Not dramatically. No scene. I just got to the door, looked at what was happening on the mat, and found a very reasonable internal argument for why today wasn’t the right day. I came back a week later and did the same thing. Stood at the edge of something that felt enormous and talked myself back out to the parking lot.

The third time I stayed.

I tell you that because the version of this story where I walked in and immediately got to work, where courage arrived clean and intact on the first attempt, would be a lie. And a lie would rob you of the only part of the story that’s actually useful: that the third time looked exactly like the first two times from the outside. Same gym. Same mat. Same door. The only difference was that I went through it.

Joe Kent writes in Send Me that special warfare operators rely on a simple rule in high-stress moments: control your fear. Not eliminate it. Not ignore it. Control it because the mission doesn’t care how you feel.

What these operators understand is that you cannot wait for confidence to arrive before you act. Confidence is the result of action, not its prerequisite. The men who go first in dangerous situations are not the men who feel no fear. They are the men who have learned to act in the presence of fear, before it resolves, before they know how it ends. Courage is not the absence of feeling. It is the decision that the feeling doesn’t get a vote.

Here is the lie that keeps more men stuck than any other single thing I have encountered in coaching, in therapy training, in my own life:

I’ll do it when I’m ready.

It sounds reasonable. It sounds responsible, even. It sounds like the kind of thing a mature, self-aware person says before making an important move. It is none of those things. It is fear wearing the costume of patience. It is the story your nervous system tells you when the gap between who you are and who you want to be becomes visible, and the visibility is uncomfortable, and comfort is available if you just wait a little longer.

Readiness is not a feeling that arrives before action. It is a feeling that arises from action. You do not get confident and then step on the mat. You step on the mat, badly, repeatedly, and confidence shows up later as a byproduct of the reps.

This is not motivational poster language. This is a neurological fact. The brain builds competence through repetition, not intention. You cannot think your way onto solid ground. You have to walk there, and the walking is always awkward before it isn’t.

The mat taught me this in the most direct way possible, because it does not negotiate.

You cannot tell the mat you’re not ready. You cannot reschedule your submission. When a better opponent has you in a position you don’t know how to escape, the options are tap or suffer — and suffering through it out of pride teaches you nothing except that pride is expensive. Tapping is not losing. Tapping is data. It tells you exactly where your game has a hole and gives you something to drill tomorrow.

That’s the mechanism: show up, get exposed, learn the specific thing the exposure reveals, show up again.

Men who have been on the mat long enough stop being embarrassed by taps. They start being curious about them. What was the setup? Where did I lose the position? What did he see that I didn’t? The tap becomes information instead of verdict. That shift from verdict to information is one of the most useful things a man can develop, and it starts by being willing to be bad at something in front of other people.

Rolling with someone better than you is the fastest path to growth. Not rolling with someone at your level, which is comfortable and confirming. Not rolling with someone worse than you, which is satisfying and useless. Rolling with someone who will find every gap and exploit it, calmly, without malice, simply because that is what the mat asks of both of you.

Most men avoid this. Most men find reasons to stay in rooms where they are already competent. It feels like wisdom. It is actually atrophy.

I want to be clear about what courage is and isn’t in this context.

Courage is not the absence of fear. If you are not afraid, you don’t need courage; you need a harder challenge. Courage is the decision to act in the presence of fear, before the fear has resolved, before you know how it ends. It is the step onto the mat when your hands are shaking. It is the conversation you’ve been postponing for three months. It is the application you submit before you feel qualified. It is the first session with the therapist when you’ve spent years convinced you could figure it out alone.

It is always uncomfortable. That is not a bug. That is the mechanism.

I walked into that gym three times before I stayed. The first two visits weren’t failures; they were part of the same decision. Most things worth doing take more than one attempt at the door. The men I have watched grow the fastest on the mat, in coaching, in the rooms where men are finally honest about what they’re carrying, are not the ones who walked through cleanly on the first try. They are the ones who kept coming back to the door until they went through it. Who took the tap, and came back.

That willingness to return to the door, to the mat, to the hard thing is where confidence actually lives.

If you are waiting to feel ready, I want to offer you this:

The feeling you are waiting for does not exist yet. It will exist, but only after you have done the thing you are waiting to feel ready for. That is not a paradox. That is the sequence. Action, exposure, information, adjustment, repetition, competence, confidence. In that order. Always in that order.

Courage before confidence. Every time.

Pick the thing. Go back to the door. Stay this time.

No Quarter Given. Not to the wait. Not to the version of comfort that calls itself wisdom.

At least for today.

I've always had to take things apart to understand how they work. I've just never dissected a brain.

But I've come close. Years of coaching men through some of the worst moments of their lives, an MFT program that is essentially a graduate course in how human beings break and rebuild, and a personal decade of pulling my own wiring apart and trying to figure out what was wrong with the circuit. At some point, you stop being afraid of the machinery and start getting curious about it.

Here's something I wish someone had handed me in a hotel room in the middle of a divorce, when the voice in my head was louder than anything else in that small, quiet space.

Your brain is not neutral. It is not an impartial observer of your life. It is a filter. And at some point, without your conscious permission, you set it.

Deep in your brainstem sits a network of neurons called the Reticular Activating System. The RAS. It's been there since before you had language for anything. Its job is to decide what gets through to your conscious mind and what gets filtered out. Because here's the problem your brain solved before you were born: there is too much information. Every second, your senses are processing millions of inputs. Sounds, light, temperature, the feeling of your clothes against your skin, the hum of a refrigerator three rooms away. If your brain treated all of it equally, you would be completely non-functional within minutes.

So the RAS filters. It decides what matters and what doesn't. And the criteria it uses are simple and ruthless: it looks for what you have taught it to look for.

Think about the last time you bought a car. Or even thought seriously about buying one. Suddenly, that model was everywhere. Same streets. Same city. The cars were always there. Your RAS just wasn't flagging them before. The moment you gave it a target, it started finding the target.

That's not magic. That's your hardware doing its job.

Here's where it gets personal.

I spent a long time with a RAS that was set to find evidence that I wasn't enough. Not consciously. I wasn't walking around thinking, ' Find me proof that I'm failing. ' But somewhere along the way, childhood, religion, and a marriage that asked me to be smaller than I was. My filter got calibrated to catch anything that confirmed the story. A comment. A silence. A look. My brain would find it, flag it, and file it as evidence. Meanwhile, the contradictory evidence of the moments of genuine connection, the things I was building, the people who showed up, would slide right past the filter.

I took my dog, Riley, to the river last week. First time she'd seen moving water. She didn't hesitate. Didn't test it. Didn't stand at the bank calculating the risk. She just went in all seventy pounds of her, tail up, completely committed, water going everywhere. Her body cooperated because she's built for it, and she doesn't punish herself for the moments it doesn't.

I watched her and thought about all the ways I've done the opposite. Stood at the bank. Calculated. Then punished myself for hesitating.

That's the old filter doing its job. I trained it to find evidence of inadequacy, and it is very, very good at its work.

I wrote in my journal during the worst of it: I have been in a hypnotic rhythm that has prevented me from connecting with my inner warrior.

I didn't have the language for it then. What I was describing was a RAS calibrated for survival in a particular kind of pain. Useful once. Destructive now. Running a program I hadn't consciously chosen and couldn't seem to turn off.

The good news is that the filter can be reset.

This is where most conversations about the RAS veer into vision boards, manifestation, and other things I am professionally skeptical of. So let me stay concrete.

Resetting the filter is not about positive thinking. It is not about pretending the bad things aren't there. It is about deliberately, repeatedly giving your brain a new target to scan for, and doing so with enough specificity and emotional weight that the RAS takes the update seriously.

Two steps. Neither of them is easy.

The first is the image. Not vague aspiration. Specific, detailed, embodied. Not I want to feel better but I am in a room having a conversation I don't dread. I know what I'm doing next. I am not performing. The more specific the image, the more useful it is as a target. Your brain cannot search for a blur.

The second is the feeling. Emotion is what converts a thought into a signal your nervous system takes seriously. When you attach genuine feeling to a specific image, not manufactured optimism, but real desire for a real thing, you are essentially writing new code for the filter. You are telling the RAS: this is what we're looking for now.

Neuroscience backs this up. Visualization with emotional engagement activates neural pathways in ways that are measurably similar to physical practice. Your brain, to a meaningful degree, cannot distinguish between a vividly imagined experience and a real one. That's not a loophole. That's the mechanism.

