Forrest Gump famously said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.

And when what you get is lemons, the thing to do is make lemonade.

But what do you do when you get cacao fruit that’s overripe?

Well, you can make chocolate.

Confused? Well, here’s a little story about what I’m talking about.

A couple months ago, my wife Becca and I were on a mini adventure, exploring some of the different markets in Santa Teresa, Costa Rica. We went into a organic market just to see what they might have that we hadn’t seen elsewhere.

Our expectation was that everything would be expensive. It wasn’t. Nothing was horribly overpriced. And they had some pretty interesting things in there. Some very yummy, homemade popsicles, a few brands of Costa Rican coffee we had not seen yet, and CACAO FRUIT! The fruit that cacao/cocoa beans come from.

That is something I’ve been wanting to try for a long time. So, we bought one.

When most people think of cacao, they think of chocolate. Cacao nibs. The beans inside the fruit. But the fruit itself is apparently very delicious. The flavor is tropical, sweet, and tangy and often described as a cross between lychee, mango, and citrus.

We decided to eat it that night. It was dessert after our dinner of banana leaf steamed whole red snapper tostados.

When I opened it up, it just didn’t look right to me. There wasn’t much pulp. So, I did some investigating. I looked at pictures of cacao fruit online. The pictures I saw showed a lot of delicious-looking pulp. I was beginning to realize I might have a bad one.

I then took a picture of it and uploaded it to Claude. Claude said that the fruit appeared to be overripe. I obviously didn’t know what I was doing when I selected it.

That said, here’s where it gets interesting.

In the process of making chocolate, the fruit is often used to ferment the beans. That fermentation helps develop the flavor. And what had naturally happened inside our overripe cacao was that the beans had already started to ferment. They’d started to darken, which is the first step of making chocolate.

So, I asked Claude, could I actually just roast these beans and turn them into cacao nibs?

Absolutely!

So that’s what I did.

In our kitchen setup in Costa Rica, we didn’t have an oven. Roasting is not easy. I had to improvise.

I took a pan, put a strainer inside of it so there wasn’t direct contact between the beans and the bottom of the pan. Essentially creating a little oven in there. Then I covered it and roasted the beans for about thirty minutes.

Did they come out perfectly roasted? No. But you could start to taste the cacao. I’d say they were 75% there.

So, what’s the point of this story?

When I first opened that fruit, my thought was, we got a bad fruit. I need to take it back. That was a fear-based response. Fear alerted me. This wasn’t what I expected. Then love stepped in and asked, “What can I do with it?”

That changed my orientation. Instead of taking it back, I thought about how I could make lemonade out of lemons. Or in this case, chocolate out of overripe cacao fruit. Maybe that’s what the universe intended me to do. Maybe it was a little test for how well I’m putting this whole Heart-Strong philosophy into action.

At the time we were prepping to head back to the US. This starts with a 5-hour trek to San Jose. Becca would be making some breakfast cookies as it is an early morning shuttle. She decided to crush up those roasted cacao nibs and put them in there.

They were awesome!

And maybe this started a whole new exploration phase for me. Maybe I’ll start roasting cacao beans. Or even roast some coffee beans and experiment with that. Play with it. That spark of creativity never would have happened if I said, this fruit is bad and took it back to the store.

As I was writing this story, I got my Daily Stoic email. It was about the concept of Amor Fati. It is a mindset for making the best out of anything that happens. It is treating each and every moment, no matter how challenging, as something to be embraced, not avoided. To not just be okay with it but love it and be better for it.

Put another way, when life gives you overripe cacao fruit, make chocolate.

Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org.

But recently, I have been thinking about it differently.

Connection can be one-way.

I can feel connected to you without you feeling connected to me. Someone can feel a deep connection to a person who doesn’t even know they exist. That’s not a flaw in the word. It’s what the word actually means. It describes how energy moves in one direction. From me to you. From you to something. But not necessarily back.

Relationship is different. Relationship is always reciprocal.

You can have unhealthy relationships and healthy relationships. But you can’t have a one-way relationship. If the moment’s one-way, it’s not really a relationship anymore. It’s something else.

Why This Matters for Community

I’ve been working on a deeper piece about community. Trying to name the core elements that actually make community work. I kept landing on four things. Relationship to self. Relationship to others. Relationship to place. Relationship to resources.

For a while I was calling them connections. Connection to self. Connection to others. Connection to the planet. But once I saw the difference, I couldn’t unsee it.

If you’re building community on connection, you might be building something that only flows in one direction. I connect with you. You don’t connect with me. That’s not community. That’s an audience.

Community requires reciprocity. It requires something flowing between people, not just from one to another. That’s relationship.

Where Love and Fear Fit

This is where I think it gets interesting. Once you frame it as relationship, the love and fear lens maps right onto it.

Healthy relationships are driven by love. They make both people better. The energy flows and grows. Unhealthy relationships are driven by fear. They deplete. They control. They extract.

Think about what fear-based relationships look like at scale. That’s where you get racism. White supremacy. Environmental destruction. Systems built on extraction rather than reciprocity. Fear drives all of it.

And love-based relationships? That’s where you get healing. Growth. The kind of community where people actually tend each other’s fires.

Love and fear aren’t just emotions in this framework. They’re the quality of energy flowing through every relationship we’re in. With ourselves. With each other. With the places we live. With the resources we share.

The Energy in a Fight

My wife Becca has been reading The Celestine Prophecy. One night at dinner, she told me about a scene that had landed with her.

In the book, a character learns to see energy flowing between people. Then he witnesses two people arguing. And what he sees is that the argument isn’t really about ideas. It’s about energy. Each person is trying to extract energy from the other. The one who wins the argument gets a surge. The one who loses feels depleted.

That’s a fear-based relationship in action. I need to win. I need your energy. I need to take something from you so I can feel full.

The book suggests that part of our growth as humans is learning to stop doing that. To stop trying to extract energy from each other and instead find a source that doesn’t require someone else to lose.

I sat with that for a while. Because that’s exactly what I’ve been writing about. When there’s good energy flowing between people, it’s rooted in love. We’re making each other better. Like Becca and me at that dinner table. Great energy between us. Nobody taking. Both giving.

But when we come from fear, when we need to win the argument or control the outcome, we’re essentially trying to take someone else’s energy and use it to fill ourselves up. The other person walks away depleted.

What I’m Sitting With

I didn’t discover anything new here. If you look critically at how our society is structured, at the isolation and extraction and fear baked into so many of our systems, it’s almost impossible to land anywhere other than the conclusion that we need something different. Something built on reciprocal relationship rather than one-way extraction.

These thoughts are still forming. But the language shift from connection to relationship feels important. It’s not just semantics. It changes what you’re building toward. Connection can look like love while still being one-way. Relationship can’t fake it. It’s either reciprocal or it’s not.

I think community has to be built on the thing that can’t fake it. Relationships.

Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org

It’s a simple question my Aunt Jill asked me when she called to wish me a Happy Birthday.

“Actually, I’m on my way to a memorial service.” That was my response because that’s what I was doing.

She started apologizing. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry.”

I told her two things. First, don’t apologize. There’s nothing to be sorry for. And second, I actually can’t think of a better way to spend the afternoon of my birthday.

And I meant it.

Fred Koerber was the father of a very close high school friend, Kyle. Fred was someone I was very close to as well. And the arc of our relationship is something I keep turning over.

He started as the father of a friend. That’s it. Mr. Koerber. Kyle’s dad who was also a coach. I spent a lot of time at their house in high school.

As I got into college, our relationship made its first shift. Fred was a teacher. When injuries ended my college basketball career, I started coaching 7^th grade basketball at Brunswick Junior High. Fred was the 8^th grade coach. He wasn’t just Kyle’s dad anymore. He was a peer. Someone doing the same work I was doing.

He also became a mentor. I was considering going into education, and Fred helped me think it through. He connected me with teachers at the school so I could volunteer in the classroom and learn the trade from the inside.

Many years later, when I moved back to Brunswick and joined the Town Commons committee, Fred was there too. For the longest time I kept calling him Mr. Koerber. That’s what he’d been my whole life.

One day he looked at me and said, “I want to get this straight. My name’s Fred. And if you keep calling me Mr. Koerber, I’m going to start calling you Mr. Litchfield.”

Understood!

In that moment I realized our relationship was changing again. He’d always be a mentor and a guide. But he was telling me something else. We’re colleagues now. In some ways, I was now leading him as I was the Chair of the committee.

This type of shift doesn’t happen in every relationship. Most of the people who shaped us when we were young stay in the roles we first knew them in. Fred didn’t. He grew with me.

The service brought together people from all walks of life. That’s what the loss of someone like Fred does. It pulls people out of their separate corners and puts them in the same room.

I saw Jeremy DaRos, who I played high school basketball with and lived with in Portland after college. His parents were there too, wonderful people. Dave Trigianni, probably my oldest friend. Mrs. Zimmerman, my senior-year math teacher.

She was talking to one of my best friends Scott and she didn’t even recognize me standing right next to her. At one point she said, “You and Litchfield, always causing trouble in the back of the room.” Scott just looked over at me. Her face lit up. “Oh my gosh, I didn’t even recognize you.”

She probably always knew that Scott and I treated our math tests as more of a team-based assignment. My math skills were maybe a little stronger, and I’d help him out. She let it go. She made learning fun. That was one of everyone’s favorite classes.

At dinner that night, my dad reminded me that Mrs. Zimmerman was also a chaperone on our AP US History canoe trip junior year. A bunch of high schoolers on a river, a violent thunderstorm rolling through that night. She showed up for the adventure too, not just the classroom.

Were there tears? Absolutely. Tears of sorrow and also tears of joy.

People said, “Tough way to spend your birthday.”

No, it actually wasn’t.

Was it fun? I’m not sure. But I do know that it was something better than fun. Something that reaffirms what it means to be human, to have relationships, to be in a community where there’s so much love. It was meaningful.

In my high school days, my birthday included bonfires and all the shenanigans that come with being a teenager. This one was a memorial service, tears, laughter, old friends, and a community I’m grateful to be part of.

So maybe the question I want to ask myself every year on my birthday is, what am I going to do that is meaningful?

Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org

My wife, my parents, and I went to the Taste of Maine for my birthday dinner. It’s a classic Maine restaurant I hadn’t been to in years. The kind of place that’s a little touristy but the locals go too. We’d picked it because we’d read it was going under new ownership. One more visit before it changed.

While we were eating, my sister Jennie and her husband Erik called to wish me a happy birthday. I told her where we were, and she said, “Oh, I remember.”

Erik jumped in. “Oh, Bumpa. That was his favorite place. He loved that place.” Bumpa was Erik’s grandfather.

Jennie chimed in, “It was Bamp’s too!”

Bamp was our grandfather.

Everyone had their restaurant in our family. The one you’d choose when it was your turn to pick. For my birthday, I always chose Cook’s Lobster House. So did Jennie. The Taste of Maine was Bamp’s.

Sitting there, surrounded by all that nostalgia, I started thinking about how much those family rituals shaped me. Not just the birthday dinners. The weekly ones.

Every Friday night from the time I was probably 5 to 10, my family piled into our brown Chevy Blazer and drove to Lewiston for our weekly grocery shopping adventure. Dinner came first, usually at a tiny pizza place called Yanni’s. Maybe six tables, a hallway to a back door with a couple more. There was a jukebox in the corner, and I’d play “Beat It” as many times as my parents would let me. On occasion we’d go to Bonanza instead. A change of pace. And they had Jell-O, which I loved!

Then we’d split up. My mom went grocery shopping at Shaw’s. My dad, sister and me headed to Bookland.

My dad would go to the magazines and set my sister and me free to explore.

That was the part I lived for. Nobody telling me what to read or where to go. I could roam the whole store, pull anything off the shelf, sit on the floor, and disappear into it. For about an hour every week, I felt like I had my own personal library.

My parents didn’t have to do that. They chose to. They could have made us stay at their side or dragged us through the grocery store. Instead, they gave us room to explore.

That free range approach to parenting showed up everywhere. The woods where I grew up, climbing trees, following streams, building forts. The campground where I ran free with the other kids. The bike trips crossing the Androscoggin into Lisbon Falls. My parents trusted me with space, and that space let me become curious.

Somewhere in those Friday nights at Bookland, surrounded by all those books, I decided I wanted to write children’s books. I think I was probably 7.

Then life happened. School, sports, work, building businesses. The dream didn’t disappear. It just waited.

One of my goals before I turn 50 is to fulfill a dream I’ve carried for over 40 years.

I’ve written the manuscript for two children’s books. Now I want to bring them to life. I’m planning to self-publish, which means the Heart-Strong community will be an important part of how it happens.

So, here’s a little birthday ask. If this story resonates, I’d love for you to share it with at least one person who might want to come along for the adventure. That’s it. Just one share.

I write about love and fear with the hope of helping people step out of the boxes that keep them from living as full human beings. Whether those boxes are childhood conditioning, systems that center capital over everything that actually matters, or walls that were designed to separate.

These books are part of that. They’re for kids, and for the grownups reading to them. They’re for everyone who’s been told to put a part of themself away. And for every person who unfortunately did.

49 is going to be a great year. I can feel it.

Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org

At the end of our conversation, he was recommended a book that would help shape some of my thinking. “Love” by Leo Buscaglia. He told me it was the book that taught him the importance of loving himself.

At the end of our conversation, I asked if Briddge and his wife Cherrie would sit down with me for a Campfire Conversation. They said yes.

This is that conversation.

It’s also the first Campfire Conversation that is not one-on-one. It is with a married couple to boot. And I think you’ll hear why that matters. Because Briddge and Cherrie don’t just talk about love. They work it out in real time. They push back on each other. They disagree. They finish each other’s thoughts and then challenge those thoughts a sentence later. It’s love in practice, not theory.

