Most dads I work with think they're doing it right. That's the problem. They've provided, they've shown up to the games, they've built the ideal family, and then their wife says something has got to change and he has no idea what she's talking about. I sat down with the Gap to Gig crew to...
Most men I know can tell you exactly how many hours they worked this week, and almost none of them can tell you what they felt on Tuesday afternoon. That's a big part of what Dave and I got into on this one. I shared how I stumbled into men's work through my own pain....
There's a study that asked people, across cultures, what actually marks the moment a boy becomes a man. For girls, the answer was simple, her body matures, she can have kids, she's a woman. For boys, it had nothing to do with the body. It was about behavior. How he shows up, what he proves....
There's a moment in this conversation I still think about: a guy in one of my groups finally admits, out loud, that there was a stretch of his life where part of him thought about just checking out. Another man in the circle doesn't try to fix it. He just turns to him and says,...
There's a version of this I hear from guys constantly, the frog in the boiling pot. Things are fine, then the temperature creeps up so slowly nobody flinches, until five or six years later someone finally points out the water's been boiling the whole time. That's basically what Melanie and I spent this episode unpacking,...
There's a version of the lone wolf that gets romanticized in movies and gym locker rooms and every joke about the guy who doesn't need anybody. Here's the actual biology of it. The lone wolf is the one that got kicked out of the pack, and he dies faster. That paradox sits right at the...
There's a particular kind of quiet that happens when a man is surrounded by people and still feels completely alone, and I lived inside that quiet for a long time before I ever had a name for it. I sat down with Lisa Lacey on Notes from the Edge and we went straight at it,...
There's a client I mentioned in this conversation who spent a whole weekend on a ski trip with guys he's known since he was five years old, right in the middle of a painful separation, and not one of them brought it up the entire time. He came home lonelier than when he left. That...
I spent my teenage years watching other guys wrestle and touch each other easily, cracking jokes with their whole bodies, while mine simply refused to do any of that. Girls were the terrifying part. My body would lock up, I'd freeze, I'd ruminate for hours instead of just talking to someone. That pattern didn't fix...
What happens when a man finally stops abandoning himself just to keep everyone around him comfortable? That question sits underneath most of what came up in this conversation, starting with my own story. I grew up in a family of neglect, not much physical touch, not much emotional connection, and by the time I hit...
I was a teenager who froze every time a woman I liked walked into the room. Body tight, palms sweaty, brain completely offline. That's where I start this conversation on Echo Chamber, because that freeze followed me into my twenties and it's the reason I ended up doing this work in the first place. I...
There's a very specific kind of panic that shows up in a young man's body around attraction, sweaty palms, a throat that won't open, a mind spinning through everything you could say and none of it coming out. That's where I started this conversation on The Growth & Ownership Podcast, tracing my own story back...
I log anonymous usage events: a random session ID (stored in your
browser until you tap "Start fresh"), which chip you clicked, how
long responses take, what kinds of content I found for you,
whether you clicked a recommendation, and the general topic of
the conversation (like "divorce" or "purpose") picked from a
fixed list. The text of our conversation is not stored in my
analytics.
Your messages are processed by Anthropic's Claude AI to write my
replies. Our conversation history lives in your browser's local
storage, not on a server, and "Start fresh" erases it. I do
not set cookies, send anything to Google
Analytics, or store your IP address. Full details are in the
privacy policy.
