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.

Becca (my wife) and I were staying at her mom’s place in Melbourne, Florida during our road trip south. I’d been working from different coffee shops in the area and found a good one called Lucky Goat Coffee in Rockledge. Good coffee. Good energy. It felt like the kind of place where people settle in and spend time with themselves or others.

One morning I grabbed a seat at a six-top table. Just me, my laptop, and a cup of coffee. A few minutes later, a group of young people walked in together. Four or five of them. They were waiting to order, and it was pretty clear they were going to need a table.

So, I got up and asked, “Hey, are you all together?”

“Yeah, yeah,” one of them said.

“Are you going to be staying here?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, why don’t you put your stuff down on this table so you can claim it? I’ll move.”

That was it. That was the whole thing. I gave up a table.

They were so grateful you’d think I’d bought them all lunch. One of the guys came over and introduced himself. His name was Mason. He asked what I do. I told him I’m from Maine, we’re traveling, and I do some writing around love and fear. He thought that was interesting. I mentioned we were on our way to Costa Rica. We chatted for a minute and then I moved over to a chair nearby.

A few minutes later, Mason walked up. “Hey, can I get you a drink?”

I said no, I was good. Plenty of coffee. But I appreciated it.

I ended up shifting to a table where I could see their group. I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop. I was just writing and observing. I could see a Bible on the table. Every once in a while, someone would bow their head. It looked like a Bible study.

These were young people. Late twenties, early thirties I would estimate. And they were going deep.

When I got up to leave, they all acknowledged me. Said thanks again. Mason got up, shook my hand.

I asked, “Do you mind me asking, were you having a Bible study?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You want to join?”

I laughed. “I actually took part in my first one a few days ago while visiting friends in South Carolina.”

I explained that I grew up in New England where church attendance is pretty quiet. And the state I live in, Maine, is considered one of the least religious.

But as I’d been driving south, I’d been noticing something. Faith was showing up differently. More visibly. More in community. At a diner in Georgia, I’d seen a men’s group meeting around a flyer that said, “Iron Sharpens Iron.” At coffee shops, Bible study groups. It wasn’t just about going to church. The community was extending beyond those walls into everyday spaces.

Then I asked Mason something I’ve gotten comfortable asking strangers on this adventure. “Would you be willing to get coffee with me this week while I’m in town?”

He said yes. We set it up for the next morning at Lucky Goat. 10 AM. I told him to feel free to invite others.

Three Men, Three Stories

The next morning, Mason showed up with two others. Eric and Shakey. Shakey, I would learn, is the pastor of a church the three of them are planting together called Lost and Found Florida.

I asked if I could record the conversation. They said yes. We sat down. And for almost three hours, we talked about God, Jesus, faith, the devil, self-preservation, pride, disconnection, love, and choice.

We did not agree on everything. And that was completely okay.

What struck me first was how naturally these three men went deep. There was no warmup. No small talk about sports or weather. Shakey opened with a prayer. And then we were in it.

I want to be honest about where I was walking into this conversation. I consider myself deeply spiritual but not very religious. I grew up going to a Congregationalist church and probably stopped going consistently around age eight. Given the choice between basketball and church, I was choosing basketball every time. After 9/11, I started questioning organized religion more seriously. I couldn’t reconcile how three faiths that worship essentially the same God could be in such conflict.

But I’ve also come to see how much good religion has done in orienting people toward love. And my whole perspective on this adventure is simple. Whatever helps someone find their true self and move through the world in a positive way, that’s a good thing. What works for some people doesn’t work for others. I’m here to learn, not judge.

So, I told them that. And then I listened.

Relationship, Not Religion

Early in the conversation, Mason said something that I found really interesting.

“It’s more relationship than it is religion.”

I asked him to say more. He explained that when Jesus died on the cross and the Holy Spirit was sent, something shifted. The connection between God and humanity became personal. Direct. Not mediated by systems or structures, but available through prayer. One on one. At any time.

“The highest form of spirituality through relationship is simply prayer,” Mason said. “You get to talk to God one-on-one at any point in time. And that is such a dynamic difference between religion and relationship. Because religion, just like the world, will tell you to clean up from the outside in. But the Holy Spirit will always work on you from the inside out.”

That distinction landed for me. Not because I suddenly agreed with everything behind it. But because it reframed something I’d been carrying. I’ve always associated religion with structures and systems. Churches. Rules. Hierarchy. Mason was describing something different. Something more intimate.

Eric built on it. He read from John Chapter 1. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” He walked me through the idea that when Christians talk about the Word of God, they’re not talking about a book. They’re talking about a person. Jesus.

“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” Eric said. Then he connected it to something I hadn’t thought about before. The name Emmanuel. God with us.

“This is the big deal,” Eric said. “God desires to be with man. Ever since Genesis Chapter 1. He forms him with His hands. He breathes in him. From the very jump, God desires to be with man.”

I told them about the image I grew up with. God as an old man with a long white beard up in the clouds. How I had a hard time accepting that idea.

Eric smiled. “God can’t be defined. He’s infinite. He’s other. And yet, He comes near.”

The Map and the Compass

I asked them a question I’ve been thinking about for a while. When you look at the Bible, do you see it more as a map or a compass?

I explained what I meant. A map gives you defined routes. If a bridge washes out, you’re kind of stuck. A compass is a tool that helps you navigate. It helps you orient around obstacles and find your way back.

Mason had an answer ready. “This book is the map. Your prayer time and your relationship with the Lord is the compass.”

He said the Bible contains the details. The terrain. The history. The instruction. But the relationship with God through prayer is what gets you back on track when life knocks you sideways.

Eric went further. He said the Bible is a map to the person of God. Not a map to a destination. Not a map to perfection. A map to understanding who God is. And that when you understand who God is, you can face anything.

“I’m on a soft rock,” he said. “I’m not moved.”

You Can’t Have Love Without Choice

There was a moment in the conversation when everything kind of converged.

We were talking about the Garden of Eden. I was asking about why God would even allow the possibility of evil. Why was the serpent there? Why was the tree there? If God is perfect, why create a world where things could go wrong?

Eric’s answer was simple and direct. “God values choice over everything else. The Bible says God is love. You cannot have love without choice. You cannot have true love if I can’t choose to love you. If I’m forced to love you, it ain’t love.”

I actually said it out loud. “I love what you said. You can’t have love without choice.”

And then I sat with the weight of it. Because choice is hard. It means you have to be responsible for the choice you make. And that’s what makes love hard. Because love is a choice.

That line of thinking runs right through everything I’ve been exploring on this adventure. Love isn’t a feeling you stumble into. It’s a direction you choose. And fear often shows up as the thing that keeps us from making that choice. Fear of rejection. Fear of being wrong. Fear of losing control.

These three men were describing a faith that they believed was built on choice. Not blind obedience. Not inherited tradition. Choice.

What Goes Against Your Nature

Mason said something else that stuck with me. He said the Bible is the only book that will tell you to do things completely contrary to your nature.

I asked for an example.

Eric jumped in. “Jesus said if somebody slaps you on the cheek, offer the other cheek. If somebody takes your cloak, give them your tunic. Love your enemies. Pray for those who hate you.”

I said, “So we’re born with this instinct toward self-preservation. And Jesus is saying, do the opposite.”

“It’s not about putting yourself in harm’s way,” Eric said. “It’s about denying the flesh. Picking up your cross. Following.”

He pointed to something I hadn’t fully considered. When Jesus asked his disciples to follow him, he was asking them to follow him to his own death. And they went willingly. Not at gunpoint. With love in their hearts.

“That is not natural,” Eric said. “Nobody wants to die.”

I thought about how often I choose self-preservation in small, everyday ways. Avoiding a hard conversation. Protecting my ego. Keeping distance from people who see the world differently than I do. Those aren’t life and death moments. But they’re still moments where I’m choosing fear over love.

“I Got Fed Up and Yelled at God”

Each of them shared how they came to faith. None of their stories were simple. None of them inherited it passively.

Mason grew up in a Christian household but got tired of going through the motions by the time he was fifteen. He went the way of the world, as he put it. Drugs. Drinking. DUIs before he was twenty. His parents almost sent him to military academy.