I'll tell you what actually changed the filter for me.

It wasn't a visualization exercise. It was a decision. The decision that I was done being the man who filtered for evidence that he wasn't enough. That the story was wrong. That I was going to look for something else now, not because everything was fine, but because I had paid enough tuition on the old program and I was ready to run something different.

That decision didn't fix everything overnight. The old filter had years of calibration behind it. It would flag things. I'd notice. I'd redirect. Redirect again. The practice is in the redirect, not in never having the thought.

But something shifted. Slowly, then faster. The RAS started finding different things. Evidence that I was building something. Evidence that I was capable of harder things than I'd given myself credit for. Evidence that the people worth keeping had been there the whole time, and I'd been filtering them out.

The cars were always there.

If you are in a season of your life where your brain keeps finding the worst interpretation of everything, I want you to consider the possibility that you are not broken. You are running an old program on hardware that was built to be updated.

You set the filter. Maybe not consciously. Maybe it was set for you by circumstances or people who didn't know what they were doing to your wiring. But it can be reset.

Give it a new target. Make the target specific. Attach something real to it. And then redirect, every time the old program tries to run, until the new one takes.

That's not soft. That's the hardest maintenance work a man can do.

No Quarter Given. Not to the old filter. Not to the story it was built to confirm.

At least for today.

You know the one. You’ve seen the discourse. Taylor Frankie Paul, the woman Disney built four seasons of television around, is at the center of it. Again. Except this time, the footage wasn’t produced. It wasn’t scheduled. It wasn’t a cliffhanger designed to bring you back for episode six. This time, the footage was real, and that made all the difference.

That’s the tell.

Disney put the arrest footage in the pilot. Read that sentence again. They didn’t stumble into the drama; they opened with it. They sent her to the Oscars. They greenlit four seasons of a show built around the spectacle of a woman’s life coming apart in real time, and they called it entertainment. The audience watched. The sponsors paid. The algorithm rewarded everyone in the ecosystem.

Then TMZ dropped a video on a Thursday, and suddenly every executive, every advertiser, every person who clicked play all sixteen times across four seasons discovered, simultaneously, that they had morals.

They don’t have morals. They have a threshold.

There is a difference between the two, and it matters enormously.

Dakota did something wrong. I’m not here to litigate that and I’m not building him a defense. What he deserves online, he’s getting. But I want to ask a question that nobody seems interested in asking, because asking it gets you lumped into a category of men the algorithm has decided are dangerous.

How many men absorb situations like his quietly, without cameras, without platforms, without a single person organizing a cancellation campaign on their behalf?

That’s not a rhetorical jab. That’s a real question about a real population of people who will never trend on anything because what happened to them was never filmed.

The footage business doesn’t cover them. There’s no footage. There’s no content. There’s no arc. Just a man sitting somewhere trying to figure out what happened to his life, carrying a story he doesn’t have language for, because the culture handed him exactly two options: perpetrator or punchline.

Here’s what the culture has decided men are allowed to be: Homer Simpson or Andrew Tate. The lovable idiot who can’t figure out the dishwasher, or the predator radicalizing teenagers in a Romanian compound. Pick one. There is no third option offered. There is no lane for a man who is trying to think clearly about his own experience without being handed a red pill or a laugh track.

Louis Theroux made a documentary about the manosphere. It’s well-produced. He’s a skilled journalist. The frame — here are dangerous men radicalizing other men — is real as far as it goes. Tate and his orbit are a genuine problem. Agreed.

But Theroux does what the culture always does. He points at the fire and never asks what dried out the wood. He shows you the symptom in high definition and never sits with the condition. Here are the broken men. Here is how silly, sad, and dangerous they are. Now back to you.

What he doesn’t say is this: men are being radicalized into those spaces because there is nowhere else to go. We have stripped out every traditional structure that used to hold a young man’s development, the rites of passage, the mentorship, the initiation, the earned sense of belonging, and replaced it with nothing. No ritual. No threshold to cross. No elder handing you something real on the other side of the hard thing you just did. Just an algorithm full of men who are angry about it and willing to give you a framework, however poisonous, for why.

I feel that pull myself. I step into this conversation, and I can feel one foot drifting toward a category I don’t belong in. I was raised by a single mother in the LDS church. I’ve sat with women in pain. I’ve seen what certain men do. I am not confused about that. But I also have a foot in the camp of men who have been through something real and couldn’t find the language for it, and I add my voice as a voice of reason in the hope that it still lands somewhere useful.

Theroux saw the problem. He just wasn’t willing to be part of the answer.

The manosphere didn’t make that show. Netflix did.

Here’s what I know about the systems that generate this discourse: they are not built around truth. They are not built around care. They are built around footage.

Footage of the arrest. Footage of the confrontation. Footage of the breakdown. Footage of the apology tour. Footage of the comeback. The machine needs all of it. It needs the violence, and it needs the outrage about the violence, because both generate engagement, and engagement generates revenue, and revenue is the only metric that actually matters inside the building.

When the footage stops being entertaining and starts being evidence, that’s the moment the machine pretends it never wanted any of this.

That’s not a moral position. That’s a liability assessment.

The TikTok therapists will give you vocabulary for what you watched. Reactive abuse. Trauma bonding. Coercive control. Some of those terms are real, and they matter, and they belong in the conversation. Some of them are being deployed so fast and so loosely that they’ve become a way to close a conversation rather than open one. A way to assign roles before anyone has to think too hard. Hurt people use borrowed language to land blows without accountability, and an algorithm that rewards the velocity of the take over the accuracy of it.

Here’s what rarely gets said about reactive abuse: it often isn’t a choice. It’s a nervous system responding faster than the person’s self-awareness does. Sustained provocation rewires your responses before you have the language to name the pattern you’re inside. You can’t interrupt what you haven’t learned to see.

But the moment it turns physical, that explanation ends. Not because the pattern wasn’t real. Because your body knew the line before your mind caught up, and you crossed it anyway. The unconscious response is no longer unconscious once your hands are involved. I can’t speak to how women navigate that threshold. What I know is that men need to understand their own nervous systems, not as an excuse, but as the only way to interrupt the cycle before it gets that far. That’s not a soft idea. That’s the hardest work there is.

None of that is justice. All of it is content.

And before anyone assumes I’m only talking about men: feminism has done this to women, too.

Not feminism as a principle. Feminism at its best was built to name something real, and it did. But feminism as an institution, the framework, the model, the approved narrative, has a threshold of its own. A woman whose story doesn’t fit gets the same treatment a man does. She was the aggressor. The dynamic was complicated. She fought back. She contributed to the cycle. Tell that story in certain rooms, and watch how quickly the framework that was supposed to protect her becomes the thing that reassigns her role.

Erin Pizzey built the first domestic violence shelter in the world. London, 1971. She opened it, ran it, and then reported what she actually saw: that many of the women coming through her doors were themselves violent, caught in cycles that predated their current relationship. She published her findings. The response from the movement she had helped create was death threats, bomb threats, and professional exile. She eventually fled the country. Her data wasn’t refuted. Her character was destroyed.

The Duluth Model, the framework that has shaped DV intervention in seventeen countries for forty years, was built on the premise that domestic violence flows from patriarchal power. Its co-creator, Ellen Pence, admitted as much in a 1999 essay published by Sage. Writing about her own work, she said the framework “did not fit the lived experience of many of the men and women we were working with” and that her commitment to the model had been so total that contradicting evidence “went unnoticed by me and many of my coworkers.” That is a scientist describing confirmation bias in her own published words. That is an architect admitting the building didn’t hold.

The institution kept building anyway.

Every system that stops asking hard questions about its own blind spots eventually produces the damage it was designed to prevent. That’s not a conservative argument. That’s not a liberal argument. That’s what happens when a moral project becomes a machine, and the machine starts serving the narrative instead of the people standing in front of it.

Violence is not a gender issue. It is a human issue. The systems that produce, protect, and profit from it are not selective about whom they damage. They are selective about whose damage gets a platform.

The ones who get the platform are the ones with footage.

I’ve been close enough to this to know that the people it damages most are the ones who never make the cut. No footage. No arc. Just the cost.

Justice doesn’t trend. It doesn’t generate engagement. It doesn’t need a clip to be real. It just requires someone to care whether it happened, not whether it was filmed.

