The Kid Nobody Picked: An Open Q&A With My Men's Group

Every Wednesday morning I get on a call with the men inside Becoming a Dominant Man. They bring their questions about the course, their marriages, their kids, their fear, their sex lives, the thing they've been avoiding for six months. I answer. That's the format, and it works.

This time I flipped it.

These men open their lives to me week after week. They tell me things they've never said to another human being. And I realized I'd never really given them the same in return, at least not in a long time. So I opened the floor and told them to put me on the spot. Ask the hard questions. Ask the things about me and my life that haven't made sense to you. Personal questions, nomad questions, whatever you want to know.

What came back was a mix of the light and the heavy, which is exactly how life actually goes. We talked about my bike. We talked about the friend who died a few days earlier. We talked about how you get a dog to the vet when you don't have an address, and about the seven year old inside me who still isn't fully convinced anyone wants him around.

This is that conversation, expanded. I've taken the questions the men asked and gone further into them than I did on the call, because a live answer moves fast and some of these deserve more room.

You can listen to the full episode here: Listen to Episode 148 | Watch on YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

"What bike do you ride?"

We started light, and I'm glad we did.

I ride a Sava. S-A-V-A, sometimes branded Savadeck. It's a Chinese carbon fiber frame builder that makes genuinely high end stuff, and mine is built out with full Shimano Dura-Ace. About fifteen and a half pounds. Pearl white frame with a 50 millimeter deep wheelset color matched to the paint, so the wheels have this reflective pearlescent quality when the light hits them. It is cool as hell and it is fast and I love it more than I probably should love an object.

The reason I ended up on it matters more than the specs.

Dawn and I were both riding Trek hybrids from around 2012. Aluminum frames, carbon forks, flat handlebars. Perfectly fine bikes. But I've got arthritis in my shoulders from years of beating myself up in CrossFit, and flat bars give you exactly one hand position. As I started riding more miles, that single fixed position started tearing my shoulders apart. I wanted drop bars for the simple reason that they give you three or four places to put your hands, and rotating through them keeps any one joint from taking all the load.

That's a small physical detail, but it's a decent picture of how I approach most things now. The problem wasn't that I needed to toughen up and ride through shoulder pain. The problem was a design constraint that gave me no options. Change the constraint, and the willpower question disappears.

Then there's the part where I got a carbon racing bike and Dawn was still on the Trek. I'm a bigger guy with longer legs, and I was already faster than her on equal equipment. Put me on a fifteen pound race bike and it stopped being a shared ride. She got on mine once, I dropped the seat for her, and she immediately said "oh, I want one." She's now on a pearlescent red version of the same bike.

I'll bring it into a call sometime so the guys can see it.

"Any sex toys for you?"

The men have heard me talk plenty about toys for Dawn. Someone wanted to know what I've got.

I have one. Her name is Dawn.

I'm not being cute for the sake of it. I've never seen a male toy that appealed to me, and I'm genuinely open if someone has a recommendation. But the honest answer is that my erotic life is oriented almost entirely toward her body, her responses, what I can draw out of her. That's where the charge lives for me. Dawn, meanwhile, has a closet. She keeps finding new favorites and the old favorites don't get retired, so the collection compounds. It's a fun hobby.

There's something underneath the joke worth naming. Her surrender is the thing I want. So the toys in that closet are mine too, in the only sense that matters to me.

"What's your favorite and least favorite part of living in an RV?"

Same answer for both. Novelty.

We're parked on gravel in the middle of the woods in northern Wisconsin as I write this. By December we'll be in Florida. Last February we were in southern California. Everything in between is new: new grocery stores, new landscapes, new accents, new regional weirdness. My life is structurally novel, every day, by default.

That's incredible for me. I think novelty does something for a human being that nothing else replaces. It's why people count down to vacations. It's why a new city makes you feel awake in a way your own neighborhood stopped doing years ago. I get that as my baseline instead of as a two week allotment.

And it's the hardest part.

Not because we're isolated in the physical sense. We stay everywhere from remote gravel pads in the woods to RV resorts with three pools, a gym, hot tubs, and pickleball courts. There are people around constantly. The problem is that they're always different people.