He explored other paths. Buddhism. Islam. He read the Bible but didn’t understand it.

Then one day he got fed up.

“I was yelling at God,” Mason said. “I said, I don’t even know if you’re real. But I guess I do care because I’m trying to talk to you. I want to experience you. I want to know everything about you before I try to keep figuring all this stuff out about me.”

Two weeks later, he got sober for the first time in seven years. He walked into a church for the first time since he was thirteen or fourteen. He said it wasn’t the preacher or the worship that moved him. It was a weight. The weight of something real pressing down on him in that chair.

“I felt the Holy Spirit,” he said. “I fumbled my way to that altar, crying like a baby. And I stayed there probably thirty minutes after service. Because the Lord showed up for me that day.”

“He Spoke to Me and Said, That’s What You Were Feeling”

Shakey’s story started with his grandmother. She raised him after police raided his parents’ home for drugs when he was around eight years old. She was the only representation of Jesus in his life.

He described getting filled with the Holy Spirit as a child while watching gospel singers in his grandmother’s bedroom. He could still smell the fried chicken she was cooking. He fell to his knees and stayed on the floor for an hour.

But as he got older, he said he became “too saved.” Judgmental. Nobody wanted to be around that. So, he went back to his mother’s house and started living differently. One foot in the Word, one foot in the world.

Then everything changed. He was living in Atlanta, working for a TV show, making good money. His mom called and asked him to come home to Alabama for his sister’s birthday. He packed more clothes than usual. He couldn’t explain why.

“The whole time I’m driving to Huntsville, I felt like death,” Shakey said. “Something is off. Something is about to happen.”

His brothers and cousin went out that night. His family had been robbed, and they went to retaliate. His cousin was killed. His brother went to jail. He’s still there.

“In that moment, the Holy Spirit spoke to me and said, that’s what you were feeling. I need you to stay here.”

Shakey described standing on top of the fireplace in his family’s living room while everyone was screaming and confused. He told them they couldn’t fight each other. They had to turn to Jesus.

“In that moment,” Shakey said, “everybody in my living room got saved.”

From there, God called him to full-time ministry. He went to school. Then he moved to Florida. Then he planted Lost and Found Florida, a church that started from what he called a divine chain of events, including a 911 butt-dial that connected their executive pastor with a couple who had a building and were praying for young people to fill it.

“You mean to tell me you’re going to bring my wife and my daughter here? To plant a church?” Shakey said, laughing. “What does it look like? We ain’t got no money for this.”

He laughed again. “He’s like, yeah, I’m going to pave the way for you.”

“I’ve Seen Jesus With My Eyes”

Eric’s story was the hardest to hear.

His father was Dominican; a drug dealer connected to the cartel in New York. He was being groomed to become a high priest in Santeria, a form of Spanish witchcraft. Eric’s roommate was a warlock. Rituals. Seances. Dark stuff.

Eric said he was born with what he called extreme sensitivity. From a young age, he could see things others couldn’t. Including Jesus. He described seeing Jesus standing in his bathroom when he was nine years old after he lied to his mother about his homework.

But he also saw demons. Spirits that came into his room at night and surrounded him, saying the same thing over and over. Kill yourself. Kill yourself. Kill yourself.

As a child, Eric was deeply suicidal. He hated himself. He hated everyone. He had a notebook where he planned violence. He described thoughts so dark he paused before sharing them.

“It was sick,” he said. “It was disgusting.”

He went to church. Played on the worship team. But he was living two lives. In college he started drinking and doing drugs. And then one night, after a dangerous high, God spoke to him.

“You’ve been dedicated to me. Your life is tied to me. And if you’re not going to serve me, then this is it for you.”

Eric said, “All right, Lord. I’m not going to go back and forth with the world.”

He went into full-time ministry with an organization called Circuit Riders. He traveled the country. He gave his life over.

“God was like, I’ve been real. I’ve been real. You know I’m real. And now it’s time to follow me.”

The Wrestling

There’s a story in Genesis where Jacob physically wrestles with God. Mason read it to me from Chapter 32. Jacob won’t let go until God blesses him. And God changes his name to Israel, which means “one who wrestles with God.”

But here’s the part that got me. After the wrestling, God touches Jacob’s hip and dislocates it. And then God leaves without fixing it. Jacob walks away with a limp that everyone can see.

“He didn’t fix him,” Mason said. “He claimed to have seen God. And people knew that he walked differently because of that moment.”

Mason said that’s what a relationship with God does. It changes you. Marks you. You walk differently after.

I told them I was wrestling too. I believe Jesus was one of the most incredible people to ever walk the earth. I look to him for inspiration. But I struggle with the idea of him being the Son of God. That’s just where I am.

They didn’t flinch.

Eric asked me what was holding me back. I said a few things. That history is typically written by the victors and people in power. That I have a hard time accepting there’s only one way. That I believe there are a lot of paths for people, and when someone finds one that works for them, that’s a good thing.

Mason nodded. “When it comes to this, you’re only going to get to a certain point where you have to make a commitment. The Lord didn’t call us to understand Him first. He called us to follow Him first. And with following comes understanding.”

I respected that. And I was honest. “I’m still going very broad in my study. That’s just where I am.”

Nobody tried to argue me out of it.

Love People

Shakey told me one more story. He used to own a souvenir shop back in Alabama and made a t-shirt that said, “Love People.” He explained that it came from a season of his life where loving people was hard for him.

“God said, I’m gonna show you.”

Shakey is Black. His wife is white. Her father was openly racist. He didn’t want a Black son-in-law. Didn’t want a Black grandchild. Would leave their church campus just to avoid seeing them in the hallway.

I asked the obvious question. “How is this man a Christian and he’s racist?”

Shakey smiled. “That’s the question I had too.”

But he didn’t fight it. He said, “That’s God’s son. And God wants him more than I want him.” He trusted that God would get to the man in His own time.

A few weeks before our conversation, Shakey said, the man was delivered from racism. Over FaceTime, of all things. Fully. And now he sees Shakey’s family in a completely different light.

“Guess how I did it?” Shakey said. “I didn’t fight the man. I said that’s God’s son.”

Divine Intervention

Near the end of our three hours, Mason asked if I wanted to place my faith in Jesus right then. He was gentle about it. No pressure. But direct.

I said, “Can I hold on that offer until maybe the next time I see you guys?”

He said, “Absolutely.”

I told them it wasn’t a light decision. I was in an exploratory space. Becca wasn’t feeling well and I wanted to get back to her. And a plow truck had taken out a rock wall at our house back in Maine, so I had some practical things to deal with too. Spiritual reasons, relational reasons, and practical reasons.

They laughed. No offense taken.

Before I left, I shared the coffee cup story I’ve been carrying with me on this trip. If you’re carrying a cup of coffee in a crowded room and someone bumps into you, why did you spill coffee? Most people say because someone bumped into them. But really, you spilled coffee because you were carrying coffee. If you’d been carrying water, you would have spilled water.

What you carry is what you spill.

I told them that’s how I move through the world. I’m always asking, how do I spill more love?

Eric said something back that I think about now. He said that everything good he carries, he didn’t come up with. He’s imitating Jesus. The kindness, the love, the patience. None of it is his. He’s just imitating the person he follows.

“If you’ve seen anything good from us,” he said, “it’s because we’re imitating Him.”

What I’m Sitting With

If you had asked me the Sunday before this conversation what I’d be doing on the following Tuesday, I certainly wouldn’t have said sitting in a coffee shop in Rockledge, Florida, talking about God, the devil, and self-preservation with three men I’d never met.

But that’s what happened. Because I gave up a table.

I want to be careful here. I’m not saying that giving up a table is some heroic act. It isn’t. It’s a basic act of decency. But here’s what I keep coming back to.

It was a choice. A small one. It took about ten seconds. And it opened a door to one of the most meaningful conversations I’ve had on this entire adventure.

Mason, Shakey, and Eric are not men I would normally cross paths with. I suspect they’re in their late twenties and early thirties. They’re planting a church in central Florida. They’ve lived through addiction, violence, loss, racism, and spiritual warfare I can barely comprehend. Their belief system is different from mine in real, specific ways.

