Kevin Stacy is a decorated combat leader and served as a pilot with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment - the Army’s elite special operations aviation unit. He is also the Founder and Executive Director of Station Foundation, which helps Special Operations warfighters and their families transition to coming back home through retreats and community support.

It is work I hope the military, and even American society more broadly, can widely adopt one day.

Note: This interview has been edited so it can fit in an email.

What men carry home

Johnny Bowman: What issues are you seeing from folks coming back from Special Operations?

Kevin Stacy: I'd start off by saying most folks that make it to the Special Operations community have already served for a while - particularly the folks that I work with. It's incredibly physically demanding to be in this community. Often, their bodies are broken down. They're also exposed in combat and in training to things that impact cognitive functions. So you think TBI, CTE - even the things that you can't see, these concussion blasts, these direct hits, they're feeling that physically. We're also seeing a lot of exposure to, I would say, toxic chemicals hard to pinpoint or nail down yet, and that's showing up in the form of cancer. We have an incredibly high rate of cancer within our community.

Because of what we put the body through, hormones are completely out of whack. For example, when I got my blood tested, my testosterone was just below 200. These levels would be similar for our Nation’s warfighters we’re expecting to go out the door and engage in combat operations, which is insane. You're seeing guys come home just depleted in all these areas.

Not dismissing it, but much of this is being associated with this level of service, something that Dr. Frueh calls “Operator’s Syndrome”. The cumulative effects of serving in combat. Our responses are becoming far better in addressing these aspects before they are out of hand, but much of it isn’t going away. That's what we deal with when we serve in this area.

But what I don't think has been fully addressed, and it's happening now, is coming home from war with the “invisible wounds” of moral injury and, and the loss of identity and purpose as we move away from uniformed service.

With moral injury, the idea is that I'm acting or watching events unfold that I do not agree with morally. It conflicts with how I live my life from a values-based standpoint and I carry that home with me. Often moral injury is layered with survivor guilt, meaning I'm coming home but my teammate’s not. And all of a sudden now you're plopped back in a country that forgot you were even fighting in the first place. And now you may be out of service.

You may be trying to find employment or trying to figure out life beyond the military. With a loss of community, a loss of purpose, and on top of all the things that you gave physically, this is what shows up at my doorstep. And sometimes guys don't even realize it. I didn't realize it. I didn't realize how much my body got beaten down. I just thought this is normal for us. And it's not.

Johnny Bowman: If someone doesn't have a Station Foundation, what are men's options for dealing with moral injury or these issues that you're talking about?

Kevin Stacy: There's not a lot. There's great stuff for financial readiness, college assistance, or vocational rehabilitation. There's great stuff for physical health as well. Those things tend to be covered. I think the gap in service and where I think we fit best is that spiritual reconditioning from war.

We look at going to war as something that's more sacred than our society has absorbed. Treating it as more than just a deployment, but rather a very sacred process that warriors go into fully. America is world class at going to war…terrible in coming home. In the spiritual area, I think it takes a lot of work to get into that space with men. Men in general are often a bit reluctant to go to these places. And so I'm dealing with a hyper masculine, hyper aggressive kind of archetype, but deep down they want to come home.

Another path with elders and community

Johnny Bowman: If you could redesign what coming home looks like for our military, what does that look like?

Kevin Stacy: So when we're done (and there are guys that do 20, 25, 30 years of service), we hang it up and get sent out to pasture. There's little to no architecture within the current structure to keep these guys around for their wisdom, insights, and experiences. We need to do a better job at creating ways to retain these warriors for far more than their tactical prowess. We need them for their decades of leadership and understanding of what war does. They're not interfering with the leadership or organizational requirements, but rather serving as a council of elders that help the next generation navigate what it means to go to war. When I was at West Point, and in the early years of GWOT, there were very few, if any, elders to help us. I think about where we're at now in society, and in our military where there's this exodus of experience - more importantly exodus of wisdom - and we have to retain that.

How we retain that is by taking influential warrior-leaders who embody the values and attributes of the warrior archetype, and train them to serve now as healers and guides home from war. What we've done is created a program that helps men come home from war through ceremony.

Rights of passage

Johnny Bowman: What does that look like?

Kevin Stacy: The Station is incredibly fortunate to be in a place in the country where there are tribes that did a brilliant job of bringing their warriors home. Their legacies and homecoming traditions serve as our model on how we get back there. Not to steal their culture, but to learn from them. And there's so many wonderful men around here that have helped us do just that.

To share on a high level, there's four rights Warriors move through in our Program called “The Return”. This is a 9-day hero journey based on ancient warrior traditions of what it means to walk the Warrior path. The first rite is to share their story amongst other warriors. This requires deep reflection on the points in life that brought you to the present moment. It demands authenticity and vulnerability – key traits of a true Warrior. And it takes the tribe to sit and listen, recognizing themselves in their fellow Warrior's path and come to appreciate and respect one another on a deeper level. You think you know someone until they share their story.

The second is “to sing the songs of our Fallen”. Those that can't be here, we walk for them and we do it in a very particular way – carrying a large rock, in silence, through the woods, at night. We hear stories about guys from combat, guys in training, and then guys that we've lost to suicide. We learn about Warriors who matter to our tribe. When we walk down that hill, we're all better Warriors for it. We go home as better husbands and fathers. Because those songs take a little weight off our chest.

We participate in a three-day mini-journey. We depart our comforts and move into the backcountry, experiencing the peace and majesty of Nature, experiencing true stillness and silence, where I can begin to digest the journey and take time to reflect on what truly matters to me.

And through that process, they come out of the woods and write a letter. Often those letters are to their families and are of gratitude and thanks… or it might be a letter of forgiveness. They may ask for forgiveness or they may give it to someone who may or may not deserve it. When we come back together as a group, we sit around a fire and read these letters aloud to other Warriors…in a similar way to sharing our story but with a specific direction of our kindness. We then complete the homecoming through a purifying process. Once they come out of that, they enter into this beautiful homecoming ceremony to where they're finally cleansed and brought into a new experience of grace and reconciliation.

What family needs

Johnny Bowman: You also work with family members of special operations forces. What needs are you seeing from family members?

Kevin Stacy: Let's start with spouses. These are amazing women that ride till there's nothing left. These are the people that take care of all the children, the family business, the home. They keep everything together and stable, so that guys like me don't have to worry about it when you go overseas. They put off careers. They completely sacrifice their identity and wellness so that their husbands can be safe. So when they show up to us, there can be a lifetime of experiences to unpack–just like the Warriors. Sometimes it's a challenge to know who you are amidst all of the requirements to care for others, putting yourself on the back burner when everything is directed in support of someone else. And it becomes incredibly difficult to take care of myself. I feel guilty even just thinking about taking care of myself because there's so much else to do.

The kids desperately want to know their dads. As Dads who serve in SOF, we are absent in really critical times in our childrens’ lives and it's not by choice. We don't ask to go away for first baseball games, birthdays, holidays - we go because the mission calls and there is no choice.

I'll tell you a personal experience and hopefully this helps. My son was really young and I was deploying all the time. During a trip to Afghanistan, my wife shared with me that she found our son in his crib banging his head saying he was a bad boy. He connected all the other guys in our neighborhood coming home every day in uniform seeing their families, but his dad doesn't come home. So his first thought was, "It has to be me. Why is he not coming home?" He had no idea that I was constantly coming and going out of the country. And for me, that struck me dead in the heart. They always say kids are very resilient, but how do you become resilient? You got to go through really traumatic events.

And that was a wakeup call for me. And that's why as my wife and I began building The Station, it was absolutely critical to not only include, but to place them as a priority, the spouses and the children. Serving in SOF is a family mission…make no mistake.

Johnny Bowman: Thank you. Anything else?

Kevin Stacy: If what we've talked about resonates, and people are interested in figuring out ways they can be part of something bigger than yourself that is making a lasting difference, reach out and to be part of a solution. Coming home from war takes a community. This is not a military issue, but an American issue.

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First off, blessings to everyone affected by the LA fires. My elementary school and old home burned down and it’s sad. But I live in NYC now so my heart goes out to everyone who’s lost a home, a grocery store, a church, a school, a life.

Second off, it’s January. The official month of making life goals and hypothetically reinventing your entire self. Especially when it comes to health.

Last January, I published How to get into A+ health and How to figure out if I’m healthy. They were the result of listening to every longevity, fitness, and nutrition podcast worth it’s salt, then distilled to give 80/20 recommendations for how to be fit as hell through your 70s. They’re the most popular posts I’ve written to date, and the the advice there remains dynamite.

But it didn’t cover everything, so I’m building on it this year with one of 2024’s hottest health topics: oral care.

Somehow, 2024 was a big year for teeth. Andrew Huberman published a set of oral care protocols, the New York Times ran a whole thing on tooth health, and Azealia Banks had the most surprisingly useful Twitter post on oral care I’ve seen to date (while also getting into a celebrity feud).

So here’s my oral care roundup, largely taken from Andrew Huberman and oral care advice articles that interviewed real dentists. None of the product links are affiliate links, mostly cause I don’t got time for that.

The fundamentals

Your teeth are either in a state of demineralization or remineralization. Demineralization is when your teeth lose minerals when you eat and drink. Remineralization is when you add those minerals back through the calcium and phosphate in your saliva. Remineralization makes your teeth stronger. We like it.

So the whole schtick here is to do things that put your mouth in a state of remineralization. And the key to that is having saliva at the right pH level. Specifically a pH of 7.5 - 8.5 (7.0 is neutral). Here are the major do’s and don’ts for that.

What to NOT do

• Drink sugary or acidic drinks (e.g. carbonated beverages). Sugary and acidic drinks lower the pH level of the mouth, causing demineralization. In fact it’s one of the most efficient ways to demineralize teeth out there.

• Alcohol and stimulants. Same as soda, alcohol and stimulants like cocaine and meth encourage the demineralization of your teeth by making the pH of your mouth more acidic and drying out the mouth. This is why meth addicts’ teeth are especially no bueno. Adderall and other stimulating ADD drugs also fit into this camp, albeit to a lesser degree, so folks on those meds should take special care of their teeth.

• Mouth breath. This causes dry mouth. Since saliva helps neutralize acids and pH levels in the mouth, a lack of saliva can lead to demineralization. There are many other health reasons to not mouth breath, but the biggest one in my book is that it just looks kinda goofy.

What to do (in order)

• Do your dental routine before breakfast and coffee. Brushing before breakfast removes bacteria, increases saliva production, and protects your teeth from acids in food and coffee. Doing it right after sugary food or acidic beverages like coffee can promote demineralization. If you do brush after coffee/breakfast, wait at least 30 minutes. Also, floss before you brush. It’s shown more plaque is removed this way.

• During the day, go long periods without eating or drinking. Peak saliva production happens during the day. The more saliva at the right pH level, the more your teeth remineralize. Eating and drinking anything interesting will lower your mouth’s pH, so going 2 - 6 hours without eating while awake improves tooth remineralization.

• Do your dental routine at the end of the day. Night time is the most important time to brush and floss. This is because saliva production is dramatically reduced at night, and so if you have food or drink remnants in your mouth at night, you don’t have as as much saliva to bring the pH levels back up to neutral. And again, you don’t want to brush directly after a meal because many meals cause demineralization, so brushing at least 30 minutes after is ideal.

What to use

• Floss and/or waterpik. Both work very well, and are complementary to each other. Bryan Johnson, king of doing the most for all things health, does both. Bryan Johnson uses Dr. Tung’s Floss and says it removes 25% more floss. I like this silk floss by Biom because it’s a) not plastic and b) make me feel like a fancy boy for $10. I don’t personally waterpik because flossing is enough of a pain for me, but here’s New Yorg Mag’s recommendations which was counseled by dentists.

• Tooth brush. Use an electric toothbrush with SOFT bristles. Hard bristles should be illegal. Medium bristles should be under some Trump tariff situation. Hard bristles, and to a lesser extent medium strength bristles, disrupt the interface between the teeth and gum and causes gum recession. Literally no reason to put them in your mouth.

• Toothpaste. All good toothpaste has a remineralization agent in it, which is exactly what fluoride is. But fluoride ain’t the only remineralization agent in town. Hydroxyapatite is another, and is actually what our own mouths naturally create to remineralize our teeth. Hydroxyapatite and fluoride seem comparably effective at remineralizing. I use hydroxyapatite since I like the idea that it’s similar to the natural hydroxyapatite my mouth creates. Specifically I use David’s toothpaste.

How to use it

• Floss. Get that string all the way in there, curve it against the teeth, and rub. Take no prisoners. You’re there to give those food bits absolute hell.

• Brushing. Apply soft pressure, not hard, especially with an electric toothbrush. And brush your gums. When you brush the gums, you encourage blood flow to deeper areas of the gums and mouth, which is good for tooth health and decreases sensitivity to hot/cold sensations. It also seems like the American Dental Association’s recommendation of brushing for 2 minutes at a time is a good one. This study and this study showed brushing for just 45 seconds (the average folks actually brush their teeth) or 1 minute removed far less plaque.

