Last year I took energy from Costa Rica and brought it home. The flow only went one way. This year I wanted to leave something behind. What happened when I did surprised me.

It took me six months to finish a podcast literally called Men. While on an adventure about men. When I finally circled back, I realized the drift might be the most interesting part of the story.

I gave up a table at a coffee shop in Rockledge, Florida. That small choice led to a three-hour conversation about God, fear, love, and choice with three strangers who became friends.

Healthcare, capitalism, prisons, education. I didn't set out to find a common thread. But one keeps showing up. These systems disconnect us from the things that make us whole.

John Biewen is the host of Scene on Radio, one of the most important podcast series I've encountered. Sitting across a campfire from him was surreal. He didn't let me stay comfortable.

A family friend made a claim during a car ride about immigration that didn't sound right. Instead of arguing, I did what the adventure has been teaching me: check the facts before reacting.

Kharma Amos is a UU minister who came out in 1990s Tulsa, Oklahoma. This Campfire Conversation explored queering as a verb, the fear of freedom, and why love sometimes looks like resistance.

This is the deep dive companion to my piece asking "What is Money?" It traces 5,000 years of monetary history from Mesopotamian clay tablets to modern fiat currency, with 52 citations.

I was sitting in a drive-through line and I started thinking about convenience. Not the good kind. The kind that quietly replaces the things that make us human.

I came across a collection of postcards from the early 1900s. The rhetoric on those century-old cards is almost identical to what's circulating now. Different targets. Same fear.

Kerem Durdag came to the United States as a young immigrant. Along the way, he developed a philosophy that sounds simple but is anything but: decency is a radical choice.

Thanksgiving is a complicated day. It carries real gratitude and real harm in the same breath. A celebration of abundance built on a story that erases Indigenous suffering. I'm learning to hold both.

I thought I understood capitalism. After all, I'm an entrepreneur with an MBA in Finance. Turns out, it's complicated. Very complicated. My trail notes from Scene on Radio's Capitalism series.

At the Common Ground Fair, I went to a session called "Power of People vs. Power of Money." I was expecting a conversation. What I watched instead was a room of like-minded people default to correction over curiosity.

I was eleven the first time I heard Cult of Personality by Living Colour. I didn't understand the lyrics yet. Forty years later, the same song taught me something completely different about fear and power.

I picked up a book about testosterone expecting biology. Instead I walked away thinking about prison systems, basketball camps, and what it means to build a world where men can be strong in love instead of fear.

After I wrote about the films that shaped me, I started wondering about other people. So I built something. A custom GPT that takes your childhood movies and reflects back what they might have taught you about being a man.

I grew up in a small town in Maine. We didn’t have cable. So my sister and I watched the same stack of VHS tapes over and over. Those movies shaped me in ways I couldn’t see at the time.