Young Men Awake: A Manifesto, in Conversation

Before we built anything, we sat down and asked each other the questions — the real ones. What are we actually here to give young men, and why does it matter? This is that conversation, lightly edited. It's the closest thing we have to a manifesto.

— James & Pete

Part One: James asks Pete

James: So — riff for a minute. What excites you most about working with young men? You walk into a room full of guys who don't know you, who've got some vague sense that men's work matters, or that they need help, or that there's more. What is it you're bringing them into?

Pete: I want to widen — obliterate, even — the boundaries of what they think a man has to be. What success looks like, how much it's supposed to cost them. I want to hand them new lenses for discerning what a worthwhile life actually is, and I want that life to be weirder and wider and wilder and more curious and more mysterious than the one they've been handed.

Culture is a strong planet. It pulls on how we think and feel and behave as men, on what we set our sights on. I want to bring another planet into the room — one that's way more expressive and open and alive.

And then I want to back that up with real resources. Community and curriculum. Community and circle. Because a new way of being has bambi legs at first — it's wobbly, it's new — and the feedback most guys get from the culture will try to shove them back toward the old way. So they need hubs. Places to return to, with men and mentors and elders who can look at them and say, plainly: you're doing great. That's the work. Offer another possibility that enlivens them, then build the communities that keep that aliveness fed.

James: How was that made possible for you? Is there a moment that stands out where you went, "this is what I have to do with my life"?

Pete: Showing up to an open house at the incubator in Western Mass, sitting in on a men's group for the first time — guys running the rounds, the lover, the warrior, the magician, the king. Experiencing that was an oasis. Most of the other times another planet came into my world to grow me, it was scary, it came with resistance. This one wasn't. It was just, this is where I want to be.

James: And who do you get to be now, because of that?

Pete: A much handier mechanic. Before, I had a busted-up old truck — it ran, but it needed work, and learning on it gave me tools. Now I've got that same access to myself. When I'm stuck, or scared, or contracted, I've got a whole toolbox I'm practiced with. I don't always remember to use it, and I don't always choose to — but it's there.

What I've noticed is that there's always some inkling of what I want my life to be, and then there's fear and shame that rises up to keep me from steering toward it. Before this work, I got through that fear by grace, by luck, just gritting it out. Now the choreography is in my body. I have practice going toward the thing, living through the fear and the shame instead of waiting for them to pass.

James: Here's the thing I keep landing on. You live with a lot of fear — you'll say so yourself — and you still build the whole vision. You moved to Idaho, built a family compound, rented the excavator, put in the road, kept death close. Risk after risk. So: why are you our guy? Why are you our guide?

Pete: Because I'm on fire too. My whole body's in flames, same as the guys I'm working with — I've just been at the work of putting it out a little longer. I think I'm a fair canary in the coal mine. You've probably got wants and pressures you never chose, you've been told what a man is and what success looks like, and you're burning under it. I'm right there with you, and here's how I'm working with mine.

I don't offer the high dive — the two-and-a-half flips, the no-splash landing. I don't have that. What I offer is this: when you're standing at the top of the board with pee dribbling down your trunks, I can say I've done that. And I'll show you the flop. The loud one, the one that turns you red. And you'll see I didn't die. I offer the view of an ordinary man, trying — blooper reel included, not cut. That's the whole point. A guide who only shows you the highlights teaches you to hide. I'll keep the bloopers in, and I'll bring a wave of grace for everyone else trying to live their lives as themselves.

Part Two: Pete asks James

Pete: Can I turn it around? The question you started with — if you could wave a magic wand, bring these guys through the carwash so they come in one way and leave another — what do you want for these young men?

James: In 2021, on retreat, a mentor I deeply look up to said, "I love young male energy. This energy is going to save the world." It was the first time someone I respected told me there was something inside me that important. Not an energy to tame, or tone down, or chop up and damp down — an energy center, Tony Stark style, capable of incredible things. I'm not sure the world needs saving exactly, but think how much more fun, connection, and beauty we could be having. That's why I love being around you and I love your life — it's a beautiful life, and it's a product of how you've spent your time.

So I keep wondering: what if every young man let that little ember in him get oxygen? Let it catch, get a tinder bundle on it, and start to blaze?

Pete: Say more about the ember.