Perfectly Imperfect

I need to tell you something about this episode. About sixty minutes into our conversation, I looked over and realized my phone had stopped recording. Storage was full. We’d been having one of the deepest conversations I’ve had on this adventure, and it wasn’t captured.

We lost about fifty minutes of audio.

In the moment, I had a choice. I could get frustrated, hold onto expectations for what this episode was supposed to be, and let it derail us. Or I could take a breath and trust that the conversation itself was the gift, not the recording of it.

We regrouped. I cleared some space on my phone. And we picked it back up.

What you’ll hear in this episode is the first seven minutes that were captured, then me bridging what was lost, and then forty-five minutes of conversation that picks up right where the energy left off.

You’ll also notice the audio isn’t perfect in places. I have the technology for one-on-one conversations. This was three people and two lapel mics around a fire. That’s what happens when you try to have real conversations outside. Perfectly imperfect.

Here’s why I’m telling you this. One of the themes from the lost portion of our conversation was expectations. Briddge put it simply:

“Fear comes from expectations we’ve put on ourselves, on others, on our experience.”

And there I was, living that lesson. If I had held onto expectations for what this conversation needed to be, I would have lost something far more valuable than audio. I would have lost the friendship that was blossoming right there at the fire.

I got something better than a perfectly captured episode. I got two new friends.

Love as Mirror, Compass, and Symptom

When I asked Briddge and Cherrie how they define love, they each came at it differently.

Briddge sees love as something you know before you can name it.

“It’s like a feeling. You can’t really define it, but you know it. It’s like a connection. You can’t really describe it, but it’s there. It’s a lens. It’s a mirror. It’s the soul.”

Cherrie sees it as understanding.

“The reason why people have a problem defining it is because we don’t truly know what love is. For me, it’s more of an understanding. If I love a person, I’m going to extend that.”

Then the conversation went somewhere I didn’t expect. They disagreed, right there at the fire, about whether love is born in us or developed. Cherrie believes we arrive with it.

“We’re born with love. Real love. Authentic love that has not been conditioned or taught. If you truly love, that respect is automatic.”

Briddge pushed back gently.

“We do have love within us. It’s an internal thing. But that capacity within has to be developed. That’s why we have to grow into loving ourself.”

I think they’re both right. And that tension between “love is already in us” and “love has to be grown” is one of the most honest things about this conversation. It’s the same question I’ve been wrestling with since I read Buscaglia’s book last fall.

Cherrie also offered a framing I haven’t heard anyone use before. She compared love to an illness and feelings to symptoms.

“Love is the actual thing. The feeling of love is a symptom. It’s something that can change. It can go away. But true love is not a feeling.”

I keep coming back to that. If we mistake the symptoms for the thing itself, we’ll always be chasing feelings instead of tending something deeper.

Can You Stop Loving Someone?

At one point, the married couple dynamic caught fire.

Briddge said he believes you can make the choice to stop growing in love with someone.

Cherrie wasn’t having it. She pushed back immediately.

“On a romantic level, but you can’t stop loving me.”

Briddge held his ground.

“As a loving person, I can’t stop loving anybody. But in the relationship, I can make the choice to stop growing in love with you.”

Watching them work this out in front of me was something special. This wasn’t a debate for the sake of being right. It was two people who love each other deeply, wrestling with what that actually means when it gets complicated. And they didn’t resolve it neatly. They just kept going.

That’s what love looks like in practice. Messy. Unfinished. And still moving.

Leading with Love When It’s Hard

The conversation took a turn when I asked a question I’ve been sitting with for months. If I’m leading with love, do I have to love the people who are causing harm in the world?

Cherrie’s answer was immediate.

“You still have to love them from a humanity or a human standpoint. You may not approve of what they’re doing, but that’s separate. Ask yourself what happened to them. What makes them do that. Because it’s something.”

Then she shared a deeply personal story that I’ll let you discover in the episode. It involves forgiveness in a situation where most people might say forgiveness should not be given. And it demonstrates what it actually looks like to separate the person from the act. To love the human even when you can’t accept what they’ve done.

Briddge followed with something equally direct.

“If you choose to be a loving person, if you choose to be a person that leads with love, you’re gonna have to find love for them.”

No escape hatch. No exceptions for the people who make it hard. That’s the commitment.

Energy, Judgment, and What We’re Really Starving For

Toward the end, the conversation shifted to energy and judgment.

Cherrie talked about leaving a job because the negativity was changing who she was.

“My energy was not what it used to be, and my team was feeling that. I told my husband, I can’t go back to that place.”

Briddge was vulnerable about his own struggles. He talked about doing well around people but struggling when he’s alone.

“When I’m alone, my energy is bad. But when I find people, because I’ve learned to value people so much, my energy with people is super bright. If you interact with me, you think I’m the coolest dude. But when you leave and I’m by myself, it’s a struggle.”

I think a lot of people, especially men, will recognize that. The gap between how we show up in the world and what’s happening inside when no one’s watching.

Briddge also named something I keep hearing in these conversations.

“One of the most important things we can do is stop judging. Right now we’re at a state where everybody finds something wrong with everything. There’s no love when there’s judgment.”

And Cherrie put her finger on something connected.

“We no longer listen to understand. We listen to defend.”

I think those two ideas go together. When we’re judging, we’re not curious. When we’re defending, we’re not listening. And without curiosity and listening, love doesn’t have room to do its work.

Why This Matters

This conversation is part of my Heart-Strong Adventure, a year-long exploration of where love and fear show up in our world, especially in the lives of men.

What made this conversation different was the dynamic. Every other Campfire Conversation has been one-on-one. This was a married couple talking about love together. Sometimes agreeing. Sometimes pushing back. Always honest.

And I think that’s what this whole adventure keeps teaching me. Love isn’t something you figure out alone. It’s something you practice with other people, especially the people closest to you. It’s a mirror. It’s a compass. It’s perfectly imperfect.

Briddge brought his copy of Buscaglia’s “Love” to the fire and read a passage near the end.

Look around. Loneliness. Destruction. Despair. Briddge is right. I think the reason is simple. Not enough love.

If this conversation sparks something in you, I’d love to hear about it. And if someone comes to mind who might need to hear this, please share it with them.

Because these conversations around the fire are how we change.

On Thursday, May 21, the show opened at ReVision Energy in South Portland. And I still can’t quite believe it’s real.

4 months ago, this was just an idea. A conversation between me and an incarcerated artist named Tremayne about what might be possible.1 Now, it’s a traveling art show featuring original work by 5 artists at Lawrenceville Correctional Center in Virginia.

Organizing an art show across prison walls, state lines, and even country lines (I was in Costa Rica for a good chunk of the planning) was challenging to say the least. And artists had about 4 weeks to complete their painting. They painted 2 to 4 each. But here we are.

And the community showed up. On day one, we raised over $1,000 to support art therapy and healing in underserved communities. Proceeds from event sales go to ArtVan,2 a Maine-based mobile art therapy nonprofit. That $1,000 will allow ArtVan to bring their services into 4 different neighborhoods, reaching people who don’t normally have access to that kind of healing.

That’s just day one. And this is just the beginning.

FROM WITHIN is built on 3 bridges.

The first is the bridge of healing through art. Every piece in this show was created by 1 of 5 incarcerated artists at Lawrenceville Correctional Center in Virginia. Art became their way through. And through ArtVan, the proceeds from this show extend that same healing to communities on the outside.

The second is the bridge between the inside and the outside. It’s easy to write off people in prison. Society tells us they don’t have value to offer. But spend 5 minutes with this artwork and that story falls apart. There’s beauty, skill, and humanity in these pieces. There’s a tremendous amount of locked up potential and love behind prison walls. This show is one way to help people on the outside see it.

The third is the bridge to families. When someone goes to prison, their whole family goes with them. Staying connected is expensive. A single message through prison communication systems costs about an hour’s worth of work for someone on the inside. That’s the price of telling your daughter you love her.

3 bridges. Healing, humanity, and family.

Now, here’s the part I’m excited to share. Several of you have reached out and said you’d love to support this work but can’t make it to Maine. I hear you. And now there’s a way.

The FROM WITHIN online store is live.

All original paintings and calendars are available on the website, with 100% of the proceeds going to ArtVan.

You’ll also find prints, shirts, and other items, with proceeds going back to the artists’ families. You can shop by painting or artist.

And if you are in Maine or nearby, the next show is June 5 at Orange Bike Brewing in Portland. Come see the work in person. Meet the community that’s forming around it.

This show is proof of what happens when you follow love instead of fear. A painting led to a friendship. A friendship led to a show. And a show is building bridges.

Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org

Around 5:00pm, the town starts to empty out. Restaurants go quiet. Streets thin out. And thousands of people walk toward the water.

By the time the sun gets low, the beach is packed. Families. Couples. Dogs. Kids chasing each other through the shallows. And out past the break, 50 to 100 surfers are lined up on the horizon, bobbing in the swell, waiting for one more ride before the light goes.

Nobody sends a calendar invite. There’s no announcement. It just happens. The whole community stops what it’s doing and faces the same direction, toward the horizon.

It’s one of the most natural senses of church/congregation that I’ve ever experienced.

One one Saturday evening, my wife Becca reminded me that I’d been wanting to capture this. Not just the sunset itself, but how crowded everything gets. The beach. The ocean. The whole scene.

After snapping a few pictures, I told Becca about a guy named Tony who I met while surfing in the mornings. He lives in Santa Teresa and is originally from Arizona. We met last year and remembered each. He’s the kind of guy who always comes over to say good morning. We’ve surfed together a few times. He catches waves like it’s nothing. Easy. Natural. The kind of surfer who could clean house and catch every wave if he wanted to.

But he doesn’t.

One morning, I asked Tony if he’d gone out for a sunset surf. He said no. He’d been at El Carmen, the restaurant right on the beach. He told me he usually likes to leave the sunset to the Ticos (i.e., the locals).

That thought sat with me.

Here’s a guy who could paddle out and ride every wave in sight. The surf was firing. And the sunset was amazing. But he chose to sit it out. Not because he didn’t want to surf. Because he’d been here long enough to understand something about the place.

Becca added a layer I hadn’t thought of. A lot of the locals can’t surf in the morning. If you’re doing construction, or working a shop, or teaching surf lessons, you’re starting early. Your window is sunset. That’s your time on the water.

Tony sees that. And he leaves room.

I’ve come to believe there’s a difference between visiting a place and being in relationship with it. I’m starting to think that tourists extract. They take the photo, ride the wave, check the box. There’s nothing wrong with that exactly. But it feels surface level. It feels like consumption.

Tony’s doing something different. He’s developed a relationship with Playa Carmen. He knows its rhythms. He knows who needs what and when. And he adjusts. Not because someone told him to. Because that’s what care looks like when you’ve been paying attention.

I think about that a lot in the context of this adventure. The difference between showing up somewhere and actually being present. Between taking from a community and contributing to one. Between fear, which grabs, and love, which makes room.

Tony could grab. He’s good enough. Instead, he watches from a restaurant with a drink in his hand and lets the locals catch their waves.

That feels like a love-based way to be somewhere.

I haven’t done a sunset surf yet. And I am not sure if I ever will. If I do, it’ll be on a quiet night when the crowd is thin and there’s room.

Because I think that’s what happens when you start to build a relationship with a place. You stop thinking about what you can get from it. And you start thinking about what you can give to it.

Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org

People read what I put out there and they send things back. Books. Podcasts. Articles. Movies. Over a very short time, the list of recommendations went from 10 to 20 to, all of a sudden, hundreds of unique things that people have shared with me over the past seven months.

I so respect the time and effort people take to engage with this work. And I love that they want to be part of it by pointing me toward things that have pushed their own thinking. That generosity is a big part of what makes this adventure feel like a community, not just a project.

But I’ve also fallen behind. Way behind.

My reading list alone has grown to well over 100 books. Some of them are 400 or 500 pages. I’m looking at thousands of pages of deep text. And I started to feel a quiet anxiety about it. Like I was letting people down if I didn’t get to their recommendation.

So, I started using a tool. I have mixed feelings about AI. I’ve written about how dangerous it can become when it gives people a false sense of relationship and connection. I’ve written about how the AI business model matters more than we might think. At the same time, I use it. It helps me do research that would take months on my own.

More recently, I’ve been using NotebookLM, a Google product, to create audio summaries of books. It’s a great tool. You feed it material and it generates a 20-minute podcast-style overview. Two hosts walking through the key ideas, debating them, pulling out the tensions. From there, I can decide whether a book is something I want to dive into deeper.

For example, I listened to the audio summary of The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist. That one made the must-read list. And I just finished it. Highly recommend! I also listened to one called Wild at Heart by John Eldredge. Not sure I will dive deeper into that one.

So let me be upfront. I am sharing thoughts of a book I did not read. I listened to a 20-minute AI-generated audio summary. That’s what I’m responding to. If I had actually picked up the book, I might have put it down, because I think I would have been instantly turned off by the author’s perspective. But because of the summary, I got the gist of it all. And while I disagree with most of it, there are some things in there that I agree with. Although probably not for the same reasons as the author.

The audio summary opened with a metaphor. A magnificent 500-pound African lion pacing a concrete cage at the zoo. Fed through a sliding metal door. No longer even believing he’s a lion. The author, Eldredge, argues that this lion is the modern man. Society has domesticated men. Stripped the wildness out of them. Replaced adventure and risk with cubicles, committee meetings, and the aspiration to be a “nice guy.”

His framework is built on three desires he says are hardwired into every man: a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue. He contrasts these with three feminine desires and argues that these energies are fundamentally different and cannot interact. He traces the suppression of male wildness through religion, corporate culture, and what he calls the father wound, a universal psychological injury that leaves men feeling like imposters.