Making real friends as an adult is already hard. You lose the built in scaffolding: the job you show up to every day, the recurring activity, the neighbors you accumulate history with by accident. Take that away and replace it with a rotating cast, and you learn that proximity was doing more work than you realized. We meet great people. We meet them for two weeks. Then one of us drives away.

Friendship, the deep kind, seems to require repetition more than it requires chemistry. You can have a stunning conversation with a stranger at a campfire, and it doesn't become a friendship, because a friendship is built out of the eightieth ordinary interaction, not the first extraordinary one. Text threads and video calls can maintain a friendship. In my experience they struggle to build one from scratch.

"Does constant novelty reduce the power of novelty?"

Someone dropped this in the chat and it's a sharper question than it looks.

In one sense, yes. Novelty becomes your normal, and then the contrast disappears. We went back to where we used to live last month, first time in almost two years, and being there felt strange. I could drive places without programming the GPS. I recognized buildings. I knew which lane to be in. After two straight years of nothing but new, familiarity itself was the disorienting experience. That's a genuine inversion, and I didn't expect it.

But the thing novelty actually gives me hasn't worn off at all. We still pull into a new place and notice how different the light is, how differently people talk, what they eat, what they're proud of, what they complain about. That fascination is undiminished. What faded was the anticipation, the "I can't wait for the trip" feeling. What stayed was the trip.

I think that distinction matters well beyond RV life. Anticipation is a story about the future. Fascination is attention in the present. If your relationship with a new experience is mostly anticipation, then yes, making it constant will hollow it out. If your relationship with it is attention, constancy doesn't diminish it, because attention doesn't run on scarcity.

"What was your biggest challenge in establishing your power exchange, and how did you overcome it?"

Two answers, because there were two different challenges.

The first was saying out loud that I wanted it. I'd wanted something like this for close to two decades and had never once spoken it. Not to a partner, not to a friend, not to anyone. Overcoming that took exactly one thing, which was growing a set of balls and opening my mouth. There's no technique underneath it. There's a moment where you either say the true thing or you don't, and every strategy for making that moment comfortable first is just a more sophisticated way of not saying it.

The second challenge is the one that actually took work: getting clear on what I wanted it to be.

Dawn and I built this as a life, not as a bedroom game. Which means I don't get to outsource the design of it. I have to know what I want it to be, and I have to set the direction, because that's the job I took.

It's easy to picture what you want in the bedroom. Most men can generate that image in about four seconds. What's hard is Monday night. What's hard is a random Tuesday afternoon when nothing is charged and nothing is scripted and life is just happening.

Here's what happened this week. Dawn and I found out that a man we'd both become close to died suddenly of a brain aneurysm. We knew him through the internet, never met him in person, but we were in touch several times a week for eight or nine months. Then the emails stopped. We thought he was busy. A week and a half went by and we heard from his wife.

He was thirty eight. He slumped over on a train on his way to work. Gone like someone flipped a light switch.

So: how does a power exchange work in that moment?

You can't plan for it. That's the actual answer to the question. You can think through how you want your dynamic to go, you can build agreements and structure and rhythm, and then something arrives that none of it accounted for.

This is where people say "life got in the way of our dynamic." No it didn't. Life is just doing what life does. Nothing got in the way of anything. The dynamic met a real condition and either held or it didn't.

And if you think you're going to sustain high intensity, scene energy, kink charged dominance twenty four hours a day, try it for one week. Not a life. A week. It doesn't work that way, and the men who believe it does are usually the ones who burn out and conclude the whole thing was a fantasy.

Which moves the question off of technique entirely. It stops being "how do I do this" and becomes "who do I have to be." How do I become the kind of man who can lead through this, rather than trying to control it?

Leading and controlling get confused constantly, and the difference shows up exactly in moments like this one. Control is an attempt to hold the conditions steady. It works right up until the conditions refuse, and then it produces panic, or rage, or collapse. Leading is holding a direction while the conditions do whatever they're going to do. A man who leads can be grieving and still be the ground his woman stands on. A man who controls has to get himself regulated first, because his structure is the only thing holding him up.

His death has been rattling around in me all week. He had plans. He had a business he wanted to start, a schedule change coming at work that was going to give him more free time with his wife, a list of things he was excited about. All of it was just a good idea. That's all any of it was.