If I missed anything, let me know in the comments and I’ll edit this accordingly :)

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Therapy speak is getting more and more popular. 20 years ago nobody heard of these words, and now they’re the subject of memes. It’s stuff like:

• Holding space

• Toxic

• Intergenerational trauma

• Healing

• Self-care

Most of these terms have been popularized by women and queer writers through blogs and social media. Nobody is spelling out the meaning of these terms, and, most of the time, people don’t need to. The words themselves resonate with their audience. Women and queer folks get the gist.

Straight men don’t get the gist. Our cultural context is different. The phrases often sound too academic, too vague, or too filled with emotional judgement for us to resonate with them.

And so when these terms get used, we tend not to engage. We either nod our heads in silent confusion or dismiss the statement as therapy bullshit. I think this is an issue. A lot of these terms are just as useful for men as they are for women and queer people, but we don’t have language that makes these concepts make sense to us. If we did have labels, we’d have greater interest in exploring our emotional landscape.

Take PTSD, for example. PTSD was officially recognized as a mental health condition in 1980. That was the first time the US put a label on debilitating mental conditions being the result of external events, and not individual weakness. Now we estimate 7% of US veterans have PTSD and can design treatments around it.

But PTSD aside, men tend not to put labels on their inner emotional landscape. It hasn’t been a popular part of our culture. For women and queer communities, these labels get popularized all the time. For men to gain greater emotional awareness - something most men seek in some way or another - we need to create terms that work for us. We need a different dictionary.

The dictionary

Luckily, we’re not starting from scratch. Men’s group leaders have recognized this issue for decades and have using different language. Here are some of the terms I’ve heard men’s group leaders use in an attempt to use terminology that resonates more with men.

Holding space => Active listening. Here’s the 2015 blog post that popularized the term “holding space.” It’s 1,850 words about how to present with someone when they’re going through a tough time. For a lot of women, it resonated so hard it popularized a whole new term. For a lot of men, it’s wordy and vague. When I hear men teach the exact same concept, they use a different term: “active listening,” which is listening and asking clarifying questions. For men, it doesn’t need to get more complicated than that.

Intergenerational trauma => Legacy. The concept of parents leaving their kids with emotional baggage is useful and universal. But “trauma” invites a victim mindset, which isn’t necessary for the vast majority of stuff we inherit from our parents. Ish Iguarta, cofounder of the men’s group All Kings and a leader of men’s groups while in prison, uses the term “legacy” instead of “intergenerational trauma.” Legacies can be good and bad, big and small. By using the term “legacy,” men are invited to look into the good with the bad, and assign as much emotional weight to things as they find useful.

Vulnerable => Transparent. Asking a dude to be vulnerable implies that there’s an emotional weight that he’s hiding. He needs to feel something, and then share it. , who leads the men’s group Junto, uses the term “transparent” instead of “vulnerable.” I dig it. Asking a dude to be emotionally transparent is just asking a dude for honesty. That’s simpler. There’s less judgement and expectation involved, and they get at it exactly the same thing.

Positive / negative => Useful / not useful. A lot of therapy, and the modern world in general, encourages labeling things as positive or negative, good or bad. These can be vague and judgmental terms. Andrew Horn often uses the terms “useful” / “not useful” instead. I find this is more specific and personal, and so it resonates with me more.

Healing => Feeling pain or feeling possibility. “Healing” does little to describe emotionally moving past something. I’ve never once understood what someone is referring to when they say they’re on a “healing” journey. The men’s work leader Bill Wich once described all healing work to be either a) feeling pain to get over pain or b) feeling possibility so we can do more things. I find this more useful. It describes what the “healing” process looks like and what the goals are: feeling safe and doing stuff.

Masculinity => Manhood. “Masculinity” is like the term “caucasian.” It checks an academic box and is a part of zero people’s actual identity. It usually only comes up with the phrase “toxic masculinity,” so it also carries negative vibes. Whenever I hear the term “masculinity” get used in emotional work, I know the audience isn’t men. I prefer “manhood.” Nobody has to explain what “manhood” is to me. Any dude can feel it. Boys aspire to it. Masculinity, by contrast, feels like something I have to research.

Processing emotions => Feeling. In my humble opinion, “processing emotions” is a term folks use to make “feeling” sound complicated and worthy of academic discussion. And to anyone who says “processing emotions” encompasses more than just “feeling,” I say this: no it doesn’t. I will die on this hill.

Mental health => ???. Mental health, in my view, is the final boss of therapy-speak terms. It’s ubiquitous and yet absolutely blows at describing what it’s supposed to. For one, mental health is about emotions, which are felt everywhere - not just in our heads. Secondly, “mental health” has come to mean not having problems like depression or anxiety. It does nothing to explain what actual “health” looks like.

To fill this gap, I’ve heard the term “mental fitness” or “mental strength” get used, which speaks to a certain resiliency that I find attractive. But using workout analogies for mental states feels limiting.

, a men’s group member and teacher of the course Nervous System Mastery, uses the term “emotional fluidity.” Emotional fluidity refers to the ability to

1. be aware of our emotions

2. feel our emotions

3. welcome all of them without getting overwhelmed or shutting down.

That, to me, is exactly what the goal of mental health is. My only gripe is that “fluidity” can sound like a physics textbook. If anyone can come up with a term that feels more intuitive, I would be eternally grateful.

The mission ahead

I think this project is vital to men’s mental health. It will take decades, and requires thousands of people adding in their two cents until we words that resonate. If you have a preferred term for some vague therapy word, throw it in the comments. Let’s build the dictionary.

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Luigi is a specific type of guy. He’s a programmer who is into fitness. He seems anti-capitalist yet retweets Peter Thiel. He cites academic papers and yet is into spirituality. It feels incongruent and niche.

This also describes a lot of dudes.

If I were to go down the list of the most popular male podcasts and their affiliated tribes - Andrew Huberman for the science inclined, Joe Rogan for the MMA enthusiasts, Sean Ryan for the military curious, Chris Williamson for the modern GQ man - every single one of them caters to that type of guy.

And so someone with interests as specific and as Luigi turns out to be an Everyman, and is treated as a folk hero.

But Luigi had one interest that ruled them all, and that is fitness. Luigi had abs. His abs had abs. Anyone who’s chased the abs dragon knows that being a regular gym goer is not enough. This level of abs requires fitness being a whole personality.

10 years ago, being a fitness philosopher felt extreme. Today, this describes every podcast host I just mentioned.

Men care about health more than ever

A mixture of podcasts, Instagram, and Tiktok has put fitness and related health issues at the forefront of dudes’ minds. If you’re a man on social media, you’re getting health content. And so men have a want: to be not just healthy, but healthier than ever.

At the same time, America is the sickest it has ever been.

• 73% of Americans are overweight or obese.

• Heart failure deaths increased 906% among people <45 in the last decade.

• 12% of Americans have diabetes.

This creates tension. Men are more health obsessed than ever and yet we’re surrounded by sickness. In my opinion, these are the conditions for anger.

And when we think about the systemic causes for how sick we’ve gotten, it’s clear this anger will grow:

• Our healthcare system frustrates patients and has one of the worst outcomes per dollar spent of any country in the world.

• Our food systems are grown with a recognized poison (glyphosate), are processed to be addictive, and are subsidized to prioritize calories over nutrition.

• We built a world that is filled with plastic that causes cancer and chronic health issues, air and water whose contaminants exceed health guidelines in most counties, and lighting that disrupts healthy circadian rhythms.

So where does this leave us?

In my opinion, it leaves us with a generation-defining fight. I’ve talked before about how men’s sense of household security is broadening to domestic health, how Gen Z’s valuing autonomy prioritizes time and health alongside money, and how Gen X health podcasters have more influence over folks’ lives than a medieval church. These trends once felt coincidental, and now they feel like they’re part of the same culture war. Men want to protect their agency, and protecting health is the most visible way we do this.

One of the talking points of this newsletter is that men broadly care about two things: health and wealth. For the past few generations, we focused on wealth. I think podcasts, Tiktok, and Instagram are shifting the balance towards health. I think we’re still in the early stages of men becoming more health conscious. And as health increasingly becomes an identity for men, it’ll get more political.

I find it surprising that health feels as politically amorphous as it does right now. Joe Rogan - perhaps the most popular “dude who talks about fitness” on the Internet - endorsed both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. For such a huge issue, it is wild that neither party has claimed this territory yet. And there’s a frustrating lack of solutions, it’s also an opportunity for anyone trying to make political inroads with men.

And the opportunity is simple. Men are redefining manhood through health right now, and are looking for allies. Who will help us get healthy? Thousands of health-focused tribes are being built on social media right now. Who are their allies? We’ll likely soon find out.

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Tis the season, so I’m reposting this holiday post from last year. My request to you: be spicy. It’s always worth it.

Tis the season of family gatherings. It’s the season for family members to ask uncomfortable questions of each other. It’s the season for uncles and aunts to let loose their hottest of hot takes. There’s a popular narrative out there that these are conversations to “navigate” or “get through.” That take is for children. Here at A Man’s Work we celebrate Spicy Uncles, Spicy Aunts, and their allies.

This issue is devoted to making your holiday dinner table as intimate and uncomfortable as folks can stomach. It is a guide for how to be that person your younger relatives will need to navigate. The following is a list of activities and questions that are guaranteed to raise the emotional stakes.

The Hot Take Game

If Spicy Uncles created a dinner table game in a laboratory, this game is what I’d expect. It comes courtesy of my cousin Patrick, a bonafide Spicy Uncle. Here are the rules:

1. Everyone at the table writes down a hot topic or question on a card. I’m talking stuff like “Is there an afterlife?,” “Is America headed for civil war?,” “How do you think the world will end?” My mind instinctively goes to spirituality and politics but there’s a million buttons to be pushed here.

2. The notecards get handed to someone to read. I recommend choosing the most opinionated uncle at the table. If he’s got a job with some decorum, he’s more likely to obey the rules here.

3. Opinionated Uncle reads the first notecard. You then go around the table, with each person sharing their honest opinion about the question. If it’s a yes or no question, stick to yes or no answers. If it’s more than a yes or no answer, you may need a timer to limit folks’ answers to something like 2 minutes a piece.

4. Here’s the kicker: there is no debate or follow up questions allowed. Once you’ve stated your opinion, you keep it moving. Everyone just has to marinate in the sea of spicy opinions.

5. Once all opinions are stated, Opinionated Uncle reads off the next notecard.

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Scare the Children Rants

My girlfriend and her friends, all of whom qualify as spicy aunts, created this next one. Here’s the premise: everyone over the age of 30 has a municipal issue that they’ve simply had enough of, and can rant about if given the opportunity. If you don’t immediately know what yours is, know that it exists somewhere deep inside you. You just have to dig.

The more local the issue, the better. Here are some examples:

• My girlfriend has had it with NYC traffic police who issue tickets for cars parked in front of defunct fire hydrants. It’s a grift!

• My friend Tyler has had it with the decibel levels of the NYC subway. They’re loud as hell!

• I’ve had it with New York State workers comp audits for small businesses. We tax manual labor 100x more than office work!

Everyone at the table gets a minute to rant about their local issue. If you have a family member with a yard sign protesting something like windmill construction, this is their time to shine. This rant has been nicknamed the “scare the children” rant because the whole point is to get a little unhinged and petty about it. Don’t be evenhanded. Let ‘em have it.

The Primary Question

My Primary Question is the question I ask myself the most. What do I feel compelled to do or think more often than not? When do I feel stress and what question do I have in the back of my head during those situations, making them more stressful?

A few examples of Primary Questions:

• Do you like me?

• Am I right?

• Am I worthy?

• How do I protect myself / my family?

You may or may not want to explain this, but 9 times out of 10, our Primary Question is tied up with some Mommy and Daddy issues. The whole game is a Trojan Horse to get at insecurities created in response to childhood experiences that for one reason or another, continue to carry disproportionate weight in our minds.

I talk more in depth about the origins of The Primary Question exercise here, but the idea is simply to go around and share what each person’s Primary Question is after a few minutes of thought.

I did this with my family a few years ago over Christmas. It got emotional in a powerful way, with insights I’ll remember forever. I highly recommend.

“I come from a people who…”

This final one is the simplest. All you do is go around the table, with each person finishing the sentence: “I come from a people who…” Folks can interpret the end of that sentence however they wish.

In my experience, most folks will take this prompt as an opportunity to talk about their ancestors, and all the positive and negative judgments they have of them. As a result, this game definitely gets interesting at a table with friends with different ancestors. It’s a rare portal into how folks think about whom they come from.

And for family events where most folks are talking about the same ancestors this game might seem redundant, but I wish I played this game with my grandparents so I could hear how they interpreted our ancestors. It’s also interesting to hear how siblings and different generations have different depictions of whom they come from.

