father began his spiritual transformation

* The broccoli that convinced him the universe might be listening

* Luck as the action that increases your future expected value

* Why awareness without embodiment changes very little

* Preston’s psychic reading of Cisco’s purpose and hidden strengths

* Why people need spaces capable of holding their full range

* Sultar on technology, self-expression, addiction, and the future

* Preston’s haunting answer to the eternal-loop question

This one traveled from poker tables to artificial intelligence, through the center of the Earth, past an interdimensional consciousness, and finally arrived at silence.

Just another evening inside the Vibe Cauldron.

Learn more about the Omnivore Club at www.thevibesamurai.com.

Travis James Mayo grew up moving between homes, attended ten schools before high school, lost people he loved to violence and addiction, and left home at sixteen.

Today, he creates videos about language, psychology, perception, consciousness, and the hidden systems shaping our lives. But beneath the polished ideas is a deeply personal question: How do you stop your past from deciding your future?

In Vibe Sesh #26, Travis opens up about the brutal voice he once used against himself, the books and practices that helped him rebuild, becoming the present father he never had, and why the demons don’t disappear just because you understand them.

We also explore why language can become a prison, how he uses walking, gratitude, visualization, and a wild science-fiction mind palace to interrupt destructive thoughts, why online community matters, and what happens when knowledge finally becomes action.

The conversation ends with two ordinary moments Travis would relive forever: one with the grandfather who made him feel loved, and one more chance to sit with his mother and ask what she had been carrying.

His final realization stopped us cold:

“I am the adult of my childhood now.”

Featuring Travis James Mayo, Bruno (Vibe Samurai), and Cisco.

In this conversation:

• Growing up in chaos and attending ten schools before high school• Why Travis started sharing ideas online after years of collecting them privately• Language, self-talk, and the seven words that may be quietly limiting your life• Why insight alone doesn’t stop the demons• Becoming your own supporter when nobody is coming to rescue you• Travis’s “mind palace” inspired by Red Rising• Why becoming a father changed the adult he chose to become• Cisco opens up about negative self-talk, journaling, and feeling stuck• Attention versus trust in the age of AI• The loneliness behind intellectual curiosity• Why Travis wants to join the Omnivore Club• The two ordinary moments he would relive forever

Is astrology revealing something written into the universe, or giving us a symbolic language for understanding ourselves?

In Vibe Sesh #25, astrologer Noelani, The Sassy Sage, takes Bruno and Cisco beyond Sun signs and horoscopes into birth charts, planetary timing, Jungian individuation, Hermeticism, tarot, and the strange patterns that shape our lives.

Highlights

* Why your Sun sign is only one slice of the astrological pizza

* Whether we discover our identity or create it

* Astrology as a map for shadow, purpose, and personal patterns

* Noelani’s live readings of Bruno and Cisco

* A final tarot pull that ends with The Emperor: boss up and build it

A funny, unfiltered conversation about destiny, agency, community, and one big question:

What is the soul trying to become?

People-pleasing looks generous from the outside. Underneath, it can be an attempt to manage everyone else’s feelings so that you never have to feel rejected, unsafe, or alone.

In Vibe Sesh 24, self-leadership and relationship coach Kori Strobl joined Bruno and Cisco for a raw conversation about the anxiety beneath people-pleasing, why insight alone rarely changes us, and how easily chemistry gets mistaken for emotional capacity.

Cisco brought a recent experience with limerence into the room, Kori caught the entire pattern hiding inside one tiny word, and Bruno confronted his own struggle with “algorithm pleasing” while building a growing public community.

The conversation eventually returned to the yoga studio Kori once tried to save, the shame that drove her into hiding, and the emotional work that helped her step back into visibility.

This was not a conversation about becoming selfish or no longer caring about people. It was about learning to care without disappearing.

10 Highlights From the Conversation

1. People-pleasers can be quietly controlling

Kori began with a provocative idea: when your okayness depends on everyone else being okay, you become invested in managing their emotions. The intention may be loving, but underneath it is an attempt to create safety by influencing how other people behave.