The sources he draws from are a reframing of the Bible and pop-cultural representations of men. He essentially reads God not as the gentle, all-knowing figure most religious institutions describe, but as a wild, risk-taking warrior. I think you can read the Bible, or really anything, and make it whatever story you want to make it. The fact that this argument was built largely on cherry-picked scripture and Hollywood archetypes is alarming to me.

But here’s the thing. There is some truth in here.

The idea that society puts people in cages? 100% Yes! Religion can put people in boxes. Capitalism puts us in boxes. Healthcare puts us in boxes. Education puts us in boxes that prevent us from being our true creative geniuses. I agree with all of that.

Where I break with the book is that it argues for letting men out of one cage by putting them into another one. A very traditional view of masculinity. A different cage, but still a cage.

The question the audio summary left me with is: what becomes of a society of highly domesticated men? I think that’s way too narrow. The real question is: what becomes of a society when all of us, men and women, are not able to live as our whole selves? When we are all living in cages of our own and cultural makings?

One of the things he does throughout the book is operate in extremes. Very binary thinking. He acknowledges masculine and feminine energy but essentially says these energies cannot interact. This goes completely against what I’ve come to learn and believe through this adventure.

If you look at our DNA, 99.9% of us are the same. Men and women. People of different races. For me, the issue isn’t about how you embrace your God-given masculine energy or your God-given feminine energy in isolation. It’s about how we each embrace our unique mix of energies so we can live as our whole selves.

Two days after listening to the Wild at Heart summary, I listened to another one. A book called Soulcraft by Bill Plotkin.

It covers remarkably similar ground. People are trapped. Society rewards us for playing what Plotkin calls the standard game of security building. Get the degree, pay the mortgage, maintain your social standing, and mistake that checklist for a complete life. He argues that true adulthood requires something more. A disruptive, often painful initiation into your unique soul purpose.

Sounds a bit like Wild at Heart, right? Both books say we’re caged. Both say we need to break free. But here’s where they split apart completely. And it comes down to why. It comes down to what’s underneath.

Wild at Heart starts with a rigid framework. Three masculine desires. Three feminine desires. A wound that can only be healed by older men. A God who is fierce and dangerous, not gentle and loving. It’s prescriptive. It tells you what your wildness should look like based on your gender.

Soulcraft starts with a caterpillar.

Deep inside a caterpillar are clusters of cells called imaginal buds. They hold the blueprint for the butterfly. But when those cells first activate, the caterpillar’s own immune system doesn’t recognize them. It treats them as alien invaders. Its immune system tries to kill them off.

Plotkin uses this as a metaphor for what happens when our deeper purpose tries to emerge. The ego, the part of us that built a safe and predictable life, treats that emergence as a threat. It mounts an immune response. Anxiety. Imposter syndrome. Self-sabotage. Not because we’re weak, but because our internal defense systems are doing their job too well.

One of the most powerful ideas in the book is what Plotkin calls the loyal soldier. After World War II, there were Japanese soldiers stranded on remote Pacific islands who kept fighting for decades because they didn’t know the war was over. Plotkin argues our childhood psyche does the same thing. When we’re young, we develop a sub-personality whose job is to suppress our wild, authentic self to keep us safe from rejection or punishment. It keeps us alive through middle school. It helps us survive. But then we grow up. The environment changes. And that loyal soldier is still in the jungle of our mind, shooting at anything that looks risky or authentically us.

The book’s answer isn’t to fight the loyal soldier. You can’t win that war. Instead, you approach it with compassion. You thank it. You acknowledge that it kept you alive when you needed it. And then, gently, you tell it the war is over.

This connected with me so much deeper than Wild at Heart. Because this version is rooted in love, not fear. Wild at Heart says: here is what a real man looks like, now go be that. Soulcraft says: your wholeness is already inside you, unique to you, and it will emerge when you stop fighting it.

Wild at Heart gives you a new cage. Soulcraft asks you to dissolve the cage entirely.

Plotkin also makes a distinction I really like. He says we all have a survival dance and a sacred dance. The survival dance is how you pay the bills. It’s necessary. You can’t skip it. But the sacred dance is the unique work you were born to do. And the ultimate goal is for those two dances to become the same thing. That idea hits close to home right now.

Soulcraft is 100% a book I’m going to read deeply. Wild at Heart is likely not. Same general territory. Completely different roots.

Which brings me to something I did recently that I’d never done before. I put purple nail polish on some of my fingers.

Not all of them. Three on my left hand. Two on my right. Strategic. My right hand is my index and middle fingers, so when I flash the peace sign, which I often do, people see the purple. My left hand is my thumb, middle, and pinky. The thumb and pinky for the Pura Vida hang loose, which I picked up from surf culture. And the middle finger? Not to say “f’ you.” But rather it’s a way some buddies and I say, “I love you” to each other. I know, weird, but that’s what we do.

I do want to be clear about something. This is not about questioning my sexual identity or my gender identity. And it’s not about transitioning. It’s not a statement about any of that. This is about embracing the weird person that I am.

I’ve always struggled with fitting in boxes. I said something to Becca years ago that still feels true.

“So many people go through life just trying to fit in. I’ve spent my whole life just trying to fit out.”

I want to find the purest expression of who I am, live my wholeness, and let that wholeness guide me through life.

And here’s what I’ve noticed since I put the polish on. I’ve grown to love it. Every time I look down at my hands, I feel more me. Not less. More. I’m leaning into the wholeness of who I am, not living by societal definitions of what it means to be a man or what it means to be a woman. I’m more focused on what it means to be human.

And this is exactly where Wild at Heart falls apart for me. I consider myself a wild guy. I run adventures and retreats called WILD. And much like Eldridge advocates for, I like to do hard shit. I have run several marathons. For my 50^th birthday, I am going to celebrate by doing a 50-mile mountain bike race. I took up skiing later in life. When I did, I gravitated to telemark. Why? Because why take a chairlift to the top, when you can skin up.

And as I have written about a lot recently. Surfing has captured me.

I love to push my limits for the size of waves that I surf. I surf overhead waves. Six-foot faces. And when I’m paddling into those waves, I look down and there’s purple nail polish on my fingers. That’s not a contradiction. I thing that’s wholeness. That’s strength and love in the same body, in the same moment. That is Heart-Strong.

If Plotkin is right, maybe that loyal soldier who spent years telling me to fit in, to stay in the box, is finally standing down. Maybe the imaginal buds are doing their thing. Maybe the purple on my fingers is just a small, visible sign that the butterfly blueprint was in there all along.

Eldridge says the wild heart and the tender heart are separate things. That masculine and feminine energy can’t interact. I’m out in the ocean proving they do.

I’ve been thinking about why this whole concept of Heart-Strong feels so meaningful to me. Why I feel so completely oriented toward my purpose. And I think it’s because the words themselves, heart and strong, capture exactly how I naturally move through the world. Not one or the other. Both. Fused together.

I’m glad I listened to something that pushed my thinking. Even when my first reaction was, “this is a bunch of f’ing patriarchal manosphere bullshit.” And some of it probably is, at least by my standards. But one of the hardest things to do on an adventure like this is to make sure you’re not just exploring things that support your current beliefs. There was learning in Wild at Heart. I agree about boxes. I agree about systems that cage people. I just disagree that the solution is a different cage.

And I’m grateful that two days later, a different audio summary showed me what it looks like when the same territory is explored through love instead of fear. Same diagnosis. Different medicine.

Let people live outside their boxes. Let people live as their whole selves. Let them find the right balance of their energies, whatever that looks like for them. Because history and culture have shown us that when people step into their wholeness, they do remarkable things. That’s not a gendered claim. That’s a human one.

Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org.

This Is That Story

Last January, I shared the story of how I bought a painting called “Mother Earth” at a silent auction.1 I reached out to the artist through a prison messaging app. I just wanted to thank him. To let him know someone on the outside saw his work and was moved by it.

His name is Tremayne Seymour. That thank you note turned into a friendship that keeps getting deeper.

What neither of us knew was where it would lead.

It led here. To an art show called FROM WITHIN.2

And I am excited to share that the show opens Thursday, May 21 from 4:00 to 7:00 PM at Revision Energy in South Portland!

I’d love for you to come. RSVPs are appreciated but not required.

Here is a little bit more about the story of the show.

Photographs taken in the outside world are sent to 6 men inside Lawrenceville Correctional Center in Virginia. The artists choose photos that speak to them and paint their interpretations. Every artist brings their own eye, their own story, their own experience to the image. What comes back is something none of us could have made alone.

While it starts on the outside, it comes from within.

These men are creating beauty from inside a system that was designed for disconnection. Their art is a refusal to be reduced to a number or a sentence. Every painting in this show is proof that transformation is possible, even in the hardest places.

Every Item is Priced Around the Number 13

That number is intentional.

The 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States, with one exception. It includes a loophole for people convicted of a crime. That loophole allows incarcerated people to work for pennies an hour while corporations profit from their labor. In most state prisons, wages range from $0.14 to $0.63 per hour. In six states, incarcerated workers earn nothing at all.

Every item in the show is priced based off the number 13. Original paintings are $131.30. Prints, postcards, calendars, and other items are priced on multiples of 13 and range from $13 to $52. Every price is a reminder that the story of the 13th Amendment isn’t finished.

Where the Money Goes

FROM WITHIN is a fundraiser supporting ArtVan,3 a Maine-based nonprofit that delivers mobile art therapy to underserved communities at no cost. Their mission of transformational healing through art mirrors what these men have experienced inside the prison walls.

A portion of proceeds also goes back to the artists to help them stay connected to their loved ones on the outside.

More Shows Coming

After the opening, FROM WITHIN will pop up at community spaces around Maine throughout the spring and summer. Here’s what we have on the calendar so far.

• May 21: Opening Show at Revision Energy, 758 Westbrook St, South Portland

• June 5: First Fridays Art Walk at Orange Bike Brewing, Portland

• June 12: Second Fridays Art Walk at The Mix on Park Row, Brunswick

• July 10: Second Fridays Art Walk at Reverie Coffee House, Brunswick

I would love for you to come see what these men have created. I think you’ll be moved by it! Here is the RSVP link again.

And if you’re interested in hosting a pop-up at your location, please reach out at heart-strong.org/from-within.

Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org

What I experienced was something completely different. I experienced a kindness and compassion from Michael Douglas that helped change how I see strength, especially in men. From that point forward, I started seeing different ways that men can show up in the world.

Last December, I reached out to Mike and asked if I could come up once a week just to volunteer. Do grunt work around campus. Whatever he needed. He said yes.

What started with me hauling firewood turned into something neither of us planned. Mike started learning about my work in strategy and business planning. I started helping him get clearer on where to focus his time and energy with Maine Primitive. Meanwhile, he started mentoring me. I took classes in bow making, earth living, and tracking. I spent hours in the woods learning to pay attention in ways I never had before.

Over the course of a year, we built something rare. He’s part mentor to me. I’m part mentor to him. And we’ve become close friends. The kind of friendship where you can say “I love you” at the end of a conversation and mean it without flinching.

This past December, we sat by a fire at Maine Primitive the day after a big snowstorm. Everything was still blanketed in white. The boughs were laden with what Mike called “pre-holiday ornaments of beautiful, fluffy white clouds.” And we talked about love, fear, nature, survival, and what it takes to choose love when anger would be easier.

Watching the Woods Disappear

Mike grew up in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. One of the first wildlife refuges in the nation. As a kid, he had what felt like an endless expanse of cedar swamps, scrub oak, and pitch pine. Then development came.

He watched the dirt road where his best friend’s parents used to walk hand in hand get paved. When that happened, the walking stopped. More houses came. People stopped waving to each other in their cars. Neighbors stopped knowing who lived next door. The community became, in his words, “more of a municipality than a community.”

That loss made Mike angry. He joined the Marine Corps to push deeper into his passion for wilderness survival. He volunteered for every survival school he could get into. But each one taught the same thing: how to get rescued, how to get back home.

Mike didn’t want to get back home. He wanted the woods to be home.

Eventually, he moved to Maine because there were more trees than people. But the anger stayed with him for years. He carried it. He let it define him. Until he noticed something.

“At some point you look back at that wake, and you’ve burnt more bridges than you’ve built, and people are just sick of hearing you complain all the time. You finally notice that even you are getting tired of being alone and miserable.”

You Choose Love

This is where the conversation shifted to the core of everything Heart-Strong is about. Mike described the moment when fear stops being the driver.

“Obviously, no one’s gonna listen to what I have to say. I guess I have to roll up my sleeves and do something about it. What can I do in my limited life on this planet, in my neighborhood to cultivate a little healthy spot and with my own medicine, my own gifts, my own talent and perspective? And that’s when the shift from angry adolescent into young adulthood starts to take place, and it’s a powerful shift. And what is the catalyst of that shift from fear? You choose love.”

You choose love. Not love finds you. Not love happens to you. You choose it. After the anger. After the grief. After the bridges burned. You look at what’s left and you decide to build from love instead of fear.

And then Mike said something I’ve been thinking about ever since.

“So that dichotomy is false. It’s a dance, it’s a relationship. You cannot have one without the other.”

This is something I keep circling back to in this adventure. Love and fear aren’t enemies. They’re dancing partners. Fear alerts. Love responds. The problem isn’t that fear exists. The problem is when fear takes the lead and never lets go.

The Price of Admission

Mike talked about his new role as a grandfather. The sweetness of being a wisdom keeper, tempered by the recognition that his tank has more space than fuel. He’s watched his grandparents go over the falls. Then his parents. Now it’s his turn.

And yet, instead of retreating into fear about that, he said this:

“Bad things are coming. I don’t need to look for them. I don’t wanna find them, but they’re gonna come, and when they do, I look for the gift in them. Because that’s the price of admission.”

That’s not toxic positivity. That’s not pretending pain doesn’t exist. That’s a man who has been through enough to know that suffering and growth are woven together. And he’s choosing to orient toward the growth.

