Campfire Conversations

I first wrote about Carlos Walker last September after the Returning Citizens Luncheon in Virginia. We’d met the year before when something about his art pulled me in. Since then, we’ve built a friendship through weekly texts, phone calls, and the kind of check-ins that start with “love you, bra.” Carlos spent 13 years in prison. He’s an artist, an author, and someone who has given away 3,500 book...

Back in September, I wrote about meeting a man named Briddge Orius at the Returning Citizens luncheon in Norfolk, Virginia. We had maybe ten minutes together. We instantly connected over our mutual love of Ziggy Marley’s “Love is My Religion.” At the end of our conversation, he was recommended a book that would help shape some of my thinking. “Love” by Leo Buscaglia. He told me it was the book tha...

Nearly ten years ago, my wife, Becca, and I drove up to Maine Primitive for a survival course. I thought I knew what I was signing up for. A Marine-turned-survival-instructor in rural Maine. I was expecting hardcore. Toughness. Grit. What I experienced was something completely different. I experienced a kindness and compassion from Michael Douglas that helped change how I see strength, especially...

If you’ve been following my Heart-Strong Adventure for a while, you know Sam Harris. You know he spent 24 years, 8 months, and 10 hours in prison. You know he came home on July 1, 2024 and immediately started working to help others do the same. You know he co-founded the Re-Entry & Recovery Alliance. You know he goes back into the facility where he was incarcerated and facilitates the I OWE MORE g...

I’ll be honest. I was a little starstruck sitting across the fire from John Biewen. John is the creator, producer, and host of Scene on Radio, a documentary podcast out of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. Over the past decade, he has taken on some of the hardest subjects in American life. Race and the invention of whiteness. Democracy and its fragility. The patriarchy. Capitalism...

Kharma Amos came out as a lesbian in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1990. She was 18 years old. It wasn’t the most accepting place or time. Her entry into adulthood shaped everything that followed. As she told me around the fire: “My entry into adulthood was one of resistance to hate. Of me and people like me being discriminated against in various ways at that particular time in history. And so, when I first...

Tom Haslett spent years in the investment management industry, climbing the ladder, doing everything right. Then one day he looked around at the people in positions above him and realized something uncomfortable. There was nobody there he actually wanted to become. That realization changed a lot. Today, Tom spends his time thinking about questions most people avoid. What is money actually for? How...

Twenty-five years ago, Chris Lombard had never been around horses. He was going through a breakup, standing in a barn, when he looked into a horse’s eyes and saw something that changed everything. Not excitement. Not fear. Just contentment. A state of being fully present, fully at peace with life as it was. That moment set Chris on a path he never could have planned. Today, he’s known across the U...

Kerem Durdag came to the United States at eighteen with two hundred dollars in his pocket and a dream that felt impossible. Turkish/Pakistani and raised under dictatorship, he arrived at a Catholic Benedictine university in Minnesota as a Muslim immigrant who had never heard of the state before landing there. What happened next helped to shape the trajectory of Kerem’s path. Monks saw something in...

For nearly two years, I’ve been sitting with an idea. It started as a feeling more than a plan. A sense that some of the most meaningful conversations happen not in studios or conference rooms, but around fire. Where the crackle of wood and the flicker of light soften our defenses. Where we stop performing and start being present. This summer, that idea became real. I sat down with Elmer Moore, a...