And none of that mattered at the table.

What mattered is that I was curious. They were open. And we chose to be present with each other for almost three hours. Four men, different backgrounds, different beliefs, different everything. Having a conversation that actually went somewhere.

I think about disconnection a lot. It’s one of the themes I keep returning to on this adventure. We’re so divided. So sorted into our camps. And a lot of that is by design. People in power benefit when the rest of us are separated.

But here’s the thing I keep learning. Connection is available to us almost anytime. It’s usually just one small choice away. A question. A gesture. A willingness to stay a little longer.

I said something during our conversation that surprised me. I told them I’d call our meeting divine intervention. Before that morning, I would have called it random. But after sitting with Mason, Shakey, and Eric, I’m not so sure anything about it was random.

I don’t know what label to put on that. And I don’t think I need to.

I do know this. I walked into Lucky Goat Coffee as a stranger. I walked out with three new friends, a head full of beautiful thoughts, and the clear sense that something happened in that room that was bigger than any of us.

That’s what happens when you give up the table.

In the first piece, I wrote about how the healthcare system trains providers to lead with fear.1 Then, I looked at what sort of results a fear-based system produces.2 After that, I explored what the system keeps locked up. How tying healthcare to employment traps people in jobs they might otherwise leave. How the fear of losing coverage shapes decisions about risk, entrepreneurship, and purpose.3

Now I want to step back. Because as I’ve been sitting with all of this, a pattern keeps emerging. One that extends far beyond healthcare.

A few weeks ago, I was visiting friends in South Carolina. The husband is someone I deeply respect. Naval Academy graduate. Doctor. Colonel in the military. A man of profound integrity who lets his Christian faith guide how he moves through the world.

Over the course of a few days, we found ourselves in deep conversation about spirituality, faith, and how we each make sense of the world. I shared that I don’t consider myself religious or Christian, but I do feel deeply spiritual. That there’s something beyond us. Something connecting us.

At one point, I said something that had been forming in my mind for months: “I think the biggest challenge we have in the world right now is disconnection.”

He didn’t hesitate. “Absolutely. And the devil wants to keep us disconnected.”

He continued, “Because God wants us to be connected. When we’re connected, we’re powerful. Powerful as a unit, not as individuals.”

I’m not sure I would use the same language. But I can’t stop thinking about what he named.

The Pattern I Keep Seeing

For the past several months, I’ve been exploring different systems through the lens of love and fear. Healthcare. Capitalism. Prisons. Education.

I didn’t set out to find a common thread. But one keeps showing up.

These systems disconnect us.

Not as an accident. Not as an unintended consequence. Disconnection seems to be what they do. Sometimes by design. Sometimes through evolution over time. But the result is the same.

We end up separated. From ourselves. From each other. From nature. From community. From the sources of love and healing that make us whole.

Let me show you what I mean.

Healthcare: Disconnection as Business Model

Earlier in this series, I wrote about how the American healthcare system trains providers to lead with fear. How residents are hazed into emotional detachment. How the business of medicine keeps people tethered to jobs they might otherwise leave because losing health insurance could mean financial ruin or death.

The system creates classes. If you have good insurance, you get access. If you don’t, you’re on your own. When someone loses their job, they often lose their healthcare. When someone gets sick, they may lose their home.

From my perspective, this is disconnection built into the architecture. You’re separated from care based on your economic status. You’re separated from community because your survival depends on staying employed. You’re separated from risk-taking, from entrepreneurship, from following your purpose, because the cost of failure could literally become a life-or-death situation.

Capitalism: Disconnection as Accumulation

When I traced the history of capitalism, I found disconnection at the root.

It started with enclosure. In the 1500s and 1600s, elites in England began fencing off the commons. Land that had been shared for generations became private property. People were pushed off the land their families had worked for centuries.

Before enclosure, you were connected to land, to community, to place. After, you were labor. And the land, a resource. Something to be bought, sold, exploited, and extracted from.

The same pattern shows up in how money changes us. In 2006, researchers at the University of Minnesota ran a series of experiments on what happens when people are reminded of money. They found that people primed with money preferred to play alone, work alone, and put more physical distance between themselves and others. In one experiment, people who had been thinking about money literally set their chairs further apart from a new acquaintance.

Just thinking about money makes us more isolated.

Tom Haslett and I talked about this in our Campfire Conversation. How money, which started as a tool to facilitate connection and trade, has become something that separates us. How accumulation replaces relationship. How we measure worth by what we extract rather than what we contribute.

Prison: Disconnection as Punishment

I’ve written a lot about prisons. About the returning citizens who showed me more love in one afternoon than I’ve felt in most settings. About Tremayne, who I met through a painting and who is now a friend.

What I keep noticing is how the prison system is designed to disconnect people from their sources of healing. Connection is how people heal. Study after study shows this. Relationships. Community. Love. These are what help incarcerated people transform and stay home when they get out.

And yet the system makes connection expensive and difficult. It costs roughly an hour of prison wages to send a single email. Phone calls are marked up. Visits require travel and time that families often can’t afford.

When someone goes to prison, their loved ones go too. Not behind bars. But into a different kind of exile.

The 13th Amendment allows slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for crime. Corporations exploit this loophole. People work for pennies an hour. And the barrier to staying connected to the people who love them grows higher.

If connection heals, and the system makes connection nearly impossible, then what is the system designed to do?

Education: Disconnection from Our Genius

I recently read a book called Beyond Anxiety by Martha Beck.4 In it, she describes a study that really landed with me.

In the 1960s, NASA commissioned researchers George Land and Beth Jarman to develop a test that could identify creative geniuses. They wanted to find their most innovative thinkers for space-related projects. The test worked well. So, Land and Jarman got curious. Where does creativity come from? Are some people born with it, or is it learned?

They gave the same test to 1,600 children between the ages of three and five. 98% scored at the creative genius level.

They tested the same children five years later. The number had dropped to 32%.

Five years after that, it was 10%.

When they gave the test to 200,000 adults, only 2% scored as creative geniuses.

The researchers blamed a school system and social environment that, in Beck’s words, “actively teaches us not to be the geniuses nature intended.”

We start life as creative geniuses. The system un-teaches it.

We get disconnected from our own brilliance. From the imaginative capacity we were born with. From the part of us that sees possibilities instead of problems.

The Common Function

I keep coming back to what my friend said in South Carolina.

The devil wants to keep us disconnected. Because when we’re connected, we’re powerful. Again, I don’t know if I’d use those exact words. But I understand what he’s pointing to.

These systems, whether through intention or evolution, share a common function. They separate us from the things that make us whole.

Healthcare separates us by class and keeps us tethered through fear of losing coverage.

Capitalism separates us from land, from community, and even from each other through the very act of thinking about money.

Prisons separate people from their loved ones and make the connections that would help them heal nearly impossible to maintain.

Education separates us from our own creative genius, teaching us to be productive members of society rather than integrated, self-knowing humans.

Kevin Hancock writes about this in his book Not for Sale, drawing on Lakota wisdom. To work collectively, to be truly interdependent, you first have to find yourself. You have to understand and be guided by your own inner purpose.

Our systems are not doing that. They’re doing the opposite.

What Would Connection Look Like?

I don’t have a program to propose. This is a discovery year for me. I’m listening and learning and sharing what I find.

But I keep thinking about what Elmer Moore and I talked about in our Campfire Conversation, that “connection is the most powerful currency.”

And what Kerem Durdag told me: “Physical proximity is our essential oxygen.”

If disconnection is what these systems produce, what would it look like to design from connection instead?

Not as utopia. Not as a perfect blueprint. But as a question worth sitting with.

What would healthcare look like if it were designed to keep people connected to care regardless of employment status?

What would our relationship with money look like if we measured wealth by connection rather than accumulation?

What would prisons look like if they were designed to strengthen the connections that help people heal and stay home so they can contribute to their communities?

What would education look like if it protected the creative genius we’re born with instead of teaching it out of us?

I certainly don’t know the answers. But I think the questions matter.