2. People-pleasing is indirect self-care

The people-pleaser is often trying to take care of themselves, but through everybody else. If I can calm you, please you, heal you, or prevent your disappointment, then perhaps I can finally feel safe. The problem is that my emotional stability now lives outside of me.

3. Sensitivity can become either hypervigilance or a gift

Kori’s childhood sensitivity taught her to monitor everything happening around her. That same sensitivity later became her ability to recognize patterns, hold space, teach, and understand people deeply. The work was not to lose the gift, but to turn some of that sensitivity inward and include herself in her own awareness.

4. Chemistry can make you feel full without giving you nutrients

Cisco shared a recent experience with limerence and a woman who told him she did not have the capacity to pursue the connection. Kori distinguished chemistry, how intensely someone makes you feel, from capacity, what that person can actually sustain through honesty, tension, disagreement, and repair.

Chemistry may temporarily fill the stomach. Capacity provides nutrition.

5. The entire pattern was hiding inside the word “yet”

The woman told Cisco that there was chemistry but no capacity. Cisco repeated it as “no capacity yet.”

Kori stopped him immediately. The woman had already completed her sentence. Cisco added “yet” because hope could not tolerate the finality of what she had said. One tiny word kept the emotional tab open.

6. Stay in your own life and visit the other person

Kori’s dating advice was beautifully simple: slow down. Do not mentally move into another person’s life after a few moments of chemistry.

Stay rooted in your own routines, friendships, purpose, and identity. Visit the other person, observe them over time, and then return to the life you already love.

As Kori put it, you have to create a life worth staying in.

7. Adaptability is a superpower until you have no center

Cisco described himself as a chameleon who can move between different people and environments. Kori did not tell him to stop adapting. She explained that adaptability becomes dangerous only when there is no internal reference underneath it.

The question became:

Who are you when nobody else is in the room, and can you remain that person when someone walks in?

8. The algorithm can become another person to please

Bruno admitted that weak engagement can make him question whether he has lost his ability to create. Kori called it “algorithm pleasing.”

The same mechanism had found a new target. What began as authentic expression could slide into performance once there was an audience, a community, and something visible to lose.

9. Kori returned to the story that once made her disappear

Years ago, Kori attempted to save a yoga community by taking over its studio. The business generated significant revenue, but the rent made it unsustainable. When it closed, she experienced the outcome as a personal failure and retreated from public life.

During an earlier Breakthrough Call with Bruno, the story was still intensely emotional. Afterward, Kori allowed herself to grieve, wrote herself a letter, and began slowly returning to visibility through Toastmasters, social media, podcasts, and public teaching.

In this conversation, she told the story without disappearing inside it.

10. Showing up for yourself does not immediately remove the pain

Kori compared emotional presence to sitting beside a child who has skinned his knee. Sitting with him does not instantly stop the knee from hurting, but he no longer hurts alone.

Self-leadership is not always fixing, explaining, or transcending the emotion. Sometimes it is simply remaining present in the body and refusing to abandon yourself while the feeling moves through you.

The conversation ended with Kori imagining her eternal loop: dancing alone on a baseball field to Prince, fully alive, completely free, and enjoying her own company.

Maybe belonging to yourself looks something like that.

You can find Kori at: https://www.koristrobl.com/

Vibe Sesh 23 went everywhere: money, boredom, technology, reinvention, mental health, Bitcoin, creativity, community, and what happens when you finally stop overthinking and let something move through you.

It was messy, funny, occasionally uncomfortable, and deeply human. Somewhere inside the chaos, we discovered what Vibe Sesh and the Omnivore Club may really be offering:

Presence is rare, but every one of us has access to it.

10 Highlights From the Night

1. When money stops being the purpose

DJ, a 20-year-old from Florida, asked how I keep money from consuming my life. The answer surprised me: the more I became the Vibe Samurai, the less I cared about endlessly accumulating more. Purpose stopped being money and became presence, creativity, and human connection.

2. Gen Z never lost the pacifier. It became the phone.

DJ spoke about how difficult it is to remain present when every scroll delivers another demand on his attention. Cisco described the phone as the pacifier Gen Z never had to surrender. If you have been digitally stimulated since childhood, boredom doesn’t feel empty. It can feel unbearable.