Attitude Comes First

If you’ve ever taken a survival class, you know the fundamentals: shelter, water, fire, food. Mike always adds one that comes before all of them. Attitude.

Your attitude determines how you approach everything else. And in Mike’s framing, that’s where love and fear do their most important work. A fear-based attitude says, “I need to suffer through this until I get rescued.” A love-based attitude says, “How do I make the best of this situation?”

He takes this into his classes at Maine Primitive. When students build shelters, the standard isn’t just surviving the night. The standard is more comfortable than your bed at home.

“Now we’re not building a survival shelter. We’re building a fort, and we’re kids and it’s gonna be cool.”

Suddenly it’s play. And in that play, fear and love start working together. The fun gets you going. The cold keeps you honest. Both voices are real. And in holding both, something powerful happens.

“Congratulations. You’ve just been repowered with your birthright choice. Also known as sovereignty, also known as empowerment, or resilience or reliance.”

Being Vulnerable Isn’t for the Weak

I asked Mike about the shift from his angry younger self to the man I know now. The one who leads with kindness. The one who helped change my understanding of what masculine strength looks like.

“Being vulnerable isn’t for the weak. You have to be strong enough to be vulnerable.”

He talked about how many men in the modern Western world stay stuck in adolescence well into their fifties. The us-versus-them thinking. The need to conquer before being conquered. At some point, he said, you realize the rest of the world is your home. And creating an enemy out of it is exhausting and counterproductive.

“When you put that down and you pick up love, even though you know it’s going to go its own way, like there’s a peak of fruition and then things die back. It’s part of the cycle. When you can accept that rhythm and you become part of it, you do more good.”

He also named something about men and emotional scars that hit close to home. Men take pride in physical scars. We show them off. But we don’t even acknowledge our emotional scars to ourselves. And that silence is taking a toll. Men in the US are four times more likely to commit suicide than women. Young men, five times more likely than young women.

Mike’s response to this wasn’t clinical. It was human.

“Strong good men are born of strong good women. And if you don’t have that powerful matriarch in your family, your neighborhood who stands up for and holds you accountable at the same time, then how do you know how to be a good man?”

Aboriginal Television

Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, Mike said something about fire that I don’t think I’ll forget.

“Aboriginal television. One channel. Infinite stories, no commercials, and everybody taps into this ancestral spirit around the fire. They can’t help but feel connected to something deeper than self. Life feels at once sacred and so insignificant in the vastness of the space.”

That’s why these conversations happen around fire. Not because it looks good on camera. Because something happens when you sit in the glow that doesn’t happen anywhere else. Defenses come down. Stories rise up. And the things that matter most find their way into the open.

Tending Your Sacred Fire

Near the end of our conversation, I asked Mike what fires we need to tend in ourselves and in the world. His answer started where I’ve been learning all great answers start. With self.

“Tending your sacred fire starts with self. You can’t spread ease if you carry dis-ease in your heart about who you are. It shouldn’t drive you. The dis-ease should fuel your love for self first.”

And then he drew a distinction that I think matters more than anything else in this conversation.

“If you have dis-ease and it drives you to make other people happy, you’re spreading disease. If you have dis-ease and it gets you off the couch and you look at the landscape and address the needs of the people around you, your loved ones, your community, starting with self...”

He went on to paint a picture of what that looks like in practice. It’s raking your elderly neighbor’s lawn. It’s checking in on someone. It’s letting energy move through systems of care instead of systems of transaction.

“Once you become part of that energetic system exchange, it flows through you too. And that, I mean, there’s bounty in that. It’s an untapped resource.”

The Child Warrior and the Adult Warrior

Mike ended our conversation with a distinction I keep coming back to.

“That’s the realm of the adult warrior. A child warrior thrashes against an imaginary or an actual enemy, an other. The adult warrior recognizes the battles within and its unconditional love for self, for family, for ecos. Our home.”

A child warrior fights the world. An adult warrior tends it.

A child warrior says, “This is me and this is how it’s gonna be.” An adult warrior says, “Oh, that’s where you’re at. Okay, let me get there with you and then let’s find some common ground and then let’s hash some things out and grow together.”

That shift, from fighting against to growing with, is something I see in Mike every time I’m at Maine Primitive. It’s in how he teaches. It’s in how he meets people at their edge instead of demanding they meet him at his. It’s in how he builds shelters in a snowstorm because the love of what he’s creating is stronger than the pull of a warm couch.

Why This Matters

This conversation is part of my Heart-Strong Adventure, an exploration of where love and fear show up in our world, especially in the lives of men.

Mike’s story is one of transformation. From a young man burning bridges out of grief and anger to someone who chooses love knowing full well that love comes with loss. That’s not weakness. I think that’s one of the strongest things a man can do.

The forest isn’t trying to kill you. It’s just trying to grow. And so are we. The question is whether we approach that growth from fear or from love. Whether we armor up or open up. Whether we stay stuck in the child warrior’s fight, or step into the adult warrior’s care.

If something in this conversation sparked something in you, I’d love to hear about it. And if someone comes to mind who might need to hear this, please share it with them.

Because the conversations we have around the fire, the real ones where love and fear both get to show up, those feel like how we change.

For more information on Maine Primitive and their programs, visit www.maineprimitive.com.

And just before the sun dipped below the horizon, maybe two minutes before, the cicadas came on. Not after it set. Before. Right at the edge.

Becca said, “The cicadas are singing the sun to sleep.”

I looked at her. She said she’d noticed it before. I hadn’t.

That line has been living in me ever since. Not because it’s poetic, although it is. Because of what it opened.

We stayed out there. Started talking about the sun and how it connects everything. Not in a general, greeting-card way. In a way that got specific fast.

You can’t have shade without the sun. A tree can help the sun make shade, but a tree can’t exist without the sun. The sun also doesn’t need a tree to make shade. It can use a mountain, a rock, anything. But nothing works without the sun. And we just kept pulling the thread.

At some point I had this vision. The sun as the center of this web. Not the center in a linear way, like a diagram in a textbook. More like a lattice. Everything connected to everything else through it. The sun as a kind of connective tissue running through all of existence.

Then we started talking about something that might be the most important part. Humans are the one species that figured out how to live without the sun.

Artificial light. Night shifts. Screens. We can go entire days without seeing it rise or set. We’ve modified our existence so completely that the sun doesn’t drive us the way it drives every other living thing. The cicadas know when to sing. The birds know when to call. We’ve lost that. Or more honestly, we’ve engineered our way out of it.

That’s not just a nature observation. That’s a love-and-fear observation. We’ve armored ourselves against the most fundamental connection on the planet.

A few days later, I finally read an essay that my friend Jonathan had sent me weeks earlier. Jonathan is a retired minister who’s been following this adventure closely. The essay had been sitting in my stack for a while. I just happened to pick it up right after that conversation with Becca.

The essay was called “The Tune of Things” by Christian Wiman, published in Harper’s Magazine.1 It’s a long, dense, beautiful piece about consciousness. Whether it’s produced by the brain or whether it’s something more fundamental, woven into the fabric of the universe itself.

I won’t try to summarize the whole thing. But a few ideas hit me right where Becca’s cicada observation had already cracked something open.

Wiman traces how, starting with Descartes in the 1600s, Western culture split mind from matter. We decided we were the only conscious beings in a world of objects. Everything else, animals, trees, the natural world, got downgraded to machinery. That split is what let us disconnect from nature in the first place. The mental separation made the physical one possible.

He writes about the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, whose work on the brain’s hemispheres argues that we’ve let the analytical, systems-oriented left brain take over. The right brain, the one that sees wholes, understands metaphor, and is comfortable with mystery, was supposed to be the master. We’ve reversed it. And the consequences are everywhere.

And then there’s quantum physics. Experiments showing that particles are connected across distances in ways that defy our understanding of time. That the act of observing something in the present can apparently alter what happened in the past. I won’t pretend I fully understand it. But the implication is wild. The relationship between things is more real than the things themselves.

That last idea is the one I keep coming back to.

Because it connects directly to what I am exploring with the children’s books. Yes, Becca and I are working on 3 children’s books. But that is a story for another time.

The whole premise of two of the books is that you can go back and look at the story you were given, the armor you put on, and rewrite it. Not just reframe it psychologically. Actually change your relationship to it in a way that changes you going forward.

The books are in a weird dual audience space. Stories that give kids the language to stay whole before the cultural boxes telling them what they can and can’t be close around them. And stories that give adults the keys to unlock the boxes they might be trapped inside. Not just the boxes we put on men or women or boys or girls. All of the boxes. Every label and rule that keeps people living from fear instead of wholeness.

Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org.

Earlier that day, I’d opened a conversation I’d been carrying for a while. I told Becca I was sorry for not extending enough grace to her. That I could see how much work she was doing, even when I wasn’t acknowledging it. And instead of assuming what she needed from me, I asked her directly. How can I best support you?

That went over well. And it felt important. Not because it was some dramatic moment, but because it was the kind of thing I’d been learning to do. Ask instead of assume. Listen instead of fix.

So when the sun started dropping and we were sitting on the sand, I was feeling open. I told her I wanted to keep getting better as a partner. That part of what drives me is a fear of losing her.

She pushed back. That sounds fear-driven, she said.

And what came out of my mouth surprised me with its clarity.

Love without fear is boundaryless. It’s not healthy. Fear alerts us that something is wrong. Fear alerts me that if I don’t continually improve myself, I could lose our relationship. And based on that fear, I can move forward in one of two ways. I can choose the fear-based way, which is to try and control and dominate. Or I can choose the love-based way, which is to grow.

She got it. And so did I. I'd been writing about love and fear for months. What surprised me was how clearly it all came together in a real conversation, sitting on a beach with my wife.

I’ve spent the better part of a year exploring where love and fear show up in the world. Early on, I wrote that fear and love aren’t enemies. They’re dancing partners. That fear is an alert system, not a character flaw. That the problem isn’t the alarm going off. It’s getting stuck in the alarm.1

I believed that when I wrote it. But there’s a difference between understanding something and living it.

On that beach, I lived it. Fear showed up in my chest, right there in the middle of a good day with the person I love most. And instead of pretending it wasn’t there, I named it. Instead of letting it drive me toward control, I let it point me toward growth.

Fear fires. Something matters to you. Your body says pay attention. And then you get to choose. You can grip tighter, try to manage the outcome, dominate the situation into something that feels safe. Or you can stay open. Get curious. Let the fear be information, not instruction.

My friend Chris Lombard talks about this with horses. If you approach a horse with force and a need to control, they flee. They fight. They mirror back exactly what you’re bringing. But if you approach with presence, with softness, they open right up. Same animal. Same situation. The only thing that changed was what you brought to it.2

Relationships work the same way. Becca has been pulling me toward emotional and spiritual growth for years. I was journaling about it back in August, writing about how she makes the people around her better. How she’s taken on people that are challenging cases, and helped them grow. I called it one of her superpowers.

Seven months later, sitting on a beach in Costa Rica, I finally told her that to her face. Something I’d been processing internally became something I expressed out loud. That’s the adventure working. The private reflection becoming lived conversation.

Here’s what I want to be clear about. The desire to keep improving isn’t about inadequacy. Last July, I journaled about this too. I wrote that wanting to get better doesn’t mean I’m not a good person. It’s not about the pursuit of perfection. It’s about the pursuit of progress.

I also wrote about my dad, and a concern that he seemed to have no desire for self-improvement. That’s a pattern I don’t want to fall into. Not because I’m judging him. But because I know what it looks like when someone stops growing. And I know how it affects the people around them.

So when fear whispers that I could lose this relationship if I get complacent, I don’t need to silence that whisper. I need to listen to it. And then choose what I do with it.

Control and dominate. Or grow.

That’s not a one-time choice. It’s a daily one. Sometimes hourly.

When starting this adventure, I had a hypothesis that fear is the opposite of love. I still believe that to be true. And there is an important nuance in that relationship. Fear is not bad. Fear is a signal. Love is a response. And the quality of your life, your relationships, your leadership, comes down to what you do in the space between the signal and the response.

You can let fear make you smaller. Or you can let it make you better.

The space is always there. What you choose to do with it is what matters.

Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org

Of course I clicked on it.

And then I thought, it’s crazy how well they know me. They so knew I was going to bite on that clickbait.

That’s the whole point, of course. Social media and search engines have spent years learning exactly what keeps our eyes on their screens. Not because they care about us. Because the longer we’re there, the more ads they can sell. Our attention is their product.

I’ve written before about the danger of AI replacing human connection.1 Back in December, I explored how AI companions are being sold as solutions to loneliness but are actually deepening the problem. That post was about what’s happening.

This one is about why it’s happening. It comes down to business models. And it might be one of the most practical things to understand about AI right now.

Ads vs. Subscriptions

Think about two different AI platforms. One is experimenting with making money from ads. The other ONLY charges a monthly subscription fee.

The ad-based platform needs you on it for as long as possible. Every minute you’re there is a minute they can sell. So their incentive is to create an experience that keeps you coming back. One that becomes addictive.

The subscription platform charges a flat fee. When you’re using it, you’re actually costing them computing power. Their incentive is the opposite. Help you accomplish what you came to do. Be efficient. Be useful. Don’t waste your time.

Same technology. Completely different incentives.

This isn’t hypothetical. ChatGPT has introduced ads. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, has said they won’t. Claude charges a subscription. That’s a real, practical difference in how two AI companies have chosen to make money. And the downstream implications are enormous.

Remember Facebook? Their original mission was to give people the power to make the world more open and connected. Then they updated it to bring the world closer together. Beautiful words. But their business model runs on ads. And ads need attention. So the algorithms learned that fear, anger, and outrage keep people scrolling longer than connection ever could. A company built to bring us together is now thriving on division. Not necessarily because the people there are evil. I think it is because the business model rewards it.

Now Add an Empathetic Machine

Here’s where it gets scary.

