Katie has been in Cara's life since the fifth grade. When everything fell apart in high school, hers was the first phone number Cara thought of, and what her family did next changed the shape of Cara's whole life.

This week Katie came to Idaho for the first time, and two halves of Cara's life met each other.

We also get into what's actually happening at the Grand Canyon after the flood, why the South Rim has no water, and what the people who work there are living with right now. Plus a boat that isn't supposed to be able to sink, and a trip we decided on the day before we left.

She said she needs to be ridden by the gods before she can really teach.

Barbara McAfee has been helping people find their full voice for over 30 years, and she means something much bigger than how you sound. She means the version of you that stopped being heard somewhere along the way. The one that got careful, got quiet, got told it couldn't sing.

In this conversation, Barbara walks us through her five elements framework (earth, fire, water, metal, air) and what happens when you finally let the sounds that got stuck inside you come out. We get into the Morning Star Singers, the volunteer hospice choir she's been leading for 19 years. We talk about stage fright, perfectionism, and why Barbara now interprets that anticipatory terror as the onset of the sacred rather than evidence that she should stop.

James talks about Kristen. About his mother.

And Barbara says something neither of us will forget: I would rather hear something true than something perfect.

Barbara's upcoming Full Voice Fundamentals class runs November 9 through December 7, five 90-minute sessions, limited to nine people, $249. If this conversation pulled at something in you, that's a real place to go. [barbaramcafee.com]

Her books:

• Full Voice: The Art and Practice of Vocal Presence [barbaramcafee.com]
• Vocal Intelligence (audiobook includes over an hour of music) [barbaramcafee.com]

The Reinvention Project is where we do this kind of work every Thursday. Free class the third Thursday of every month, a weekly Circle if you want company in it, or book a call if you'd prefer something deeper.

Find us everywhere: linktr.ee/kerouacscruising

Support the show: https://ko-fi.com/kerouacscruising

He wasn't going in. Then he went in.

James just got back from seven days of backcountry hunting in the Sawtooth Wilderness with his son. 90 miles down a dirt road, no phone service, nights in the 20s, and more than 55 miles of hiking! He pulled a muscle coming down a cliff. He left his thyroid medication in the base camp tent. He never got the elk.

And... he'd do it again tomorrow.

This episode is the full debrief: what backcountry hunting actually looks like, what seven days completely off the grid does to a person, and how James accidentally ended up in an alpine lake in his boxers while deciding he absolutely was not going in.

And at the end, Cara makes it a Kerouacs Cruising episode by asking the obvious question: what does any of this have to do with the rest of your life?

Also, there's a teaser for something new that's been cooking. More on that soon.

Check out our Blog for the Full audio version of James's hunting Video.

The Reinvention Project is where we do the deeper work. Free class every third Thursday; join the weekly Circle if you want community along your journey, or book a call if you'd rather just talk to us directly.

Find us everywhere: https://linktr.ee/kerouacscruising

Support the show: https://ko-fi.com/kerouacscruising

It's messy first. That's what nobody tells you about changing your mind.

This is the finale of our Mindset Shift series, and we spent it exactly where we should have: in the hard part. Not the inspiration, not the science (though there's some of that too), but the in-between. The grief of leaving the old version. The void before the new one settles. The way the people who love you will sometimes pull you back without meaning to. And the moment when the only thing holding you steady is knowing what actually matters to you.

We get into contemplation as a tool (and it's probably not what you think it is), mindfulness and meditation in plain language, the power of building a community around who you're becoming, and why self-compassion isn't soft; it's structural.

We started this series in episode 14 asking whether you could change. This episode is the answer to what happens after you decide to try.

Series links if you want to go back to the beginning:

• E14: Old Dogs Can Learn New Tricks
• E15: The One Thing You Can't Stop
• E17: The Story Isn't Finished Yet

Dig deeper into the science of this week's episode in our blog

The Reinvention Project is where we do this work with people, not just talk about it. Free class every third Thursday; weekly Circle if you want company in it regularly, or book a call if you'd rather just talk.

Find us everywhere: linktr.ee/kerouacscruising

Support the show: https://ko-fi.com/kerouacscruising

📚 Mentioned in this episode:

- Richard Rudd — Gene Keys (contemplation framework): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IWcDKUw0Ic

- Theta Brainwave / Programming Before Age 7: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878929324000653

- Mindfulness and meditation clinical summary: https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/meditation-and-mindfulness-effectiveness-and-safety

The truck saga is back, and this time we're not calling it bad news.