It could be any one of us this afternoon. That's not morbid, it's accurate, and the only useful response I've found is to stop running back into the past or living for the future long enough to actually be in the life that's here.

"How long did it take to prepare for a nomadic life, and how ruthless did you have to be about getting rid of stuff?"

I dreamed this up about ten years before we did it. So that's one answer.

The reason the ten years matters is what I did with them. Early on, close to the beginning of that decade, I looked around at my life and thought: I will never be able to do that carrying this much debt. I had debt from opening businesses. I had rental properties. I had the full apparatus of a guy building a conventional life.

When I added up the total future money I'd have to earn just to clear all of it, that number reframed everything. Debt isn't really money you owe. It's future labor you've already promised away. Every dollar of it is a claim on a version of you that doesn't exist yet.

So I changed how I made decisions. I used to love getting a new car every two or three years, just because I'd get bored. Right after I made this decision I'd bought a new vehicle, and I told myself: I'm keeping this one. I bought it in 2014 and drove it until right before we left, ten full years. Some debts I paid off, some I exited by selling the underlying thing. I got out of the rental property business entirely.

We got to debt free, and that is a form of freedom I didn't fully understand until I had it. All you have to cover is your ongoing life. That's it. The past isn't billing you anymore.

Then came the actual transition. For two years we did the RV thing part time, leaving Minnesota when it got cold, coming back for the holidays, leaving again, returning in spring. After the second winter, driving back north, we looked at each other and said some version of "I don't really want to go back." We were having too much fun exploring.

We got back around April and spent six months getting rid of everything. Sold the boat. Sold my Jeep. Made God knows how many runs to Goodwill and every other donation place in the metro. In September we rented a storage unit and put in the things we thought we'd want someday if we ever settle again, like the standup deep freezer, the stuff you don't want to re-buy.

Which is funny in hindsight, because the money we'll pay that storage place would buy all of it new. Almost two years in and loving this life, I'm about ready to let the whole unit go. I don't need it. I don't want it. I don't think about it.

The part I didn't plan for was the last two weeks. We'd already sold our house and were renting a townhome, so the endgame meant ending that lease, moving everything out, getting the place cleaned to inspection standard, timing all of it against having the RV loaded and ready to roll. The big decisions I'd thought about for a decade. The final logistics blindsided me. That's usually how it goes. The vision is the easy part. 

"Where do you and Dawn get community and connection?"

I don't have a good answer for this one yet, and I'd rather say that than manufacture one.

Right now it's each other, and it's these men. One of the reasons I look forward to Wednesday mornings as much as I do is that I get real conversation with men who are actually working on something. The coaching I do carries a lot of my connection load, which I'm aware is not a complete solution.

What we hoped would happen is that we'd build new friendships on the road. We've met genuinely cool people. But the people we meet are mostly other travelers on their own schedules, or locals who already have full lives with jobs and kids and existing friends. Two weeks isn't enough runway to get to the place where staying in touch feels natural rather than effortful.

This was my highest priority for our life in 2026 and I have not cracked it.

There's a real gift buried in the failure, though. When you don't have a community absorbing your attention, you get very good at being with your own thoughts. Both of us are markedly more comfortable in our own company than we were. Sitting at a campfire, staring into it, no phone, no conversation, genuinely at peace. Not waiting for something. Not filling anything.

I wouldn't have chosen that as a curriculum. Being unable to distract myself with people forced my hand into learning to be still. That's turned out to be worth something.

"What makes you different from most other men when it comes to being a dom?"

Nothing, except that I've been willing to do the things most men resist.

I've resisted them too. I fought tooth and nail against giving up my vices. I fought against actually sitting down with my inner child, against building a relationship with the scared little boy who was me. None of it came naturally and most of it I did late.

The only difference is that I've actually done it. Not perfectly. Not always. Something still comes up and I'll sit there pretending it isn't there for a month or three. But I've been through the door enough times to know that the door is the way, so eventually I go in.

What most men do is avoid that thing until their entire life detonates. Until the marriage ends, or the body breaks, or the drinking stops working. Then, wreckage everywhere, they finally sit down with it.

I stopped waiting for the explosion.