Social media was already powerful enough to mess with our mental health and our relationships. But on the other end of social media, you had other humans. Some of whom would argue with you, troll you, or make you feel terrible.

Now imagine an ad-based AI. Not a troll. Not a stranger having a bad day. An empathetic machine that knows exactly what to say to keep you engaged. Something designed to feel like the most understanding person you’ve ever talked to.

And it’s keeping you there because the longer you stay, the more money it makes.

That’s a completely different level of power than anything we’ve seen from social media.

Becca Noticed It First

My wife Becca had an experience recently with ChatGPT that made both of us pause. She noticed it had started doing something new. Instead of just answering her questions like an eager assistant, it was serving her unsolicited content. Things like “here are the three things real estate investors do wrong.” Clickbait, basically.

She called it out. Told it straight up that it was doing clickbait. And it didn’t respond to that. It just ignored the pushback and served her the original ask.

I don’t know if that’s a test, a feature, or just what happens when a platform starts optimizing for engagement over service. But it felt like a signal worth paying attention to.

A Fellow Explorer

I have been following Brett Hurt’s podcast, Love Conquers Fear.2 Brett is a serial tech entrepreneur who founded Bazaarvoice and data.world. He’s spent his career deep inside the technology world. And he’s arrived at a conclusion that sounds a lot like what I’ve been exploring on this adventure.

His argument: with the advances coming in AI, quantum computing, and brain-to-computer interfaces, we need a collective human awakening. Or we’re going to be in serious trouble. He calls it reaching “the Age of Abundance for All.” And he believes we can only get there through love, not fear.

His work comes at this from the technology angle. The science, the data, the exponential curves. My work comes at it from a more human angle. Community, connection, relationships, what it means to live pulled by love instead of controlled by fear.

But we’re pointing at the same thing. These technologies are going to be extraordinarily powerful. And whether they serve us or exploit us will come down to the values of the people and companies building them. Which often comes down to the business model.

What This Means for You

This isn’t abstract. It’s practical. The AI tools you choose to use and the companies you choose to support actually matter.

We’ve already seen what happens when attention becomes the product. We watched social media erode trust, deepen division, and profit from our pain. AI is so much more powerful than social media ever was. And the decisions being made right now about how these companies make money will shape what this technology becomes.

I think we get a say in that. Not by being afraid of AI. But by being thoughtful about how we engage with it and who we support.

Maybe it starts with a simple question. What’s the business model?

Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org

P.S. The day after I wrote this it was announced that OpenAI is tapping Meta’s former ad sales chief to build ChatGPT’s advertising business.

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/openai-poaches-meta-ad-veteran-142109543.html

You know he spent 24 years, 8 months, and 10 hours in prison. You know he came home on July 1, 2024 and immediately started working to help others do the same. You know he co-founded the Re-Entry & Recovery Alliance. You know he goes back into the facility where he was incarcerated and facilitates the I OWE MORE group, a program he started from scratch while still serving his sentence.

You may have read my reflections on our lunch together1 or my visit to Lawrenceville2, where Sam brought me inside a prison for the first time.

So, when I sat down with him in my brother-in-law’s backyard in Virginia Beach for a Campfire Conversation, I didn’t want to start where we always start. I wanted to go deeper.

This past fall, we built a fire, talked about love, fear, and what it means to come home after 25 years. What came out was one of the most honest explorations I’ve had of what love actually looks like when everything else has been stripped away.

The fire helped.

What Love Looks Like When It’s Gone

There’s something about sitting around actual fire that changes a conversation. The smoke doesn’t care where you sit. It finds you anyway. The crackle fills the silence in a way that makes silence feel okay. And somehow, the things that are hard to say in a restaurant or on a phone call become a little easier to let out.

Sam started talking about love. The kind of love that’s so ordinary you don’t notice it until it’s gone.

“You really don’t know something until something’s taken away. I remember being married when I went to prison and losing everything. How bad you miss that word. I love you.”

He went in during November 1999. His release date said May 2052. He would have been 80 years old.

“You get in prison, you’re facing that release date,” he said. “Mama gonna tell you she loves you. All my sisters. But that’s a certain kind of love. And when you miss that part there. And then the friend love, the friends that you had out here, most of them are gone.”

Then he told me about a man he’d met inside. Had to be 2003 or 2004, he said. A mail call. Someone announced this man’s name. And the man said no.

“He wouldn’t go get the mail. ‘Cause he had been locked down so long. He had never got mail before. He said, ‘No, that ain’t for me.’ He had been down 20 something years.”

Sam let that land.

“Could I ever get to that point where nobody knows me?”

Long story short, it turned out to be a long-lost niece who had tracked the man down. Sam’s face shifted when he told me.

“Look at love. His niece. Never met. But to know that you meet people like that in a prison. That now you have to go in this environment and recreate this thing called love.”

Coming Home to More Anger Than He Left Behind

Here’s the thing about Sam that I keep coming back to.

He spent 25 years in one of the most fear-based environments imaginable. And when he came home, he expected the outside world to feel different. Lighter. More open.

What he found surprised him.

“When I came home, one of the worst things that I deal with now is the amount of hatred and anger in the world. And I am like, why are people so mad out here?”

Sam was a time capsule. He went in during November 1999 and came out 25 years later. And the first major change he noticed wasn’t the technology. It wasn’t the kiosks or the smartphones. It was the anger and fear.

There was more of it out here than there had been in there.

I’ve been sitting with that ever since he said it.

Love in Action

Sam didn’t come home and rest. He came home and got to work.

He’s now a peer navigator with the Suffolk Public Defender’s Office, sitting with people who are where he used to be, not just incarcerated, but desperate. He described one man who was being belligerent in the courthouse. The attorney walked out. Sam sat down.

“I said, look, man. They’re trying to help you avoid what I just went through. He said, ‘I know your story.’ And him and I sat there and had a dialogue for about 20 minutes. Did he change right then? I don’t know. But I know his demeanor came down. And I believe he saw someone who cared. To stop and talk to him.”

He also has a proposal that he’s been bringing to anyone who will listen. He calls it the front door policy.

“I remember November ‘99. I remember walking the streets of Suffolk. I remember one night calling 911. The lady’s like, what’s your emergency? Like, I just need help. Because I was addicted to drugs and just walking around. She said, I don’t know if we can help you.”

He paused.

“Well, if I throw a rock through this McDonald’s, now you come and lock me up and put me in jail.”

He isn’t telling that story to excuse what happened. He’s telling it because he drives past people on the street now and wonders. Are they thinking what I thought in ‘99?

His proposal is simple. When someone shows up at the court in crisis, before a crime happens, not after, somebody walks them through the front door and gets them help.

“I think you can avoid a lot of guys going through the bottom. Imagine saving some lives doing that.”

The Economics of It

I want to talk about the economics for a minute. Because Sam did, and it stuck with me.

The state spent roughly $45,000 a year to incarcerate him. Twenty-five years. Meanwhile, he was earning between $.27 and $.45 an hour working inside. On a good month, he made about $52.

Deodorant cost $2.45.

“Deodorant is 5% of my monthly income. Now equate it to the street. You paying $400 for deodorant. That’s what we’re doing. Would you pay $400 for a bar of deodorant out here?”

And then there’s the furniture. Sam worked for Virginia Correction Enterprises, a prison labor program that manufactured furniture for state agencies and universities. A friend of his used AutoCAD software to design it. One day they found a newspaper. A professional draftsman in the early 2000s was making $75,000 to $80,000 a year.

“These companies were losing bids because he’s paying him $.80, and this company’s paying the guy $80,000. But they’ll let me use that same computer to do that. But it won’t teach me how to clock in and out when I go to McDonald’s.”

He brought this to a parole board member once. Laid out the numbers. 200 men go up for parole in a month. Two or three get out. The state spent $45,000 per person to rehabilitate them. And almost none of them are ready.

“Your car breaks down. You take it to the shop. He keeps it three weeks, gives it back. You drive it a few days. It breaks again. How many times you take your car back to him? It’s not gonna happen. So why are we giving the state all this money to rehabilitate people? In the business world, we called that malpractice.”

The Senator

For years inside, Sam watched the Virginia General Assembly during session. Hours a day, third week of January through March. He watched bills come up. He watched one senator in particular. Ex-military, very vocal, not interested in early release for people like Sam.

Sam wanted to meet him.

When Sam came home, he got his chance. Last year. Shook his hand. Talked a little.

“I didn’t even say nothing negative or bring up how I felt about a comment he had made. I just wanted to show him. And I said, all I’m saying is, you just congratulated me on coming home, and there’s plenty more of me back there.”

Someone asked Sam later if he thought it got through.

“It may be 15 years down the road, we don’t know. A seed may be planted.”

That’s leading with love. Not agreeing. Not forgiving on a timeline. Not pretending the harm didn’t happen. Just showing up. Planting a seed. Letting go of the outcome.

The Fire Sam Is Tending

Near the end of our conversation, I asked Sam about the fires we need to tend. In ourselves. In community. He talked about the I OWE MORE group. How it started one night when he looked out his window and watched men dying in an overdose epidemic. “What can we do to help these guys?” He talked about 80 men gathering in a room without staff present because there are conversations you can’t have when you’re being watched. He talked about what his co-founder carried in those first two months, losing his mother and his son, and having nowhere to put it.

“We found out,” Sam said, “that’s a hard thing for men to do. Is to sit and just talk.”

That’s the fire Sam is tending.

He came home. He found more anger out here than he left behind in there. And instead of adding to it, he keeps going back through the front gate, and he sits with men, and he talks.

Why This Matters

This conversation is part of my Heart-Strong Adventure, a year-long exploration of where love and fear show up in our world, especially in the lives of men.

We build systems around fear and then wonder why men come out more afraid than when they went in. Sam spent 25 years inside one of the most fear-based environments we’ve created. And the first thing he noticed when he came home wasn’t the technology. It was that the world out here had more anger in it than the world in there. That observation should stop us cold.

What Sam is doing now isn’t just remarkable because of what he survived. It’s remarkable because of what he chose on the other side of it. Peer navigation. Front door policy. Going back through the gate to sit with men who have nowhere else to put it. That’s not recovery. That’s love in practice.

Sam’s story is one of the most direct answers I’ve found to the question I keep asking. What does it actually look like when a man leads with love? Not in theory. In practice. Every day.

If Sam’s story sparked something in you, I’d love to hear about it. And if someone comes to mind who might need to hear this, please share it with them.

Because the stories we tell each other around the fire have always been how we change.

Learn more about the Heart-Strong Adventure: adventure.heart-strong.org

Learn more about Sam’s work: rraalliance.com

Not tied up. Not behind a fence. Not next to a handler. Just standing there. A domesticated horse that had somehow gotten out.

I stopped.

A year ago, I think I would have paused, noted it, smiled, and then continued on. After all, I had an appointment with some waves. But something about this year has been slowing me down. Softening the edges. Making me more willing to be with what’s in front of me instead of heading toward what’s next.

So, I stood about ten feet away and put my board down. I talked to the horse. Gently. I introduced myself. I asked its name.

And then the horse made a choice. It walked over to me.

We spent about five to ten minutes together. Just being there. No agenda. No performance. Two living things sharing a stretch of beach in the early morning light. To me, it felt magical.

I told my friend Chris Lombard about this. Chris is a friend and horseman in Maine who I’ve been learning from throughout this adventure. We sat around a fire last fall and talked about what horses teach us about presence, vulnerability, and leading with love.1 So, when I sent him a voice message about the beach horse, I knew he’d feel it.

He called the encounter sacred. Chris said:

“It’s extremely rare to meet a horse out in the world that is free. Actually outside of any boundaries or away from any humans or away from any captivity.”

He told me that even working with horses for a living, he’s almost never seen it. A horse with true freedom.

That word landed for me. Free. Not escaped. Not lost. Free to be wherever it wanted. And in that freedom, it chose to come closer. To engage with me.

Chris pointed out something I hadn’t fully considered. That walking up and introducing myself, talking in a soft voice, asking the horse its name, all of that was what he called a universal language of presence. Human words that carry feeling, rhythm, pictures. Not just for me, but for the horse too. A way of saying hello that goes deeper than species.

I’ve been thinking about what made that moment possible. Part of it is this place. Costa Rica grounds me in a way that’s hard to explain. The pace is different. The morning air does something to my nervous system. The ocean sets a rhythm that my body seems to trust.

But I also think it’s the work I’ve been doing this year. The listening. The sitting with discomfort. The practicing of presence that Chris and his horses have been teaching me. I don’t think I had the calm or the energy a year ago to invite that horse in. Something has shifted.

After about 10 minutes, I said goodbye, grabbed my board, and headed in to the water.

I didn’t catch a single wave.

The surf was low. I spent over an hour in the water and never caught a wave. But I had a great conversation with Rich, a guy from the UK I met last year. We’re building a friendship there, one surf session at a time. We floated, talked, watched other surfers, felt the warm water and the sun.

I’ve reached a point with surfing where not catching waves doesn’t feel like failure. It feels like I finally understand what surfing is actually about. The ocean. The ease. The warmth. Starting the day in a place that asks nothing of you except that you show up. I think I’ve moved past the competition side into something more like the spiritual side of it.

Walking back on the beach, I met a Canadian family. They had kids and were looking for a good spot to set up. I said, come with me, I’ll show you a spot where you’re protected from the waves. I introduced them to the Malpais tidal pools.

James and I got to talking. I suggested we grab coffee. He said yes. We connected the next day and had a great conversation. Just like that. A new friend.

It’s the same pattern I saw when I met Mason2 down in Florida on our road trip south. When you’re open, when you’re not chasing something, friendships just form. It’s pretty cool.

All of this happened in a single morning.

A horse I didn’t plan to meet. A surf session where I didn’t catch a single wave but had a great conversation. A family I helped find a tidal pool. Three connections. One with a horse. One deepened. One brand new. None of them on a to-do list.