If you've been with us since the engine seized up back in episode 12, you know exactly which flashback opens this one. We're back in that moment... the pops, the shudder, the quote that made both our stomachs drop. This time we used it as the jumping-off point for part three of our Mindset Shift series.

We tell you about a farmer whose horse ran away, then came home with a dozen wild horses, then broke his son's leg, then kept that same son out of a war draft. Every time something happened, the farmer said the same thing. Maybe.

We get into the actual science behind why your body responds to stress differently depending on what you believe about it (there's a 30,000-person study behind this one), and a part of your brain called the reticular activating system that's been deciding what you notice, and what you don't, since before you could talk.

We're still holding the pen on how the truck situation turns out. So far, it's not finished. Neither is yours.

Series links:

• E14: Old Dogs Can Learn New Tricks
• E15: The One Thing You Can't Stop
• E18: Love Yourself First

Note for clarity: Cara referred to the brain's content filtration system as the "reticulating activating system" throughout this episode. Its correct name is the reticular activating system. Same incredible mechanism, same science, just wanted to name it right.

If any of this is something you want real, ongoing support putting into practice (not just something to nod along to), that's what The Reinvention Project is for. A free class every third Thursday, a weekly Circle if you want company in it regularly, or book a call if you'd rather just talk it through with us directly.

This episode drew from a body of real research on stress mindset and cognitive reappraisal. If you want to go deeper:

• Keller et al. (2012) — the landmark 30,000-person study on whether believing stress harms you actually affects mortality: Health Psychology, 31(5), 677–684
• Jamieson, Mendes, Blackstock & Schmader (2010) — reappraising pre-exam arousal improved GRE performance: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(1), 208–212
• Jamieson, Nock & Mendes (2012) — reappraising stress improved cardiovascular and cognitive responses: JEP: General, 141(3), 417–422
• Brooks (2014) — reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement: JEP: General, 143, 1144–1158
• Crum, Salovey & Achor (2013) — stress mindsets and how they shape the stress response: JPSP, 104, 716
• 2024 meta-analysis (Scientific Reports) — 44 effect sizes, overall d = 0.23 for reappraisal and mindset interventions on task performance
• Tedeschi & Calhoun (1996 onward) — the post-traumatic growth framework and PTG Inventory

Some weeks the adventure is a moose on a dirt road and a new grandbaby, and the real work is just holding your peace while everything's uncertain.

This week we're taking a breather. After two heavier episodes (and before two more), we brought you along on an adventure day out to Lake View, a tiny lakeside community east of Athol, Idaho, winding mountain roads, moose and baby moose, dogs getting knocked over by the waves, and our first clear-sky day since the Spokane fire. We talk about the land we once looked at out here, grandbaby number two, and the honest truth of this season: we're back to DoorDashing after the truck engine, money's tight, and instead of calling it a hard time, we're treating it as a test of whether we actually believe what we teach. Spoiler: so far, we're holding our peace. This is also the episode where we say it out loud for the first time... Kerouacs Cruising and The Reinvention Project are one and the same now.

What You'll Hear in This Episode:

• An adventure day out to Lake View, Idaho (moose, dense rainforest foliage, a lakeside town that feels like an island)
• Why this region is part of the Washington rainforest, and why we both quietly love it
• Grandbaby number two, and taking a day off from responsibility to just be outside
• The big behind-the-scenes shift: The Reinvention Project is now officially a branch of Kerouacs Cruising, not a separate thing
• How the new monthly free class and the Circle actually work
• The honest money season, and why we're choosing not to call it hard this time
• What it means to keep embracing your life when the horizon's uncertain

Resources and Mentions:

• Lake View / Lakeview, Idaho (the lakeside community on Lake Pend Oreille, east of Athol)
• Lake Pend Oreille
• Kerouacs Cruising presents The Reinvention Project (the newly integrated one-world) ... the free monthly class is the third Thursday of each month; the Circle community meets weekly
• The Spokane fire (referenced as the reason for recent smoke; first clear day after it)

This is the first episode airing since we made it official... The Reinvention Project isn't a separate thing anymore; it's the deeper room inside Kerouacs Cruising. If the conversations here ever make you want to go further, into your own life, with people walking beside you, that's what it's for. There's a free class once a month (the third Thursday) where you can just come sit in and see how it feels. No pitch, no pressure. Reach out anytime, or here's the link whenever you're ready: kerouacscruising.com/reinvention

If you've got someone in your life who's in their own uncertain season and holding on anyway, send them this one. And if you're new here, welcome; we put out something real every week from wherever the road has us parked.