3. Cisco unexpectedly became the elder

Cisco has often wondered what he could possibly offer anyone. He is too young, too uncertain, not accomplished enough. But when DJ described a struggle Cisco had already lived through, something changed. Cisco stopped evaluating himself and started helping.

He recommended long walks without headphones, learning to tolerate boredom, and reclaiming attention from everything competing for consciousness.

Afterward, Cisco surprised himself:

“I was in my flow state. I was a vehicle. It wasn’t even me.”

Sometimes wisdom appears when we stop asking whether we are qualified to give it.

4. The room got uncomfortable, and we stayed human

One guest arrived with unusual behavior, frequent interruptions, and stories that were difficult to follow. It created a genuinely uncomfortable hosting situation.

But he also offered one sharp observation: many people publish profound ideas without ever allowing the audience to meet them. Going live gives people the chance to discover whether someone truly stands behind what they say.

The challenge was preserving one person’s dignity while protecting the experience of the entire room.

5. Starting over at 56

Ebony Queen joined us from her college dorm in Michigan. After divorce, financial difficulty, an injury, and ten years working as a pharmacy technician, she returned to college after a 30-year absence.

At 56, she is preparing to become a cardiovascular sonographer.

Reinvention does not care how old you are. It only asks whether you are still willing to move.

6. A philosopher appeared from Bangladesh

Sadat joined his first Instagram Live at seven in the morning from Bangladesh. He helps participate in a local group of around 30 people who meet to explore difficult ideas without becoming trapped inside their judgments.

His central principle was simple:

“You have to choose both to see where they lead.”

Before becoming attached to one side, temporarily walk both intellectual roads. Assume an idea is true and follow its consequences. Then assume it is false and do the same. Curiosity begins when your opinion stops believing it owns reality.

7. Thinking can interfere with knowing

Sadat also described a period of isolation in which he tried to unravel his own mind. He realized that excessive thought was separating him from action.

His example was cricket: when he simply played, his body knew what to do. When he consciously analyzed every movement, performance became harder.

Thought helps us prepare. But at some point, we have to get out of the way and allow experience to act through us.

8. Maybe you are not blocked. Maybe you chose the wrong medium.

Cisco has struggled to create short-form videos, even though he comes alive during live conversations. That led to an important realization: his problem may not be a lack of ideas or courage. He may simply be forcing himself into a form that fights his natural strengths.

The path forward might be live conversation first. The videos can emerge from that.

Sometimes the path of least resistance is not laziness. It is alignment.

9. The product is presence

In the middle of a conversation about Bitcoin, creativity, community, and the future of the Omnivore Club, the real idea appeared:

“The whole product is presence.”

Not more information. Not networking for its own sake. Not another community where people perform intelligence at one another.

A place where people listen, remain curious, and help someone discover that they have something worth contributing.

Presence is rare. But we always have access to it.

10. We are discovering this in public

This night was not polished. People rambled. Stories collapsed halfway through. Someone invented part of a frog myth while telling it. We got distracted by Bitcoin, content creation, edibles, dentures, and whether anyone was actually 5’10”.

But something real kept emerging.

Vibe Sesh is becoming a public human laboratory: strangers arrive as audience members, step into the room, and sometimes leave with a different understanding of who they could become.

We don’t know exactly where this is going yet.

That might be the most exciting part.

Summary:

Andrew Fung has spent more than 13 years exploring Asian-American culture through comedy, food, politics, and the Fung Bros. He joined us from the streets of New York for a conversation that began with foreskin freedom and somehow arrived at Buddhism, Christianity, racial identity, mindfulness, family, and the moments that make us feel most alive.

It was hilarious, occasionally chaotic, and unexpectedly intimate. Andrew shared parts of himself he rarely discusses publicly, while we explored one central question: Can identity remain meaningful without becoming the entirety of who we are?

10 highlights

* Foreskin freedom enters the chatAndrew explains his defense of “natty dudes,” giving us perhaps the most unexpected opening in Vibe Sesh history.