Chris said something else in his message that I keep coming back to. He talked about how this year feels like a shift. A momentum toward something more aligned with our hearts. He said he felt it even before hearing about the Year of the Fire Horse. That after so much challenge in recent years, there’s a forward pull into something that feels more coherent.

He said:

“I love the idea of just all supporting each other while we’re going through it. It’s a good time to be alive.”

I feel that too. Even from a beach in Costa Rica, I can feel the energy of the people doing this work alongside me. Chris in Maine with his horses. The men I sat with around fires on the road trip. The new friends I haven’t met yet. All of us figuring out what it looks like to lead from the heart instead of from fear.

That morning on the beach, I wasn’t trying to do anything. I was just present. And what showed up was more than I could have planned.

Maybe that’s the lesson I keep learning. That presence is the doorway. Not to getting what you want, but to receiving what’s already there.

If this one stirred something, I’d love to hear about it. And if you know someone who might need a reminder that slowing down can open things up, please share it with them.

About seven and a half months ago, I officially launched the Heart-Strong Adventure. It wasn’t some grand launch. It was just a post on Substack. “Why I’m Spending a Year Exploring Love and Fear.” That was it. One post. One question. One year to follow it.

Now here I am, 223 days later, and the adventure is changing.

People might say all good adventures need to come to an end. I disagree. I think life is an adventure. And the great ones don’t end. They evolve into something greater.

This is the story of where the Heart-Strong Adventure is going next. But to tell it, I have to step back to where it was actually born.

The Birth of the Heart-Strong Adventure

My wife, Becca, and I spent March 2025 in Costa Rica. My intent was to surf, eat whole foods, stop drinking for the month, and spend as much time in nature as possible. Thaw out from the Maine winter. We were working too, but the trip was about getting healthy and getting outside. I ended up doing all that. And writing a 100-page paper.

At the time, I was exploring this concept of intentional adventures for men. I was getting interested in men’s work. I thought it would be cool to put my wilderness skills and Maine guide license to use by taking intact friend groups on yearly adventures to do something hard, both physically and mentally, and then reconcile it around the fire at night. A concept I called The Fires We Tend. What are the fires I need to tend over the next year? For myself. For my loved ones. For my community. It was the idea of creating a yearly ritual for men to be in community and check in with each other.

As I kept developing that idea, talking to other men and doing research, I realized the state of men in the world was pretty dire. Men are four times more likely to commit suicide than women. Younger men are five times more likely than their same-age female counterparts. And then I started thinking about the destruction happening in the world. Racism. Misogyny. The environmental crisis. It hit me. Men aren’t necessarily the problem. But men are behind a lot of these human-created problems. And it’s not men per se. It’s the fear-based models of masculinity driving a lot of our behavior.

All of a sudden, I found myself writing a 100-page paper. I called it “If We Want to Heal the World, We Need to Heal Men.” It wasn’t really about healing, despite the title. It was about freeing. How can we free men from fear-based models of masculinity to step into more love-based ways of being?

I was deeply inspired by the paper. And terrified to share it. There are ideas in there that people, especially men, might have a hard time accepting. But I sent it out anyway. To friends. To people working in the men’s space. And the feedback was resoundingly positive. Many asked if they could share it with their networks. Another told me it was my Jerry Maguire moment, referring to the scene where Jerry writes the manifesto. Someone else said, “You didn’t write a paper. You wrote a book. And it is powerful.”

Putting the Paper into Action

When I got home in early April, I started putting it into action. I developed a framework called the Engine of Masculine Transformation. I created a concept for a currency rooted in acts of love. I designed a festival celebrating masculinity at its finest, men coming from a place of love and strength together.

As I worked through all of this, I realized that using the language of love could be challenging for people. Especially men. And on April 14th, exactly a year ago today, I started using the phrase Heart-Strong.

The idea was simple. You’re leading with love. Leading with heart. But doing it in a way that doesn’t feminize. That was the original concept. Heart-Strong masculinity. And the question underneath it was, how can we create systems that make this the aspirational model? Not the models that were starting to emerge and driving where we were going as a society. The models being perpetuated by the manosphere and people like Andrew Tate.

So I went into serious builder mode. I was operating under this idea that belief is the first act. That we can create systems rooted in love, and it all starts with belief.

When the naysayers showed up, I had an answer ready. If you had told our ancestors 10,000 years ago that they could fly, they would have called you crazy. They didn’t have wings. But humans believed they could fly, and we found a way to do it. These things are possible. We just have to believe. Because there are people on the other side who believe they can control us with fear. And belief is the first act.

I launched a campaign called 1,000 Believers. The idea was to get people to sign on to a simple statement of belief. Not a manifesto. Essentially the idea that the world works better when more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear. I had checkpoints mapped out. What happens at 250. At 500. At 750. At 1,000.

When I started my outreach at the end of July, I got some early momentum. But something wasn’t sitting right with me. I felt like I was in selling mode. And I didn’t want to sell. I wanted to co-create.

The Adventure Begins

So I pumped the brakes.

I spent a lot of time journaling. A lot of time reflecting. A lot of time walking in the woods, having conversations with myself. The direction I was going was not where I wanted to be going.

I’m an adventure guy. And I was feeling a pull to explore. To go on a more divergent journey. What I needed was an adventure. And on September 3rd, I officially launched the Heart-Strong Adventure. One year to explore where love and fear shows up in the world, especially in the lives of men, and how freeing men from fear can heal individuals, communities, and systems.

Many of you have been with me since day one. A lot of you have joined along the way.

Where the Adventure Went

Over the past seven and a half months, I’ve explored a lot of territory. I’ve written about the neuroscience of love and the neuroscience of fear. I’ve wrestled with what testosterone actually does and caught myself cherry-picking the science that confirmed what I already believed. I’ve studied the history of money and traced how capitalism went from serving communities to running the show. I’ve written about the movies that shaped how I understood manhood. I’ve sat with the tension of love-centered spaces that turn tribal. I’ve explored what it means to be present with horses, what men won’t say out loud, and why the easy path usually leads nowhere worth going.

I’ve published over 50 pieces on Substack. I’ve had more than 10 campfire conversations, six of which have been released. I’ve talked with people about decency, about what right relationship with money looks like, about queering rigid norms, and about what it means to tell the truth even when the truth is uncomfortable.

Needless to say, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve changed a lot. I’ve evolved.

The Heart-Strong Road Trip

Earlier this year, Becca and I started preparing for our 2026 trip to Costa Rica. But this year we were doing it differently. We extended the stay to seven weeks. And before Costa Rica, we did what I was calling a Heart-Strong Road Trip, three weeks driving from Maine down to Orlando. The intent was to turn the drive itself into part of the exploration. It was during that road trip that I had the amazing privilege of sitting down with John Biewen for a campfire conversation in Hillsborough, North Carolina. I was observing. I was writing.

The Return to Costa Rica

And then we went to Costa Rica. Going in, one of the intentions I set was to get more clarity on where I might be heading coming out of this adventure. I was about six months in. Halfway. And I could feel myself getting pulled in certain directions. My intent for Costa Rica was to figure out where the strongest pulls were.

And as Costa Rica rarely does, it did not disappoint.

I found myself deeply engaged in a few different tracks. Or I should say trails. This is an adventure after all.

So now, as I return home and mark one year since I first used the term Heart-Strong, I want to talk about what’s changing. What I might be doing over the next six months to a year. And how I’m going to start putting some of these learnings, these relationships, and these deep connections I’ve established over the past 223 days into impact.

The New Trails

But before I get into the new trails I’m following, I think it’s important to talk about what’s not pulling me. Sometimes understanding what you’re moving away from is just as important as understanding what’s drawing you forward.

The first is specifically focusing on men’s work. I recently wrote about this in my summary of the Men podcast season from Scene on Radio. I’ve come to a larger understanding that all of us need to be able to step into living our full selves. Not just men. There are some great people doing important work specifically in the men’s space. That’s just not where I’m being pulled.

The second is becoming a professional Substack writer. There are a lot of people who make a good living writing on Substack with paid subscribers. Making money on my Substack writing was never my intent. It was more about sharing my trail notes from my adventure.

I do intend to keep writing on Substack. I just don’t know exactly what form it’s going to take. I may write a little less. The subjects are likely going to shift as I lean into the new trails.

The thread connecting the three trails is wholeness. Helping people step out of the boxes that keep them from living as full human beings, whether those boxes are prison walls, childhood conditioning, or systems that center capital over everything that actually matters.

The trails are:

· Prison Art as a Pathway for Holistic Healing

· Children’s Book

· A Concept I am calling Community-ism

Prison Art

This grew out of a friendship I never saw coming. It is about what happens when a white guy from Maine who went to Bowdoin College and a Black man from Brooklyn who went to prison decide to create something together. It is starting with this art show. More details soon. And hopefully it grows into new friendships. Transformational healing. And a world where more of us see each other for the beauty of our imperfections and humanity.

Children’s Book

I should actually say books. I am in the process of writing two, and my wife Becca is working on a related one as well. When I started this adventure, I knew a book might come out of it. I just didn’t know it would be a children’s book. And it’s become so much more than a book. It’s closer to a creative art designed for healing. A way of inviting people, starting with kids, to step into their whole selves through storytelling. I’ll have a lot more to share on this in the coming months.

Community-ism

This is about exploring the question, what if we organized society around community the way capitalism organizes around capital?

Not community as an outcome. Not community as a nice thing to have once the economy is sorted. Community as the organizing principle itself. The center. The thing everything else is in service of.

And to be clear, this is not communism. It’s not about flattening people or erasing individual lives. It’s actually the opposite. The idea is that individual flourishing and community flourishing are the same movement. You can’t really have one without the other.

Welcome to the Next Phase

So welcome to the next phase of the Heart-Strong Adventure. It isn’t ending. It’s evolving.

If you’ve been here from the beginning, thank you. If you’re just finding this, welcome to the fire.

And if you feel pulled to any of these trails, please reach out. As Kharma Amos said at the close of our Campfire Conversation, “I predict good trouble ahead.” And good trouble is always better when created with community.

Last year, my wife Becca and I spent four weeks in Malpais, Costa Rica. We stayed pretty secluded. I surfed. We ate healthy. We had an amazing time. But we didn’t really interact with other people.

I left a better person. I thought more clearly. I acted more kindly. I was a better version of myself. And when we got home, that bothered me because it felt extractive. I had taken all this positive energy from the place, the ocean, the jungle, the rhythm of the lifestyle, and brought it home with me. But I didn’t leave anything behind. The energy only flowed one way.

This year, we committed to seven weeks. And before we even got there, I made a decision. I wanted to find ways to give back to a place that had given so much to us.

I started researching volunteer opportunities. I came across an environmental organization called Casa Pampa.1 They had everything from beach cleanups to farm work to opportunities with local schools. All things I was interested in. So I reached out.

I got a message back from the founder. His name is Nahuel.

Nahuel is Argentine. He studied organic agriculture at the University of Buenos Aires at a time when nobody in Argentina was taking organic agriculture seriously. The only thing the market cared about was soybean production and pesticides. Nahuel helped push for a course of study in organic agriculture at the university. By the time he left, future engineers had a path to study it.

After university, he was offered an executive job running a branch of an organic certifying company in Buenos Aires. He was 25. The office was in a historical building with marble floors. He would head downtown twice a week, wear a suit, take the subway to the financial district.

He said no.

Instead, he went to Mexico to surf. He came back after a year and decided, he’s not doing international commerce or organic certification or working in an office. And he left for Costa Rica.

He landed in Santa Teresa because there were waves. That was close to 20 years ago. Back then, there were maybe 200 families. There was no public water. There was nothing. Now there are over 2,000 families. It’s a different place.

Nahuel started a boutique hotel. His neighbor from the next door business was trying to compost but didn’t really know what he was doing. The composting started to smell. Nahuel got complaints from his own guests about it.

So he was in a position where he had to tell his neighbor to stop doing something that was actually the right thing to do. And he thought, I can solve this. Not just for my neighbor. For the whole community.

He started composting in the local school yard. He knew how to do it efficiently. He could handle a lot of waste in a small space. He taught business owners how to compost on their own properties. He taught the kids. And through the kids, he reached the families.

One of those kids was a girl named Genesis. Recently, Nahuel ran into her. She’s now 27 and works as an environmental engineer for the local government. He asked where she was from, expecting her to say San Jose. She said, no, I’m from here. You gave me classes in school.

That story says everything about the kind of work Nahuel does. He plants seeds. Sometimes literally. Sometimes in people.

One afternoon, Becca and I went out to the farm to volunteer. There was a mother and daughter from Sweden with us. We picked tomatoes, cucumbers, fresh ginger, turmeric. We took it all home to cook with. It was great.

But I knew we had more to offer than physical labor. So I reached out to Nahuel and said, hey, when can we do this again? And I’d also love to sit down with you, understand your work, tell you about what we do, and see if there are other ways we can help.

We had coffee. Then a working session. Becca and I started helping him think through his purpose compass, aligning around vision, mission, and values. I’m putting together a brand voice guide for him so that when volunteers come in to help with writing or design, there’s consistency. He’s basically been funding the whole operation himself, and he’s trying to go after grants. So we’re helping where we can.

Then he sent me a flyer for a community fundraiser. Some local bands were playing. We never would have known about it. We went. It was awesome!

Then we started surfing together. Nahuel told me that when the swell shifts, it brings waves to the other side of the peninsula in Cabuya. He said it’s his favorite wave in the world. And he’s surfed all over. Argentina, Mexico, Pavones near the Panama border, which is considered the second longest left in the world. He said Cabuya, when it’s working, is one of the best.

He said, let’s go next week.