Because if the systems we’ve built are disconnecting us, and if connection is what makes us powerful and whole, then maybe the most radical thing we can do is stop. Look around. And start working in community to rebuild systems that connect.

This is the final piece in a series on healthcare and fear. The earlier pieces in this series are “Trained to Lead with Fear,” “What Does a Fear-Based Healthcare System Produce?,” and “What a Fear-Based Healthcare System Can Keep Locked Up.” For more on capitalism and money, see “The Story of Capitalism,”5 “What is Money,”6 and my Campfire Conversation with Tom Haslett.7 For more on prisons, see “There’s Room on the Porch for Everyone”8 and the four-part Lawrenceville series.9101112

Sources:

1. George Land and Beth Jarman’s creativity research is described in Martha Beck’s Beyond Anxiety (2024) and their book Breakpoint and Beyond: Mastering the Future Today (1992). Land also discussed the findings in his 2011 TEDx Talk, “The Failure of Success.”

2. The money priming research is from Kathleen Vohs, Nicole Mead, and Miranda Goode, “The Psychological Consequences of Money,” Science 314 (2006): 1154-1156. A 2015 review by Vohs in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that across 165 experiments in 18 countries, people reminded of money are consistently “less interpersonally attuned” and “eschew interdependence.”

3. Kevin Hancock’s exploration of Lakota wisdom and self-knowledge appears in Not for Sale: Finding Center in the Land of Crazy Horse (2021).

Now I want to talk about my own experience of fear and the healthcare system.

When I was 29, I left my job to start a company. It was called Atayne. It was a running and cycling apparel company. My goal was simple and rather ambitious: create a model for the apparel industry that didn’t exploit people and the planet for the sake of profit.

When I made the leap, one fear loomed larger than all the others.

It wasn’t the fear of failure. And it wasn’t even the fear of running out of money. I could survive without a paycheck for a while. I had savings. I had skills. I had people who believed in me.

The fear that almost stopped me was health insurance.

I could get by without making money. But if something catastrophic happened medically, it could have ruined me financially. One bad diagnosis. One serious accident. One of those hospital bills you hear about that wipes out a family’s savings in a single stroke.

That fear almost kept me from pursuing my dream.

But as I have been diving into the healthcare system and thinking about my own personal experience, I’ve thought a lot about how many people don’t make the jump.

According to a West Health-Gallup survey, one out of every six adult workers in the United States is staying in a job they might otherwise leave because they’re afraid of losing their employer-sponsored health insurance.

One in three workers say they’d be at least somewhat likely to leave their current job if health insurance weren’t a factor. More than one in four say they’d be likely to start their own business.

Researchers have a name for this. They call it “entrepreneurship lock.”

A Harvard Business School study found that when the Children’s Health Insurance Program expanded, self-employment increased by 12%. Parents who no longer worried about losing coverage for their kids could finally take the risk of starting something.

RAND found that self-employment rates jump significantly when workers turn 65 and qualify for Medicare.

Think about that. People are waiting until they’re 65 to follow their dreams because they’re afraid of what might happen to them medically.

I think about all the creativity, innovation, and love that never enters the world because of this. The businesses that don’t get started. The art that doesn’t get made. The risks that don’t get taken. The callings that don’t get followed.

All because a fear-based system has taught people to be afraid.

I’ve been self-employed going on almost 20 years. I don’t have employer-sponsored health insurance. So, I’ve had to figure something out.

Here’s a breakdown of what I’ve pieced together.

I’m part of a health cost-sharing community called Sedera.3 It’s not insurance. It’s a group of people who pool resources to help cover major medical expenses. It handles catastrophic stuff.

For primary care, I have a direct care provider, Dr. Oren Gersten.4 I pay him a monthly fee, and in return, I get something that feels almost radical in the American healthcare system: a relationship.

When I go see him, we talk for an hour. Not fifteen minutes. An hour. He knows me. He knows what’s important to me. He knows my life, not just my symptoms. When I need something, I can text or email him directly. No gatekeepers. No scheduling nightmare.

I do a full panel of labs once a year. He charges me his cost. No markup. If you’ve ever seen what labs cost through the traditional system, you know what a difference that makes.

His incentive is to keep me healthy. Not to bill procedures. Not to run tests. Not to refer me to specialists who will run more tests. He makes his money by providing a service, not by maximizing volume.

He cares for me as a whole human. Not as a collection of symptoms waiting to be coded.

I love the care I get. His is an amazing doctor. And I think part of the reason is he put himself into a system where he can lead with love and not be controlled by fear.

The tradeoff of all this is I pay for everything out of pocket. And it adds up.

It forces me to be intentional in ways I wouldn’t have to be if I had traditional insurance. When I get a running injury, I don’t typically go to physical therapy. I take care of it myself. Last year in Costa Rica, I wiped out surfing and the fin of my board hit my foot. I probably broke or fractured something. I didn’t do anything about it.

For years, my liver enzymes have been elevated. I’m finally seeing a specialist about it in a couple months. Specialists are expensive.

These are the calculations you make when every medical decision comes directly out of your pocket.

My personal situation does give me a bit of hope. Within a fear-based system, people are finding ways to build something different.

My doctor has opted out of the billing-driven model. He’s created a practice where the incentive is aligned with actually keeping people healthy. Where he has time to listen. Where he can know his patients as humans.

It’s not perfect. It’s not accessible to everyone. But it shows what’s possible. It shows what care can look like when it’s not organized around fear.

With all of this, I keep coming back to a question: How much love, beauty, creativity, and innovation never enters the world because fear-based systems instill and perpetuate fear in people?

I think about the person with a business idea who stays in a job they hate because they can’t risk losing coverage.

I think about the hobbyist artist who never makes the leap because the what-ifs are too terrifying.

I think about the parent who doesn’t take the chance on something new because the stakes feel too high.

Fear-based systems don’t just fail to serve us. They actively hold us back. They keep us small. They keep us tethered to choices we wouldn’t otherwise make.

And somewhere in there, all the things that those people might have created, all the love they might have brought into the world, stays locked inside.

Those are costs that don’t show up in any spending report.

This is the third story in a series exploring healthcare through the lens of love and fear. The first post, “Trained to Lead with Fear,” looked at how doctors are trained. The second, “What Does a Fear-Based Healthcare System Produce?”, examined the data around healthcare outcomes. In the final post, I’ll step back and look at the bigger picture. Healthcare. Prisons. Education. Commerce. What if our most critical systems are designed to keep us afraid? And what might it look like if they were built on love instead?

Sources: West Health-Gallup Healthcare in America Report (2021), on workers staying in jobs for health insurance, Harvard Business School study on CHIP expansion and self-employment, RAND Corporation research on Medicare eligibility and self-employment rates

That conversation left me with a question: What does a fear-based healthcare system actually produce?

I want to be clear. I am not a healthcare expert. I’m not going to pretend to understand all the complexities of this system. This is me swimming in the shallow end of a very deep pool. I am looking at some numbers that caught my attention and only scratching the surface.

What I found was hard to ignore and I wanted to share.

The Spending

In 2024, the United States spent an estimated $13,432 per person on healthcare. That’s the highest in the world. Germany came in second at $7,383. The average for the other nine wealthy countries in this comparison was around $6,000.

We spend roughly twice as much as comparable nations.

The Outcomes

You might expect that spending twice as much would get you better results. It doesn’t.

The Commonwealth Fund compared healthcare systems across ten high-income countries in their 2024 “Mirror, Mirror” report. The United States ranked last. Dead last. We had lower life expectancy, higher rates of preventable death, and worse outcomes across nearly every category.

The countries that ranked highest? Australia, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. And they spend far less than we do.

But here’s where it gets interesting.

The Paradox

The Commonwealth Fund measured five different areas of healthcare performance. Here’s what each one means:

Access to Care: Can people get and afford healthcare when they need it? This includes whether cost prevents people from seeing a doctor, whether they have a regular place of care, and whether they can get appointments and after-hours care when needed.

Care Process: When people receive care, is it high-quality? This looks at prevention, safety, coordination, patient engagement, and whether care reflects patient preferences. It measures whether the care delivered includes features that experts consider essential to quality.