To quantify the vibe shift, 35% of young men in 2016 identified as Republican. By 2023 it was 48%. 

This makes young men swing voters, and for this election they swung in huge numbers to the right. The Wall Street Journal found that between 2022 and 2024, young men shifted from supporting Democrats to to supporting Trump by 13%.

What’s driving the shift?

There are lots of theories why:

Some people lament that Democrats don’t care about men. If you look at the Democratic party’s “Who We Serve” section, they list 16 different identity groups like women, LGBTQ+, Black people, veterans, even “ethnic Americans.” The list totals 76% of the population, leaving out men and white people. 

This correlates with a lack of Democratic outreach. 

• The Young Men’s Research Initiative finds that Republican aligned groups have outspent Democrat aligned groups on ads targeting young men by 8 to 1 since September. 

• Democrats also tend to exclude male-aligned audiences in ads. A recent analysis on Facebook and Instagram spending found that Joe Rogan, Barstool Sports, and Elon Musk are in the top 10 lists of excluded audiences for Democratic campaigns.

  

  

Others point to the media landscape. The popular progressive Twitch streamer Hasan Piker talks about how every major interest that young men have - sports, wealth, and health - the online content is right leaning. 

This leads to a lot of hand wringing over young men becoming Hitler youth.

I find this to be liberal fear-mongering. 

Yes, there is a backlash among young men against the term “feminism.” But on questions of gender equality for young men, we see it getting closer to women’s views, not farther. Richard Reeves from the American Institute for Boys and Men goes through examples here and explains how young men’s policy preferences are getting closer to women’s views, not farther, here.

What men want

So what’s driving the bus? My favorite take on this comes from Scott Galloway. What will determine this election, he stated, is “which campaign puts forward a more aspirational vision of masculinity.”

In other words, it’s vibes. Young men want to feel good. They currently feel like shit. How does each party dig them out? I see three parts to this.

The good life. Young Republican men are very clear on what “the good life” looks like. It looks like this:

Young Democrats do not have an equivalent vision. Is making money a part of it? Is getting fit a part of it? Not really. Culturally, the focus tends to be anti-poverty programs and subsidized healthcare - not becoming your best self.  

Not being mired in an endless tarpit of shame. Off the back of the Me Too movement and cancel culture, young men are mired in shame. It doesn’t help that when liberals want something to change, they default to shame. When Barack Obama wants Black men to vote, he shames them. When liberals hear language they don’t like, they shame. When liberals want more people to wear COVID masks, they shame.

And shame shows up in a thousand indirect ways as well. When the Democratic Party wordsmiths a platform to appeal to 16 different identity groups, it feels soft and careful. Or when candidates like Harris wax on about hot button issues like Israel-Palestine, and you’re still unsure where they land, it feels evasive. There’s a want to ditch the smart and agreeable schtick. Bring back big, dumb sentences.

Shame is the left’s primary tool of control, and young men don’t like feeling controlled. It’s also useless at getting someone to change. It’s an energy vampire that inspires more depression than good decisions. So young men seek content from those who promise a different path. Nearly every influencer who does is conservative. Chief among them is Donald Trump, who has turned shamelessness into an art form.

Role models. MAGA world has role models young men care about: Elon Musk, Dana White from UFC, and Bryson DeChambeau (professional golfer). 

Democrats don’t. At best, there are interesting and powerful guys who don’t like Trump, but do not embrace the Democratic Party. These are men like Mark Cuban, Scott Galloway, and Charlemagne Tha God. 

Meanwhile the men who are closely aligned with the party like Tim Walz, Doug Emhoff, and Pete Buttigieg, have big Responsible Dad energy. Most dudes don’t get off on being Responsible Dads - it’s an image curated more for women than men.

Can liberals get their balls back?

I talk sometimes about how the #1 question dudes ask themselves, consciously and unconsciously, is “How do I get my balls back?” It comes up in men’s groups across age, race, and class all the time. Any influencer who can answer that question gets major points from men. 

And it doesn’t need to sound crass or cruel. There are versions of being self-confident, wealthy, and healthy that we all agree are good. It’s called having agency. We all like that and should encourage it.

But for Democrats to embrace this requires a vibe shift. Men want to feel that seeking strength is good. They want to feel that authenticity is appreciated more than apologies. As of now, this is uncomfortable territory for liberals. 

The other option is for Democrats to just focus on women. That may be the easier shift to win elections. Young men and women trust each other less and less. Culturally, both sides seem convinced the path to a better future is in spite of, not because of, the other gender. It may be easier for a party to focus its appeal to one gender, and not to both at the same time. But the cost of that path is that the gender wars get more stark and weird. I don’t want that.

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Whether its microplastics in our balls, “forever chemicals” in cooking pans, or carcinogenic chemicals in our sunscreen - men are getting worried about toxins. 

The fear is especially strong among young fathers. There are endless updates about how common household items are now going to hurt the development of children. To take a few findings from the last three years: 

• At least 45% of the US’ water supply was determined to have unhealthy levels of PFAS, otherwise known as forever chemicals. 

• Microplastics are likely in every man’s testicles. Relatedly, synthetic clothing fibers like polyester and nylon shed microplastics in the air and accumulate in our lungs, brain, and liver. 

• Gas stoves have been ruled carcinogenic due to the chemicals they release

• 81% of Americans are regularly exposed to glyphosate, which is linked to cancer, infertility, and neurological conditions

What seemed like paranoid conjecture 10 years ago is increasingly a scientific acknowledgment that we’re surrounded by toxins. Millennial men, and especially young fathers, are responding to the threat. In the name of household security, they’re avoiding canned foods, plastic water bottles, receipts, and sea salt - all of which have microplastic, a hormone disruptor. 

They’re also loading up on gear. Men are buying stainless steel pans, zinc sunscreen, and heavy duty water filtration units. It’s like Neo outfitting himself in The Matrix, except in the appliances section of Costco. 

I find this interesting because men’s sense of security is broadening into domestic health - usually a domain men cede to women. Increasingly, outlets with male audiences like Men’s Journal, Huberman Lab, and Joe Rogan are talking about this stuff. Toxin talk is now firmly in the dude discourse.

“America is the fattest and sickest it has ever been”

The issue is not, of course, just about microplastics or PFAS. In the words of Justin Mares, one of the leaders of the End Chronic Disease campaign: “America is the fattest and sickest it has ever been.”

As Justin Mares puts it in his excellent newsletter chronicling this issue: 

• For the first time in American history, our life expectancy is trending down

• 50% of Americans have diabetes or prediabetes (and 25% of kids)

• 73% of Americans are obese or overweight, (and 45% of kids). 

• 93% of Americans have at least one marker of metabolic dysfunction that signals future chronic disease, and chronic illness is up 200%+ since the 70s. 

These stats run counter to a new wave of masculinity that is fitness and health focused. About half of the male-led podcasts in the top 20 regularly talk about health and fitness. The result is men are educating themselves and their families about health in ways we haven’t seen before. 

And with education, comes a righteous anger. “The Great American Poisoning” is a term Justin uses that I think encapsulates the sentiment men are feeling today. Regulators have been willfully ignorant. Our communities’ physical welfare is in decline. There is a giant sized space for men to go “what the fuck.”

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Public health, by men for men

This is changing how public health campaigns are being communicated. Men, now more than ever, are speaking up on public health. As a result, these campaigns sound different from public health campaigns of the past - they’re angrier and more direct. 

Here’s a Fox News segment about this issue. 

The vibe is less “be informed” and more “we are getting fucked.” 

Counter that with the vibe of Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign to end childhood obesity. That campaign focused on parent info sessions, updated nutritional standards, healthy food advertising campaigns, and improved fruit and vegetable stocking at “food desert” locations. 

To be clear, plenty of women are pissed off about this too. But men tend to feel more permission to get publicly pissed off. And in these situations, it is a wildly useful tool. One of the themes of this newsletter is that big shifts in American policy and culture are generally fueled by anger. I talk more about how war and angry religious revivals have fueled progressive social policy here. As a result, I welcome this shift in public health.  

And it’s interesting that Fox News, which skews male and is known for being one of the angrier networks, has done far and away the most extensive coverage on this issue. Tucker Carlson alone has hosted several segments on it. 

And it’s bleeding into politics. Rogan’s recent interview with Trump talked about these issues. RFK Jr. wrote a WSJ op-ed that focused on the chronic illness epidemic. Dr. Marty Makary, a gastrointestinal surgeon at Johns Hopkins and the guy who inspired Atul Gawande’s book Checklist Manifesto, just gave this Congressional testimony where he lays into chronic disease in the US and our poisoned food supply.

The issues of toxins and chronic disease is a portal for men to get involved in public health. It’s also an instance where anger is warranted and useful. I hope more media outlets, beyond Fox News, recognize this. It’ll bring more men into the conversation and it will support public health.

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Testosterone and performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) have gone mainstream. They used to be just for bodybuilders and were seriously frowned upon. Now Jeff Bezos, RFK Jr, and Joe Rogan are on it, and nobody bats an eye. 

How’d we get here?

Hollywood has certainly helped. Here’s a sampling of dudes who are between very likely to 100% confirmed that they took PEDs. 

• Hugh Jackman

• Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson

• Chris Hemsworth

• Rob McElhenney

• Jake Gyllenhaal

• Jason Statham

• Logan Paul

• Mark Wahlberg

• Kumail Nanjiani

• Sylvester Stallone

• Ryan Reynolds

A Hollywood trainer in 2013 estimated 20% of actors use performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) to achieve their physique. A professor of physical therapy at the University of Southern California recently estimated that 50 percent to 75 percent of Marvel stars use some form of PED.

And then there’s the Internet. Reddit is a goldmine of steroid advice. A huge amount of Instagram and TikTok influencers are on steroids (also known as “gear”). Perhaps the most popular influencer for Gen Z, Sam Sulek, is geared to the gills.

The Youtube channel More Plates More Dates built its following on tearing down which celebrities he thinks are on steroids or now (“natty or not”). 

Kenneth Boulet has a popular account where he goes up to jacked people at the gym and asks them if they’re natty or not. The answer? All the super jacked guys are on gear. He does it to poke fun at the industry, and yet he says he regularly has pro athletes and actors sliding into his DMs to get advice on their steroid use. 

More recently, men over 40 with money have been doing testosterone supplementation simply to feel younger, stronger, and sharper. Joe Rogan, Dax Shepard, and RFK Jr are public about their use. Jeff Bezos is strongly suspected of using TRT.

Steroids 101

There are two major classes of PEDs: anabolic steroids and human growth hormone.  

Anabolic steroids are used for muscle gain. “Anabolic” refers to tissue building - which in this case means muscle. Human growth hormone (HGH) can be used both as an “anti-aging” protocol or for building muscle or both. Technically, HGH is not a steroid. Both give men energy and muscles, albeit through different mechanisms. 

And generally there are two different treatment goals: getting huge (having higher than normal levels of testosterone) and getting healthy (upping a deficient level of testosterone to “normal” levels). Testosterone Replacement Treatment (TRT) is a term reserved for treating testosterone deficiencies. Both treatment goals often use the exact same stuff: testosterone, aka anabolic steroids - just in different dosage amounts. 

Benefits of steroids can include:

• Looking jacked

• More energy

• Quicker recovery to workouts

• Improved concentration

Downsides can include

• Large purple pimples

• Hair loss

• Raisinette sized testicles 

• Mood swings, especially between frustration/anger and depression  

• Liver damage

• Cardiovascular disease 

• Needing to inject yourself with needles like clockwork

• Your body no longer being able to produce its own testosterone, making getting off testosterone very difficult.

• Spending $$$. TRT can cost a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a month

If you’re interested to learn more about TRT, here is a great explainer from a PhD who bodybuilds, takes steroids, and is honest about the pros and cons.

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The grey area

Because the term “steroids” is associated with “getting as huge as possible,” people like RFJ Jr. will say they’re doing TRT for anti-aging, and so aren’t taking steroids. 

I take issue with this for two reasons:

1. Taking testosterone means taking anabolic steroids

2. RFK Jr. is absolutely ripped for a 70 year old. Doctors may be prescribing testosterone as “anti-aging”, but the result is still about muscle gain and performance enhancement. 

Most medical professionals are clear on their recommendations. If you’re medically deficient in testosterone, you feel like shit, and you can afford it, chances are they’ll consider prescribing TRT. If you’re not medically deficient, they won’t. 

But increasingly, men over 40 who are taking TRT are simply have low testosterone - not medical deficiencies. And then they’re taking testosterone at levels that give them 20 pounds more muscle at 50 than they had at 30. It’s taking the notion of gender affirming care and putting it…on steroids.  

As Dax Shepard has said on his popular podcast The Armchair Expert, “I spent my whole life as a medium boy, now I’m a big boy and I like it.”