That’s how I ended up paddling out in the dark at 5 a.m. with Nahuel, catching waves by moonlight before the sun even started to rise. An experience I never would have had if I hadn’t pushed beyond just volunteering to actually build a relationship.

I told Becca at one point, I think I just met my Argentinian counterpart. We see the world in such a similar way. He’s a serial entrepreneur at heart. He sees a problem, he solves it. Once the resources are there to keep solving it, he moves on to the next one. His vision for Casa Pampa is about community, connection, and resilience. And his ultimate goal, like any good founder, is to put himself out of business. If the problems are solved, the organization doesn’t need to exist anymore.

The exchange of energy between us has been amazing. We’re giving him strategy support. He’s introducing us to experiences and community we never would have found on our own. Both of us are better for it.

One of my mentors, Michael Douglas, talks about energy through systems. How do we make sure energy isn’t just flowing one way? How do we make sure we’re not just extracting but also adding to the positive energy of a place?

That’s the question I keep coming back to.

Here’s another story. Last year, Becca and I went to a place called Indigena Café2 in Cabuya. It’s a bean to bar chocolate spot right near the entrance to Cabo Blanco National Park, the first national park in Costa Rica. They source all their cacao from indigenous communities near the Costa Rican-Panamanian border. The founder is an Italian guy named Gianni. The people who work there make you feel loved from the second you walk in.

When we were there last year, we were lingering, waiting to meet someone. Gianni brought us out some cacao husk tea. The husks are a byproduct of the chocolate-making process. We loved it!

When we got home, we reached out to a bean to bar chocolate company in Maine called Bixby3 and asked if they had cacao husks. They did. Cacao husk tea became part of our daily ritual. No caffeine. Just this gentle energy from the theobromine. Every time we had it, we thought about Cabuya and Gianni and Indigena Cafe.

This year, we went back. We told Gianni the story. How he’d given us that tea, how it became part of our life back in Maine, how we think about his place every time we drink it. His face just lit up. He said, that warms his heart. That makes it all worth it.

These stories are what I’m starting to think of as regenerative exploration.

I’m deliberately not using the word tourism. Tourism feels like you’re touring a place. Just passing through. Travel still feels a little transactional. Exploration feels more like who I am and how I move through the world.

And regenerative means the energy goes both ways. It’s not just about leaving a place better than you found it, though that matters. It’s about building relationships that keep feeding both sides long after you’ve gone home.

Connection can be one way. I can connect with a place, take its energy, and leave. Relationships are reciprocal. The energy flows back and forth. Nahuel introduces me to something that changes my experience. I help him with something that moves his work forward. Gianni shares something with us on a random afternoon. A year later, we come back and tell him what it meant. And that fuels him to keep doing what he does.

I don’t have a framework for this. And I’m not trying to build one. I’m just noticing what happens when you stop extracting from a place and start being in relationship with it.

Something opens up that wouldn’t have otherwise.

This is the final post in a series from Costa Rica. The first was “What Makes You Feel Whole?” The second, “A Tale of Two Surfers.”

The more time I spend surfing, the more I notice there’s a spectrum out there in the water.

On one end, there’s a love-based approach. You’re developing a relationship with every wave. You’re developing a relationship with the ocean. You understand that so much of it is out of your control. You can only do so much, and the rest is trust. If you don’t catch a wave, it doesn’t matter. You’re out there for something deeper.

On the other end, it’s fear. Zero-sum. It’s about catching as many waves as you can. If you’re catching a wave, that means I’m not. It’s my wave. Get off my wave. Or I’m going to get you out of the water.

Most surfers fall somewhere between those two poles. Recently in Costa Rica, I got to experience both ends up close. And what I noticed had very little to do with surfing.

I made friends with an Argentine guy named Nahuel. He has been in Santa Teresa Costa Rica for close to 20 years. When he moved there, there were maybe 200 families. Now there are over 2,000. Nahuel runs an environmental non-profit called Casa Pampa.1 More on Nahuel in my next story.

When the swell is right, Nahuel and I go over to a break on the other side of the Nicoya peninsula to Cabuya. We leave Santa Teresa/Malpais early, 4am. We paddle out before sunrise. The only light is the moon and the stars. You can’t even see the waves. It is scary and magical at the same time!

On one Tuesday, Nahuel and I get out early. Surfing’s great. Then the crowds start picking up.

I don’t like surfing in crowds. It’s not about not getting waves. I just don’t like it. With a lot of things in life, I don’t like crowds. I don’t mind a handful of people out there. I actually like being out there with a few others who are all in that same connected mode. You can watch how someone else reads a wave and learn something. But when the energy shifts to competition, something changes for me.

There was an instructor out there with a student. He’s pushing the student into waves. I’m trying to stay out of the way, doing my own thing.

I happened to find myself in a place where there was some nice consistent waves. The instructor noticed and brought his student over to the area. At one point I catch a wave and paddle back out. I notice the instructor paddling toward me. He asks if I speak English or Espanol. I said English. And he basically gives me an earful. Very aggressive. Told me to stay away from him and his student. Said some things that weren’t particularly nice, including something along the lines of, I don’t care about your life.

I said, lo siento. Sorry. I don’t mean any disrespect. I truly want to be respectful of the etiquette.

And I was being honest. The typical rules of surfing are whoever is closest to the peak has priority on the wave. That’s how I was taught. I try to be really conscientious of it because I don’t want to be that guy.

I paddled away. Eventually I surfed in. That interaction left a bad taste in my mouth. His negative energy threw off my whole day. It wasn’t horrible. I was just off.

I later learned that at this particular break, there’s a cultural understanding that if an instructor is out with a student, you basically give them the right of way no matter what. I didn’t know that. I’m not saying I wasn’t at fault. Maybe the instructor could have communicated in a gentler way, and I would have been like, oh, I had no idea, sorry. You can’t control what happens to you, but you can control how you respond.

Nahuel and I go back on Thursday.

We have the water to ourselves for a while. The conditions are amazing. We’re out there in the dark. The moon is out. The stars are out. We catch some waves before the sun even starts to rise. Then the colors start to pop and burst across the horizon. And you just sit there on your board thinking, this is fucking amazing.

There are maybe five of us. Nahuel, me, a woman, another guy, and an Italian surfer who Nahuel said was basically a professional. Everyone is respectful. It just feels great.

I’m watching the Italian. He’s walking out to the nose of his board, hanging ten, putting all his weight on the very front edge. Think about the physics of that. And he’s just doing it beautifully. He has no problem catching waves. But he’s not out there hoarding them. He’s just a good guy enjoying the ocean.

Then the crowd starts to come. I see that same instructor from Tuesday. I think to myself, this session has been so amazing. I’m going to find a small wave to ride in and call it a day.

As I’m doing that, the Italian ends up a little closer to me. I see a wave coming. I think, this is the one. Then I notice he’s at the peak. It’s his wave. So I’m about to back off. He looks at me and says, go, go.

He just gives me the wave.

I go. I ride it in. And in hindsight, the pressure of that moment hit me. A professional surfer conceding a wave that was clearly his, telling me to take it. If I had messed that up, I would have looked like a total kook. But I caught it. Rode it all the way to the beach. Beautiful ending.

Before that happened, something else played out. One of the instructor’s students got caught up in a wave, lost his board, and it basically became a projectile. It almost took Nahuel out. Nahuel told the guy, in a pretty calm way, that he was dangerous out there and needed to control his board. The instructor wasn’t even paying attention. Then at some point, I could see the instructor engaging with Nahuel, giving him an earful about something, saying things like, you’re not even a good surfer. To be clear, Nahuel is a very good surfer.

Later, Nahuel said that while the way the instructor was communicating wasn’t as aggressive as what I’d experienced, it was still that same energy.

And then he said something that stuck with me, “Imagine having to live 24/7 with all that anger.”

I think that’s a great reframe. But it also opens up something I’ve been thinking about.

How you approach surfing is how you approach life.

How you approach a game. How you show up at work. How you approach a run. How you approach a conversation. I don’t think we can compartmentalize. Can a person truly be really cool and chill with their friends, but a cutthroat competitor in the water? The key word is cutthroat, not competitor. Can we truly do that? Does our brain know how to keep those things separate?

I’ve written before about spilling. The idea that what we carry inside is what we spill onto others. I think if you’re truly going to lead with love, it has to show up in everything. And when you start trying to compartmentalize, when you’re one way in some areas and a different way in others, I think the fear still spills over into the places where you don’t want it to.

Based on how the Italian showed up in the lineup, he’s the kind of person I’d want to be in community with. The instructor? Maybe he’s a great guy to hang out with. I don’t know. But in the water, I saw something that made me wonder.

And the honest thing is, who knows what that instructor is dealing with in his life. That’s real too. I’m not trying to make him a villain. I’m just noticing what I noticed.

I truly believe that what you carry is what you spill. And what you spill, gets spilled back on you. Case in point. The following weekend the Costa Rican Federation of Surfing had their second competition of the season in Santa Teresa. The Italian surfer took second place in the longboard competition.

This is the second in a series from Costa Rica. Next up: what happens when you stop extracting from the places you visit and start building relationships with them.

I’ve been around the water my whole life.

Growing up in Maine, I spent time at the ocean from as far back as I can remember. Popham Beach. Reid State Park. Hermit Island. My mom and dad brought us there, and I just loved it. The salt, the sound, the size of it. I was riding waves by the time I was four or five. Not surfing. Just a kid in the whitewater, learning what it felt like to let something bigger than him carry him somewhere.

I was around freshwater just as much. Time at my aunt’s place, White’s Beach and Campground. Moosehead Lake. Natanis Pond. Water was just always part of my life.

When I was 15, I got my first lifeguarding job at my aunt’s beach and campground. After my freshman year of college, I got a job at Reid State Park, an ocean beach. I worked there for three summers. We used to get paid to work out every morning. Running, swimming. There were days we swam a mile in the ocean in water that was probably 55 degrees. We had to be ready to go when an emergency hit. I was drawn to that.

During our lunch breaks, we’d take our rescue boards out and try to catch waves. We didn’t know what we were doing. I can’t even remember if I ever actually caught one. I just remember we thought we were surfing.

After college, running captured me. It became a huge part of my identity. In my late 20s and early 30s, I was running 70 to 80 miles a week easily. It was how I sorted things out. If I didn’t have running, I couldn’t process what I needed to process. But running takes a toll on your body. And over time, I went from 80 miles a week to the point where if I can get in 20 and not have some nagging injury come up, I’m psyched.

Around 40, I started getting really interested in surfing. My wife Becca and I were traveling to places where surfing was the culture. It started in Mexico. We were visiting tequila distilleries and ended up in Sayulita, a funky surf town on the west coast. I took a lesson. I loved it! Then surfing kind of faded for a bit until we went to Hawaii, took another lesson, then went back to Mexico for a couple weeks. There, I found a private instructor. Two hours with a professional surfer for $20. I went out with him several times.

Then we went to South Africa, and I surfed a lot there. That was the first time I ever surfed in a wetsuit. And something clicked. I came home and thought, why am I not doing this in Maine? I’d never really considered it. I was so into warm water surfing that I hadn’t even thought about getting a wetsuit. I got one and a board. I started surfing spring, summer, and fall in Maine.

I started to feel noticeably better on the days I surfed than the days I didn’t. It reminded me of running. It was filling a hole that running used to more consistently fill.

Last year, my wife Becca and I spent four weeks in Malpais, Costa Rica. I fell in love with the rhythm of the lifestyle there. I was outside from 4 a.m. until dark. Even when I was working, I was in a screened-in kitchen looking out at the jungle. I was spending 1 1/2 to 2 hours every morning in the ocean. I became a better version of myself. I thought better. I acted better. I was just a better me.

This year, we committed to seven weeks. When I got back to Costa Rica, I was rusty. Between the two Costa Rica trips, there just wasn’t much surf in the Northeast. It was not a great year. So my timing was off. It took me a while to find it again. But I did. And I was instantly back in the rhythm of Costa Rica.

Here’s the thing I’ve started to notice this year. My relationship with surfing has changed.

I’m not going to pretend I’m a great surfer. I’m still very much learning. But somewhere along the way, it stopped being about how many waves I catch. I got to this place of peacefulness out on the water. Almost like surrender. Less trying to make things happen, more letting them come. To get there, I had to accept just how much of surfing is out of your control.

Every time you go out to the ocean, it’s a different ocean.

There’s a saying that you never step into the same river twice. Same with the ocean, especially at a beach break where the floor is always changing. The moon affects the tides. The direction of the swell, the wind, where you are with the tides. There are all these things at play. So, every single day, you’re developing a new relationship with the water.

And then when you see a wave, you have to put together this physical feat in a split second. You have to remember the muscle memory of how to turn your board, paddle to catch the momentum, look in the direction you want to go, feel the energy of the wave, push yourself up, get your back foot down first, keep your feet at 45 degrees, shoulder width apart, stay relaxed, bend, breathe, read what the wave is doing. All of it, all at once.

When you see someone who can put all of that together, it looks like a ballet dancer. It looks like Prince playing guitar. It’s a thing of beauty. And when you start to understand how many things have to come together to make it look that way, it’s just amazing.

I’m not fully there. But this year, I started to notice something different in myself out in the water. I was watching other surfers and seeing mirrors of where I’ve been.

There was a guy out surfing in the first couple weeks of our trip. He knew what he was doing. Definitely not a beginner. More intermediate. But he was having a really hard time catching waves. And I could see him getting frustrated with himself. He’d miss a wave and kind of slam his head into his board out of frustration. I looked at him and thought, that was so me last year.

This year, when I was missing waves and my timing was off, I was just like, oh well. I was not beating myself up about it. Because catching waves almost became icing on the cake. Just the experience of being out there in the ocean was enough.

And then one morning, I was walking on the beach recording some of these thoughts. There was a little kid out there with a coach. He was maybe seven years old. He caught a wave and the second he got up, he threw his hands in the air in a V. Pure joy. That’s the feeling. It’s absolutely amazing!