That’s the standard. That’s always been the standard.

No Quarter Given. Not to the violence. Not to the performance of caring about it.

At least for today.
~Tyler

Lacrosse has been in my blood for as long as I can remember. My family. My outlet. The thing I ran toward when I didn’t have words for what I was carrying. It was the first language I learned that my body understood before my mind did. I didn’t know until much later that the game was built for exactly that.

Lacrosse is the oldest team sport in North America. The Haudenosaunee people, the Iroquois, have been playing it since at least 1100 AD, and they’ll tell you it’s older than that. Older than recorded history. Part of the creation story itself. They called it the Creator’s Game. They played it as medicine, to heal the sick, to settle disputes between nations, to honor the dead. Games could last days. Fields had no boundaries. Hundreds of men. No helmets, no pads, no rulebook. Just the game.

The Haudenosaunee name for it roughly translates to “they’re bumping hips.” The original contact sport.

When a community member fell ill, they organized a medicine game on their behalf. The belief was that the energy of competition, the spirit of the players, the movement of the game itself carried healing power. They played for something bigger than the score.

I spent years playing this game before I understood that. And then I got cancer, and I understood it completely.

I want you to know as you take the field this season. You are holding something ancient. Something that was built to heal, to unify, to connect people to each other and to something larger than themselves. The modern game has changed a lot since then. But the best players I’ve ever watched, the ones who made you feel something, they played like they understood what the game was actually for.

Play like that.

Now. Let me tell you about the guy who coached you.

That’s me in high school. Rib pads that apparently nobody uses. Hair that I thought was a good idea. A dry Colorado field in March that smelled like early spring and ambition. I played this game before I coached it. I coached it before I really understood it.

It put me on fields in Colorado, in Utah, eventually across from kids who would become the team I’m writing this letter to.

I was never just coaching for the season we were in. I was coaching for this one.

I’ve been waiting to write this letter for a long time.

Some of you I’ve known since you were in single digits. Let that land for a second. I was there before you had a two-man game. Before you had a slide package. Before you knew what a face-off was. I watched you trip over your own feet on a field that looked enormous to you then, and I thought: these kids are going to be something.

I wasn’t wrong.

Every time I told you to find the open man instead of forcing the shot, every time I made you run the same play until it was muscle memory, every time I got on you for ball watching instead of cutting, I was making a deposit in an account you’re about to cash.

You’ve been building a language together since third grade. The other teams you’ll face this season? They’re still learning to talk. You’re already fluent.

That’s not an accident. That’s years of work. Yours and mine.

Now let’s talk about what wins championships.

Attack the guy who just recovered from a slide. He’s gassed. He reset, he thinks the play moved on, and his feet haven’t caught up with his head yet. You know where the ball is going before he does. That’s not a trick. That’s what you’ve drilled. Use it.

Two-man games aren’t just an offensive concept. They’re a mindset. They say: I trust you. I know where you’re going. I don’t need to look. That kind of trust takes years to build, and it cannot be faked on film. The teams you play this season don’t have what you have. They haven’t had the same guys in the same field since they were eight years old.

Play as you know it.

Here’s the culture I want you to build this season, and I mean build deliberately, not accidentally.

Make the other teams feel your history before the opening face-off. Not trash talk. Not theatrics. Presence. The way you warm up, the way you communicate, the way you play the first two minutes sets a tone that is very hard to walk back. Set it high and early.

Win with purpose. Lose with information.

A healthy fear of losing is not the same as fear. It’s respect. It’s the thing that keeps you sharp in the third quarter when everything is tied, and the other team thinks they’ve figured you out.

They haven’t figured you out. You’ve been playing together since you were eight. There are layers to your game that they haven’t seen yet. Trust that.

And when you lose, because you will at some point, everyone does, don’t let it be wasted. Losing that teaches you something is not a loss. It’s tuition. The teams that go deep in May are not the ones who never lost. They’re the ones who lost early, learned fast, and didn’t repeat the mistake.

Build that culture. Make it uncomfortable to lose. Make it unacceptable to learn nothing from it.

I have to tell you about the last game I coached manny of your older brothers.

They were playing Alta. Losing. And half of them were already mentally at the senior party, which, honestly, I understood but could not accept. I needed them on that field. So I did what any reasonable, emotionally regulated adult coach would do.

I headbutted Owen Erker’s helmet.

Full commitment. Trying to spark something. My head hurt for a week. I don’t know if it worked. What I know is that I would do it again, because that’s what the game asks of you sometimes.

Some of you watched that from the sideline. Some of you heard about it afterward. Now you’re the ones on the field. And you’ve logged more hours, more reps, more film than that group ever did. You came up in a different era of this program. You don’t need someone to headbutt you in the helmet to wake you up.

You already know what this costs. Play like it.

I’ve watched you grow up on that field.

From kids who couldn’t catch a pass to athletes who can read a defense three moves ahead. I’ve watched you fight with each other and come back the next practice because you loved the game more than you loved being right. I’ve watched you become a team in the truest sense of the word, not just players who happen to wear the same jersey.

I coached you to be something. You became it.

The Haudenosaunee say there’s a simultaneous game going on in the sky world, and the ancestors are playing with us. I don’t know about all that. But I know that the medicine game was built to heal, to unify, to connect people to something larger than the score. When you play this season, play like you know what you’re holding.

Hold your heads proud. Not arrogant. Proud. There’s a difference, and you know what it looks like because I showed you both.

Set the tone early. Play your game. Trust your teammates. Build the culture. And go take the state.

I’ve been watching this day come for a long time.

No Quarter Given. FERDA!

~Tyler

And then, at breakfast, Jackson and London walked through the door. My nephew and his sister. Also from home, also unannounced. I stood there for a second, the way you do when something good surprises you and you’re not sure your body knows how to handle it without making it weird. It handled it fine. Mostly.

That was the whole weekend in miniature. The kind of people who show up before you ask them to. The kind of love that doesn’t announce itself. It just walks through the door.

Saturday, I stepped on the mat at the Tap Cancer Out BJJ Open.

I want to be honest with you about what happened, because this journal has never been about performing health or pretending the scoreboard reads differently than it does.

I lost both of my matches.

The first went to points. Here’s what I know now that I didn’t then: points are a strategy, not just a byproduct. I went in to fight. I didn’t go into score. That’s on me. You can have all the techniques in the world and still lose the game you forgot you were playing.

The second went by submission. A move I have been caught in before at open mats. One I know. One I’ve felt coming. And still, I got caught. Partly because I was gassed. My cardio was the honest limitation, and the mat does not accept excuses, only adjustments.

Here is what I also know. My jiu-jitsu held up. I stayed composed when the pressure came. I probably could have slipped that submission if my gas tank had more in it. The mat told me what to work on. I'm listening.

But I walked off that mat proud. Not in spite of the losses. Because of what the losses clarified.

Competence breeds confidence. Not wins. Competence. The work you put in before anyone is watching, that’s the thing that lets you stand in your own corner without flinching. I stood in my corner. I competed less than a year after APL tried to take me out. I raised more money as an individual than anyone else at the event.

I went 0-2 and won the day.

To the Ones Who Showed Up Financially

Most of you reading this already know who you are, because most of you are already here, already subscribed, already part of this corner. You didn’t just donate to a campaign. You looked at a man trying to compete post-cancer on a jiu-jitsu mat for something bigger than himself, and you said: I’m in.

To Jon Thomas, who built Tap Cancer Out from the ground up and still took a moment to show up on my page personally. You created something worth competing for. That’s nothing. That’s everything.

To Matthew Reyes, my Aussie brother from another mother Thank you.

To Rich and Kristen Dapice, who gave together. That’s its own kind of statement.

To Bo Harris, who called this exactly what it was: getting back to the mat. Love you.

To Heidi Rhoads, who wrote “Love You Forever” and meant every word of it. I felt it.

To the crew from the network, Amy Oscarson, Kent Besaw, Shaun Lowder, and K’Shelle Waller: you showed up the way good colleagues do, without being asked, without making it complicated. Amy donated twice and wrote something I keep coming back to: “Congrats on tapping out cancer. Now comes the fun part.” Kent also gave twice, which tells you everything you need to know about him. K’Shelle told me to kick butt, which, frankly, was exactly what I needed to hear.

