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.