News from Ray
The Night I Had Dinner With Michael Jordan
By Ray Diaz · August 2026
Let me put you in the room.
I am at a high school event with one of my closest friends. The place is loud the way only a high school gym gets loud. And the crowd is chanting. Not for a team. For us. For my friend, for me, for the thing we had built together out of nothing but content and nerve.
And standing off to the side, watching all of it, is Michael Jordan.
You have to understand what that does to your body. This is a man who does not need to be impressed by anything. He has been the most famous athlete alive since before I could read. And he is standing there taking in a room full of kids screaming names that are not his, and he is genuinely interested in why.
He invited us to dinner. Just like that.
I want to tell you I was smooth about it. I sat down at that table and we talked crypto, which I loved, because it meant he was talking to me like a person with a brain and not a fan with a phone. But the thing that got me was smaller than that, and I still think about it.
His wife is Cuban.
I am Cuban. My parents came here from Cuba with nothing. And I am sitting across from Michael Jordan realizing his kids are growing up with the same language in the house that I did, the same food, the same everything. Nobody tells you that. It is not in the documentaries. I found it out at a dinner table I had no business being at.
Then it got stranger. He knew a guy I knew from Puerto Rico, somebody deep in Bitcoin mining. The same world I had walked into through my friend and mentor Dan Fleyshman, who put one of the first Bitcoin ATMs in Las Vegas. Six degrees collapsed into about two, right there over dinner.
I took one picture that night. One. People ask me why, and here is the honest answer: I did not want to be that guy. He had already given us the whole evening. Turning it into a photo shoot would have been taking something that was not offered. He was gracious about all of it, but that is exactly why I did not push.
The picture is dark. You can barely see us. I do not care even a little bit.
I know what that night was.