To Bo, who called this exactly what it was: getting back to the mat. Love you, brother.

To Amy, Kent, and Shaun, the work family that shows up before you ask. Amy donated twice and wrote something I keep coming back to: “Congrats on tapping out cancer. Now comes the fun part.” Kent gave twice too, which tells you everything you need to know about him. You three are the kind of colleagues that make the work worth doing.

To K’Shelle, an old colleague who told me to kick butt. Still listening.

To Sydney, who showed up quietly, and it landed exactly right.

To Sorge, who didn’t just donate; he picked up the phone. That kind of gesture doesn’t go unnoticed. Ever.

To Benjamin Paynter and Rachele Lennberg, to Ian Sime, steady and generous. Thank you.

To Michael Grandpre and Chase Lindsley, thank you for your support. It meant something.

To my closest people, Troy Evanson, Chris DeBeikes, Jackson Hunter, Linda Connor, Dave Guttenberg, Alayne Outlaw, Pat Koelling, Jake Reni, and Steven Forbes: you are the corner. Every single one of you. Dave Guttenberg gave generously, as he always has. He’s been part of my family’s story long before he knew this fight. This one’s for Nick, too, Dave. Thank you. Jackson walked through the door on Saturday morning as a surprise and had already donated before he got there. That’s the kind of people I come from.

To Don and Sue Mantyla, who wrote that they love me and are grateful to contribute to something wonderful. I read that more than once.

To Lava Care, who showed up with the energy of an entire team behind one donation. We love Tyler. Keep fighting. Heard.

And to the five of you who gave anonymously: I don’t know who you are, I don’t know why you chose to hide, but one of you called me a big sexy man, and I carried that energy into my warmup like a theme song. Thank you. All of you. Especially you. For the record, the OnlyFans pivot was briefly considered and swiftly rejected. Toes Tease & Takedowns only. It’s all tongue in cheek. Mostly

Last, and with the most respect, to Park City Jiu Jitsu, my home gym. Professor and Mona, you didn’t just donate as an organization. You built the place where I learned to stand in my own corner. Everything on that mat in Salt Lake started on your mat. Thank you.

Because of all of you, I didn’t just compete. I competed with purpose. There is a difference between stepping on the mat and stepping on the mat for something. You gave me something.

One more thing. If you’d like a complimentary paid subscription to Field Notes as my small way of saying thank you, reply to this email or drop a comment below. No pressure, no presumption. The offer is open.

Pain with purpose. That’s the Tap Cancer Out motto. You funded that. Thank you.

If this post met you where you are, share it. The Substack is free. The corner is open. All you have to do is show up.

No Quarter Given. Not to Cancer. Not to Empty Corners. Not to the Easy Way Out.

~Tyler

Not hope as optimism or faith in the future, but hope as a transaction. The quiet belief that if they do enough, endure enough, or sacrifice enough now, something will finally resolve later. Relief, meaning, peace, or belonging deferred, but guaranteed.

This way of relating to life is common among men who grew up in high-demand families/religions. It’s just as common among men who didn’t adopt hustle culture. Different language. Same operating system.

Work harder now. Delay your needs. Stay obedient to the grind. Life will begin once you arrive.

The problem is that “arrival” keeps moving.

Psychologically, this pattern makes sense. The human nervous system is built around the prediction of rewards. Anticipation is motivating. Effort feels tolerable when the payoff feels imminent. Systems that promise future resolution, spiritual, financial, or personal, leverage this mechanism well. They keep men striving even when the reward never fully materializes.

This is transactional hope: the belief that effort purchases future being.

Over time, attention drifts away from presence and toward outcomes. Men become fluent in having achievements, metrics, milestones, while becoming increasingly disconnected from being. From inhabiting their bodies, their days, their relationships, their actual lives.

When meaning always lives in the future, the present becomes something to endure rather than inhabit.

High-demand religions train this early. Meaning is conditional. Endurance is virtuous. Relief is promised later after obedience, after sacrifice, sometimes after death. When men leave those systems, they often believe they’ve escaped the cycle. But nervous systems don’t reset just because beliefs do.

So the pattern migrates.

Hustle culture steps in seamlessly. Grind now. Optimize everything. Sleep later. Heal later. You’ll live once you’re “there.”

Without containment, without a stable internal point of origin, effort becomes reactive. Motion replaces direction.

I saw this clearly a few years ago, in a moment that surprised me with its intensity.

After everything I had endured: divorce, illness, identity collapse, years of rebuilding, I became convinced I was going to win the $1.8 billion lottery on Christmas Eve. Not in a joking way. In a calm, almost settled way. As if relief had finally chosen its delivery mechanism.

I didn’t stop working. I didn’t buy things. But inside, something had shifted. I was already living after the win. Already imagining the pressure lifting, the waiting ending, the struggle finally making sense.

It wasn’t greed. It wasn’t fantasy for fantasy’s sake.

It was transactional hope resurfacing under load.

Some part of me believed that all the endurance had earned a resolution. That suffering, correctly borne, would be rewarded. That being could finally begin once having arrived.

I didn’t win, of course. But the moment mattered. It showed me how quickly the nervous system reaches for an outcome when containment thins, even in men who know better.

That pattern shows up in more ordinary ways every day.

There’s the man living a deferred life. He’ll rest after the next deadline, date after the next raise, and take care of his health after the next project ships. He lives in rehearsal mode. From the outside, it looks like ambition. From the inside, it feels like waiting. The system never learns that effort can end without being replaced by more effort.

There’s the man stuck in the moralized grind. He believes suffering equals virtue. If it hurts, it must matter. Rest feels suspicious. Ease feels undeserved. This is religious conditioning translated into productivity language. Discipline without containment becomes self-punishment. Work becomes identity rather than a tool.

And there’s the man chasing the external finish line. The number, the title, the body, and the relationship that will finally validate the effort. Neurologically, the outcome is predictable. Anticipation spikes, relief fades quickly, the goalposts move. He isn’t lazy or unmotivated. He’s misoriented.

What they all share is a disconnection from presence. Attention is anchored in future states of having rather than current states of being. The nervous system stays mobilized, scanning ahead, never fully landing.

Transactional hope persists because it feels purposeful. It offers meaning without stillness, direction without presence. You don’t have to ask who you are underneath the striving. You just keep going.

Breaking the cycle doesn’t mean abandoning ambition. It means changing where effort originates.

The first shift is replacing deferred meaning with daily containment. Instead of asking what today will earn you later, the question becomes whether today has edges. A beginning, a middle, and an end. Work that starts and stops. Recovery that actually happens. Meaning distributed throughout the day rather than postponed.

The second shift is choosing at least one non-productive non-negotiable. High-demand systems train men to justify everything in terms of output. Breaking the cycle requires violating that rule. One practice each week that doesn’t advance status, money, or optimization, and is protected anyway. Training, walking, heat, silence. The nervous system learns that nothing collapses when you stop proving yourself.

The third shift is reclaiming your point of origin. Not asking what you’re building toward, but where your effort is coming from. Fear of falling behind. A need to be seen. An old belief that rest must be earned through suffering. Or a place that’s already stable.

Effort that originates from containment compounds. Effort that originates from hope burns.

There’s nothing wrong with hustle, discipline, or hard seasons. The problem is hustling without orientation.

When hope becomes transactional, men don’t slow down. They hollow out. They keep moving long after movement stopped, meaning anything.

Containment breaks the cycle by giving effort a place to return to. A man who knows where he stands doesn’t need to chase imagined futures for relief.

He works. He rests. He chooses. He stops.

Not because a system promised him something later, but because he’s finally inhabiting the life he’s already in.

That’s the difference between striving and direction.

In this raw, funny, and heartfelt episode, Danny reflects on his retirement after 29 years in air traffic control. From emotional goodbyes and epic farewell runway photos to stepping into the unknown, he opens up about the fears, freedom, and fresh starts that come with major life transitions.

With Tyler offering his signature humor and thoughtful insight, and Riley the podcast dog creating chaos, the guys dive deep into what reinvention looks like for men. They discuss the topics of identity, routine, candidly, and finding purpose when structure is absent. Whether it’s jujitsu, helping at-risk youth, or training for the Leadville 100, Danny and Tyler explore what it means to stay grounded when everything is shifting.

They also discuss:

• Danny’s farewell photoshoot on the runway

• The mental load dogs carry (especially while sniffing!)