Here's what it actually looks like, in practice, stripped of anything impressive. I go to bed a little early. I turn off the lights. I close my eyes and I picture myself walking into my childhood bedroom, on one of those days when a seven year old version of me had been picked on and mocked all day at school and came home carrying it. Adult me walks in and sits down and asks him how he's doing. What does today feel like?

And then I let the old feelings come. Outcast. Scared. Nobody likes me. I don't have any friends. All the stuff I had no ability to process at the time, so it sat there and festered and eventually hardened into a personality.

That's it. That's the whole technique. It is not brave. I don't even want to use the word brave, because bravery has a hardness to it that doesn't match what this is. It's willingness. Willingness to look at the thing I didn't want to look at, and to stay there while it's uncomfortable.

It feels weak while it's happening. It feels tender and small and gentle, nothing like the imagery men attach to dominance. But what comes out the other side is groundedness. The specific strength of having actually given a damn about yourself, of having done something real on your own behalf instead of managing around it.

That is the strength I think we're all actually after. We just look for it in places that can't produce it.

"How do you handle extended family, holidays, voting, the vet, all the things that assume a fixed address?"

The logistics questions are fun, so here's the practical version.

Address. There's a service for full time RVers called Escapees Mail Service. They give you a real physical mailing address at their location. Driver's license, passport, bills, tax documents, all of it goes there. They bundle your mail and forward it wherever you happen to be when you're ready for a batch. I keep almost everything electronic, so not much runs through it.

The dog. Before we left I set Snoop Dogg up with Banfield, which is a nationwide vet chain. He goes in around June and December for checkups, shots, and teeth cleaning, and his records follow him. I'll be in Florida in December, so I'll find a Banfield down there and book it. The general principle is that national chains are enormously useful when you have no fixed location. Discount Tire, which goes by America's Tire in some states, rotates tires free for life when you buy from them, at any location in the country.

Voting. By mail, at least for now.

Holidays. We call. We don't go back. Everyone we'd want to visit lives somewhere brutally cold, and I'm not driving north in December to watch a niece open a present and freeze my ass off doing it. Love them. Not that much.

Extended family. We don't have especially close relationships there, so staying in touch looks the same as it does for anyone: a call, a text, an email. That's honestly what most people do even when they live twenty minutes apart.

"Have you thought about how long you want to be nomadic? And where would you settle?"

The longer we do this, the longer the answer gets.

We already have roughly two years of destinations planned and we've barely scratched the surface of what we want to see. If I had to guess, I'd say indefinitely. I would be very surprised if we're not still doing this in ten years. The challenges I've described are real, and we're willing to carry them, because the enjoyment and the simplicity are worth it.

As for settling: there are two places I've been that I loved enough to think "I could make a home here." Both are in the Southwest, downstream of the Colorado River, and I won't build a long term life somewhere I'm not confident water comes out of the faucet. If you haven't looked into what's happening with Lake Mead and the Glen Canyon Dam, it's worth an afternoon. It's a real mess and it isn't improving on the timeline people need it to.

So I don't have an answer. Part of what this life is for is finding out where that might be, if we ever want it.

Honestly, the idea of buying a house that doesn't move feels almost claustrophobic to me now. That used to be the dream. Build the business, buy the big house, the nice house. Now the thought of being fixed in one place permanently makes my chest tighten. I'm not ready for that, and I don't see it coming soon.

"Before your inner work, how did you deal with settling for half of what you wanted?"

I didn't deal with it. I blamed everyone else for everything that wasn't how I wanted it. I made myself a victim of outcomes I didn't like. I always had an excuse ready.

The truer answer is that until you've done inner work, you don't know what you're doing. I didn't know I was living at half. That perception wasn't available to me. I was operating entirely on one axis: if I like it, it's good, and if I don't like it, it's bad, or I'm bad, or something's wrong.

Which is exactly how a two year old operates. I like it. I don't like it. I like it. I don't like it. Everything measured against how I feel about it right this second. It's a completely self centered way to move through the world, and I was doing it well into adulthood, and I could not see it, because you cannot see what you don't yet have the equipment to see.

That's the brilliance of Jung's line: until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. What you experience as fate, as the thing happening to you, is very often something you haven't accepted reality about, including your own role in it.