* Why Andrew followed the Vibe SamuraiFriends had been sharing Bruno’s videos, and the “intellectual omnivore” idea convinced Andrew that this conversation might go somewhere unusual.

* How the Fung Bros helped name Asian-American lifeAndrew reflects on creating videos about experiences mainstream culture largely ignored, giving young Asian-Americans the feeling that they were not alone or defective.

* The cultural importance of LinsanityJeremy Lin was not merely a basketball phenomenon. He disrupted what an Asian-American man was culturally permitted to look like.

* Why Asian men struggle to make people feel somethingAndrew examines the tension between competence and emotional impact, and why reasonable, moderate Asian men rarely become America’s heroes or villains.

* Can white people be proud of being white?Gavin joins an unexpectedly nuanced discussion about racial pride, historical baggage, cultural specificity, and whether inherited identity can be appreciated without becoming exclusionary.

* Christianity meets BuddhismAndrew discusses his Christian beliefs, curiosity about Buddhism, and why he rarely shares this part of himself publicly. Bruno explains mindfulness, nonattachment, and why Jesus remains his “main squeeze.”

* Is Asian-American identity discovered or constructed?We ask whether “Asian-American” describes something intrinsic or a relational category created through history, culture, and contrast.

* Can you put down an identity without disappearing?Bruno and Andrew represent two responses to the same in-between condition: one continued excavating Asian identity, while the other gradually stopped needing it to explain everything.

* The Eternal Loop revealAndrew chooses two moments he would relive forever: hitting a game-winning basketball shot and being surrounded by his healthy family. Then comes the question that brings the entire conversation home: In either moment, was there an Asian Andrew?

Culture may furnish the room. Presence is why we want to remain there.

Vibe Sesh 21 - Are You Interested In Being Interested?

No guest. No agenda. Just eight strangers, a Zen tiger, and the first real night of the Omnivore Club.

No special guest this time — just Bruno, Cisco, and whoever wandered into the room. That’s the whole experiment: strip away the “invisible audition” of a booked interview and see what a room of curious strangers does with total freedom. Turns out: a lot. In two hours the conversation ping-ponged from freedom and anarchy, to a Zen parable about a tiger, a strawberry, and a mouse eating your rope, to mycelium being the biggest trade network on earth, to one guy’s two-year religious deconstruction, to a first-timer named Josh asking “are humans naturally good or evil?” thirty seconds after saying hello. This is what the Omnivore Club actually looks like when it’s working — not a panel, not a pitch, just people who showed up interested in being interested.

10 Highlights:

* Cold open: Bruno and Cisco riff on pre-show rituals — Bruno’s “magic formula” for getting psyched before a show, honed over 20+ episodes and compared notes with a fellow host who times his out to the minute

* The origin story — Bruno and Cisco trace Vibe Sesh back to its roots on X Spaces: audio-only, anonymous, no forced introductions, just “we got sucked into a space and boom” — the format this whole show was built from

* Cisco’s read on what he learned watching Bruno work: “you have a hypersensitivity to words, reactions... and you can point those things out and ask them about it” — the closest thing to a technique breakdown Cisco’s ever given on air

* A first-timer named Josh joins the room and immediately drops: “What do you guys think the natural state of humans are? Good or evil?” — no warm-up, no small talk, straight into it

* The freedom/anarchy tangent lands on a line from Gavin that stops the room: “Man is but slave to self, but to be slave to self is to be free”

* Cisco counters with Viktor Frankl — “between the stimuli and response there’s a gap, and in that gap is your freedom” — and the group spends the next five minutes trying to widen that gap live

* The Zen parable: a man hangs from a cliff, tiger above, tiger below, a mouse eating through the rope holding him — and right in front of him, a strawberry. The room sits with it: do you eat the strawberry?