The future of steroids

There are some who think that as Hollywood is forced to get honest with PED use, that PED use will get less popular. I disagree. I think steroids will become normalized and more popular. It will become an aesthetic decision like getting tattoos.

All the incentives point to wider usage. Most men with public personas or even a social media following will get more popular if they look bigger. And as the drugs get better and cheaper, I have to imagine this trend will accelerate. 

I don’t know if all this is a net positive/negative for dudes. My guess is that it serves drug companies more than it serves the average man. On the flip side, if I can look jacked at 70 without totally undermining my health, sign me the hell up. Drug companies, you win again.  

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This newsletter talks a lot about community and social capital, and Sam Pressler is perhaps the person thinking hardest about what government can do about it. His blog, Connective Tissue, goes into the research, current events, and ideas surrounding community building. His recently published Connective Tissue Policy Framework is the most comprehensive collection of tangible policy ideas on community building that I’ve seen. 

Sam and I discuss the current energy behind communitarian policy, how government can promote community building, and what readers themselves can do to promote it.

Why now for social connectedness

Johnny

2023 was a big year for policy interest on social connectedness. The surgeon general released his advisory on Social Isolation and Loneliness. Senator Chris Murphy proposed his National Strategy for Social Connection. Governor Wes Moore launched his Department of Service and Civic Innovation. Why are policy makers focusing on social connectedness now? Who has been talking to these dudes?

Sam

I think the conditions were ripe for an upswell in communitarianism. Here’s how I introduce the moment at the start of the policy framework:

“The election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the outbreak of the Covid pandemic in 2020 can both be viewed as major shocks that challenged the existing sociopolitical paradigm. But these were also surface-level events, occurring atop a deeper current of decades of technological, economic, social, and cultural change that both hollowed out the core of communities and eroded trust in institutions and expertise. A half-century of conservative and liberal policymaking that elevated individualism, market deregulation, and the wisdom of experts has reached an extreme end point, leaving in its wake isolated individuals, weakened civic life, and widespread alienation and institutional distrust.” (p. 5)

All of this was a long time coming, but you can point to the Surgeon General's advisory on loneliness as a turning point. He puts this advisory out and publishes this op-ed in The New York Times, which creates this media whirlwind. Everyone begins attaching their own solution to the problem — like, “Can pickleball solve male loneliness? Can retaking Constantinople solve male loneliness?” While there has been a lot of unseriousness, there has also been a lot of attention to these issues. 

The reason why, in my view, it got so much attention was because it touched on such a deep cultural nerve. People are feeling more isolated from one another. People are feeling more disconnected from the institutions that promote meaning and belonging in life. And this isn’t just a “vibe.” It’s a structural and cultural reality: we are more isolated from one another and we are more disconnected from religion, community, unions, and family. 

Once the Surgeon General opened the door, you saw people like Senator Murphy, who was already doing some work around this, really stick his head out and get engaged. You saw mayors start expressing interest in getting engaged. But policymakers haven’t been intentionally focused on these issues since the last wave of communitarianism in the 1990s. And many don’t have a sense of where to begin.

The role of government

Johnny

What do you think is government's role in regenerating connection within communities?

Sam

I don't think policy should be the driver of this. It's weird for me to say because I just wrote this policy framework. But I do believe first and foremost, it requires both community-driven change and a deep change to the spiritual and cultural consciousness of our country to value different things — the community and the individual, obligations and rights.

But, even then, we can still ask, “Is there a role for policy to play?” The way I communicate the role of policy is it’s about creating the enabling conditions for connection within communities. I don't think policy and government should be playing a direct role in helping you make friends. But there are things that government can do that can create those conditions for more civic opportunities (e.g. more third places, more groups, more programs and activities), for more participation, and for more connection — all of which enable a positive feedback loop of connectedness to occur in communities.

Johnny

What are some examples?

Sam

I think about housing and neighborhoods as a place where we should be putting a lot of energy. Where we live fundamentally dictates who we interact with in our neighborhood, who we build relationships with, the places that we go, the groups that we join. And the way we've designed where we live has sorted us in so many ways: across lines of class, of race, of age, and more.  

This housing affordability crisis is creating a once-in-a-generation moment for us to re-envision the role of housing and neighborhoods to strengthen connection within communities. But right now, the focus has almost exclusively been on the material — on building more units and on lowering costs.

It has not been, “What happens in the neighborhood when we build this?” We need to think about the role of neighborhood activation and neighborhood programming. Governments can very easily create microgrants — $250, $500 grants — for block parties, and people can begin interacting in the streets with one another. Government and philanthropy can fund local barbecues and neighborhood dinners for people to get to know one another. They can fund sports leagues and other types of violence interruption programming at the neighborhood level, especially in places that have low trust to get people interacting with one another. They can fund the creation of little community spaces like micro gardens and micro parks and enabling little pubs and cafés in communities so people have the space to connect. And they can create neighborhood-level leadership roles so that neighbors can consistently coordinate and host these types of neighborhood activities. 

Another example is the opportunity we have around adult transition as a stage of the life course. Most cultures throughout history have had rites of passage that mark the transition from childhood to adulthood. And those rites of passage shape who we become as members of the community. Unfortunately, the adult transition period in the U.S. has become the great sorter of our social lives by class, rather than the great connector like it once was.

But I think we have an opportunity to reimagine the adult transition as the great connector of American life, and there are a few different things we can do policy-wise. 

One is what Maryland and California are doing: creating a state level of service year program where, ideally, a plurality of graduating high school seniors have a collective experience of service at the point of the adult transition. You get benefits from that to either go to college after or to do a vocational program after. But, in the process, you're actually having that shared cohort-based experience of cross-class, cross-geography participation and connection.

The second is domestic exchange programs. There's a group called the American Exchange Project in the US that takes high school juniors and seniors from very different places, and through a cohort-based program, helps them experience places that are very different from the ones they grew up in. For example, a group of teens from Palo Alto, CA may do an exchange with a group of teens from rural Texas. This experience allows them to build deep connections across class, geography, and political ideology.  These types of exchanges are starting to be instantiated within state-level policy.

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What you can do

Johnny

If you're your average citizen reading this report, getting excited about the idea, but you're not in government or public health or urban planning, what would you like that person to do with this?

Sam

I think there are two levels to it. First, if you care about these things and you want your local government to care about these things, this can become a set of priorities to advocate for. For example, you can ask your local government, “Why don't we have a block party grant?” And you can organize your neighbors and try to get your government or local community foundation to start a block party grant. The policy opportunities within the framework can become priorities that you can put to your government and organize collective action towards that.

There are also some things that you don't need government to start doing. For instance, in Falls Church, VA community leaders somehow found out about this essay I wrote on why every community should have a welcome kit, which was adapted from the policy framework.  And they were like, “Let's just start building neighborhood welcome kits.” Now, if you go on their website, there's a whole neighborhood welcoming page with all the resources. They took a policy opportunity from the framework and translated it to their local context.

So there are real things that you can look at this framework and say, “Oh, that's a cool idea. We don't need to wait for government. We can do it now.” 

—--

Check out The Connective Tissue Policy Framework here

Check out Sam’s newsletter, Connective Tissue, here.

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Is Christianity back?

Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Russel Brand, and Red Scare podcast host Dasha Nekrasova are praising Christianity. 

Meanwhile, one of the leaders of the New Atheists movement, Richard Dawkins, calls himself a "cultural Christian." Another leader, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, now identifies as a Christian convert.

It’s been a minute since Christianity has felt edgy, but here we are. 

And it has spurred a lot of intellectual debates about Christianity beliefs in the modern world. Are they regressive? Or serving needs the secular world has overlooked? Are we seeing a mini revival or an anti-woke fad?

I think this debate is boring. We’ve been debating religious morals since the Enlightenment, and know how this plays out. It amounts to people pointing out each others’ hypocrisies. It has pundits-debating-on-cable-TV energy. 

More interesting to me are what is driving the popularity of new faith based groups. If we look at the fastest growing faith-based groups across America and the world, they aren’t doing new things on the belief front. What they tend to focus on are rituals. They all have daily or weekly routines that meet people’s needs and create personal zeal. 

This newsletter is about the role of rituals in modern faith based groups and their impact on men. More and more, I think we’re going to see groups leverage ritual for cultural power. 

Back the hell up what’s going on?

Despite me feeling meh about the majority of his book, Jamie Wheal’s Recapture the Rapture summarizes 3 key elements of religion in a useful way:

1. Morals: Guidelines or rules for how to live

2. Scripture: The stories that provide context for followers

3. Rituals: Activities to connect people to each other, the divine, and to ourselves. 

Since the Enlightenment, we’ve endlessly debated the Morals bit, and sometimes the Scripture. 

In the early 2000s, the New Atheists turned this debate into a whole ethos. Religion was morally wrong, they claimed. We need different rules.

But those new rules never really came. The closest we got was a list of how to avoid getting canceled. The list felt more like HR rules than moral guideposts. 

What if this debate on morals is no longer moving us forward? What if, and hear me out, the morals and scripture bits were never the most impactful parts of religion? 

What if, for the vast majority of history, the most impactful part was the rituals: the meals, the fasts, the songs and prayers, the greetings and goodbyes, the small group meetings, the ceremonies marking births and weddings and funerals. 

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What’s actually working

Despite the growth of secularism today, three faith based groups come to mind that are wildly popular: F3 Nation, Falun Gong, and Pentecostalism. I think they show what works in 2024. 

F3 Nation is a free workout group for men. F3 stands for Fitness, Fellowship, and Faith. Men get together once a week, often at 5:30 in the morning, and do a 45 minute workout together. This is followed by a short prayer.  

And that’s it. 

It started in 2011 and now has ~90,000 members. F3 Nation addresses what it calls the "sad clown syndrome" of middle aged men. This refers to men who are trying to be a good guy to family and friends, but inside they know they're out of shape, have few close friends, and have lost their purpose. If you’re interested in reading more about it, you can read my interview with its outgoing CEO John Lambert here. 

Falun Gong is a controversial religious movement that started in China in 1992. It has an estimated 10 million members today. It’s anti-Communist, anti-feminist, and its founder has claimed aliens are responsible for various scientific inventions. I ignored it as a crazy cult, but then I read Peter Hessler’s book Country Driving where he details rural life in China in the 90s. He notes that in the small village he was staying in, middle aged folks were getting into Falun Gong because it provided group qigong exercises for free. 

Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religious group in the world. It’s adding 13 million new members a year and has ~600 million adherents today. It is a branch of evangelical Christianity, is perhaps best known to outsiders for folks speaking in tongues during services, and has large footholds in the US, Brazil, China, and Nigeria. 

While Pentecostal services and rituals differ between communities, they emphasize health and wealth (much like male focused podcasts do today) with a socially conservative lens: no drinking, no gambling, no womanizing. In many communities where Pentecostalism is growing such as Guatemala, Brazil, and South Africa, it’s the only source of addiction treatment. Church members often meet in smaller cell groups of 6 - 12 members during the week to discuss personal issues and needs.

So what?

All three of these groups enroll new members through rituals and services that are immediately useful: workouts, qigong, and small group accountability support. These rituals eventually lead to personal transformation. I think for all the high and mighty debate around religious belief, there’s no secular answer to the needs these groups fill. 

I find that men especially crave ritual. The amount of podcasts I’ve consumed in the pursuit of more productive morning routines, gym routines, and mental health schemes is…a lot. All of these are in the spirit of personal transformation, and yet they don’t quite deliver it. 

Secular wellness culture tops out at self-acceptance. This is better than hating one’s self, but it doesn’t provide the kind of zeal many of us look for in life. Meanwhile physical health culture tops out at looking good naked. This can also be life changing! But many are looking for more holistic transformations. 

Sooner or later, the intellectuals will catch on. The focus on “who is right?” will shift to “who is useful?” And the debate about which morals to adopt will shift to which rituals to adopt. I look forward to that shift.

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Steve Schlafman coaches high performing individuals on how to “downshift” to a life filled with more intention, clarity, and purpose. I started following Steve when he was a successful VC in NYC, and then grew really interested in his journey when he started posting publicly the difficulties and benefits of downshifting. If you’re at all interested in what downshifting your life could look like - now or in the future - this interview is for you.

What is downshifting?

Johnny: You work with a lot of folks who made money, got burnt out, and are now reprioritizing what they want in life. What, in your opinion, is the top thing your clients are looking for?

Steve: Before I even answer the specifics of the question, it's important to note that it's not just founders who have made a lot of money. I work with many founders and other high performers who have worked on their companies for eight to twelve years. Some of them haven’t had the outcome they were expecting, and now they're left asking themselves, "Who am I?" They're standing at the base of a mountain, looking up, not even knowing what the next mountain will be.

What are they looking for? It really varies depending on the person, but generally speaking, the big one is wanting a reset—and not necessarily knowing how to do it. For example, I have a client who refers to one of his parts as “get shit done.” As you know, I love IFS (Internal Family Systems), and this “get shit done” part just runs his life.