Administrative Efficiency: How much time and money are wasted on paperwork, billing disputes, and bureaucracy? This captures the challenges doctors face dealing with insurance claims, the burden of reporting requirements, and patients’ time spent on medical bill disputes.

Equity: Do low-income people have similar access and care experiences as higher-income people? This measures whether income level affects someone’s ability to get care, pay for it, and receive respectful treatment.

Health Outcomes: Do people live long, healthy lives? Are deaths from preventable and treatable causes low? This includes life expectancy, excess deaths from the pandemic, and deaths that could have been avoided through effective healthcare.

Now here’s the paradox.

The US actually ranked second on Care Process. Second. That’s the quality of care delivery itself. Prevention, safety, coordination, patient engagement.

When people can access care, we’re good at delivering it. The medicine itself isn’t the problem.

We ranked last on Access to Care. Last on Health Outcomes. And second-to-last on Equity and Administrative Efficiency.

The care is good. The system blocks people from getting to it.

The Full Picture

Here’s how all ten countries compare. The numbers in each domain column show where that country ranked (1 = best, 10 = worst).

*Sweden’s overall rank is based on four domains instead of five. Sweden’s privacy laws prevent the collection of income data in surveys, so the Equity domain could not be calculated. The US ranks 9th in Equity because Sweden is excluded, making it last among the nine countries measured.

Source: Commonwealth Fund, “Mirror, Mirror 2024: A Portrait of the Failing U.S. Health System,” September 2024.

Look at the US row. We’re second in Care Process. But last in Access, last in Outcomes, and last (among countries measured) in Equity. And we are second to last in Admin Efficiency. The system delivers good care, albeit inefficient, to people who can get it. But it blocks too many people from getting there.

So, what explains this gap? The US spends the most and ranks last. Other countries spend less and rank higher. Is there something fundamentally different about how these systems are designed?

To find out, I looked at three other factors: how much each country spends, how unequal their incomes are, and what type of healthcare system they use.

Additional Context: Spending, Inequality, and System Design

A note on income inequality: The numbers in the "Income Inequality" column are called Gini coefficients. Think of them as a score from 0 to 1. Zero would mean perfect equality, where everyone has the same income. One would mean perfect inequality, where one person has everything. The higher the number, the greater the gap between rich and poor. These figures use disposable income after taxes and transfers, calculated consistently across all ten countries using OECD methodology, making them an apples-to-apples comparison. The US has the highest income inequality of all ten countries (0.39). Sweden has the lowest (0.28).

Sources: OECD Health Statistics 2023/2024; OECD Income Distribution Database 2021-2022.

The Design

Look at the last column of that table. The “Healthcare System Type.” Every other country has achieved universal coverage. The specific model varies. Australia uses single-payer. Germany uses regulated non-profit sickness funds. The UK runs a national health service. But they all share one thing in common: everyone is covered.

The United States is the only country that maintains separate systems for separate classes of people. The only one that relies on voluntary private insurance as the primary mechanism. The only one that allows for-profit insurance companies to deny coverage.

As T.R. Reid noted in the PBS Frontline documentary Sick Around the World (2008):

“The United States is unlike every other country because it maintains so many separate systems for separate classes of people. All the other countries have settled on one model for everybody. This is much simpler than the US system. It’s fairer and cheaper, too.”

The Wealth Supremacy Connection

The pattern is hard to miss. The country with the highest income inequality also has the worst healthcare outcomes.

This reminded me of something I explored in an earlier post, “What is Money?”2 In that piece, I shared a quote from Marjorie Kelly’s book, The Making of a Democratic Economy, that has stayed with me:

“In a democratic society founded on the truth that all persons are created equal, we have permitted in our midst an economic system based on the directly contrary principle that wealthy persons matter more than others. Deserve greater rights. Justifiably wield greater power. Rightly enjoy greater voice. Are due greater deference. And possess a limitless right to extract from the rest of us.”

From my perspective, the US healthcare system operates on wealth supremacy. If you’re wealthy, you get better care. You live longer.

The data backs this up. A 2016 study led by economist Raj Chetty found that the richest 1% of American men live 14.6 years longer than the poorest 1%. For women, it’s 10.1 years. From 2001 to 2014, the top 5% of earners gained about 3 years of life expectancy. The bottom 5% gained essentially nothing.

Being rich in America buys you 10 to 15 more years than being poor in America.

The system is working exactly as designed. For the wealthy.

Except When It Isn’t

A study published in April 2025 in the New England Journal of Medicine found something interesting. Even the wealthiest Americans have shorter lifespans than their European counterparts.

The researchers, led by Irene Papanicolas and Sara Machado at Brown University’s School of Public Health, compared survival rates across wealth levels in the US and 16 European countries. They tracked more than 73,000 adults aged 50 to 85 over a 10-year period.

Their finding: The wealthiest Americans have survival rates on par with the poorest Europeans in western countries like Germany, France, and the Netherlands.

Let me say that again. The richest Americans die at about the same rate as the poorest Germans, French, and Dutch.

As Papanicolas noted:

“The findings are a stark reminder that even the wealthiest Americans are not shielded from the systemic issues in the US contributing to lower life expectancy.”

The system built on fear and wealth supremacy can’t even deliver for the wealthy what systems built on equity deliver for everyone.

What I’m Sitting With

I’m not here to prescribe solutions. I don’t have the expertise for that.

But I am sitting with a lot of thoughts and questions.

In a fear-based system, even the “winners” seem to lose compared to systems built on something else. Fear hoards. It protects. It separates people into classes and rations care based on ability to pay.

The other systems don’t operate that way. They start from a different premise. Everyone is covered. Everyone matters.

And it turns out that sharing actually produces better outcomes for everyone. Including those who have the most to share.

This isn’t just about healthcare. It’s about the fundamental question of how we build systems. Do we build them to serve the haves at the expense of the have-nots? Or do we build them to care for everyone?

The data suggests the first approach fails even on its own terms.

This is the second post in a series exploring healthcare through the lens of love and fear. The first post, “Trained to Lead with Fear,”. Next, I’ll share my own experience navigating this system as a self-employed person. The fear that almost stopped me from pursuing my dreams. And the cost of living without the safety net that comes with traditional employment.

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

Sources

Healthcare System Comparisons:

• Commonwealth Fund, “Mirror, Mirror 2024: A Portrait of the Failing U.S. Health System,” September 2024. Link

• Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, “How does health spending in the U.S. compare to other countries?” 2024.

• OECD Health Statistics 2023/2024

Income Inequality:

• OECD Income Distribution Database, 2021-2022 data (disposable income after taxes and transfers)

Healthcare System Design:

• T.R. Reid, Sick Around the World, PBS Frontline, 2008. Link

Wealth and Health in the US:

• Raj Chetty et al., “The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001-2014,” JAMA, April 2016.

Wealth and Mortality US vs. Europe:

• Sara Machado, Ilias Kyriopoulos, E. John Orav, and Irene Papanicolas, “Association between Wealth and Mortality in the United States and Europe,” New England Journal of Medicine, April 2, 2025. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMsa2408259

Wealth Supremacy Quote:

• Marjorie Kelly, The Making of a Democratic Economy: Building Prosperity for the Many, Not Just the Few (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2019)

From the very beginning, doctors are trained to lead with fear.

Medical school. Residency. The whole way through. You could get sued. This could happen. That could happen. Fear is the foundation.

And it doesn’t stop after training. Every day, she’s measured on how quickly she sees patients. How quickly she gets rid of them. How quickly she finishes her chart. How much she bills.

Not whether anyone got better. Not outcomes. Speed, volume, and billing. That’s what the system rewards. And this is at a non-profit hospital. She said it’s the same everywhere. Every institution is beholden to the same rules. The pressure to move fast is relentless.

I asked her why more doctors don’t push back and use their voices. She had a simple, one word answer. “Fear.”

She has a very clear view of the purpose of the medical system. “We are here to reduce human suffering.” That’s supposed to be the whole point of medicine. But the system she works in isn’t designed to reduce suffering. It’s designed around fear. Fear of lawsuits. Fear of lost revenue. Fear of empty beds.