* Levin — dialing in from a different time zone entirely — pivots the room to mycelium and fungi as “the world’s biggest trade network,” and somehow it fits perfectly into what everyone’s already been circling

* A raw, unscripted moment: one participant opens up about two years spent deconstructing his religious upbringing — “I did about two years worth of research... it was, it was the construct of a man’s thinking and interpretation” — mid-conversation, unprompted, no one steering him there

* Cisco names the Omnivore Club’s actual founding code out loud for the first time: come in good faith, don’t diminish curiosity over certainty, presence over performance, disagree without domination — “nothing is too deep, strange, or silly to explore”

Nate found me through one video. Not the one that made him blow up — the one before it, where he opened by telling people not to expect anything useful. No hook, no tip, no strategy. Just him, talking about growing up off-reserve, feeling caught between worlds, not always sure his own identity belonged to him. Then a few weeks later he posted a video about being an "intellectual omnivore," and it went everywhere, and four more just like it followed, and by the time we sat down he'd tripled his following in about fourteen days. So that's where we started — not with the growth, with the gap. What happens to the part of you that doesn't perform well, once you find the part that does? We got into his indigenous background, his production company, his best friend and business partner Desmond who showed up mid-conversation and ended up staying, fatherhood, masculinity, scripts versus no scripts, and whether using AI makes any of it less real. No script on our end either, for what it's worth.

Ten highlights

* He hit 30,000 followers while cooking hot dogs. Found out mid-lunch, standing over the grill.

* The video that actually got Bruno’s attention wasn’t the viral one — it was the one Nate almost didn’t post, about his Indigenous identity, with zero call to action.

* “It takes a lot of work to make the worst thing you’ve ever seen” — Nate’s own line about what it actually costs to find your voice online.

* He posts 10 to 20 trial reels a day and treats every one as a data point, not a finished thought.

* His business partner Desmond joined the conversation unannounced and ended up staying for the rest of the episode.

* A hard, honest exchange on AI and scripts — Nate’s never scripted a video in his life, Bruno uses AI constantly, and neither one backed down easy.

* Nate on why he dropped the “niche” advice completely: “You are the niche.”

* A story from a documentary he filmed about Indigenous WWII veterans denied recognition by the Canadian government — and one subject’s unscripted line: “If you can inherit their pain and their trauma, you can also inherit their power and their agency.”

* The Kamloops residential school discovery in 2016, and what it did to how an entire generation of Indigenous people had to relate to their own history.

* Desmond’s answer to the Eternal Loop question — sober six years, four days of fasting and silence during a Sundance ceremony, then getting to hug his family again. Bruno called it the best answer they’ve ever gotten.

Follow

Nate Gaffney on Instagram: @nategaffney

Vibe Sesh 19 - Did You Choose Your Life, Or Just Get Good At Performing It?

Benoit Malige built the Porsche, the boat, the four-story house on the intracoastal — then walked away from all of it and started calling it "the first life."

This week’s guest is Benoit Malige, a French-American writer and entrepreneur who spent his twenties and early thirties chasing the version of success everyone told him would fix him — real estate empire, multiple Porsches, a house on the water, a 30,000-person investor network — and got there. Then he sold it, walked away from the company he built, and gave himself one year to figure out why none of it made him feel anything. What came out of that year became a newsletter, a book, and a framework he calls The Second Life: the idea that most of who we are was handed to us before we could choose it, and the real work isn’t self-improvement, it’s figuring out what’s actually yours to keep. We got into his story, his viral “need to belong” video, why he doesn’t believe in fixed personality types, and what it actually felt like the night he realized he was too scared to find out what would happen if he stopped.

In this episode:

* The night in Punta Cana he went from “future locked in” to unemployed with one week to leave the country

* Why he calls the version of success he built “addiction in a suit”

* The line that started it all: “I have everything I wanted — why do I feel nothing?”

* His three-brains framework: the logical brain, the emotional brain, and the nervous system that overrides both

* Why he thinks personality types — including introvert and extrovert — are mostly a story we tell ourselves

* The masking theory: why performing drains you more than the people you’re performing for

* His viral video on why we don’t become ourselves — we become whoever gives us the best shot at being wanted

* Building and then walking away from a 30,000-person community, and what he learned about leading one

* Why he thinks awareness without embodiment is just “sophisticated suffering”

* His Eternal Loop answer — and what it revealed about what he actually values

Find Benoit on Instagram: @benoit_malige