• Why “third spaces” matter for men and youth

• Leadville 100 and the drive to compete with purpose

• Daily discipline, friendships, and the systems that hold men up

If you're navigating big life changes—or just love hearing two men talk honestly about life, identity, and personal growth—this one’s for you.

Read more

We didn’t predict this year, not even close. Illness, treatment fog, big life changes, training gaps, and still… the foundation didn’t break.

In this episode, we talk about what it looks like to keep moving when life gets weird, how jiu-jitsu exposes your nervous system, and why “self-rescue” is a skill, not a slogan. We also explore the differences between homeostasis and allostasis, building safety in the face of change, and the quiet power of being surrounded by solid people.

What we cover:

• The weird year nobody could’ve predicted

• Getting sick, ear pain, sinus “Q-tip exorcisms,” and why Danny hates airplane air

• Why jiu-jitsu is mental health, not a hobby

• Coming back after health issues and realizing the room leveled up without you

• Jealousy, pecking order, and staying in a growth mindset

• Homeostasis vs. allostasis, and learning to be safe in change

• “Self-rescue” and why anger isn’t leadership

• How training becomes regulation for dads and sons

• The medical cloud: nausea meds, ATRA, arsenic, and losing your clarity

• Gratitude, community, and the people who showed up when it mattered

• Retirement uncertainty, identity shifts, and learning to celebrate yourself

• Why we’re switching release days to Tuesdays in 2026

Takeaway:

Life isn’t predictable. You don’t need certainty. You need a foundation that holds, people who don’t disappear, and the ability to adapt midstream.

If this episode hit you: share it with a friend who’s quietly carrying a heavy year.

Not the spa kind of heat. The kind that leaves you with one question and no room to negotiate: Can you stay?

Outside the door, there’s a cold plunge. ice cold water. No coaching. Just consequence.

This isn’t wellness. It’s containment.

Containment is the presence of limits that organize pressure. It’s when stress, emotion, and energy have edges strong enough to hold them, so they don’t spill everywhere else. Men don’t lack feeling. They lack environments, rhythms, and expectations that give feelings a shape.

We’ve spent the last decade telling men they’re avoidant. Emotionally unavailable. Afraid of intimacy. The language sounds sophisticated. It’s also lazy. Most men aren’t avoidant. They’re uncontained.

When there’s pressure without walls, it leaks. Into endless work. Into dopamine habits dressed up as hobbies. Into withdrawal that gets diagnosed instead of understood. Avoidance isn’t the disease. It’s the exhaust.

After my separation, my nervous system wasn’t dramatic, just scrambled. I was functioning, polite, productive, and completely disconnected from any internal center of gravity. I’d heard the explanation before. ADD. ADHD. Here’s a prescription. And it worked, in a narrow sense. Focus improved. Output climbed.

What disappeared was weight. The feeling that my life could hold me.

I didn’t want to live a numbed and efficient life. I wanted to feel organized from the inside out. So I stepped into the water.

Cold doesn’t ask you to process. It doesn’t negotiate. It demands presence. Breath narrows. Attention snaps into place. For ninety seconds, avoidance isn’t an option. Then the sauna. The slow burn. Stress applied inside a boundary, followed by relief.

That’s containment in practice: stress that makes sense, limits you can trust, recovery that’s earned. Not a constant expression. Not endless analysis. A system that metabolizes pressure instead of scattering it.

This is where modern coaching and therapy aimed at men often miss. The problem is rarely that men don’t feel enough. It’s that emotion arrives without structure. Unlimited emotional access without containment isn’t intimacy. It’s flooding.

So men retreat. Not because they fear closeness, but because chaos, even when well-intentioned, still feels like chaos.

Watch men on the mat, in the garage, under real responsibility. Emotion surfaces there too, sometimes more honestly than in any processing circle. Not because those spaces are emotionally permissive, but because they have rules, consequences, and feedback. Containment makes honesty possible.

This is where I break with the “feel more” industry. Oversharing isn’t courage. Constant processing isn’t depth. Demanding access without responsibility isn’t connection. It’s sprawl. Men sense this and pull back, then get labeled avoidant for refusing to drown.

I didn’t change because I learned a better language. I changed because I built a life with rhythm. Effort and recovery. Silence and speech. Responsibility before disclosure. My emotions didn’t disappear. They organized themselves.

This isn’t an argument against therapy. It’s an argument against insight without structure. Insight is cheap. You can scroll it endlessly. Structure costs. It demands discipline. It asks which wolf you’re feeding.

Here’s the principle:

Men don’t heal by expressing more. They heal by building systems strong enough to hold what they carry.

Avoidance fades when containment appears. Not because the man becomes someone else, but because his life finally has edges.

Paid readers get the containment frameworks I actually use.

Tyler opens up about the cognitive chaos of round four chemo: losing control of his thoughts, detoxing from ATRA and arsenic, and clawing his way back into clarity. Danny shares the gut-level story of being marked AWOL on Veterans Day after almost 30 years of service, losing a $10,000 bonus, and the three-day emotional tailspin that followed. 

We talk about how men often “check the box” in friendship when they’re drowning, how jiu-jitsu becomes a ritual for survival, and why being “lost” isn’t a failure—it’s a season. We also look ahead: what it means to reinvent ourselves, cut the fat, and return to the roots that made this podcast matter.

If you’ve ever felt buried, misunderstood, or mentally fogged out… if you’ve ever carried more than you let anyone see… this one’s for you.

Notable Moments / Timestamps (optional for your episode)

00:05 — Post-training exhaustion meets clarity
06:12 — Tyler’s ATRA detox and the feeling of losing cognitive control
13:40 — Danny’s Veterans Day AWOL story and mental shutdown
33:20 — “Some days you're the hammer, some days you're the nail.”
43:00 — The friendship strain neither of them wanted to admit
56:10 — Blue Belt theory: maybe this is the promotion
1:05:00 — Reinvention, holidays, pressure, and what comes next

The jackpot was simple: unlimited money, an A-frame in the hills, and freedom from every minor inconvenience, including, and this part felt very personal, lumbar punctures. I woke up irritated that the universe hadn’t held up its part of the bargain. I’ve paid my dues. Good karma should be accruing interest by now.

Instead, I had a full itinerary:

My third bone marrow aspiration and biopsy, an IR lumbar puncture with chemo, and the last hurrah, central venous catheter removal with port. If this were my graduation ceremony, the dress code would be hospital socks and intentional vulnerability.

Getting… De-Ported

I’m aware “deported” isn’t the softest word in the current political climate. But in oncology? It’s the word you wait for. It means you’re exiting the nation you never asked to live in, Cancerland, and returning home with your passport stamped “negative.”

The port didn’t glide out with a polite tug. It dug in. It acted like it had squatter’s rights. The doc gave me the obligatory “you’ll feel some pressure,” which is a medical phrase meaning prepare yourself, we’re about to violate several laws of physics.

Then he pulled. Nothing. He followed it up with, “This is just giving you a little hug,” and if I hadn’t been slightly sedated, I would’ve asked whether I’d accidentally wandered into the children’s hospital. Because whatever that port was doing, it wasn’t hugging me. He adjusted the angle, braced a little more, and pulled again. Still nothing. At this point, we were both too committed to quit, and the pain meds were… let’s say not calibrated for a device this emotionally attached to me. There was burning, there was pressure, and there was one particular yank where I genuinely wondered if he was trying to extract my sternum as a bonus.

When it finally tore free, it felt less like a medical procedure and more like evicting an angry tenant. But once it was out, the silence was unreal. No tug. No line.

No plastic port announcing itself through my shirt.

For the first time in a year, I wasn’t connected to anything but my own breath.

Just like that, I was de-ported.

The Procedure Tour (For Those Who Enjoy Discomfort)

The IR suite was cold enough to store meat, which immediately felt rude.

They positioned me into my usual stance “facedown a$$-up” a setup I hadn’t experienced since 2 Live Crew made it a cultural directive. Not exactly the posture of dignity, but it gets the job done. On the third marrow aspiration, you’d think I’d be stoic.

Nope.

That familiar pressure… pop… pull still hit like someone was vacuuming the secrets out of my bones. The biopsy followed, a mix of pressure and indignation.

The lumbar puncture was next, delivering chemo directly into my spinal fluid, as if my nervous system hadn’t already submitted its resignation.

