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.

Every September at the Common Ground Fair, I watch Chris Lombard step into a ring with one horse and a microphone. No routine. No trick list. Just a conversation using breath, body, and attention instead of force.

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.

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.