Johnny: What can that reset look like? 

Steve: In the context of this client, you have three months, six months, maybe a year. How do we design an engagement that fits the context of their life? In one case, the client needs a job in six months, and while I’m not an executive recruiter, we’re diving into what’s really important. What kind of life does he want to have? What does he want his days to look like? What kind of impact does he want to have? How much of his previous life and expertise does he want to bring into his next chapter? And so much more.

Johnny: Downshift sounds like it's accelerating what most people end up doing at some point in their life, which is reflecting on how I want to spend the time I have left. How do you hold someone's hand through that? What is the emotional arc of someone who's doing that? 

Steve:  The program is a ten-week decelerator, followed by a month-long integration period. When we bring people in, we start with a four-day retreat, where we begin teaching what we call downshift practices—these range from meditation techniques to immersing in nature, to cultivating presence. Our goal is to help them shift from fight-or-flight mode, as many have been for a long time, to a more present and resourced way of being. It’s about learning to slow down, regulate their nervous system and, as my teachers Jim and Diana from the Conscious Leadership Group say, starting to notice when you’re "above the line" or "below the line."

Each week of the program focuses on a different topic—everything from endings, death, and being with grief, to relationships with ambition, money, and achievement, core values, creativity and play, zone of genius, and so on. A lot of it involves removing resistance and old patterns—not rejecting them, but integrating them in a healthier way. This opens up space for intuition, creativity, and other attributes to come through.

How resistance shows up

Johnny: What did that resistance look like for you? 

Steve: The first resistance I experienced was largely unconscious. My consciousness and healing journey started a decade ago when I was on vacation, and I came across an ad for The Power of Now. I downloaded it on my Kindle, and it knocked me on my ass. At the time, I was largely numbing my existence with substances, especially cannabis, but also others. When I got home, I realized I needed to learn how to meditate. I had been numbing myself and resisting life in general. Nine months later I got sober.

About three years later, I quit my job as a partner at a big VC fund in New York. Then the resistance shifted—it became largely about money and the fear of not having enough. I was raised by a single mother, and while we had a great childhood in many ways, we lived paycheck to paycheck. That scarcity mindset around money is deeply ingrained in me.

There was also a moment where I knew I had to do nothing—I had been going hard year after year, even at the start of my coaching journey. I realized I needed to call a time-out. I told myself, "I’m just going to coach; I’m not going to start any new projects." During that year, I kept asking myself, "Am I going to be insignificant?" I had these voices in my head saying, "If you’re not on Twitter, if you’re not building something, are you going to be valued?"

A Man’s Work Medicine Cabinet

Downshift is a 10-week decelerator program combining in-person retreat and online sessions to help high performers transition with intention.

Applications are open until September 23rd.

If you're a high achiever seeking clarity, Downshift offers a transformative approach to intentional deceleration, helping you recalibrate and move forward with renewed purpose.

If you're ready to slow down and deepen your connection with yourself and life, this program is for you.

Learn more about Downshift.

How everyone can downshift

Johnny: For someone in their 30s, whether they've made it or not, they're definitely going through a period of prioritizing mental health and figuring out what balance looks like. What advice do you have for them?  

Steve: Everyone can downshift. I would explain it in two ways. First, ask yourself: is your identity fully tied up in work? Meaning, do you think about work all the time, are all your friends from work, and are all of your activities work-related? If your entire identity is wrapped up in work, with no multidimensionality, the transition will likely be harder. When the floor falls out from under you, you won’t have other practices or activities you love to fall back on. So, the first thing is to add some level of multidimensionality to your life—it’s really important.

The second thing I would suggest is incorporating practices that help calm your system. Some of my clients love taking a 30-minute walk in the middle of the day without their phone, or they sit on a park bench for 30 minutes with their phone off. What are those small practices you can introduce?

When you’re doing these practices daily, pay attention to the chatter in your head. Are you being self-critical? Are you telling yourself that you should be working, that this is a waste of time? Start writing down the thoughts you hear when you’re trying to give yourself this time and space. This is the kindling for growth. 

The goal of intentional deceleration isn’t to slow down for its own sake. It’s to connect more deeply with yourself, to start noticing your thoughts or feeling the tension in your body. These practices are designed to create that awareness, which can lead to self-discovery and, hopefully, to a greater sense of agency.

It’s like a snow globe—we keep it constantly shaken, so the snow never settles, and it’s always cloudy. Slowing down, even if it’s just for 30 minutes during the day, gives the snow a chance to settle. It helps with focus, renewal, and clarity. You might be surprised by the memories, ideas, sensations and feelings that come up. 

And in that stillness, you may find exactly what you need—whether it’s a new perspective, a sense of peace, or simply a deeper connection to yourself. Give yourself the gift of slowing down. You deserve it.

–

Applications are open for Downshift’s Fall Decelerator program until September 23rd, which kicks off with a 3 day / 3 night retreat in the Catskills of upstate NY. Apply here.

You can find Steve on Twitter here. 

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Last week I talked about how social capital is so important to things like health, income, happiness, and childhood development that we should reorient our lives around it. 

There’s plenty we can do as individuals to form stronger connections. But looking at America as a whole, what’s dramatically increased or decreased social capital over the years?

This week’s newsletter is about how, if we’re honest with American history, just 3 things have really moved the needle on men developing social capital en masse.

• Religion

• War

• Looking at screens

In my opinion, there’s good reason why.

Based Robert Putnam

It’s worth acknowledging that despite one thousand memes about the cure for male loneliness, everyone seems to disagree about how to address it. Robert Putnam, the Harvard sociologist whose work I focused on last newsletter, suggests wonky interventions like urban planning, campaign finance reform, more shared cultural activities, religious adherence, and more social forms of digital media. 

I think Putnam is being too diplomatic here. He’s a tenured professor who needs to seem reasonable. I think based Robert Putnam would admit that, while things like urban planning are helpful, nothing makes or breaks men’s social connectedness like religion, war, or looking at screens. Why? Because social capital peaks when young people, in groups, get hella emotional. 

Here are my receipts.

Religion

Even in 2024, religion plays a dominant role in men creating social capital. The largest men’s group in the US right now, F3 Nation, is a Christian based workout group. This is despite religion currently being in its flop era in America. It used to really dominate. Putnam points to America’s The Great Awakenings as times of peak social capital creation: 

The First Great Awakening (1730 - 1755) birthed evangelism in America. It spawned the largest gatherings of Americans at the time. Benjamin Franklin calculated a speech that the pastor George Whitefield gave at 30,000 people - 100 years before the microphone was a thing. It’s estimated 80% of Americans saw George speak at least once. These are Derek Jeter numbers.

The Great Awakening’s leaders preached that religion was not just about belief, but that it needed to be felt in the heart. For millions of Americans, this was the first time they were asked to analyze and share their feelings. Diaries were written. Church groups were formed. 

The Second Great Awakening (1800 - 1830) had “circuit riders” on the frontier that got audiences in an absolute tizzy about slavery, greed, poverty, and the consumption of alcohol. This was spurred by thousands of small gatherings. Each circuit rider sought to convert 10 - 12 core believers who would reinforce each others’ spiritual energy and eventually form a church. 

These gatherings led directly to the creation of reform societies, which catalyzed movements for abolition, temperance, improving prison conditions, and public school expansion. 

The Third Great Awakening (1850 - 1900) had two main forks:

1. The social gospel movement which spurred a lot of social reforms like ending child labor, breaking up monopolies, health and safety standards, not getting drunk every day, and anti-corruption laws. 

2. The Muscular Christianity movement which focused on sports as a method of self improvement for men. This spawned the YMCA and the Olympics.

My point is America has a tradition of practicing religion in extremely emotional ways. This tradition is wildly successful at inspiring folks to form bonds and advocate for change. 

It’s worth noting though that most converts of the Great Awakenings were women. Men were the preachers and plenty of men took part in them, but women were the majority of Awakening adherents.

Which brings us to the cultural force that is extremely male dominated.

A Man’s Work Medicine Cabinet

Downshift is a 10-week decelerator program combining in-person retreat and online sessions to help high performers transition with intention.

Applications are open until September 23rd.

If you're a high achiever seeking clarity, Downshift offers a transformative approach to intentional deceleration, helping you recalibrate and move forward with renewed purpose.

If you're ready to slow down and deepen your connection with yourself and life, this program is for you.

Learn more about Downshift.

War

War is destructive, but it also drives a huge amount of social capital creation.

The Revolutionary War created solidarity around yeeting the Brits off our back. This is obvious, but what I think is underappreciated is how it created a class of dudes who remain the absolute GOATs of social capital: the Founding Fathers. 

I don’t have many ways to measure their level of social connectedness, but I do have how many letters they wrote. Alexander Hamilton wrote 12,500 letters during his lifetime, George Washington wrote 18,000, Thomas Jefferson wrote 19,000, and Benjamin Franklin wrote 20,000. John Adams clocked a measly 1,100, and even that would have far exceeded the average American at the time.

In my opinion, beating the Brits was only 50% of the success of the Revolutionary War. The other 50% was creating a bunch of leaders who knew everybody. A young America was able to get stuff done because the Founding Father groupchat could not have been more active. 

The Civil War tore America apart like nothing before or since. It also spurred the greatest spurt of association building in American history. Here’s a chart from Bowling Alone that shows, by decade, the number of associations founded that enrolled 1% or more of the American population. 

Things are steady until the 1860s when we see a jump. As veterans reach their 30s and 40s, the number gets bigger. Political scientist Theda Skocpol calculated that half of organizations that enrolled 1% or more of Americans (e.g. The Boy Scouts, the PTA, NAACP, Red Cross etc) were founded between 1870 and 1920. The spine of American Civil Society rests in this period.

World War II had a similar effect, but on a more democratic scale. As Robert Putnam details in his book, the 1960s were the most social capital rich decade in American history across political participation, group membership, and time simply spent with friends. Why the 1960s? Because those who fought in WWII turned 40, which is when group membership peaks on average for Americans. 

Looking at screens

And then we have the stuff that detracts from social capital creation. TV, and more recently smartphones, are what Robert Putnam has found to be the single most consistent detractor of social capital across everything he’s studied. 

But even Putnam was too optimistic about the role of screens in society. He argued for smarter use of screens to aid social connectedness. What he didn’t anticipate was that being socially connected via screens - aka social media - is even more isolating than no screens at all. Like cigarettes and alcohol, none seems to be better than some.

While the data on high schools that have banned phones is early, anecdotally it’s a huge success. According to various reports, test scores have rebounded to pre-COVID levels, attendance at sporting events is up 50%, and simply having a conversation is becoming more common.

Besides social media being addictive, part of what makes phones so harmful for social capital creation is that it’s numbing. It’s the opposite of religion and war. According to Putnam, time studies have shown that watching TV is as enjoyable as cleaning your home. Social media can’t be too far off from that. 

What do we do with this?

We aren’t drafting people into war (thankfully). And religious anger in 2024 seems to be limited to abortion, which greatly limits it as a cultural force. How do we put social capital back on the map in a big way?

My hot take is that the three ingredients we need for peak social capital are:

1. Young people

2. Forming groups

3. Getting hella emotional together

My great hope is that we figure out how to do this without another world war. 

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at youth spiritual and wellness movements because I think it’s possible to bring back religious revivals. But I haven’t seen anything yet that fits the bill.

The closest thing we have to mainstream religious leaders are podcasters today. The top ones have huge reach and power, but the medium limits them to delivering information, not emotional experiences. 

I think this will change. Too many people want to feel and be connected again. If you have ideas on what that looks like…let me know.

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“Social capital” is the academic term for having homies. For “knowing a guy.” It’s being connected, in whatever shape or form, to other people. 

Everyone knows that having social capital is useful. What I didn’t know until recently is that, when it comes to social research, it’s the most useful possible thing to have. Like we should reframe the success = money thing to success = knowing people. It’s that helpful. 

Here’s what makes me say this. Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone in 2000. I finally read it, and while it’s a long and dry book, his 3 main points caused a reckoning for me. They are: 

1. Americans are becoming less connected to each other, by almost every metric worth tracking, since the 1960s.

2. The effect of this is detrimental to health, happiness, education levels, childhood development, and our physical safety.

3. The drivers behind this loss of social capital are watching TV, changes in cultural values, urban sprawl (people living farther away from each other), and people working longer hours.

This post is going to dive into these 3 points to convince you to reorient your entire life around building social capital. 

Social capital is going down

There are a lot of ways to measure social capital, and Putnam goes through 148 pages of them. Here are the highlights, which cover changes from the 1960s (when social capital peaked) until the book was published in 2000:

1. Time spent doing any kind of socializing at all is down by ⅓, despite leisure time being roughly the same.

2. Active participation in just about every kind of civic organization declined starting in 1969. This includes voluntary associations like the PTA, veterans associations, fraternal organizations like the Masons or the Lions Club, church groups, and labor unions. I say “active” because membership to organizations where you just pay dues and don’t need to show up (e.g. AARP, the NRA, Sierra Club) has held steady. It’s the showing up and volunteering that’s dropped.