Goodbyes I Didn’t Want to Say

Finishing treatment is a victory, but it’s also a kind of grief. These nurses saw me wrecked, nauseated, scared, sarcastic, stubborn, and trying too hard to be brave. And they always met me with kindness. Leaving them felt like leaving the only people who spoke the language of this last year.

You don’t expect to get attached to the people who stab you for a living.

The Thaw

Now a month out, something strange is happening. Life is thawing, even in winter. My body feels like it’s waking up after a long freeze, a hand here, a feeling there, a part of myself I thought I might not get back. My people showed up.

Friends I hadn’t heard from in years.

Coworkers covering shifts.

Meals were dropped off at my door.

Messages that landed on the right day at the right hour.

How could I not be grateful?

I cried, I raged, I broke down, I rebuilt.

And somehow, gratitude keeps sneaking in through the cracks.

And Now… the Return

As I re-enter my life, the timing feels almost scripted.

The charity jiu-jitsu tournament isn’t just happening; I’m stepping onto the mat for it with purpose. A round fought for the people who kept me here.

No Quarter is growing up, moving from an idea to a full-fledged publication. The podcast is rebooting, coming back louder and cleaner than before.

There are new projects, new stories, and new fights worth training for. Not because cancer gifted me some enlightened “perspective,” But because surviving stripped away every excuse I had left.

And since I’m already back in the fight:

I’m raising $2,000 for Tap Cancer Out.
If you train, roll with me.
If you can support, sponsor me.

If you’re in my corner from the sidelines, that counts too. Every dollar helps choke out the thing that tried to take me off the mat.

I’m de-ported now.

And for the first time in a long time, I’m walking back into my own life without permission slips, tubes, or conditions.

No quarter.
~Tyler

The triage nurse was on the phone when I arrived. Her voice was soft but steady, the kind of tone you use when someone’s already made up their mind. Later, she told me about the man on the other end. I’d crossed paths with him before, a quiet guy who’d been fighting for ten years. That morning, he’d decided it was time to go home.

Not giving up. Just done. He told me something once, early on, that I still carry:

“You don’t have to beat cancer to live better than before.”

I thought about that as I sat in the chair. About what it means to finish something. About what it means to stop. When I rang the bell that day, it wasn’t the sound of victory.

It was release.

Outside this week, the Beaver Moon was rising.

Gold and full, hanging low in the cold Utah sky like the world itself was marking the moment. The old trappers called it the moon of preparation, the season when beavers seal their dens for winter. A time for closure. For shelter. For gathering what’s worth keeping and letting the rest go.

I couldn’t have written a better metaphor if I tried.

The last four infusions were at the Park City clinic. Each one felt like crossing off a line on a calendar you’ve been staring at too long. The nurses reminded me how close I was. I hugged every single one of them when we were done.

Friday, November 7. My last day. They’d decorated the room. Balloons, paper fans, the kind of fanfare that makes you realize people actually cared. My daughter Cozette came with me. She sat in the corner, scrolling her phone, glancing up now and then to check on me. When it was over, she hugged me and said, “You did it, Dad.”

I didn’t cry. But I wanted to.

After, a coworker who’d pushed me to see the doctor in the first place took me to lunch. We didn’t talk about cancer. We talked about work, about life, about everything except the thing we’d just finished. Later that afternoon, my team surprised me on our usual Friday call. They stopped the meeting to celebrate, not just the milestone, but the fact that I’d kept showing up through all of it.

It felt strange, being celebrated.

Like the muscles for that part of my soul had atrophied. Somewhere along the way, I learned to survive more easily than I learned to let joy land. Maybe that’s the quiet curriculum of this whole journey: learning to pause long enough to let gratitude settle in the body, not just the brain.

Friday night was a celebration by fire.

After eight months of poison and prayer, I joined a few of my jiu-jitsu brothers for a pig roast. We were prepping for the fall belt test the next day, and someone had the brilliant idea to roast a whole pig overnight. Smoke curled into the cold air. Laughter echoed off the mountains. Old stories got retold with new details.

At one point, standing around the smoker, someone said it looked like a scene out of Lord of the Flies.

They weren’t wrong.

A bunch of sleep-deprived grapplers circling a roasted pig, basting it like it was our ticket into Valhalla. The smell of smoke and fat and charred skin. The sacred that has nothing to do with churches and everything to do with showing up for each other.

This was the most sacred thing I’d done all week.

Saturday, I watched the belt tests. Saw people push through nerves and exhaustion, faces red, breathing hard, refusing to quit. It reminded me of the same fight I’d just finished in a different ring.

Then, unexpectedly, the Professor called me up and awarded me my second stripe on my blue belt.

I hadn’t been the strongest version of myself this year. I’d missed classes. Showed up foggy. Moved slower than I wanted to. But I’d been faithful to the process. I kept coming back. And sometimes, that’s enough.

I felt that stripe click into place like a benediction.

Not for what I’d done. But for what I’d refused to quit.

Sunday night ended with a family steak dinner hosted by some of my favorite people and loudest cheerleaders. The Beaver Moon was still full when I drove home, lighting the mountains like a lantern.

I don’t know how to celebrate myself. I can build, lead, and survive. But celebration feels foreign, like trying to speak a language I never learned. Maybe that’s why this season had to happen. To teach me how to stay in the moment long enough to recognize that I made it.

Now that the drugs are wearing off, I can feel my body trying to remember what “normal” feels like.

My memory’s still foggy, like tuning an old radio, but it’s coming back in pieces. And my gut, my second brain, is asking for a whole new level of care. It’s funny how the place we digest life is also where we store so much of what we’ve endured.

Maybe healing there is the next practice. Less arsenic. More blueberries.

Monday marks the beginning of whatever comes next—no more infusions. No more schedules pinned to blood counts. Just the slow, awkward return to everyday life. The mind will take time to catch up to what the body has survived.

But I carry the lessons.

That joy can thrive in sterile rooms.

That courage wears scrubs.

That strength sometimes looks like sitting quietly in a chair, with an IV in your chest, refusing to flinch.

I don’t know where No Quarter goes from here. Maybe forward. Maybe inward. But I know this: the fight changes you. And maybe the point was never to win. It was to learn how to live without holding anything back.

No quarter given.

No quarter needed.

Just life.

~Tyler

P.S. — I’m Tapping In

Quick reminder: I’m fighting (literally) to raise money for cancer-related charities through Tap Cancer Out.

If you train, sign up to roll.
If you can support and sponsor me here.
If you’re cheering from the sidelines, that counts too.

My goal is $2,000; every dollar helps choke out the thing that tried to take me off the mat.

No quarter. No excuses. Just one more round.

Subscribe now

The guys discuss manhood, pride, public apologies, and the often-awkward journey of striving to do better and be better. From smother taps and eye pokes to flag etiquette and Fight Club alter egos, it’s an episode packed with laughs, lessons, and a whole lot of real.

Whether you’re a man trying to figure it all out—or just someone who loves hearing real talk from real dudes—this one’s for you.

Subscribe, rate, and share if you believe in our mission to redefine manhood and mental health.

Arsenic and ATRA back in the bloodstream, the nerves pulled tight like a guitar string tuned past pitch. I’m wired. Irritable. Raw.

Then everything stops.

October 10th. I had to put Maybe down.

Our twelve-year-old Yorkie, named after the Arrested Development character because we thought I thought I was clever in 2013. She’d been with us through everything: moves, divorce, lazy Sundays. Slept on or as close to your face as you could possibly tolerate.

She taught me about love. The kind that doesn’t demand, doesn’t posture, doesn’t need you to be better than you are. The kind that just shows up.

My kids were on their way home from Mexico.

Cancer doesn’t pause for grief. You’re supposed to just hold it together.

I didn’t.

The next day, I took my son, my oldest daughter, and her friend to get coffee. I’d already grabbed something and didn’t like it, so I swung through Dutch Bros. I ordered, waited, then held out the old cup.

“Could you toss this for me?”

The girl smiled. “Sorry, we can’t take anything back through the window.”

Something in me snapped.

“You have no problem taking my dirty money through the window!!”

Then I poured it out right there, in front of her, in front of my kids, in front of whatever part of me was still trying to be decent.

Steam rose. Silence. Then the poor kid whispered, “This is wild.”

She wasn’t wrong.

