The conference hasn't started yet!

I’ve been in Arlington since Monday morning. Sharing a room with my mentor, Adam Bird. Which alone is worth the trip.

Every day that passes, someone new shows up. Someone you only knew from the internet becomes a real person. The energy in the building shifts. The room fills. The conversations start.

This morning, Joe from MowPod walked in.

We shook hands. He went up to drop his stuff off. A few minutes later we crossed paths again in the lobby and he stopped me.

“Dude. I’ve got like five years worth of stuff I need to talk to you about.”

I said one word.

“AI.”

He said: “YUP.”

A little while later I was sitting at a table in the hotel working on building a landing page for my AI course. A few prompts. A clear vision. Maybe 45 minutes of actual focused work and the whole thing was done.

That’s when Joe came down and found me.

“I can’t talk to my friends about this. They’re sick of it. My wife doesn’t understand and doesn’t want to hear it anymore. I just need someone who gets it.”

I closed the laptop.

We talked about AI for almost two hours straight. The ideas he couldn’t shut off. The things he was trying to build. The way this technology is changing everything for people who actually use it and not just talk about it.

And somewhere in the middle of it he said something I’ve heard before. In different cities. From different people. Different ages, different backgrounds, but always the same thing underneath.

I get it.

I had to cut it short against my will. James needed help getting gear from a storage unit back to the hotel. Adam Bird and I grabbed a quick dinner. Then we went back and started setting up for the conference.

In the middle of that, my phone buzzed. Instagram DM from Corey Brown, host of Eat Your Feelings.

“Hey, when are you getting to MCC?”

I typed back: “I’m already here.”

He said: “I’ll be there in 10 minutes.”

Corey found out about the conference from me and Mr. Whiskey posting about it. He’d applied to speak here, gone through the whole process, and never heard a single word back.

Most people would’ve closed that tab and moved on.

Corey DM’d Marah, the organizer, directly. They had an hour-long conversation. A speaker dropped out. And Corey Brown is now on the MCC stage Friday morning.

He showed up that night and jumped right in hauling equipment with us.

Later we ended up at the bar. I had a water. We talked about no shame. About going after exactly what you want and not apologizing for the size of the ask. About what it actually looks like when you stop waiting for the door to open and just knock.

We talked about this conference. About finally meeting in person after following each other online. About where he gets his inspiration. About AI and veteran transition and advocacy and plant medicine and the thousand things that live in the space between where most veterans end up and where they could actually be.

Yesterday was the kind of day that reminded me why I do this.

MCC opens its doors tomorrow.

And I’m already full.

This is what the transition actually looks like when you lean into it. Not the job fair version. Not the LinkedIn version. The real version, where you find the room with the right people and you talk for hours about the things that keep you up at night and nobody looks at you like you’re crazy.

Joe couldn’t talk to his friends about AI. Corey got ghosted and knocked on the door anyway.

I started this newsletter three weeks ago because I needed a place to put these conversations. The moments between the big moments. The field reports nobody else is writing.

MCC starts tomorrow. I’ll be reporting from inside.

You don’t want to miss this one.

That landing page you saw? I built it this morning with a single prompt and a terminal window. The full breakdown; tools, process, and the exact prompt structure. It’s in this week’s paid post. If you want the actual playbook and not just the story, that’s where it lives.

My name is Adam Peters, and I’m here to unfuck the transition.