3. Voting in America is down 25%, interest in public affairs is down 20%, and Americans are 50% as likely to attend a political function

4. Time spent on religious activities like church attendance and social gatherings is down 1/3rd. 

It’s sad. Point #1 alone is enough for me to believe we’re losing at whatever game we’re trying to play.

The benefits of social capital are everything we love and treasure

Putnam limits himself to 63 pages here, but this is where I started drinking his Cool-Aid. Having more social capital improves the following outcomes:

1. Better childhood development. This includes being born healthy, graduating high school, test scores, not going to jail, and not dying. When it comes to running the sociology numbers, social capital is second only to poverty regarding its effects on childhood outcomes. And when it comes to educational attainment, social capital is an even better predictor than poverty - specifically parents having friends. 

2. Safer streets. In states where social capital is higher, violent crime is lower and people are even less likely to agree to the question: “I’d do better than average in a fist fight.” 

3. More money. Getting a higher paid job is still primarily about who you know. 85% of young men found a job through someone they know. He cites one Atlanta study that found that each employed person in one’s social network increases one’s annual income by $1,400.

4. Health and happiness. Social connectedness is the most powerful determinant of our well-being, full stop. Being more integrated in a community leads to less colds, heart attacks, strokes, cancer, depression, and premature death. These improvements rival in effect size the negative effect of things like smoking, obesity, and high blood pressure. And the most common finding from research on life satisfaction both in the US and globally, is that happiness is best predicted by the number and depth of one’s social connections.  

This is…kind of everything that matters? 

Like how much more evidence do we need to start worshiping at the altar of social capital? 

What is driving social capital down

It’s 3 major things, from larger to smaller effect size.

1. Generational changes. Those who were born in the first two decades of the 20th century were simply the most civically minded people ever. Given war and whatnot. 

2. TV. TV sucks social capital out of society because people spend time looking at screens instead of connecting with one another. People (like me) complain about social media’s influence on young folks today. What’s interesting is that the exact same effects started to show in the 1970s as TV spread. If this book were updated today, I’m sure social media and mobile phones would be the #1 driver of decreased social capital by a long shot.

3. Space and time. Urban sprawl and working longer hours lead to increased commutes and more diffuse communities. These factors get a lot of airplay, but they’re lesser ones compared to TV and not being a part of the WWII generation. 

And I’m not sure if a rising sense of materialism is the cause or effect of social capital going down, but it’s certainly a part of this. Pollsters surveyed Americans on what the “Good life” meant to them in 1975 and again in 1996. In 1975, 38% of adults chose “a lot of money.” By 1996 that rose to 63%. It certainly feels logical that the more time we spend consuming things, including media, the more we value money.

What to do?

The answer is pretty simple: join groups and make friends. Here’s how I see people actually doing this today. 

1. Join an ol’ fashioned club. Today there seems to be a rise in running clubs, golf, members only clubs, and book clubs. The digital version of this online paid communities (I belong to 3 of them), where somebody assembles content and chat rooms around a niche interest. Digital communities are nowhere near as strong as in-person communities, but they’re great for being lightly connected to like-minded folks. 

2. Living near friends. More recently, a number of groups and services are starting to make this easier and publicly advocate for this. These groups include Radish in Oakland, Fractal in NYC, and Cabin for nomads. Month long pop-up cities from groups like Edge City serve as a hypercharged version of this, as they bring industry-specific folks (largely crypto, AI, and associated tech fields) together, in a small place, with daily events for collaboration. 

3. Limit social media and streaming. So much of social capital creation is simply connecting with folks instead of looking at screens (with the glaring exception of content creators, where that’s their job). Putnam even hypothesizes that the reason children develop healthier in states with higher social capital, is because they’re simply watching less TV. By limiting screen time, we automatically become more social. For tips on on how to do this, check out this interview with modern addiction guru Alex Olshonsky.

4. Text people. Some people are naturally great at keeping in touch with folks. These people are rare. The most effective way to do this that I’ve found for myself is a method taught by Jesse Itzler, an entrepreneur known for his vast rolodex.  He takes 3 minutes a day to text 3 people. That’s 100 people a month and 1,000 people a year that he now has a stronger connection to. He tends to focus on 3 things in these messages: compliment, congratulate, and console (depending on whatever is appropriate). It’s a delightful way to start the day, and has already started benefiting me in material ways I didn’t anticipate like job opportunities, creative brainstorming sessions, and receiving gratitude from old friends.

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I credit the ManKind Project (MKP) with launching the modern men’s group movement and reviving rites of passage ceremonies. MKP remains one of the largest men’s groups in the world and has trained the leadership of countless other men’s groups. Bill Kauth co-founded the ManKind Project in 1984, and it remains the backbone of the men’s work movement today. I interviewed Bill about the origins of men’s work processes, why men’s groups have grown and women/co-ed groups haven’t, and Bill’s advice to young men entering “the work.”

Inspiration for the first retreat

Johnny: The ManKind Project wrote the book on men’s work facilitation, and when I first witnessed it, it felt like magic. How did you create it? What sources of emotional work did you bring into the mix?

Bill: That's a question I happen to know very intimately. So 40 years ago when this thing started, Ron Herring, my fellow founder, and I were in the Milwaukee Gestalt Training Group. Gestalt was a new therapeutic model that was coming into prominence at that time, as was bioenergetics and a few others. We knew and practiced these cutting-edge processes.

It was actually one of those new emotion opening trainings that David and Patricia Durovy had brought into town. It was what we call “guts” but is ran all day and all night for a weekend. Ron and Rich and I actually participated in several of those events. We got to know emotional opening processes really well, so that when we created the training, we built that in as the essential core. Rich Tosi added the fierce masculine context for the training from his years in the US Marine Corps. Together we created a well-balanced training offering men both the fierce and tender.

Safety, trauma, and cathartic release

Johnny: What did the training and facilitation work look in the very beginning?

Bill: It was crude and rude and maybe even dangerous. Oh, my God.

Johnny: Well, now I'm really intrigued.

Bill: Oh, it was such a wild experiment. Honestly, those first couple of years, I went to the ER every other training. We’d designed it for men to be fierce with some challenging games, so we had broken bones, stitches or a tooth knocked out. Oh, jeez, seriously, the training was pretty dangerous when we first started it. But every time we’d tweak it and build in a whole new safety protocol so nobody'd get hurt again in that way.

It's become profoundly more safe now than it was originally, and it’s very rare now for anyone to get hurt. We’ve even taken a lot of care around trauma. As trauma emerged as a cultural concern we picked up on it immediately and brought that awareness in as another safety vehicle.

Johnny: What was the emotional core of the training?

Bill: As I suggested earlier, we knew from years of observing that emotional opening for men was crucial, so were looking for cathartic release. Sometimes, early on, we pushed a little too hard, but learned and developed new creative ways to get the same results. There was always an enormous amount of joy. As you know from having done the training, when a man pops through emotionally and suddenly finds his heart, there's that profound moment of joy that everybody can feel. You may also recall that in that open-hearted joy that each man gets to anchor his own transpersonal life mission that he’s carefully prepared ahead of time.

How it’s evolved

Johnny: Are there any aspects that you want to see change in how men's work is performed in order to reflect needs that you see today?

Bill: Some of our protocols are 40 years old. One of the powerful training models during those early days was EST, Warner-Erhard's creation. We used similar techniques like the accountability process. But that's gotten tweaked over the years. The old model that we used was pretty crude, and we'd have to force it and try to get you for something you didn't do.

But the sophistication of the young men (our sons and grandsons) coming in now is just stunning. I went to a training a couple years ago and the leader said “Hey, here's what accountability is (and would then teach them). Anybody got any issues?” And six guys stood right up and were ready to work. New processes keep emerging just to meet the demand of the younger, more sophisticated men.

Co-ed and women’s groups

Johnny: I'm curious why co-ed groups and women's groups have just not taken off in the same way as men’s group?

Bill: The obvious answer is that we need more separate gender work before we can come together . When we open up with just men we experience that special joy. I remember that joy when I first got in my men's group. Like, “holy shit, this is amazing. I'm actually with men that I can share my heart with and talk straight with. This feels so good.” This was back in the late '70s, and I didn't walk home from men's group. I floated home, and my wife received me with all this joy. So that was my first experience of a men's group way, way back when.

I suppose that even after 40 years there's not still enough authentic challenges for men to find their hearts. We talked about that earlier, our grandkids, that new generation, they've got a lot of gifts from us, but apparently, there still just isn't enough deep men’s work.

Johnny: And what do you think it looks like when co-ed groups do succeed?

Bill: Honestly, the little success I’ve seen suggests that a high level of toleration is imperative. I built a group that was equally balanced between men and women. It’s met every single week for eight years and it's still together.  What I see from the outside is a level of tolerance. There's some people that like each other as friends, but there's others who don't like each other much. But they stay together because “it's my community.” At that level, groups that hang together are like family. There's always crazy aunt Marian, and we all know she's nuts, and there’s also uncle Frank, he's a weird dude, but what the heck, he's family. So we put up with each other at Christmas and Thanksgiving. [laughs] I hate to say it, but that's the best I've seen.

Advice for young men

Johnny: When you started this out, there was a lot of experimentation, some of which was dangerous. Now things are more safe. But what about that spirit of the early days? What would you want the young men doing men's work now to know about?

Bill: The spirit of the early days of MKP still very much exists in the joy catalyzed by the work.  The New Warrior training was designed to pop men’s hearts open. Each man’s inner expansion of being is pure joy.  It’s been 40 years now and it has spread literally all over the world, into 27 countries almost entirely by word of mouth – one man trusting another.  The process seems to work in a variety of languages and leadership.  It still brings men into joy and that is the original spirit with which we began.

I would say to young men to actually do some men’s work to grow that special part of themselves.  And be discerning in choosing training possibilities that will take you into the joy of authentic growth and discovery.

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In the world of men’s groups, where dudes open about their insecurities, I see one insecurity come up more than others: “how do I get my balls back?” 

It doesn’t always sound like that, but I see it from men dealing with all kinds of issues. 

• I see it in the young father who feels trapped by work and domestic responsibilities. 

• I see it in men who feel like they can’t speak their minds for fear of being canceled or judged. 

• I see it in men addicted to alcohol, drugs, social media, or porn and who feel helpless in the face of it. 

And the more trapped, judged, and helpless men feel, the more this question is top of mind. 

One of the themes of this newsletter is that our personal emotional baggage plays out structurally. My hot take is that to the extent any political message resonates with a majority of men, it answers “How do I get my balls back?” 

Balls back on the right

Many conservatives on the right have made this central to their messaging. It’s a reason why Dana White, the CEO of UFC, spoke at the Republican National Convention. And why Tucker Carlson made a documentary about men losing their mojo called The End of Men. And why the picture of Trump raising his fist after the assassination attempt is now his most famous image. 

For a lot of men, little else matters. If you’ve got 100 different political messages, the one that sounds like Get Your Balls Back becomes the signal, and everything else becomes the noise. As Steve Bannon explains in this interview, politically this is his entire game. As of last week, Trump holds a 17% lead among men vs. Harris (56% to 39%). 

Balls back on the left

And what about the 39% who don’t view Trump favorably? I’d put good money on those dudes wanting their balls back too. Every liberal dude I’ve talked to expresses some version of that need. They just don’t make it a political issue. 

And this is where the issue is.

There is a hesitancy among liberal men to claim the Balls Back Agenda as their own. It carries a ton of emotional baggage:

• It can feel like it undermines women. 

• It’s an admission of weakness. 

• Some men feel undeserving of “wanting more.”

• It can feel tied up in negative stereotypes of men seeking dominance.

As a result, the whole issue is ignored in public spaces. 

The Balls Back Agenda ain’t a bad thing, but there’s a light side and dark side to it.

• The light side is a drive for agency and courage. 

• The dark side is a drive for domination. 

And as emotionally evolved as we think we are, we waffle between which one inspires us most. Sometimes we think of ourselves as Abraham Lincoln or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Sometimes we think of John Wick. 

Winning is good

I don’t think repressing all urges for domination is the answer. It mostly leads to some mixture of passive aggression, shame, and anger. We need some element of “winning.” And so this becomes the question: how can liberal men get clear on what “winning” looks like for them? And do so in a way that doesn’t feel repressed or shameful?

Some guys find the answer in making money. Or physical fitness. Or fighting authority. Or creating personal autonomy. Or creating social capital. Whatever game we choose, getting our balls back requires picking one and feeling good about it. And actually feel good about it.

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I recently attended Vibecamp, a 4 day summer camp for people who are terminally online and carry their weirdness with pride. Despite folks only knowing each other from online and despite there being no formal programming, the culture was strong as hell and 400 people showed up. It was an “oh shit this is interesting” moment for me. 