What struck me most was when she described what happens when you don’t lead with fear.

Although it’s not rewarded, she believes in a different approach. When your first principle is love, she said, you pause. You listen more deeply. You stop, sit down, hold their hand, look them in the eyes, and listen with your whole heart. You give them five to ten minutes of real presence.

And then something happens. People open up. They’re carrying so much. They’re stressed, scared, overwhelmed. If you give them space, they let it out. Sometimes the complaint disappears entirely because what they needed was to be heard.

But it’s not just kindness. She said it’s better medicine. When you actually listen, people reveal the information you need to diagnose them. Instead of hearing “chest pain” and reflexively starting an algorithm of tests, you might hear something else. Like, “Oh yeah, since 1972 my chest has been hurting every time I eat tomatoes.” If you don’t stop to listen, you miss it.

She talked about older patients, like a 75-year-old farmer who doesn’t want to bother anyone. You have to give him time. Tease it out a little. And then he says, “You know doc, this has been going on for a while.” Now, you have better paths to pursue. Not just a bunch of tests and procedures.

Here’s the thing about how healthcare billing works. Hospitals get paid for each test, procedure, and treatment performed. It’s called fee-for-service. The more services provided, the more revenue the hospital generates.

Listening doesn’t have a billing code. But an MRI does. A blood panel does. A referral to a specialist does.

So, when she takes the time to actually hear the patient and figures out what’s going on without running a battery of tests, she’s being a better doctor. But the hospital makes less money. And she’s still measured on those numbers. Not on how many people she helps get healthier.

She believes the love-based approach is better in every way. Better for patients. Better outcomes. Better for the economics.

A little more time up front. More efficient, not less.

But the system doesn’t reward it. The system rewards fear.

I walked away from that conversation realizing I was looking at something familiar.

I’ve been exploring where love and fear show up for a while now. I’ve written about capitalism1 and how extraction and exploitation seem built into its foundation. I’ve written about prisons2 3 4 5 6 and how we put young men in fear-based environments and then act surprised when fear gets amplified.

Now healthcare.

Another system where the stated purpose is one thing, reduce human suffering. But the design rewards something else. Speed. Volume. Billing. Self-protection.

Another system built on a foundation of fear.

This conversation opened up some questions I want to sit with. What does a fear-based healthcare system actually produce? What are the outcomes? And what has it cost me personally to navigate a system built this way?

The data suggests that building systems to protect the wealthy might not even work for the wealthy. More on that in my next post…

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

This is the first in a series exploring healthcare through the lens of love and fear. Next, I'll look at what this fear-based system actually produces. Then, I'll share my own experience navigating healthcare as a self-employed person. Finally, I'll wrestle with the question: why are so many of our critical systems built on a foundation of fear?

John is the creator, producer, and host of Scene on Radio,2 a documentary podcast out of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. Over the past decade, he has taken on some of the hardest subjects in American life. Race3 and the invention of whiteness. Democracy4 and its fragility. The patriarchy.5 Capitalism.6 Each season is deep research distilled into something that feels less like a podcast and more like a graduate education you can take on a walk.

His work has greatly influenced how I see the world. Last fall, I spent weeks with his Capitalism series.7 It cracked open questions I thought I already had answers to.

When I reached out, I wasn’t sure he’d say yes.

He is a professional journalist, documentarian, and storyteller. One of the best. I am an amateur dude who asks people to sit around campfires and talk about love and fear. Asking John to have a Campfire Conversation with me is a little like asking Michael Jordan to play a game of horse in my driveway.

The fact that John said yes tells you something about the type of person he is.

We sat together in Hillsborough, North Carolina, on a rare snowy day, and talked about fear, love, justice, capitalism, community, and the stories we tell ourselves to keep what we have.

Justice First, Fear Underneath

I came into this conversation through my usual door. Love and fear. Where do they show up? How do they shape us?

John came through a different one.

“If I were to try to express what is in the forefront, it’s justice. And systems of oppression. And trying to understand them.”

He wasn’t dismissive of the love/fear lens. He just doesn’t lead with it. His words are justice, decency, kindness. But as we talked, the connection became clear. The systems he’s spent his career examining are built on fear. Fear of the other. Fear of falling. Fear of not having enough.

He named something I think about a lot.

“One thing that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough is the precarity of what most people live with and this sense of it in our society. If you’re not one of the winners, it’s really tough. You can fall very far and nobody’s gonna catch you.”

That fear doesn’t just affect individuals. It shapes everything.

“The fact that we’ve set up our society like that has deep seated ramifications for how our politics work and how we live together and don’t live together.”

The Tension of Participation

This is where the conversation got uncomfortable. In the best way.

John made a documentary series arguing that capitalism is built on the exploitation of labor and the natural world. He also has a 403(b) retirement account invested in the stock market. He said it plainly.

“Should I have not signed up for the 403(b) when I was 30 years old as a cub reporter at Minnesota Public Radio? Because there’s not another way actually that I’m aware of that I was gonna support myself in retirement. That was the way.”

I need to name this because I hold the same tension. I benefit from a system that I’m learning causes profound harm. I wrote a 5,000-word piece about how capitalism has been built on extraction and exploitation. And my financial security sits inside that same system.

John and I didn’t resolve this. But I think there’s something important about saying it out loud. Two guys sitting around a fire, both aware that the system they’re questioning is also the one keeping them comfortable.

As John put it:

“People have a great capacity for telling ourselves stories about the way the world is in order to justify us getting what we want. And keeping what we have.”

That line includes us.

What Love Looks Like

I asked John how he thinks about love.

“I care about you. Which is to say, I love you. If it comes to it, I will love you. I mean, I will do. I will care. I actually care what happens to you and will take steps to make your life better if I can. Especially if you need that help.”

Not a feeling. A commitment to action. That distinction matters.

He pointed to what’s happening right now in Minneapolis, where thousands of people are showing up to protect their neighbors from ICE raids.

“The people who are feeding people, the people who are giving people rides, picking up their neighbor’s kids and taking them to school so the parents don’t get grabbed at the school doorstep.”

That’s not abstract love. That’s love with its boots on.

The Fire He Tends

I ask every guest what fires need tending. In ourselves. In our communities. John’s answer surprised me for its simplicity and its importance.

“We really need to tend to the fire of telling the truth.”

He went on to say:

“Trying to say stuff that’s true. And that feeling like amidst so much that’s not true and so many lies and so much gaslighting and so many actually culturally nurtured untruths that we’ve all grown up with for generations, to in the face of that, to just kind of try to open a window that lets in the cool air of what actually seems to be true. That feels like really what I’m trying to do in the world.”

But truth wasn’t the only fire he named. He also talked about the fire of community, of caring, of openness. And then he said something that caught me off guard. He admitted he’s not great at community. He’s introverted. Not a joiner. Prefers to stay home with his laptop and his books.

“I’m not a great participant in community if I’m really, if I’m being honest.”

I pushed back. Isn’t the storyteller one of the most important roles in any community? Someone who steps back, sees the connections, and shares what they find so the rest of us can see more clearly?

He paused.

“I do think that my work sometimes contributes to what people do in community and to people’s understanding, and that that can help the kind of work that people do.”

A mentor of mine said something similar to me recently. There are soldiers and there are surveyors. You need both. Someone has to do the work on the ground. And someone has to climb the ridge and map the terrain so the work makes sense.

John Biewen has been mapping terrain for over a decade. And for this conversation, he was generous enough to sit with me and share what he’s found.

Why This Matters

This conversation is part of my Heart-Strong Adventure. A year of exploring where love and fear show up in the world.

John and I are both men who grew up in modest families, worked our way into comfort, and now find ourselves asking hard questions about the systems that got us here. We both played D3 basketball. We both care about justice. We both benefit from a system we’re learning to see more clearly.

The difference is John has spent decades doing the deep, slow, careful work of documenting these systems. I’m a few months into trying to understand them through the lens of love and fear.

Sitting with him felt like sitting with a teacher. Not because he lectured. Because he was honest about what he knows, what he doesn’t, and where he falls short.

That’s the kind of man I want to learn from.

