5 Sheep and 140 Men

6min Read

Freedom Builders, I'm still coming down from this one.

Thursday afternoon I had a knife in my hand and 5 sheep to answer to.

We harvested all 5 on site through Sacred Ceremony and broke them down by hand.

The kitchen turned them into a lamb stew that fed 140 men.

A year ago I didn't know a thing about sheep. This week I got to stand in that work and be useful, because of everything the last 12 months put me through.

Why You Should Care:

• The reset is the work: 5 days off grid with 100-plus men did more for my clarity than any quarter of grinding.

• Community gets built early: The room held a breaking man, and it held me, because the reps were done long before anyone needed them.

• The inner work stays yours: No tool, no model, no chatbot is going to sit in your edge for you.

140 Men and a Knife

This was Manifest. Second year.

Last week I told you I was headed there as a pod leader. This is the part where I tell you what it did to me.

These are men who chose the woods over Disneyland. 5 days, no outside noise, workshops every morning, elders, edges, and a whole lot of permission. A place where it's okay to cry, okay to break down, okay to be held.

I got to be of service. I led a pod, 5 men. Checked in each day, practiced my listening, helped each guy feel seen and heard.

Then one man broke down and needed holding. 100 men leaned in and gave him their weight. I've never felt anything like 100 bodies deciding, all at once, that one man wouldn't fall alone.

I sat through a 2-hour elder council too. Men who earned their wisdom, handing it down to the rest of us youngins. I left with more hope and more clarity about the kind of man I want to be.

And the food. Made from scratch, sourced clean, served with care every single day. I couldn't compliment that kitchen enough.

Five days off grid. Refilled my cup. And the day of the slaughter, I didn't even make it home.

I ate a big meal, then went straight to my van, and went down. Woke up once to brush my teeth, then dropped again. 11 hours total.

The body keeps the receipts for a day like that. Mine shut all the way down to process what it had just been through.

Name It, Write It, Say It, Then Move

Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I hit an edge.

Alarm bells. The kind you can't talk yourself out of.

The edge itself: how do we actually heal the divide between the feminine and the masculine, and own that it's going to take both of us to navigate the toxic terrain we're all living in.

Here's what I did, and it's the one move I want to hand you.

I didn't react. I sat with it first. Then I mapped the whole thing out, start to finish, until I could actually see what was bothering me. Wrote it out. Then I brought it to a few men I trust and said it out loud. Only then did I take action.

Name it. Write it. Say it to someone. Then move.

That order matters. Most of us skip straight to reaction, or we bury the bell and call it "everything is fine".

I left the writing itself right here if you want to see what an edge looks like on paper.

And this is the part the machines can't reach. I use AI all day. It drafts, it builds, it takes work off my plate. It didn't sit in that edge with me. No chatbot is going to do your inner work for you. But it did help clarify what I was thinking.

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Sunset Set at the Park

On my way home from the retreat, I skipped the closing ceremony for one thing: a sunset set at a local park to kick off summer.

I dropped some old Janis Joplin for a cute older couple who wandered up in the last 40 minutes. They ate it up. Found a little surprise on their evening walk they didn't see coming.

That's the other way community gets built. You show up in person and hand people something real, right in the moment they're standing in.

I'm back on the decks this Saturday, July 4th, at Maritime Heritage Park in downtown Bellingham, 6 to 9:30, right in front of the fireworks. Then I'm walking down to catch the show with my kid.

Tech Corner

Funny thing about my life. Same week as the men's retreat, I ran a Claude cohort, walking a small group through the workflows I use to pull busywork off my plate and my wife's.

I even picked up a new client I met there, an architect and coach trying to redesign how people live and work so they feel powered up instead of alone. After 5 days in the woods with 140 men, that one felt less like a coincidence and more like the work finding me.

Same week, Sonnet 5 shipped. Frontier-level agentic muscle in a smaller, faster form. My setup now: Fable 5 for planning and brainstorming, then hand off to Sonnet 5 to go do the work.

• The strongest model out is also the priciest, and it's rented: Anthropic's Fable 5 launched at #1 on the independent Artificial Analysis index, and it tops their cost-per-task chart too. I fed it 3 years of my brand and got a level of clarity I'd been chasing for months. The catch: access and pricing on a model like this move without asking you. Own your prompts, your context, and your exports so you can walk to the next one.

• NotebookLM now turns your notes into 60-second videos: Google just shipped Short Video Overviews: drop in your material, get a one-minute vertical explainer on a single idea. Worth a look this week if you teach anything to anyone.

The Only Invitation I Have This Week

A person in your corner. That's it.

A new client named Barron said it better than I could after we linked up in person:

That's the whole thing. If you want an ally while the ground keeps shifting, someone who's built the life and the systems and can help you build yours, let's talk.

15 minutes. No pitch, just a real conversation about what you're trying to build.

Quick one before the takeaways. Which stuck with you more this week, the knife or the circle of men? Hit reply and tell me, I read every one.

Today's Takeaways:

• Reset on purpose: 5 days unplugged bought me clarity no grind ever has. Book yours before you're running on empty.

• Run the edge in order: Name it, write it, say it to someone you trust, then act. Reaction isn't processing.

• Keep the inner work yours: Let AI carry the busywork. Don't hand it the part only you can do.

Stay grounded and free.

If you're local in Bellingham, WA love to see you at the park for July 4th.

Joshua | The Holistic Tech Wizard

The Three Doors

• Foundation, "try it out": Blueprint Session, $1,000. A focused live architecture session. Stalled idea in, working map out.

• Build: Compass Build, $3,500. Done-with-you over 3 to 4 weeks, to a working system and a Living Document.

• Community: Beyond The Matrix, the free independence layer. Step in and build with the circle.

Pass it on: Know someone building a life-first, owned version of the same thing? Forward this to them.