I think Vibecamp is some of the most interesting community building going on in the modern age, and talking to its chief organizer, Brooke Bowman (we checked – we’re not related), it ain’t by accident. I interview Brooke about different forms of building community and creating agency in life.

Wtf is Vibecamp

Johnny: Can you describe what Vibecamp is?

Brooke: I mean, that is the question. I think Vibecamp is still figuring out what Vibecamp is. But to give a little context, there is a bubble on Twitter. People get lumped together. They assume clusters and interests. And this one has happened to be fairly nerdy. People talk philosophy and science and things like that, but also shit posting. There are a lot of people who just like to be trolls and silly. It's a pretty densely connected group of people.

And it's not secret, but it feels like a secret layer of Twitter where everything isn't awful. There are conversational norms and etiquette around treating people. So hyping people up instead of tearing them down, friendly reply game, things like that. I joined Twitter in 2020, thought these people were really cool, wanted to hang out with more of them and ended up getting a crew together. The first Vibecamp was in 2022. It ended up being 400 people.

I joke sometimes that it feels like we're the one weird kid from our hometown who all happen to find each other online. As far as the event itself, it's got some similarities to Burning Man in that all the content is brought by attendees. We don't bring in keynote speakers. We don't bring in headline musicians, anything like that. If people want to DJ, they can DJ. We pretty much provide the infrastructure for the attendees, build a container for the attendees to create an event.

Johnny: How’d you get the confidence where you're new in the community in 2020, and two years later, you're organizing a 400-person camp?

Brooke: What gave me the confidence, I think, was probably that I spent around two and a half years homeless just prior to all of this happening. And it turns out that's the big bogey man for a lot of people - no ties, no social support network, just cast out. And it turns out when you do that and come out the other side, there's very little left to be afraid of on the scale of things. We made sure that there was food and shelter and the basic things were covered. So worst case scenario, I do a thing and people don't like it. And that is a very low risk compared to some of the other risks I faced.

How to build community

Johnny: And why community building?

Brooke: I think that was one of the things that I came out of the street realizing was that having friends is incredibly important. I'd always had a toxic independence and I had trouble relying on other people. And I also realized I didn't have friends for a lot of my life. I thought it was just hard to make friends. I wasn't doing anything to make friends. I wasn't hosting meetups. I wasn't finding people who like things that I like. I wasn't asking random people I run into whose vibes are good if they want to come hang out. I wasn't doing any of the things. And I think the best way to teach other people is to model the behavior. So I do those things both for myself and also to model it in public so other people can see, oh, this might be possible for me, too.

Johnny: What are your thoughts for community building in the age of Twitter?

Brooke: I think that we have barely begun to scratch the surface of what the Internet can do in terms of enhancing our lives. I think that it offers us an unprecedented opportunity to find the others, to find the people out there, whether they're on the other side of the world or not, that we're going to really click with and be able to do cool things with.

You can just do things. If people don’t like the way we do Vibecamp, or they want one where they are, you can do it. I make myself available to hop on calls. Vibecamp is at a different scale, but I'll hop on a call with somebody who's trying to do 30 people. Everyone that I know who's hosted these kinds of things are very available to give advice to other people who are trying to do it.

A Man’s Work medicine cabinet

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Alternative community building

Johnny: You’re involved in Network Societies and alternative forms of community building. Can you describe how you see community building evolving?

Brooke: I was looking at groups like Fractal in New York City and thirdspace in SF. Friendships are being made, and they're making group houses, and then they're making companies. And there are a few hubs like this around the world. I was imagining, in some amount of years, there are going to be a bunch of hubs, and they're all going to be sharing people. They're all going to be sharing knowledge. 

You find the people you have commonalities with, then you want to live near them, or maybe you hang out with them, and that makes you want to live near them, and then you figure that out. And you start with group houses, and then maybe you buy a plot of land or something. I don't know exactly how it'll go, but I think there's going to be more. 

And really, your life could massively change by living within walking distance of friends. I don't know that it's possible to overstate the effect that that can have. You just run into people and suddenly you're starting a company together or you meet their friend and now you've got a husband or a wife, and it's just a massive improvement in quality of life.

Building agency in life

Johnny: Agency is something that a lot of people are struggling with and want more of in their life. What advice would you have for folks who want more agency in their life?

Brooke: One big lesson that helped me in my transition from who I was then to who I am now was realizing that I was not only my worst enemy, I was pretty much my only enemy. There are a small number of cases where things just happened and there was absolutely nothing I could have done to stop it. But in the vast majority of times when I have been hurt or bad things have happened in my life, it has been a direct result of the choices I've made.

People talk about limiting beliefs and all that. That's a real thing. And I think that a mindset towards experimentation helps a lot because there are a lot of things that I ended up doing, even things to try to improve myself or whatever, where I was like, this isn't going to work. And I know this isn't for me.

I also think one of the most powerful things has just been following what's fun. There were so many things in my life where I would have this disembodied awareness that I like when other people do that thing, and then I would just never do it myself. And I think that probably just was most of my life. I was like, oh, I can just do those things.

Host the things that you want to go to. People tend to just be like, oh, well, if I want to hang out with my friends and have fun, I have to do it this way. And you don't. And it turns out that if you're not happy with a thing, there are going to be other people who also aren't happy with a thing. And the world is vast. And if you like inviting people over to read out loud with them, do that and people will like it.  

Where to find Brooke

• Find Brooke on Twitter

• Brooke is also building Network Society Camp: Three days of connection, coherence, and fun at a classic American summer camp for founders, builders, and leaders of the network society ecosystem. Check it out here. 

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There is no demographic group in America with a higher suicide rate than old white men. Despite depression being more prevalent among young people, and despite Native Americans having a higher suicide rate as an ethnic group overall, old white men come out on top. 

As an old white man in training, I’m especially curious about this. This newsletter is about what’s going on with old white men. 

Guns, expectations, and emotions

One explanation is old white men own more guns, and therefore are more successful at killing themselves. Other groups, such as women and youth, report higher rates of depression and suicidal ideation, but not higher suicide rates. Trying to tease out who is the most depressed gets messy when considering old white men are less likely to report depression, but there’s no denying that most suicide is by firearm. 

Then there are the theories that get at the psychological roots of the issue. Jose Del Real wrote a wonderful portrait of a man named Bill from Buffalo, Wyoming. Bill is a suicide prevention specialist. His job entails talking to old depressed men about their issues. I trust his takes. Bill’s theory is that old white men have a deadly combination of the following:

1. High expectations for their lives

2. A reality that does not come close to those expectations

3. Social norms which dissuade expressing negative emotions outside anger

The notion of self-reliance contributes to all 3 issues. Bill’s son Jeremiah jokes that it’s physically impossible to pick yourself up from your own bootstraps. The slogan was originally a joke, and now it’s become an ethos.

Today we call men who abide by this ethos “stoics.” I think stoicism is great if you’re Marcus Aurelius and you need a better mindset to help keep the Roman Empire together. But for most men, being “stoic” simply means you’re disengaged from your own emotions. You couldn’t “feel” sadness if you wanted to, and so those emotions come out sideways instead. It’s not the optimal mindset for dealing with the modern problems of isolation and depression.

Community and the decline of social capital

There is a romanticization of individualism that I think does white men dirty. I think this comes at the expense of what political sociologist Robert Putnam calls “social capital.” Others call it community.

To paraphrase Putnam, social capital is the trust that arises between people who connect with each other. He argues the cause of this decline is the decline of social organizations like church groups, bowling leagues, fraternal organizations, country clubs, and volunteer societies.

It is hard to overestimate the cultural glue these organizations had for white men. To take one example, it is estimated that 20% of American men belonged to fraternal organizations, not counting any other type of social group, in 1901. These are groups like the Freemasons, the Knights of Columbus, and the Society of Odd Fellows. They had silly names but groups like “The Knights of Pythias” had 250,000 members in those days. 

According to Putnam, cable television, urban sprawl, longer work days, and changing cultural norms drew members away from social organizations starting in the 1970s. It’s been getting worse ever since. 

A Man’s Work Medicine Cabinet

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What this looks like today

And so we have a need for new social forms. Putnam argues that today looks a lot like the post Civil War period, when war and the industrial revolution rendered existing forms of social capital obsolete. Dudes were depressed and so experimented with new forms of social organizations. These include:

• Civic organizations like the Boy Scouts (1910), the NRA (1871), and fraternal organizations

• Social movements like labor and temperance movements

• Public infrastructure like public schools and community centers

We could use more folks experimenting with new forms of connecting with each other. And some folks are! I have hot takes on a few of them:

1. Burning Man is the new Freemasons. Now hear me out. In their heyday in the 1700 and 1800s, Freemasons were a fairly elite group with their own moral code, events, and set of heterodox ideas around the nature of truth and God (which is why the Catholic Church has banned Catholics from joining since 1738). In my own words, they were the countercultural dudes with money who had a penchant for organizing things. Burning Man groups today feel similar. They have their own moral code around relationships (polyamory), inner-work (psychedelics), and community building (parties with a penchant for glitter). A lot of members come from tech. They organize a ton of events.
   

2. Startup cities are the new country clubs. Young people today don’t belong to country clubs for a bunch of reasons. Living in cities and not playing golf are two of them. One trend that seems to be taking its place is startup cities. The first was organized by crypto daddy Vitalik Buterin in 2023 and held in Montenegro (the country). 200+ digital nomads, largely in the crypto space, moved to Montenegro for 2 months to live and work together. Today, over a dozen of these startup cities have either already happened or are in the works. They provide a physical space for like-minded folks to network and become friends. I went to one last month and in the words of Toby Shorin, it was social capital creation on steroids.
   

3. Emotional work groups are the new church groups. Regular churchgoers tend to be more women than men. This is not specific to Christianity nor the US, but simply put there’s a hole that needs to be filled for men seeking spiritual and emotional support. One answer lies in men’s groups. Another lies in AA and other 12 step programs. Others lie in groups devoted to certain workout groups or hobbies where there is an emotional release (I would like to posit that mosh pits are such an example).

These are all fairly niche today. I don’t think they will be in 20 years. Something has to fill the void that our general lack of social cohesion has created. And while the rise of social media has perhaps led to more people opting out of in-person social organizations, all of these new groups use social media to market and organize. The new wave will rise because of the Internet, not in spite of it.

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Alex Olshonsky knows a thing or two about addiction. He’s the founder of Natura Care, a non-profit addiction programing harnessing psychedelics, and has recently launched a course focused on modern addictions (e.g. social media, food, work, pills) called Life Not Wasted. As the author of his blog Deep Fix Alex has been open about his journey with addiction, and how he helps folks through it. 

We talk about modern addiction, and especially what folks can do to lessen their dependence on social media. 

Defining modern addictions

Johnny: What modern addictions do you pay the most attention to?

Alex: I think the one that feels the most obvious these days is our dependency on digital media and screens. That is the one that I feel is the most nefarious, elusive, and most ubiquitous, where pretty much everyone I know has some detrimental relationship with technology. It's rare for me to meet people who just have a positive relationship with technology. So that's one that I pay a lot of attention to.

But beyond that, I think it's important that people pay attention to just wildly, potently engineered cannabis. I don't think a lot of people even realize - these extracts and vapes - what they're actually consuming is a plant medicine that's now being abused.

And then there are the pharmaceuticals, which is another sinister, very elusive mix where we have a lot of folks taking Adderall, Xanax, sleeping pills, anti-anxiety meds. 

Johnny: How do you see those issues manifesting in addiction right now?

Alex: Well, they're super secretive. I hear about it because I work with a lot of high functioning leaders and folks who aren't so high functioning who have really gnarly dependencies on these things. And no one's talking about it. And it's not quite cool in the way that it is to own other mental health malaises on social media, so you don't really hear about it publicly. But I meet a lot of people who have serious dependencies on Xanax, sleeping pills, multi-year Adderall and Vyvanse use under the table without a prescription.

Targets for reducing social media use

Johnny: When you're working with somebody who's trying to reduce their dependence on social media, what do you ask them to track and what targets do you have, if any?

Alex: I do this in my course. I do it with individuals that I work with. And I try to do it with friends and family, too, because I think everyone needs to do it. The screen time function within Apple is great. It really shows you how often you're using it. One of the first things that I think I ask people to do is to look at their weekly report and look at the daily average total and then your pickups.

Have you checked yours, your pickups?

Johnny: I did after I listened to your last interview. It was 103.

Alex: Okay, that's not bad. You want to get it lower, but it's really not bad. You run into so many objections with people who are like, well, I use my phone for work and Google Maps. The total screen time can be quite skewed based on life functions. Even mine is sometimes. When we had our baby, I was tracking contractions, and my screen time was higher.

The pickups, I think, is a more important metric in some sense, because it shows you how often that compulsion is happening. If you're picking up your phone 200 - 300 times a day, to text or to use social media or whatever it is you're doing, that's a lot of times to be doing something like that.

