What I’ve Learned (So Far) From GUTS
I began GUTS thinking I was making a podcast. What I’m realizing is—I’m entering into something more alive than that.
Eight episodes released. Seventeen conversations recorded. My goal is fifty. That’s when I think I’ll start to really understand what this thing is. For now, I’m learning as I go. Listening closely. Following the signal. Letting the form take shape through the doing.
I began GUTS thinking I was making a podcast. What I’m realizing is—I’m entering into something more alive than that. Each conversation doesn’t feel like an interview. It feels like a co-created excavation. A place where both of us—the guest and I—are exploring something in real time. I don’t come with answers. I don’t even come with conclusions. I come as a fellow traveler, offering my own vulnerability in the hope that it will make room for theirs.
When it works, it’s not performance. It’s not content. It’s shared reflection of this experience called Life.
Here’s what I’ve noticed so far.
1. People aren’t scared to go deep. They’re scared they’ll go there alone.
When the space is real, the depth comes quickly. What people need isn’t coaxing—it’s presence. When the questions aren’t transactional, and the listening isn’t performative, something opens. Most people have never had the chance to tell the version of their story that has no conclusion or point. Not because they’ve been hiding it. But because the context was never right.
2. Every life is already a story—we just don’t recognize it until we start speaking.
I’ve seen it happen a few times already: a guest shares one moment, then another, and suddenly there’s a thread. A shape. A deeper logic that starts to reveal itself. Something they lived through but never looked at this way. GUTS is not about storytelling. It’s about story recognition. What you’ve been carrying. What it’s been shaping in you. What you’re here to give.
3. Purpose doesn’t come with clarity. It comes with repetition.
No one I’ve spoken to has laid out a linear map. What I hear instead is a recurring pattern. Something that kept knocking. A pull. A question. A wound. A theme. Purpose, it seems, doesn’t arrive in a lightning strike—it whispers, then returns, again and again, like a scratch you can’t quite reach, until we start to listen.
4. Silence is where the real things come through.
Some of the most important moments come after someone stops talking. In the pause. In the breath. In the look-away. We’re trained to fill space. But space is what allows a truth to appear. If I can stay still long enough, in that discomfort of nothing, then something unplanned usually shows up. And it’s always more real than whatever I could have asked for.
5. Better questions don’t uncover answers. They uncover dimensions.
The deeper I go into this work, the more I realize: a good question doesn’t guide someone to what you want to know. It shifts what they can see. It doesn’t reveal information. It reveals resonance.
Some questions hit like tuning forks. They aren’t information-seeking. They’re vibration-testing. To help locate where something real might be hiding—where the signal lives. And if I’m listening well enough, the next question isn’t planned. It’s felt.
I’m not sure yet what GUTS is becoming. I’m still in the middle of it. Still stumbling ahead. Still adjusting the tuning. But even this early on, I know it’s not about answers. It’s not even about stories. It’s about the conditions that allow something true to surface.
And if we’re lucky, something rises that neither of us saw coming.
That’s what I’m chasing. That’s what I’ll keep learning toward. Until the space knows what it wants to be.
I invite you to join that expedition. Because I am sure that the story of one person’s life shared in this way can be medicine for yours. And vice versa. Your life shared in a similar manner can be medicine for others.
Onwards with grace and humility,
—Topaz, August, 2025