It wasn’t righteous anger. It was chemical warfare in a paper cup. It was humiliating. It was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, except Hyde was hopped up on retinoic acid at peak concentration.

At my next appointment, I asked for more Ativan. Lorazepam. The benzodiazepine that had been the only thing keeping my nervous system from full revolt. I might’ve referenced “Valium Mommy” one too many times. My nurse gave me the kind of look that means we need to talk. She sent me to the social worker.

So I sat down with a stranger and told her the Dutch Bros story. Not because I was proud of it. Because I needed someone to know that I wasn’t okay, that I knew I wasn’t okay. I knew better, but my body was a chemistry experiment I couldn’t control.

She didn’t flinch. Just nodded and said, “Let’s talk to your doctor about adjusting your ATRA.”

They cut my dose from 100mg to 50 mg per day. It helped.

A mercy through a meltdown.

Meanwhile, Riley has been adjusting well. The new dog. The chaos dog.

Turns out my joke about her being part Belgian Malinois wasn’t a joke. DNA came back: forty-four percent Malinois, twenty-seven Golden Retriever, with a dash of Husky and Malamute for flavor.

She isn’t a comfort dog. She’s a drill sergeant. A cuddle champion, she bites my butt out of bed and drags me outside because feelings aren’t the mission. Movement is.

Maybe taught me love. Riley’s teaching me discipline.

Right now, I need both.

Between treatments, I finished The Count of Monte Cristo. My jiu-jitsu buddy was reading, so we compared notes. Edmond Dantès starts as a man, becomes a ghost, then something like a saint. I underlined the same passage he did:

“There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another. Only a man who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of living.”

Before cancer, I thought I knew what hard was. I’d trained jiu-jitsu with cracked ribs, meal-prepped like a monk, kept my head down and my goals in sight. But this is a different kind of hard. The kind that doesn’t yield to effort or control. The kind that demands surrender.

The comparison between who I was and who I am now is brutal.

But Dantès is right, you don’t get to appreciate the light without the dark. You don’t get joy without intimacy with grief.

I’ve felt what it is to die, not physically, but emotionally, spiritually.

Pieces of me dissolved under the weight of chemicals and loss. And somehow, that stripping away made the small things holy.

I’m off ATRA now. The fog is thinning. My brain feels like it’s coming back online.

I still lose my temper sometimes. I still scare myself.

But I come back faster. I repair. That’s the work my kids are watching. Not a perfect man, but a man who returns.

No Quarter.

~Tyler

I’m Tapping In

I’m fighting literally to raise money for cancer-related charities through Tap Cancer Out on February 28th, one year since diagnosis.

If you train, sign up to roll.

If you can support, sponsor me here

If you’re cheering from the sidelines, that counts too.

Goal: $2,000. Every dollar helps choke out the thing that tried to take me off the mat.

They dive deep into No Quarter as a mindset—refusing to give weakness any room to grow—and how acceptance, gratitude, and community can keep you fueled when your mental and emotional tanks run low. Tyler opens up about finishing his final round of cancer treatment and the strange mix of sadness, strength, and new perspective that comes with recovery. Danny shares updates on coaching, fundraising, and the joy of watching young wrestlers grow.

There’s plenty of humor and real-life grit too: dog training disasters, road rage restraint, why Main Street traffic is the ultimate patience test, and how friendship and men’s groups keep them both sane.

“I didn’t adopt a dog—I adopted a training partner.”

This episode also includes a heartfelt dedication to Berlin Birmingham, a reminder to every man out there that you’re not alone.

Shoutouts:
• Salt Electrolytes – solid gear and even better conversations
• Mountain Elite Massage – men’s group collaboration in the works
• ATC Jeremy – out there crushing it on set and in life

For anyone feeling worn down, burnt out, or just trying to keep the wheels turning, this one’s for you. Because even when life hits hard… the gas tank ain’t empty yet. 

“If your tank feels empty, reach out. We’ve got fuel to spare.”

And as much as I’d love to tell you I’m gliding through this like some monk-bodied stoic, the truth is closer to this:

I can feel everything, all at once.

Every cell in my body seems to have a group chat, and no one knows how to mute notifications. That’s the thing no one tells you about All-Trans Retinoic Acid (ATRA): it’s not just a cancer drug. It’s empathy training for your entire nervous system.

Compared to something like Accutane, the skin-clearing cousin people take in college, my dose is… well, if Accutane is a cup of coffee, ATRA is a triple-double espresso hooked to an IV drip.

I’m in the deep-end program, swimming with biochemistry sharks.

And when I say “off,” what I really mean is: I’m off the daily arsenic drip. But the ATRA net is still going strong, catching every neuron, mood, and dream that tries to escape.

Leaky Brain Anyone?

Here’s the nerdy part: I’ve been geeking out on what’s happening inside my head. ATRA doesn’t stop at blood. It crosses the blood–brain barrier (BBB), a microscopic force field meant to protect the brain from chaos. Once it’s through, it starts flipping genetic light switches.

It binds to retinoic acid receptors (RARs) and retinoid X receptors (RXRs), the master keys for gene expression in neurons and glial cells. Those keys unlock all sorts of mood, focus, and sleep systems: neurotransmitter signaling (especially GABA and dopamine), synaptic plasticity, and stress regulation.

That sounds cool, in theory, until you realize that shifting those dials too far can scramble the mix.

When ATRA destabilizes the GABA–glutamate balance, you get this “wired but tired” cocktail: heightened anxiety, sensory overload, sleep disruption, and a kind of restless electricity humming just beneath the skin.

It’s signal saturation. It’s like your blood-brain barrier turned into a leaky speaker, every thought and sensation amplified, reverberating, impossible to tune out. And the kicker? This “leaky brain” state means your body’s doing the messy repair work in real time.

I’ve learned that recovery isn’t passive; it’s participatory. The brain wants to heal, but you must give it reasons to trust you again. So I’ve been moving daily, even walking Riley through the cold morning air or sneaking in a few light rolls at the gym. Movement pumps oxygen and growth factors back into circulation, feeding the neurons running a biochemical marathon. I’m trying to eat cleaner, real food, anti-inflammatory stuff like greens, turmeric, berries, and olive oil. I’ve added omega-3s, magnesium glycinate, and a B-complex to help rebuild myelin and steady my neurotransmitters.

Primarily, though, I’m protecting my sleep like it’s sacred. The blood-brain barrier is most substantial when you’re deep in REM, and lately I’ve realized that rest is just as medicinal as any pill. On the quieter side, I’m doing breath work and meditation, retraining my body to recognize safety instead of adrenaline. None of it’s fancy. It’s just structure, rhythm, and repetition, the small habits that remind my nervous system that it can stop bracing for impact.

Riley: My roommate has a record

Meet Riley, my newest training partner, emotional support chaos agent, and part-time life coach.

She’s between eight and ten months old, likely a German Shepherd–Malinois mix ( DNA test pending), which means she’s equal parts philosopher, athlete, and unlicensed security consultant. She was found wandering behind the Heber Walmart and spent nearly a month in County Lock-Up (a.k.a. the shelter) doing hard time for the crime of being unwanted.

I saw her mugshot on Facebook, her head tilted, her eyes defiant, and before I knew it, I was filling out paperwork and plotting her jailbreak. Upon meeting her, it didn’t hurt that she immediately suggled Cozy (“clever girl”). Now she’s home, running recon on everything in the neighborhood and teaching me that healing sometimes comes with muddy paws.

The Malinois part of her lineage explains a lot. This breed guards presidents, leaps out of helicopters, and works with special forces dogs bred to save the day, whether you asked for it or not. The Shepherd side brings loyalty, intelligence, and just enough empathy to make you feel judged when you skip leg day. The combination? A Malingator half genius, half chaos, all heart.

She drags me outside when I’d rather overthink, keeps pace when my energy’s gone, and sits beside me when the world feels too loud. She’s not here to comfort me but to train me to move, breathe, and live.

People like to say, “Who rescued who?”

I think in our case, it’s mutual. She needed a home. I needed a reason to keep showing up. She’s sweet, stubborn, and more intelligent than I deserve, and together we’re figuring out that grace doesn’t always look gentle. Sometimes it seems like a dog covered in mud and a man trying to keep up.

Back on the Mats (Don’t Tell My Doctors)

Yes, I’m back on the mats.
Ye,s I’m rolling complete contact.
And n,o my doctors don’t know.