If John’s words sparked something in you, share this with someone who might need to hear it. And if you haven’t listened to Scene on Radio, start anywhere. You won’t regret it.

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

Which means you may not know this particular thing about me.

I am an extreme optimist.

Not the quiet, measured kind. The kind with my own math system.

Here’s how it works. When I want something to happen, I identify all the possible outcomes. Then I assign each one equal probability. Doesn’t matter how likely any of them actually are. If there are three outcomes, I have a one in three chance. Four outcomes, one in four. Simple. Clean. Airtight.

My wife Becca thinks my math is suspect.

I think it’s brilliant.

She’s been living with this system for a while now, so she has opinions. But I want to tell you a story about a specific calculation. One where I started with one in three odds, took a beach walk in Costa Rica, and ended up at 60-40. In the span of about forty-five minutes.

That’s not delusion. That’s just good math.

It started with Matthew McConaughey.

Becca and I have a Friday or Saturday night ritual. For a little over a year now, we’ve been watching Lyrics of Livin’ with Matthew McConaughey. If you don’t know it, look it up. It’s fantastic. We got deep into his movies around the same time. The Beach Bum. Dazed and Confused. The whole catalog. At a certain point, it stopped feeling like watching movies and started feeling like catching up with a guy we kind of know.

Which is, I realize, exactly the kind of thinking that leads to sending unsolicited emails.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Idea

Somewhere in the middle of all that McConaughey immersion, an idea started forming.

What if two of his most iconic characters were the same person?

Wooderson from Dazed and Confused and Moondog from The Beach Bum. On the surface, they look like completely different guys. Wooderson is the charming, cool-as-hell dude who hangs around high school parties a little too long. Easy to write him off as a lovable slacker. But look closer. He’s wearing a Bob Marley shirt. He’s the one who steps in to break up the fight. He’s genuinely kind to everyone around him. There’s something real underneath the vibe.

And then there’s Moondog. A broken, brilliant poet adrift in the Florida Keys. Funny and free on the surface, but carrying something heavy underneath. A man whose charm has curdled into avoidance. Whose so-called freedom is really just a long drift away from anything real.

My idea was this: what if Wooderson’s effortless cool was never really freedom? What if it was avoidance? A young man moving through the world on charm alone, sidestepping anything that required him to actually show up. And what if Moondog is just what that looks like decades later, when the mask finally cracks?

It’s basically what Cobra Kai did with Johnny Lawrence. You take a character people wrote off as a one-dimensional jerk, give him a whole interior life, and suddenly you understand him. You don’t just watch him. You recognize him.

The deeper story is about a man learning to find his way back to presence, purpose, and emotional truth. That’s a Heart-Strong story if I’ve ever heard one.

Becca loved the idea too. But we never did anything with it other than let it sit in our imaginations. As Stephen King said, if an idea is a good one, it will keep coming back.

The Email

Almost a year went by.

Then one Friday night, Matthew did a Lyrics of Livin’ called “Make Love Stories.” It planted the idea for a love story in my head.

He told the story of a summer when he was a kid in Longview, Texas. Barefoot and shirtless in a shammy, sneaking into a lumberyard in the middle of the night to steal lumber. Not for profit. Not on a dare. To build a thirteen-story tree house in the piney woods near his house.

He said love stories are everywhere. Romances with ideas, with places, with the work that lights you up. That a barefoot kid giving himself completely to something beautiful, something no one asked him to build, that’s love. Not just a feeling. It’s a way of moving through the world.

I couldn’t help but think, that is certainly a Heart-Strong Adventure minus the whole stealing lumber thing.

And right then I thought, you know what? Fuck it. I’m going to email him.

Here’s what I wrote:

What’s up Matthew,

Spot on this is a love story! Not because there was a romance. Because a barefoot kid in a shammy chose something that lit him up, gave himself to it completely, and built something beautiful that no one asked him to build. That’s love. Not just a feeling. It’s a way we move through the world.

I’ve spent the past year exploring that exact idea through something called my Heart-Strong Adventure. It’s a yearlong journey exploring where love and fear show up in our world, especially in the lives of men. I write about it on Substack and host a podcast called Campfire Conversations, where I sit with people around actual fires and we talk about what it means to move from fear toward love.

I want to share something with you that your work has inspired. For over a year, an idea has been playing in my head called Wooderson to Moondog. The premise: those two characters are the same man, decades apart. Wooderson’s effortless charm was never just charm. It was avoidance. What looked like freedom was a young man tapped by fear and drifting from anything real. His relationships fell apart. His mask cracked. And decades later, a broken-but-brilliant poet washed up in the Florida Keys, trying to find his way back to presence, purpose, and emotional truth through creativity. I just wanted to share this idea with you because it came from our parallel journeys and explorations.

Now here’s the shot in the dark. I’ll be in Austin in early April. If you’d be open to sitting by a fire and having a conversation about love, fear, and what it means to be a man right now, I’d be honored to host you on Campfire Conversations. No script. No agenda. Just presence and honesty. Total long shot. But I figure, take a chance on love, right?

With respect and gratitude,

Jeremy Litchfield

Then I closed my laptop and sort of forgot about it. About a week later, after watching the next Lyrics of Livin’, I told Becca that I had emailed him.

And this is where the story turns to math. The math of an extreme optimist.

The Math

So I told Becca I had emailed Matthew McConaughey.

She looked at me the way she always looks at me when I’ve done something that makes complete sense to me and zero sense to anyone else.

So I explained, if I send that email, I see that one of three things can happen.

· One, it never reaches him. Lost in the void. No harm, no foul, I never know.

· Two, it reaches him, he thinks it’s the stupidest thing he’s ever read, and I never hear about it.

· Three, it reaches him, he loves it, says yes, and we end up sitting by a fire in Austin talking about love, fear, and what it means to be a man. After which we obviously have dinner to talk about making Wooderson to Moondog.

Three possible outcomes. One of them leads to a campfire and dinner with Matthew McConaughey.

That’s a one in three chance!

Becca probably had different thoughts.

I want to be clear that her math and my math are very different systems. Hers involves something called actual probability. Mine involves something called optimism. We’ve agreed to disagree on which one is more useful.

But even I had to admit, one in three felt like it had some room for improvement. I wanted my odds to be more like 50-50.

Good thing we were about to head out on a beach walk in Costa Rica.

The Beach Walk

Becca and I headed out for a sunset walk on the beach. The kind of walk where the air is warm and your brain just starts wandering.

And somewhere between the waves and the last of the daylight, it hit me.

I had missed a fourth scenario!

What if he’s so moved by the courage of the email that he records a Lyrics of Livin’ about it? The story of what it must have felt like for me to send the email. From his perspective. Some guy from Brunswick, Maine pitching a campfire conversation and a movie idea in the same email. And at the end of the episode, almost like he’s talking directly to me, he says yes. He throws it back out into the universe, knowing there’s a decent chance I’ll see it. Because I never miss an episode.

That’s very McConaughey, if you think about it.

So now we’re at four scenarios. Two of them end well.

That’s one in two. Fifty-fifty.

Then I had another idea!

I could write a Substack post about the whole thing. Which meant there was now a fifth scenario. The post makes it to him and he reaches out.

That’s three out of five outcomes that end well. Now the odds are 60-40!

A walk on the beach just took me from 33% to 60%.

Becca had thoughts.

The Payoff

Here’s the thing though.

The point of all this was never really about getting a response.

It was about the courage it took to send the email in the first place.

I don’t view it as a negative that he might think it’s the stupidest thing he’s ever read. I view it as, despite that, I still had the courage to put my heart out into the world.

So many great ideas never leave the room they were born in. You have a great idea in your head and then you start to self-criticize. You talk yourself out of it, out of fear. Think about all the beautiful things this world would have lost if people weren’t willing to put things out there that others may not love. Think about your favorite song. Your favorite painting. Any time you put yourself out into the world, it’s a creative expression of who you are. It not landing with others can feel like a rejection of you at your core. That makes it really hard. So to have the courage to do it anyway matters.

It is also about the positive feelings I get from this thinking and dreaming.