James: I've been thinking about school lately. For me it was the epitome of we are going to put that fire out. Squash the aliveness, numb it, sugar it out, drive it with some insane ideal of success. My whole life has been a rebellion against that earliest instruction to go small.

What I want instead is a world full of wacky, alive weirdos. The guy in the airport who leans over to the exhausted new mom and says, here, let me hold him — and she trusts it, because he's clearly safe and clearly alive. The young guy thrilled to go split wood at his neighbor's and build a fire in the backyard for no reason but the joy of it. The one who tells the younger guys, let's stay up all night — meaning, let's treat this whole life as the incredible gift it is. Those are the spaces I want to be in.

Pete: And how do you get there?

James: Two things, woven together. The craft and the community.

On a recent young men's retreat, after some intense process work, we just started a cipher — freestyling — and one motif kept coming back: carpet work makes it work. The willingness to go inside and do the deeper emotional work is the floor everything else stands on. It's the mechanic's toolbox. Like the Little Mermaid singing about all her trinkets — "I've got fifty of those." I only reach for three on a normal day, but I know fifty, and when a brother's in real need, he might need one of the other forty-seven. Young male energy saving the world means young men armed with capacity and heart and vision.

And the community is the part culture won't give you. Your squad. The guys who'll reflect back the thing you do that's just how you are — maybe not a career, but the who of who you are. That matters so much more than the what of what you do, and the what is most of what got downloaded into me.

Pete: What about success? Because your life doesn't look like the brochure.

James: No, and I'm always unlearning that standard. I live in a sweet little house in Vermont, half of it unpainted, rough trim up, the yard's part rubble pile, and I've got a rusting truck I fall in and out of love with. By one measure, I haven't made it. And I'm wealthy beyond measure. I love how unconventional my life gets to be — and how conventional, too, because I still get to do meaningful work that looks "successful" by some standard, but that's not how I'm holding my life. I'd love to help young men liberate themselves from any should, any paradigm downloaded into them, and ask the only question that matters: okay — what is it for me?

Pete: And when a guy actually does that work?

James: When you really help a man get to his own inner authority and authenticity — all the way — you don't get a man who wants to cause harm. You don't get one who isolates. You get a man in touch with real juice, and that energy doesn't hoard. It wants to serve. It gets to feel the beauty of giving. A lot of my job is just unclogging the log jam so that can flow. There was this game at my grandma's house — Kerplunk, all those marbles held up by a tangle of sticks. I'm a professional kerplunker. I see the big one, the load-bearing fear, and I ease it loose so everything held back behind it can finally move.

Pete: That's it — you're playfully surgical with it. A lot of dexterity in how you move in to help that beauty come out. Tell me more about what that's actually like for you.

James: I spent an inordinate amount of time learning how to do it, and I want to bring other guys into it. My dream is to be in a group where one man is in his process and ten others are seeing something I'd never see — bringing their own wisdom, getting weird, even saying the wrong thing and triggering something that opens a whole deeper process, more beautiful than anything I could have orchestrated.

Underneath it is a belief I keep forgetting and keep getting to remember on a deeper level: all of life is good. The painful thing that happened to you — the wound, the rejection, the heartbreak — was inseparable from who it made you. You got slammed. Your life slammed you. And that is the Tony Stark origin of the incredible being you've become. I've been lucky to have people kerplunking and holding me through all of it.

When young men learn to see through that lens, it becomes the lens of peace. You can meet anger, meanness, fear — even a stranger screaming at you from the roadside — the way you'd meet a five-year-old who calls you stupid: whoa, tell me more. Tell me what's in there. There's almost always a deeper ask underneath. Learning to relate to life from that place is, quietly, the whole curriculum.

The Through Line

We hear the same thing in both of us. There is a tremendous amount of fertile, latent beauty in our young men — aliveness that's ready to flow and just waiting for the dam to break. We want to help it break. We don't believe there's a single guy out there who doesn't have it in him; the only reason it isn't showing yet is that it hasn't been watered. It hasn't been pulled loose.

This way of moving through the world can land you in a life that's nothing short of something you could die laughing about on your deathbed — yes, I sent it. And it won't be polished. That's the part we love most.

You don't have to stick the landing.

You have to jump.

— Young Men Awake