They’d prefer I stay wrapped in bubble wrap until my next round of labs. But jiu-jitsu gives me something that medicine can’t: a sense of agency. When I’m training, I’m not “the patient.” I’m just a man, breathing, sweating, and learning where my edges are again.

I’ll compete on February 28th at the Tap Cancer Out BJJ Open, one year since my diagnosis.

The symbolism’s perfect: same fight, different arena.

What Healing Feels Like

Healing isn’t a straight line. It’s an oscillation between exhaustion and awe. My nerves buzz like crossed wires, my muscles negotiate new contracts, and my moods fluctuate between monk and maniac.

But I’ve learned that progress doesn’t feel peaceful; it feels alive. It hums, aches, and reminds you that you’re still here. Riley doesn’t care about any of that. She knows I smell like IV drips and peanut butter and that I keep showing up.

And maybe that’s the only recovery metric that matters: consistency, not perfection.

So here’s to round four, the final boss.
To leaky brains and loyal dogs.
To the noise of healing and the quiet that follows.

No quarter.
~Tyler

P.S. — I’m Tapping In

Quick reminder: I’m fighting (literally) to raise money for cancer-related charities through Tap Cancer Out.

If you train, sign up to roll.
If you can support and sponsor me here.
If you’re cheering from the sidelines, that counts too.

My goal is $2,000; every dollar helps choke out the thing that tried to take me off the mat.

No quarter. No excuses. Just one more round.

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My reward? Fatigue, brain fog, and the overwhelming sense that the nurses are one sarcastic comment away from “accidentally” swapping my IV bag with a bottle of ranch dressing. And honestly? Fair. I’ve been asking for the aux cord since week two.

But as grueling as this medical protocol has been, the scariest moment I’ve experienced lately didn’t happen in the infusion chair.

A Bloody Parallelogram

In April of 1999, I was a junior in high school. Columbine High School, eleven miles from where I sat, was under siege.

Kids who looked like me. Dressed like me. Walked through the same mall as me. Played the same video games. But that day, they were broadcast on live television, escaping through shattered windows and fire alarms, and the American dream turned into a nightmare.

It was the birth of the 24-hour news cycle, and the funeral of innocence for an entire generation.

Fast forward to September 2025.

An act of violence unfolds in Orem1, just thirty miles south of my home in Heber, on a campus where I’ve spent time. Familiar buildings. Familiar faces. What disturbed me most, though, was receiving the up-close video from my 20-year-old daughter and 17-year-old son. This time, it wasn’t just that the victims looked like me; it was the man, the kids, the energy. They were me, or at least the version of me I could’ve become in another timeline, with a different set of fractures and fewer tools to process them. What followed was:

Swift, hysterical, inaccurate.

Politicians scrambled for camera angles. Social media screamed louder than the sirens. Everyone with a platform became an expert. Somehow, nobody knew what the hell had actually happened. An early, gut-level sense of failure in our systems, an emotional fog before the facts, yet even as new and evolving information came forward, the outrage machine had already taken the wheel.

That’s the bloody parallelogram we now live inside, where facts are bent by fear, and fear is sold wholesale.

Fear is a Hell of a Business Model

Matt Taibbi wrote in Fear, Inc. that the media doesn’t sell facts; they sell fear, because fear keeps you watching.

“If you’re not scared, they can’t sell you safety.”

In the media’s eyes, the ideal citizen is terrified of the other side, glued to a screen, and ready to buy whatever balm the sponsors push between segments.

And the formula works:

• Create a villain.

• Distort the context.

• Repeat until it’s wallpaper.

Whether it’s crime stats in Chicago or drag queens in Florida, the story isn’t about what’s happening, it’s about who we should blame, and how loudly.

Taibbi also warns that we’ve entered a time when the truth is irrelevant compared to the feeling of being right:

“News audiences now require stories that confirm their feelings of fear, resentment, and moral superiority, not stories that challenge them.”

Sound familiar?

Scroll your feed post-tragedy. Everyone’s a victim. Everyone’s an expert. And everyone’s microphone is louder than their listening.

Manufactured Consent in Real Time

Decades before Zuck, Musk, and TikTok, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman laid out a blueprint in Manufacturing Consent for how mass media filters information to maintain the status quo:

“The media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them.”

They introduced the “Five Filters” of mass media tools used to decide what stories get told, and how:

1. Ownership (corporate media serves corporate interest)

2. Advertising (content must please sponsors)

3. Sourcing (journalists rely on insiders, not outsiders)

4. Flak (pushback is used to silence dissent)

5. Anti-communism / ideological control (fear-based framing keeps people aligned)

In modern terms?

That’s clickbait headlines, influencer echo chambers, selective sourcing, ratio’d posts, and “cancel culture” outrage cycles. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s a business model. Chomsky writes.

“Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state,”

In 2025, that propaganda doesn’t have to come from the top. It’s crowdsourced. Repackaged by your cousin on Instagram with a “❤️” emoji and 400,000 likes.

The Need to Be Right (Even When We’re Hurting)

There’s something painfully human about needing validation, especially when hurting. When we feel powerless or scared, we seek meaning. We seek tribe. We seek a story that tells us we’re okay, good, and on the “right side.”

It’s not just politics. It’s biology.

Validation triggers the same reward system as a good meal, sex, or a shot of morphine.

But here’s the rub: We crave control. Control online looks like a sharp take, spicy comment, and a dopamine rush from validation. When we’re scared, misunderstood, or grieving, being “right” is easier than being raw. Being “informed” is easier than being vulnerable. Being “loud” is easier than being still.

If your sense of safety depends on being agreed with, you’ve already lost.

From the Chair to the Mat

I’ve been literally full of poison this year. Arsenic, ATRA, prednisone, anti-nausea cocktails that sound like rejected IPA names. But it’s not the chemicals that scare me, it’s the culture. The one that makes us choose sides before we choose truth. The one that rushes to blame before it sits in silence. The one that taught us that being right is more important than being human. To defend people before we examine principles. To confuse being loud with being clear and right with being whole.

We’ve become addicted to personalities. We let pundits, influencers, and political figureheads rent space in our minds for free and call it “thinking.”

We elevate people and burn principles.
And when those people fall short (as always), we double down instead of waking up.

Principles don’t trend, but they endure.
People get canceled. Principles don’t. Ego flips. Integrity holds.

I don’t have all the answers. Hell, I barely have eyebrows anymore. But I do know this:

If we don’t stop.
If we don’t breathe.

If we don’t sit with the actual pain instead of the performance of pain

We will poison ourselves.

Not with arsenic.
But with ego.
Not with ideology.
But with identity addiction.
Not with what we say.
But what we refuse to examine.

So here I am. Rounding a corner in my cancer treatment, Bruised. Chubby. Occasionally hilarious. Watching a nation that seems to have no idea how to treat itself. Maybe we should stop shouting into the void and start listening to the ache.

Maybe, just maybe, we could become people who feel, not just react. Who reflects, not just reposts. Who chooses principles, even when they’re not popular?

~Tyler

PS: Still Fighting, Literally

I signed up for the Tap Cancer Out BJJ Open this February.

It’s a jiu-jitsu tournament where we fight to raise money for cancer-related charities.

This isn’t just about a tournament. It’s about making sure all this pain serves a purpose.

If you want to support my fundraiser, click here to donate.

Or share this post with someone who might need to know they’re not alone and feeling lost.

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In this episode, Danny and Tyler dive into a raw and real conversation about navigating life’s chaos, from unexpected trips to Mexico to the grind of chemotherapy cycles. Tyler opens up about training jiu-jitsu while on heavy medication, the importance of mental health, and what it means to build a fight camp not just for competition, but for life.

They cover:

• Jiu-Jitsu as therapy – finding clarity and brotherhood on the mats

• Life on (and off) the meds – how treatment impacts energy, mood, and mental resilience

• Men’s mental health – why some fight through and others give up, and how community can change the trajectory

• Consistency & discipline – from 100 push-ups and 200 squats a day to showing up for your kids

• Fatherhood lessons – how to teach discipline, trust, and resilience to sons in a world that doesn’t care about excuses

The guys also share stories about competition, the power of community, and why men need outlets that challenge and shape them. As always, it’s a mix of humor, honesty, and hard-hitting truths about manhood.