Re:Building Together EP 276 — Summer Before Devices

Host: CEELOS (@CEELOSFIGG) · Wed, 29 Jul 2026 · 1:06:12 · 5 active speakers

TL;DR

• A "Way Back Wednesday" edition on what summers felt like before smartphones — parks, water balloon fights, hood football rivalries — that drifts into an honest talk about phone (and vape) addiction.
• CEELOS ran the show from his warehouse while co-host Baked called in from work; co-host Val was stuck on a plane and only surfaced in the listener section at the very end.
• Jed pulled up mid-apartment-move and delivered the emotional center of the room: candid recovery story, a "your 20s aren't over" pep talk, and a push for Baked to start opening his own spaces.
• Concrete builds surfaced: Baked is planning a small app bundling every AI prompt the group has made, plus refreshed banner/collage tools (with Astro's help), and flagged a broken temporary Discord invite link to fix.
• The crew talked up the node/canoe (Nord) platform over older tools like Vulcan, and agreed education — getting people to actually use the tech — is the hard part.

Highlights

[8:44] The tamal summit. toomazing's lunch break turned into a regional debate — short ribs, rice, and "a tamal on the side, low key." CEELOS insisted on "tamal," not "tamale," and recounted repeatedly finding a full drumstick bone buried in Salvadoran tamales, which toomazing diagnosed as "lazy cook for you, bro."

[13:16] Defending the park. toomazing described his neighborhood football team rolling to other parks to challenge the local kids — "got in a couple fights, but you gotta hold it down for the park." CEELOS's house rule: random kids asking to play always got a no, because with strangers a fight breaks out, with friends it's just an argument.

[14:22] "White boy can dunk." A height-based basketball roast unfolded — CEELOS's abandoned hoop dreams, toomazing invoking Muggsy Bogues, and Baked repeatedly insisting on his hops ("white boy can dunk, so I got ups") while everyone promised to ball him up anyway.

[16:47] Losing the childhood crew. A more reflective stretch — Baked can count the friends he's kept on one hand, Solo dolo said "fuck no" to staying in touch with anyone from age 13, and CEELOS noted the three people up on the panel are now the people he talks to daily.

[26:52] Space-mode as a social shield. CEELOS's best bit: he keeps an earbud in and, when a petition-gatherer or salesperson approaches outside a store, he launches into a detailed unprompted monologue about NFTs and the "mob trait" until they leave him alone. "That's part of space training."

[31:25] Jed's phone dependency, confessed. Jed arrived mid-move ("it's a disaster right now") and admitted leaving his phone at a club once made for the worst ten hours of his life — but the few times he's forgotten it while out, he woke up thinking, "I need to do that more often."

[33:00–35:30] The vape-in-bed chronicles. The room's comic peak: Baked's rule about not signing into MetaMask drunk (learned "the hard way"), Jed waking at 3 a.m. to hit the vape and check OpenSea with one eye open, and the admission that he'll wake up looking for the vape only to find "my hand is stuck in my head still — I never dropped that shit."

[42:22] "You have no idea what fucked up is." Jed's turn to mentor. He told Baked (about to turn 28) that he blew his whole net worth twice before 30, got clean at 31, then crushed it from 32 to 39 — so anyone declaring their life over at 24 has no perspective. Baked agreed he now feels like he's "walking into my prime."

[45:11] Just open a space. Jed urged Baked to fire up spaces at odd hours purely to catch someone in a different time zone — "if I onboard one person and I spent two hours, to me it was worth it." He credited starting spaces a year ago with changing his whole web3 trajectory.

[52:45] The prompt app idea. Baked floated a project he wasn't ready to announce: a small app holding every prompt the group has ever made, so anyone can drop in a PFP and get several edits back — plus easier banner and collage tools, possibly built with Astro. Jed's endorsement: "people need help with creating shit — the more you help them create, the more they post."

Topic timeline

Notable quotes

• "What's in my head is evil. I try to always be active doing something." — Baked [24:40]
  ▶

  0:38
• "I hang out in spaces enough that I pretend that I'm in spaces when I don't want somebody to talk to me in public." — CEELOS [26:52]
  ▶

  0:38
• "Number one rule, never sign on to your MetaMask when you twist it, bro." — Jed [33:08]
  ▶

  0:38
• "There's times I wake up and I'm like, yo, where's my vape? And I'm looking around and see my hand is stuck in my head still. I never dropped that shit." — Jed [35:13]
  ▶

  0:38
• "If you think you're fucked up now and you're in your 20s, you have no fucking idea what fucked up is." — Jed [42:22]
  ▶

  0:38
• "When I was 23, 24, I had that feeling like, oh, my life's over... Now that I'm about to turn 28, I feel it's the complete opposite. I feel like I'm just walking into my prime." — Baked [42:51]
  ▶

  0:38

Who said what

• CEELOS (@CEELOSFIGG) — host, running the show from his warehouse; steered the nostalgia theme toward his real preoccupation, cutting the unproductive time on his phone.
• Baked (@Bakedmetax) — co-host calling in from work; the builder of the group, pitching a prompt app and tool upgrades, and the one getting the "you're just hitting your prime" pep talk.
• Jed (@jed_131) — arrived mid-move and became the room's heart: brutally honest about addiction and recovery, and the loudest advocate for using spaces to network and grow.
• toomazingTM (@TooMazing265) — on lunch break, anchor of the tamal debate and the hood-football memories; also the guy who went to the gym raw with no headphones.
• Solo dolo (@solodolo) — unrepentant device lover ("I love my device"), with camping as his one true off-grid escape.

Worth a full listen

• [33:00]–[35:30] — The vape-and-phone-in-bed confessions land better in full; the timing between Jed and Baked comparing 3 a.m. rituals is the funniest stretch of the space.
• [42:00]–[47:00] — Jed's recovery arc and his advice to Baked about opening spaces and treating web3 as a genuine head start. Warm, unguarded, and the reason to stick around past the small talk.
• [8:44]–[10:30] — The tamal debate, for anyone who wants the full Salvadoran-vs-Guatemalan breakdown and the recurring drumstick-bone tragedy.