Abundance as a value still takes daily reminding for me. I'm not running these Wednesday calls because I'm finished. I'm running them because I've done enough work on myself to see myself, and seeing yourself is the prerequisite for seeing anyone else.

And abundance turns out to be acceptance. It's not something you generate. It's not something you talk yourself into with affirmations. Abundance is how the universe already operates. We're the obstruction. So holding abundance as a value is really a commitment to getting myself out of the way, and to finding the specific ways I block it.

Which brings me back around to friendship, and to the most uncomfortable thing I said on that call.

I've been sitting with a question lately: do I still believe nobody likes me?

The kid who got picked on all day. We had a game called pickle in the middle, keep away, where everyone throws the ball over one kid's head while he runs back and forth trying to get it. I was that kid. Not just someone who got bullied sometimes. I was the one the other bullied kids picked on, because everybody could laugh at me. That was my role on the playground.

So I asked myself, honestly: do I still believe that? And do I still keep people at arm's length because of it?

The answer was yes. Still. At forty something years old, running a coaching business, married to a woman I'm in deep power exchange with, teaching other men how to lead. Yes.

That's a hard thing to sit with. It's also the most useful thing I've found in a while, because now I know where to go. When did I start feeling this way? I don't have to guess. I have a stack of specific memories. And I know that eight year old had no capacity to metabolize feeling like an outcast with no friends and no one who wanted him. So he bundled it up and stashed it somewhere.

It's still in there. And the work in front of me is letting that kid cry the tears he never cried, because back then he didn't believe anyone would understand them anyway.

That's what abundance as a value actually costs. Not a mindset. An excavation.

"I could only be nomadic if I had a sailboat."

This came from a guy in Florida, which explains a lot.

I think a boat would be about a hundred times harder, and the reason is boring: provisioning. Right now we're an hour from a real grocery store because we're deep in the Northwoods, and that's already a planning problem. You can anchor a yacht in international waters and feel very free about it, and you will run out of food in a few weeks.

The day to day logistics of being a human don't disappear when you go nomadic. Where's your power coming from. Where's your water coming from. Where does the waste go. Two people go through a startling amount of groceries.

If I didn't have Amazon, this life would be dramatically harder. We don't get two day delivery out here, most things take close to a week, but I can decide I want Medjool dates and have them show up. That's a real structural support for this lifestyle and I'd rather admit it than pretend I'm living off the land.

Take that away and go to sea, and provisioning becomes the central organizing fact of your existence. Hope you like canned tuna, brother.

"What's your favorite place you've been?"

This is the question every local asks the second they find out we live full time in an RV, and it's almost impossible to answer. I've lived in about seventy different places in the last two years.

I've landed on two answers.

The first: every place we go is our favorite, because we can go anywhere we want. We're never somewhere we don't want to be, because if we don't want to be there, our house has wheels on it. We hook it to the truck and leave. That changes your relationship to a location completely. Every place we're in, we're in by ongoing choice.

The second: it depends what you're asking about. Best nature, Utah, not close. Best food, Louisiana, also not close. There are different categories and different winners.

And we have not yet been to a single place with no redeeming quality. Even the spots we didn't love had something in them worth having gone for. Seventy places and not one dud. I think that says less about American geography than it does about what you find when you show up willing to look.

Why I did this

These men give me their real lives every Wednesday. The affair they're terrified to confess. The marriage they don't know how to save. The rage they don't understand. The part of themselves they've never shown anyone.

It seemed fair that they get to see some of mine.

And there's something else. Most of what I teach comes down to a man's willingness to be seen without armor, first by himself and then by the people he loves. It would be a strange thing to teach that from behind a curtain.

So: I ride a very pretty bike. I have one sex toy and her name is Dawn. I don't know how to make deep friends on the road yet. A man I cared about died at thirty eight last week and it's rearranged something in me. And there's a seven year old in me who still isn't sure anyone wants him around, and I'm still going in there to sit with him.

That's the whole thing. Not different from you. Just willing to go there.

Listen to the full episode: Listen to Episode 148 | Watch on YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | All episodes

The Wednesday morning calls referenced throughout this episode are part of Becoming a Dominant Man. If you want the inner work I described here, that's where I teach it, and that's where those calls happen.

You can find everything else we offer at the store, and the free material at free resources.