And a lot of people will think that they're probably at 50. And it's 300 plus. That's really high. And that's crazy common. It’s very normal for the millennial or Gen Zer to be at 150 to 200. Once you start getting below 150, it indicates to me that someone has a more conscious relationship with technology, which is still crazy because that's fucking high.

Then once you get to 60 and below – someone who's got it locked in and they're dialed. Good weeks, I'm at 60. In fact, I think that most people who are doing things in the digital world, it's very hard to be below that.

Now, that doesn't include computers, right? And so you have got to be really honest with yourself.

Now, in terms of screen time numbers for the phone, below two hours is good. Really, you'd want to be below an hour or less - below 30 minutes even. That's really good.

I'm curious, what was yours? I would guess maybe 2.5 to 4.

Johnny: I was a little over 3.

Alex: Yeah, that's pretty normal. What's crazy is that it's pretty normal to be 6+. And then you’ve got these Gen Zers who are in that 7 - 8+ a day. Jonathan Haidt’s book talks a lot about this.

And in my practice now one of the first things I ask is, “what is your screen time?” I think that it needs to become part of a model of care going forward. That's another one of my beliefs that I think in a few years from now, it will be commonplace for psychologists or doctors to ask “what's your screen time?”

Strategies for reducing social media use

Johnny: What strategies do you suggest for reducing screen time?

Alex

1. So the first thing is the tracking itself helps because it's just an awareness issue. You start noticing when you get that compulsory reach for the phone.
   
   Then when it comes to tactics, you can use the features for app limits. Personally, I find that it doesn't help people that much. It can be a great reminder, but a lot of people will just go past it, and there's a real easy way to shoot past it.
   
   

2. The other thing to do is to turn your phone into a really minimalist design: hiding a lot of apps except for the key ones, and being in permanent do not disturb mode.
   
   

3. And the other thing that's a little bit more counterintuitive that I recommend that folks do is get or use a separate device for personal scrolling.
   
   I hate to ask people to buy more technology, but for instance, what that could look like is you having your laptop for your work and really treating that as a sacred place for work. You have your phone, which is for essential communication, navigation, et cetera. And then maybe an iPad where that's your browsing, your fun time, your Netflix, your social media. And that I found in my personal experience helps me a lot.  It is really helpful for people to have that separation.
   
   

4. If someone wants to continue to use social media, a main recommendation that I give for them is to have a set time window. It's only after they've done their most important work for the day.
   
   

5. Another best practice and something I try to get everyone to do is to not immediately check the phone first thing upon waking. It doesn't matter what you do, but you have to do anything for yourself: make coffee, go for a walk, meditate. Ideally, go as long as possible before you check your phone.

Folks can find Alex at:

• His newsletter + podcast Deep Fix

• His new course on living a fulfilling life amidst modern addiction at Life Not Wasted

• The non-profit he co-founded Natura Care Programs 

• His somatic therapy and coaching practice 

  ---

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Here’s a conundrum most people on Earth face:

• We communicate for one major reason: to feel better. 

• The way we communicate does not reliably achieve this.

Here are the strategies I instinctually employ, as many dudes do, in any conversation when emotions are involved:

• Give advice (“Have you thoughts of X?”)

• Share about our own experience (“That happened to me last week”.)

• Emotionally rescue (“Don’t worry you’re a great guy”)

• Ask why (“Why do you think that?”)

In a cruel twist of fate, these are dogshit strategies for emotionally resonant conversations. Neither I nor the people I talk to walk away feeling significantly better. Or if we do, it does not last for long. 

And there’s a reason for this. People like feeling emotions, and these strategies are designed to soften or change emotions. 

• I give advice to people who are frustrated because I either don’t want to deal with their frustration. 

• I share my own experience or say stuff like “I’m so sorry to hear that” because I can feel someone’s sadness and hope that softens the vibe.

• While I might not realize it, when I ask “why” to someone, they stop feeling and start getting cerebral. 

Counterintuitively, if we want to feel better, we often have to fully feel “negative” emotions like anger and sadness before feeling “positive” ones. If I’m freshly pissed off, and someone is trying to cheer me up, I’m going to resist cheering up. I want to feel angry. And in fact the resistance to me being pissed off will likely keep me pissed off even longer. 

If someone invites me to fully explore how pissed off I am, I either do that for a short while and it gets out of my system, or all of a sudden I don’t feel pissed off anymore. Last week I gave a rock to a pissed off dude and invited him to slam it into the ground. His whole body softened and he simply dropped the rock. 

What do we do instead?

Every top executive coach that I’m aware of shares a similar strategy for solving for this. Tony Robbins, Matt Mochary (coach to Sam Altman and the CEO of Reddit, the founder of Instacart) and Joe Hudson (founder of Art of Accomplishment) all teach a version of something called active listening. 

Why?

Because they don’t have a choice. 

To date, active listening is the western world’s top answer to a number of similar issues:

• How do you get to the bottom of the thoughts and feelings another person is experiencing?

• How do you replace small chat with deep conversations?

• How do you hold space for someone?

It was originally devised in the 1950s by psychologist Carl Rogers, whom psychologists rate as the second most influential clinical psychologist ever (behind Sigmund Freud). The basic concept is that if you listen to the totality of what someone is communicating, good things happen. And by giving a name to that phenomenon, active listening became a skill people started playing with.

The first to fuck around with active listening were parents. A book and workshop called Parental Effectiveness Training popularized active listening in the 1970s, as parents were seeking non-combative ways to deal with their bratty kids.

Today, doctors use it to learn about patients. Sales men use it to engage new prospects. Business leaders use it to understand how their employees are dealing with issues. It’s friggin everywhere. 

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What does it look like?

Carl’s original book on it is vague as hell. As a result, there’s a lot of different iterations on what it looks like. The simplest version I’ve found of active listening consists entirely of doing just three things: 

1) being silent 

2) echoing back their words 

3) asking clarifying questions (except the aforementioned “why”)

I like this because it is dead simple and yet effective everywhere. The guy who taught this to me, Bill Wich, teaches this to CEOs and prisoners at Folsom. The only skill required for this is staying curious and the ability to not talk about myself.

But there’s plenty of other riffs on active listening that are useful for different needs:

• Tony Robbins teaches folks to read people’s physiology (posture, breathing, tone of voice, movement), focus (the subject of what someone is talking about), and language (what words are they choosing to describe the situation). This helps you listen to the read the full state of what someone is experiencing and attend to it. 

• Chris Barber wrote wonderful document on a version of active listening he calls “resonance.” It focuses on how to make people feel understood.

• Matt Mochary wrote a document for managers dealing with emotions in the workplace.

• Joe Hudson teaches a whole course on active listening called “Connection” where he teaches students to view life with a sense of vulnerability, impartiality, empathy, and wonder. The key to this in conversation is to focus on asking “how” and “what” questions.

Compassion with a masculine flair

While I’ve seen men and women benefit from training in active listening, dudes get especially jazzed by the practice. I think that’s so for two reasons:

1. Women ask questions about emotional stuff all the time. I don’t even think it would occur to most women to give that practice a name.

2. Active listening is a portal into what empathy looks like with a masculine flair. I got interested in active listening after watching former Folsom Prison inmates do it in a men’s group. It looked like compassion without comfort. They sought emotional truth without wanting to share in those emotions. It resonated.

Listening is one of those skills that feels silly to practice. But it’s a skill, and we do a ton of it, and doing it better transforms the fabric of life. Some day, I hope one of these executive coaches figures out how to market the shit out of it.

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Before it was cool, Paul became a “solopreneur” who quit his job, found meaning, and built a life with a radically different relationship to work. He chronicles that journey in his popular book “The Pathless Path” and with his paid community, which I’m a part of. I find Paul’s approach to work surprisingly practical and soulful. Here’s our interview. 

Johnny: You encourage folks to get clear on the question: “Why do you work?” When folks get honest with themselves, what are the reasons you most commonly hear?

Paul: The interesting answer here is that there is no common answer. The most common reaction is something like “oh wow, this is actually a pretty deep question. There are a lot of layers here.” The average worker will work 80,000 hours or so in their life and the number of hours people spend thinking about their relationship with work is much less.  Some of the surface-level answers people give are money, duty, sacrifice, to do challenging things, to make a living and so on. There is no wrong answer but often work is serving deeper needs that we don’t notice. Our deeper desires like being appreciated, being loved, being respected. These are important to realize too, because they can help you understand when they are missing and also when someone might be trying to take advantage of you. 

Johnny: If the answer is “money” or fulfilling the role of a provider, what do you ask that person next?

Paul: I just keep asking, “What else?” I don’t think people realize how much we attach to work. We put moral judgment on work. We can feel that by the guilt or shame we feel when we are without a job or work. People have tremendous anxiety if they aren’t “doing things.” Where does that come from? People rarely think about it. In the US, we are suspicious of people not doing their fair share. We have elaborate government programs to test if people are taking advantage of the system. In other countries, like the UK and places like East Asia, standing out too much is shamed. I found it interesting in Taiwan when a train crashed that the head of the rail system immediately resigned. You’d never see that in the US. 

The follow on questions I like to ask after all this digging are “is that enough?” and “Is this the life you actually want?” For many people, it’s not. People say work is for money but deep down they desire a much different setup for their life. It can be hard to realize you are playing the wrong game

Johnny: A lot of folks want to be a solopreneur for the autonomy it gives them. At the same time, a lot of folks find social media soul sucking. Do you see folks carving paths as solopreneurs without social media? If so, what do those look like?

Paul: I left the corporate world because I didn’t want to be soul sucked and am on this new path trying to do the opposite. I use some social media because I find it generative and enjoyable. If you are using something that drains you, that’s incredibly risky. It will undermine your chances of staying in the game, which is the whole game. Since I come from consulting, I know many freelancers build a solid life without social media. You don’t need more than a few clients to make that work. In that setup, social media can be a distraction.

The key here is to be honest about what you want, the kind of work you are willing to do, and what it requires. If you are trying to build an audience, you WILL need to use social media. The key is figuring out:

1. Pragmatically, which ones are effective in serving me? Twitter used to be a great place for me. Now I don’t find it as generative for my thinking or a good source of ideas.

2. What can I use such that it makes my life better? I mostly saw social media as a way to build a life. If I was meeting great people in person consistently, that was the only metric I cared about. At certain points, I found that on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Social media “scenes” always change. There have always been places where the nerdy internet types have found each other. It was Quora and then Medium and then even Linkedin and then X and now I see a lot of people in places like Warpcast and Substack Notes.

Generally, question the assumptions. If you are running a script like “I must use social media and it will suck” you are already doomed. Don’t do that to yourself. Start with your own interest and the life you actually want to build and find work and activities that fit into that.

Johnny: For folks thinking about exploring different career choices, you give them a menu of options for taking time to explore (e.g. taking an afternoon off to think about their relationship to work, convert employee work to contractor work to create flexibility, do a sabbatical). Can you walk me through the options you see folks having success with, from least to most intense?

Paul: Sabbaticals appear to be the most potent work-psychotechnology. Consistently people are able to get a broader perspective on their lives, reconnect with themselves, discover lapsed hobbies, and generate new ideas for their life. Some go back to their jobs but many don’t.

Save for a sabbatical like you save for a fancy dream home. It’s worth it.

Almost everyone I talk to wishes they took one earlier.

At the most basic level, the thing I want people to experience is that many of us are going through the motions of our life. A “wander” without a destination for two hours is a great way to notice that your brain is constantly pointing you in specific directions and craves having a plan. What does it feel like to not have a plan? Is it terrifying? If so it might be worth experiencing. Often it’s ALSO exciting and people want to follow it despite it being unsettling.  

Johnny: A lot of books espouse ways to test a new startup idea every week. You ask folks to constantly feel into what kind of work they want to be doing. How do you make a practice out of feeling and answering that question? How do folks figure out what “good work” looks like for them?

Paul: Be ruthless about what you don’t want to do. This can be hard because it often means letting go of things that might generate money or other things you should do. For example, the question about solopreneurship and social media. Assuming you MUST do those things is such a bad starting point. I embrace my own framework of “ship, quit, learn”:

1. Ship something as fast as possible

2. Design it to quit within the first few weeks or first month

3. Learn: The only goal is to see what the experience tells you.

Finding writing for me in 2018 was beautiful and devastating. I knew I wouldn’t be able to make money but also knew it was something I loved so much. I had to tinker with a lot of stuff on the side to make money and make sure I found stuff that was “good enough” in that it didn’t drain me but wasn’t too much time such that it took away from writing.

From 2018 to 2021 90% of my “work time” was spent writing and I made about $3k from it. I got by on about $35-45k from various things I did on the side and it was enough. 

Johnny: How can folks find you and your stuff?

Paul: My book is at pathlesspath.com

And the newsletter is at newsletter.pathlesspath.com

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