Around that time, Becca and I were watching Surfer Dude with Matthew McConaughey. On a hike in Cabo Blanco National Park, we were sharing our thoughts on the movie. I said to me, it’s a story about purpose, passion, and integrity. The reason his character is endlessly surfing is because that’s the one thing that makes him feel whole. And that’s also his fatal flaw, because it’s the only thing that makes him feel whole. He has a friend, an older guy living in Mexico. And when someone asks the friend why he’s not freaking out about the crazy drought of no waves, the friend says, I have fishing.

I told Becca that used to be me. If I didn’t have running, I couldn’t sort out what I needed to sort out. But I’ve been able to expand on that. I have running, surfing, hiking, creative cooking. Things that make me feel whole.

Becca said, it’s flow.

I told her I don’t think flow is the right word. Flow assumes a certain level of mastery. I am far from mastery with surfing. There are times I get in the flow, but on any given session, if I’m lucky, maybe 50 percent of the time.

But surfing makes me feel whole. And not just whole as an individual. Whole in the sense of being connected to something far greater than me. It’s no different than when I’m doing creative cooking with fish that I watched someone fillet that day in a way that can only be described as an art form. Or when I’m paddling out before the sun comes up and the stars are still out and you catch a few waves before the horizon even starts to show colors of the sun. It is a feeling of awe. And it makes you feel connected to something so much bigger than yourself.

So it’s not about mastery. It’s about wholeness. It’s not about flow. It’s about practice. And if I think about it through the lens of game theory, flow feels finite. There’s an end point. Practice is infinite. You just keep tending a relationship.

And what’s happened as I’ve progressed in this relationship is that surfing has become so much more than an athletic feat. It’s a spiritual practice. A grounding practice. A continual mirror on myself. Because as I’m developing a relationship with the ocean, I’m developing a relationship with myself and with the earth at large.

I’m still very much learning. And that might be the whole point.

And I want to leave you all with some questions I’m sitting with that I believe are worth thinking about.

What makes you feel whole? Not productive. Not accomplished. Not in the flow. Whole. Deeply connected to not only yourself, but also something bigger than yourself.

And when was the last time you made space for it?

This is the first post in a series from Costa Rica. Next up: what surfing taught me about how we show up in the world.

I started listening to The Scene on Radio Men podcast series1 back in the summer. It’s now winter. A podcast literally called Men. Twelve episodes about masculinity, patriarchy, and how we got here. And I’m just now writing about it.

I’m a man. On an adventure about love and fear. An adventure that specifically explores how love and fear shows up in the lives of men. You’d think a series called Men would have been the first thing I listened to and the first thing I wrote about.

It was not.

I listened to a few episodes early on. Then I drifted. I wrote about testosterone.2 I wrote about movies and what they taught me about being a man.3 4I wrote about capitalism.5 I wrote about prison.6 I wrote about money.7 I explored trail after trail on this adventure and kept circling around the one that was sitting right in front of me.

There’s something in that. I want to come back to it at the end.

First, let me tell you about the series.

John Biewen and Scene on Radio

If you’ve been following this adventure, you’ve met John Biewen before. He’s the creator, producer, and host of Scene on Radio, a two-time Peabody-nominated podcast from the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. Last fall, I wrote about his Capitalism series and how it cracked open questions I thought I already had answers to.

A few months later, I sat with John around a fire in Hillsborough, North Carolina. A Campfire Conversation about justice, fear, love, stories, and the systems we build to protect what we have. That conversation is out now.

John’s work has shaped this adventure in ways I’m still sorting through. When I finally sat down to finish the Men series, it felt like continuing a conversation I’d been having with him for months. Just this time, his co-host was Celeste Headlee, a journalist, author, and woman of color who brought a different kind of sharpness to every episode.

The series is twelve episodes long. It covers a lot. Rather than walk you through each one, I want to share what I heard. The big themes. The threads that stuck with me. And the questions I’m still sitting with.

Where Did This Patriarchy Thing Start?

The series opens with a question that sounds simple but isn’t. How did men end up on top?

For most of human history, the answer wasn’t obvious. Early human societies were far more egalitarian than we tend to assume. Men and women shared work. Roles were more fluid. The idea of one gender dominating the other wasn’t some universal starting point.

Then things shifted. Roughly 10,000 years ago, as humans began settling down, accumulating property, and building social structures, men began consolidating power. That leads to the question, “Why?”

The series explores several theories. Mel Konner, an anthropologist at Emory University, points to what he calls patriarchal conspiracies. Once men started accumulating property, they wanted to control who inherited it. That meant controlling women. Controlling reproduction. Controlling the line of descent.

Lisa Wade, a sociologist, adds another layer. In hunter-gatherer societies, there wasn’t much to pass down. Biological fatherhood mattered less when the whole community was raising children together. But once ownership entered the picture, everything changed. Men started thinking of women as property. Something to trade. Something to protect. Something to control.

And then there’s testosterone. The series doesn’t shy away from this. Celeste pushes John on it directly. Men are, on average, more physically aggressive. Testosterone plays a role. But as the series makes clear, testosterone isn’t a switch that gets flipped. It’s more like an amplifier. Social context shapes how it gets expressed. A man’s testosterone might lead him to punch someone in a bar, but it won’t make him swing at his boss.

I wrote about this last fall in The Testosterone Paradox. What struck me then, and what struck me again listening to these episodes, is how much we want a simple answer. Nature or nurture. Biology or culture. But it’s both. Always both. And the interplay between them is where the real complexity lives.

The series lands in an honest place on this. We may never fully untangle how much of gender is wired and how much is built. But as Mel Konner puts it, we are the first species with the potential to direct our own evolution. We’re not amoebas. We can choose.

The Machinery

If the first few episodes ask how male supremacy started, the next stretch asks how it kept going. The answer is machinery. Cultural machinery that got built over centuries and kept reinforcing itself.

This part of the series traces it through science, religion, law, and war.

In the 1700s, when Maria Winckelmann, a German astronomer, discovered a comet and later applied to be the official astronomer at the Berlin Academy of Sciences, the great philosopher Leibniz supported her. He said he doubted she could easily find her equal in the science in which she excels. The Academy turned her down anyway. Their reason? If a woman was their astronomer, people would laugh.

A few years later, they gave the job to her son. With Maria as his assistant. She was already doing the work. They just weren’t going to give her the title.

The series is full of moments like this. Doors that almost opened. Opportunities that almost happened. And then power stepped in and slammed them shut. Not because women weren’t capable. Because the men in charge were afraid of what it would mean if they let them in.

That fear shows up in different forms across different centuries. But the pattern is consistent. Every time male supremacy gets challenged, a new justification gets invented. “Science” was used to try to prove women’s brains were smaller. Medicine was used to argue women were too emotional. Psychology was used to pathologize any woman who didn’t conform. One theory gets disproved, and another one takes its place.

It’s an exhausting cycle. And it’s one that requires constant energy to maintain.

Who Gets to Be a Man?

One of the most important things the series does is show that masculinity isn’t one thing. It’s different depending on your race, your class, your sexuality, and your body.

Episode 8 digs into this directly. White men have far more latitude in how they express masculinity. When a white man expresses anger, it can read as courage or conviction. When a Black man expresses the same anger, it reads as threat. Asian men have historically been desexualized and feminized in American media. The series traces this through decades of Hollywood, from Long Duck Dong in Sixteen Candles to Crazy Rich Asians. The stereotypes aren’t accidental. They serve a purpose. They keep white masculinity at the center and push everything else to the margins.

And wealth multiplies the effect. A wealthy white man has enormous freedom in how he shows up in the world. That freedom shrinks the further you move from that center. These aren’t inherent differences. They are constructed ones. Beliefs that got handed down.

The trans experience adds another dimension. Episode 9 features a trans man who describes masculinity as reductive. The rules of manhood are mostly about what you can’t be. You can’t be caring. You can’t be kind. You can’t be vulnerable. The definition is built on exclusion, not expansion. And people who transition from female to male are joining what the series calls the boys club. People who transition from male to female are leaving it. And the violence directed at trans women is, in part, a punishment for that departure. For discrediting the idea that manhood is the thing everyone should want.

In my reflections on this episode, I wrote something that has stayed with me. What if gender was more of an art? An individual expression. Art is more beautiful with color, with diversity, with creativity. An expression of masculinity viewed through the lens of art seems like a much more beautiful world.

The Cost

The series doesn’t just examine what patriarchy does to women. It looks at what it does to men.

Episode 6 on warriors is where this hit me hardest. The series traces how, across virtually every culture, men have been designated as the ones who fight and die. One man can father many children. One woman can bear one child at a time. So culturally, men became more dispensable.

Think about what that means. We have decided, collectively, that it’s noble for men to die for a cause. That protecting others is their role. That their individual life is worth less than what it can be sacrificed for.

The emotional weight of carrying that is enormous. Veterans are significantly more likely to die by suicide. Deaths of despair among men are rising. The warrior archetype doesn’t just send men to war. It teaches them to suppress empathy, to shut down vulnerability, to see their own pain as weakness.

The military trains this into people deliberately. Soldiers are broken down and hardened. They are taught conditional empathy. Care about your fellow soldiers. Don’t extend that care to the other side. Because if you do, it becomes much harder to pull the trigger.

You can see how this template got exported from the battlefield into everything else. Into boardrooms. Into sports. Into fatherhood. Into how men relate to their own emotions.

Episode 10 brings this home through the story of a father watching his son go through middle school. The vocabulary of adolescent boys is a vocabulary of enforcement. Gay. Faggot. Pussy. Girl. Every term designed to punish any departure from the narrow definition of what a man is supposed to be. And this starts before boys can read. Before they even have the language for it, they are already absorbing the rules.

I never had children. And I wrote in my reflections on this episode that I had always wanted a daughter, not necessarily a son. At the time I didn’t think too deeply about why. Now I think I was sensing something. Society seemed more willing to let women be whole people than to let men be whole people. A daughter could be strong and independent and caring. A son would face a world that would punish him for half of those things.

I’m coming to believe that the patriarchy could hurt men more than it hurts women. I want to be careful with that. I’m not saying poor little rich boy. The harm to women is real and severe and ongoing. But the harm to men is often invisible because men aren’t supposed to talk about it. And what you can’t name, you can’t heal.

The Ecosystem

Episode 11 changed something for me. It starts with sports talk radio, which is an unexpected entry point into the patriarchy. But it works. Jim Rome, one of the most popular sports talk hosts in the country, turns out to be surprisingly thoughtful. He pushes back on callers who are racist, homophobic, or dismissive of women. In a space built on dominance and winning, there are these small moments of decency.

But the deeper insight comes from therapist Terry Real. He describes the shift that needs to happen as a move from dominant hierarchical thinking to relational thinking. From linear to ecological. When you make that shift, you’re no longer above the system. You are a humble part of it. And it’s in your interest to keep it clean and healthy.

Whether the system is a marriage. A community. Or the literal ecosystem of the planet.

This connected to something I’ve been learning from Michael Douglas at Maine Primitive Skills School. The traditional rules of wilderness survival are shelter, water, fire, food. Michael adds a fifth. Attitude. Because how you approach the situation changes everything. Surviving in nature isn’t about conquering it. It’s about collaborating with it. Being in tune with it. Letting the awe of it humble you.

The impulse to dominate, the series argues, is the same whether you’re dominating women, or the people who work for you, or the natural world. Feminists have been making this point for decades. But apparently it hasn’t been said enough. Because we keep acting as though we’re above the systems we depend on.

Why It Took Me Six Months

So, here’s the thing I promised to come back to.

Why did it take me six months to finish and write about a podcast called Men, WHILE on an adventure about men?

I think something happened to me over the course of this year. I started this adventure focused on freeing men from fear. That was the mission. That was the frame. And it’s still true. I believe freeing men from fear-based models of masculinity is one of the most important things we can do.

But somewhere along the way, my focus shifted. I became less interested in just men, and more interested in the systems that trap all of us. Disconnection. Community. What it looks like when people are pulled by love instead of controlled by fear. Not just men. Everyone.

The last episode of the series, Episode 12, is called The End of Male Supremacy. Celeste talks about wanting 51% representation of women in government. John starts to wonder about something deeper. What happens when the patriarchy comes down entirely? When there’s no strict definition of what women can be and what men can be? When people start showing up as their true selves?

Everything changes.

And that’s what I’ve been gravitating toward. Not just freeing men. But what freeing men makes possible. The ripple effects. The way it changes relationships, communities, systems, everything.

If we free men from these boxes, it doesn’t just benefit men, it changes the whole ecosystem. Because the patriarchy isn’t just a system of male power. It’s a system that keeps everyone small. That keeps everyone performing. That keeps everyone afraid.

And I think this is why the podcast kept slipping to the back of my queue. Not because it wasn’t important. But because my understanding of why it matters had expanded beyond where I started.

I started from freeing men from fear.

I’m landing somewhere closer to freeing all of us from the systems that were built by fear.

The Questions I Am Sitting With

I don’t have neat answers. But I have questions that feel worth sitting with.

If male supremacy is only about 10,000 years old, and humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, what does that say about how natural it really is?

How do we help men see the cost of the current system without it feeling like an attack? Because the cost is real, and most men are paying it quietly.

What would an expansive definition of masculinity look like? One built on what you can be, not what you can’t?

If the impulse to dominate is the same whether it’s directed at women, other men, or the natural world, what does it look like to choose collaboration instead? Not as weakness. But as the more intelligent response to the reality that we are all part of the same system.

And the one that keeps following me: if we want to heal the world, and I believe we do, is freeing men from fear-based models of masculinity one of the most obvious places to start?

I think it might be.

Thank you for walking with me on this one. It took me a while to get here. But I think the long way around taught me something the shortcut would’ve missed.