The US spends roughly twice as much per person on healthcare as other wealthy nations. We rank dead last in outcomes. What does a system built on fear actually produce?

I had a conversation with a friend who is an emergency room doctor. She told me about a system designed to heal people that is actually built on fear. Fear of lawsuits. Fear of missing something.

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.

This was the first time on the adventure that I shared someone else's words instead of my own. David NeSmith wrote a poem that asks the question at the heart of this exploration: who deserves love?

A white guy from Maine gets invited to speak with 80 incarcerated men in Virginia about leading with love. What happened inside was one of the most powerful experiences of my life.

As the year ends, I've been sitting with a question that won't let go: is love a feeling or a way of being? Four months of exploration have changed my answer.

I've been asking men about their emotional lives for months. They'll talk about almost anything. But ask them what they're afraid of, and the air changes. The silence isn't empty. It's full.

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.

Three months into this adventure, I keep getting the same questions. Why love? Why fear? Why men specifically? And why you? Fair questions. All of them.

I picked up Leo Buscaglia's book Love expecting something soft. What I found was a challenge. He argues love is learned. Neuroscience says we're wired for it. So which is it?

I caught myself cherry-picking science. And it shook me. I was drawn to the findings that supported what I already believed and quietly ignoring the rest. That's not love. That's fear wearing a lab coat.

My dad and I were wrestling with a stuck window on the house I grew up in. Under his frustration I could hear the fear. He knows time is real. The project looked like it was stealing his freedom.

I sat down for lunch with Sam Harris at Saltine in Norfolk. He spent 24 years, 8 months, and 10 hours in prison. What makes him remarkable isn’t the time. It’s what he did with those years, and what he’s doing now.

Three weeks into this adventure, something shifted. I had started with a simple frame: love is good, fear is bad. But the research kept pushing back on that. Fear isn’t the enemy. It’s an alert system.

I walked into a room full of people who had collectively served around 3,000 years behind bars. I expected to find guardedness. What I found was one of the purest expressions of joy I’ve ever witnessed.

Fear might be even more powerful than love. It’s designed to keep us alive. And when you live in constant fear, your brain actually changes. The amygdala grows more reactive. It starts seeing threats everywhere.

We treat productivity like it’s always a good thing. But what’s underneath the output? Fear-based productivity is everywhere. I got curious about what happens when it runs on something else entirely.

I looked up love in the dictionary. Merriam-Webster calls it “strong affection for another.” That felt like describing an ocean by holding up a single drop of water. So I kept digging.

It started with men going on adventures together. But the deeper I went, the more the questions changed. Behind the disconnection so many men carry, there was something else. Fear. The cultural kind.