Every time I let myself imagine how this plays out, something happens. I picture the fire in Austin. The conversation. The dinner. And my brain lights up like it’s already happening. Which means I’ve already had a campfire and dinner with Matthew McConaughey.

Research suggests that when you vividly imagine something joyful, your brain responds in ways that aren’t much different from the real thing. The emotional circuits fire. The good feelings arrive.

Your brain can’t fully distinguish between vividly imagining a feeling and actually feeling it. So even if Matthew never sees the email, I am still getting tremendous benefit from imagining that campfire in Austin.

And here’s the best part. After all my math, after all her thoughts, Becca agreed with me.

Not about the probability. She’s never going to agree about the probability.

But about the courage. About putting your heart out into the world and not waiting for permission. About the joy you get just from letting yourself believe something beautiful might happen.

That’s not delusion. That’s love doing the math.

And that now brings me to 100% probability.

That, my friends, is how the extreme optimist calculates probabilities and sees the world.

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

My Campfire Conversation with John will be coming out next week.

At the end of every Campfire Conversation, I ask my guests the same question: What are the fires we need to tend in ourselves and our communities?

John’s answer has been echoing in my head.

“We really need to tend to the fire of telling the truth.”

I didn’t know how quickly I’d be tested on that.

A few days after our conversation, I was in the car with some family friends. The relationship is complicated to explain. He’s the husband of my wife’s step-mom’s first cousin. No blood connection, but we consider them family.

We were driving to dinner when the conversation turned. He said, “I don’t want to get political, but…”

I braced myself for what was going to follow.

He made a claim that sounded specific and confident. Something about how the Biden administration had intentionally allowed undocumented immigrants across the border to preserve congressional seats. He mentioned Chuck Schumer admitting to the strategy.

I didn’t argue. I didn’t agree. I just listened.

John’s words were still in my head, “tend to the fire of telling the truth.”

So, the next day I went on a truth-seeking adventure. What began as a quick fact-check became hours of research. Pew Research. Migration Policy Institute. Census methodology. Academic studies from peer-reviewed journals. DHS data. Court cases. Congressional testimony.

I wasn’t trying to win an argument. I wasn’t trying to prove him wrong. I genuinely wanted to know: Is this true?

Here’s what I found.

Some of what he said was true. California’s population would have declined without immigration. The state lost 240,000 residents to other states but gained 312,000 through people from other countries.

According to Pew Research Center, the undocumented population has grown significantly, from 10.5 million in 2021 to around 14 million in 2023. And yes, the census counts everyone regardless of immigration status, so undocumented people do impact congressional seats. That’s been the law since the first census in 1790.

When I looked at where undocumented immigrants live, the story started to shift. Here’s what Pew Research found about where undocumented immigrants reside:

And according to Pew, the largest growth in undocumented population since 2021 was in Florida. They added 700,000. Texas added 500,000. California added 400,000. The two states with the biggest increases are both Republican leaning.

Then I looked at the congressional seat claim. This was the core of what he said. The fact that undocumented immigrants were giving Democrats extra seats in Congress.

This claim has been circulating widely. In March 2024, Elon Musk said in an interview that “Democrats would lose approximately 20 seats in the House if illegals were not counted in the census.”

So, I looked at what the research actually shows.

A peer-reviewed study published in PNAS Nexus in February 2025 analyzed every census since 1980. They found that no more than two House seats would have shifted between political parties in any year if all undocumented immigrants were excluded.

But we weren’t talking about over time. We are talking about now.

Here is what actually happened in the most recent census (2020). Pew Research found that if undocumented immigrants had been excluded, six states would have been affected.

Net partisan result: Zero. Democrats and Republicans would have had the exact same number of seats.

But what about more recent data? The undocumented population has grown since 2020. Maybe the numbers have shifted?

The Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that advocates for reduced immigration, published a projection in October 2024. They estimated what would happen if a census were conducted now.

Net partisan result: Republicans +1, Democrats -1.

Even an organization that advocates for reduced immigration found a net shift of 1 seat. Not 20. 1. And 1 in the favor of the political party that is working hard for limiting immigration.

If this were a coordinated strategy, the results don’t show it.

And the Schumer quote? I tracked down what he actually said in November 2022:

“Now more than ever, we’re short of workers. We have a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to. The only way we’re going to have a great future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants.”

He was talking about labor shortages. He said nothing about congressional seats. Some conservative commentators interpreted it as an admission of “replacement” strategy. But from what I can see, Schumer made no such connection.

What Didn’t Add Up

ICE has certainly been in the news a lot recently. From Minnesota to Maine, you can’t escape it. From my understanding, the surge in ICE activity is to deport the worst of the worst. To get the most dangerous, undocumented immigrants out of the US.

As DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in January 2026:

“On President Trump’s first day in office, he unleashed ICE to target the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens, including pedophiles, murderers, gang members, terrorists, and rapists.”

If that is that goal, one might expect that ICE agents would be fishing in stocked ponds. Places with the highest number and percentage of undocumented immigrants. You’d focus on Texas, Florida, California, and New York.

Instead, here’s what’s been happening.

Minnesota: According to DHS, 3,000+ federal agents deployed in “Operation Metro Surge.” Undocumented population: approximately 130,000.

Maine: Operation “Catch of the Day” with 1,400 named targets. Undocumented population: approximately 5,000.

Let me put that in perspective.

According to DHS, ICE’s total workforce nationwide is 22,000. Minnesota currently has about 14% of ICE’s entire national workforce. And they are deployed to target less than 1% of the nation’s undocumented population.

If you applied Minnesota’s ratio to the states with the highest numbers and/or percentage of undocumented people, it would look like this.

Total agents needed to match Minnesota’s ratio in just these 6 states: 181,859

Total ICE workforce nationwide: 22,000

Call me crazy, but I would rather be fishing in Florida if I were ICE. Looks to be the best stocked pond to me.

And here’s something I can’t reconcile.

ICE says they’re prioritizing the most dangerous people first. And 28% of Maine’s entire undocumented population is on that list. I live in Maine. If nearly one in three undocumented immigrants here were truly dangerous, you might suspect that we would be a pretty dangerous place to live.

We’re not.

According to FBI crime data, Maine has the lowest violent crime rate in the nation. 100 incidents per 100,000 people, compared to the national average of 359. And we are regularly considered in the top 3 safest states in the country year after year.

Either Maine’s undocumented population is somehow seven times more criminal than the general population, which would show up in our crime statistics. Or the targeting criteria aren’t really about danger.

It seems the pattern isn’t about efficiency or effectiveness. It seems to be about something else as the math doesn’t seem to add up for me.

What I’m Sitting With

I haven’t gone back to my family friend with all of this. And I’m not planning to. That’s not really the point.

The point is that John’s words changed how I responded to that car ride. Instead of reacting and trying to be right based on my beliefs, I got curious. I did the work. And in the age where so much misinformation is out there, the work is hard.

It takes time. A lot of time.

It takes questioning things you believe.

It takes accepting facts, even if they don’t support what you believe.

In this case, the facts were more aligned with my beliefs. And I am still questioning whether I fully explored all the facts on the other side of the argument.

But here’s what I keep coming back to: I could have just believed him. Or I could have just dismissed him. Either would have been easier than spending hours in the data.

Truth-telling isn’t about winning. It’s about tending. It’s slower than a good comeback. It doesn’t give you the satisfaction of being right in the moment. And boy do I love being right.

It requires patience. Not necessarily my greatest skill.

And it demands that you hold your own assumptions accountable too.

Maybe that’s what tending the fire of truth looks like. Not confirming what we already believe. Not scoring points. Just following the trail where it leads. And being willing to say what we find, even when it’s complicated.

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

Sources: Pew Research Center (unauthorized immigrant population estimates, 2023; apportionment analysis, 2020), Migration Policy Institute, PNAS Nexus (Jurgens & Testa, February 2025), Center for Immigration Studies (October 2024 projection), U.S. Census Bureau, FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program, Department of Homeland Security, Cato Institute, FactCheck.org, Deportation Data Project (UC Berkeley), Minnesota Star Tribune, CBS News, PBS NewsHour. Full citations available on request.