Turns out particles only behaved like particles when someone was watching them... and that might be the most useful thing we've ever learned about being human.

Last episode we talked about how you're not stuck with who you've been. This week we go further, into the one thing you genuinely can't stop: change. We get into the science that keeps proving how little we actually have pinned down (the double-slit experiment, entanglement, the fact that an atom is almost entirely empty space) and what all of it points to. That change isn't the enemy. The fighting is. James and Cara are recording this from a standstill season in Idaho, uncertain about their own next how, talking through it in real time right alongside you.

What You'll Hear in This Episode:

• The E-Squared bean experiment you can run at home to watch your own intention affect something living
• The placebo effect, and its lesser-known shadow, the nocebo effect (and why both matter for how you talk to yourself)
• The double-slit experiment, and why "reality behaves differently when it's watched" is more than a party fact
• Entanglement, the Big Bang, and the strange possibility that everything's still connected
• Why an atom being 99.9999% empty space changes how you might see "solid" reality
• The real reason change feels so hard (hint: it's not the change)
• What James is personally working through right now about letting the world come to him
• Where all of this meets your actual, ordinary, hard week

Series links:

• E14: Old Dogs Can Learn New Tricks
• E17: The Story Isn't Finished Yet
• E18: Love Yourself First

Resources and Mentions:

• E-Squared by Pam Grout (the bean experiment and the "think of someone" experiment)
• The double-slit experiment (observer effect in quantum mechanics)
• Quantum entanglement (the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger for experimental work here)
• The placebo effect and the nocebo effect
• The hotel housekeepers study (mindset and exercise, Crum & Langer, 2007)
• The milkshake / ghrelin study (how framing changed the body's response, Crum, 2011)
• GĂśbekli Tepe (the ~12,000-year-old site that reshaped assumptions about early civilization)
• Out-of-Place Artifacts (OOPArts) (the "computer chip in rock" and other archaeological anomalies James and Cara were describing)
• Nikola Tesla's frequency and vibration principle
• Dark matter (as an example of how much science still can't measure)

Everything we teach in the show, we go one layer deeper in together in The Reinvention Project. There's a free class once a month (the third Thursday) where you can sit in and just see how it feels... no pitch, no pressure. If something in this episode pulled at you, that's the door. kerouacscruising.com/reinvention

If this one got you thinking, do us a favor and send it to the one person you pictured while listening. That's how the show finds its people. And if you're new here, welcome... we drop a new one every week from wherever the road has us parked.

We kick off a short series on the mindset shifts we've spent the last three years actually trying to live, starting with two ideas that quietly rewired how we think about ourselves: your brain isn't done changing at 25, and your genes aren't the fixed hand you were dealt. We also get into two more fringe ideas we've found genuinely compelling: a DNA experiment involving photons and a water crystal study. Along the way: a gratitude practice that actually works, and how Cara talks herself out of a body-image spiral.

What You'll Hear in This Episode:

• Why "your brain is fully developed by 25" turned out to be wrong, and what neuroplasticity actually means
• The mouse study that changed how scientists think about genes: it's not just what you inherit, it's what gets switched on
• Why beating yourself up for falling off a new habit undoes more progress than the slip itself
• Two fringe science ideas we find genuinely compelling: a DNA-photon experiment and a water crystal study
• The placebo effect, and a real surgery study where sham operations worked as well as the real thing
• A simple gratitude practice, and why "realists" might just be pessimists with better branding
• How to start rewriting the story you tell yourself about your own body

Series links:

• E15: The One Thing You Can't Stop
• E17: The Story Isn't Finished Yet
• E18: Love Yourself First

Resources and Mentions:

• Adult neuroplasticity / hippocampal neurogenesis: Eriksson et al., "Neurogenesis in the adult human hippocampus," Nature Medicine, 1998. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9809557/
• The maternal care and gene expression study: Weaver et al., "Epigenetic programming by maternal behavior," Nature Neuroscience, 2004. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15220929/
• The placebo surgery study: Moseley et al., "A Controlled Trial of Arthroscopic Surgery for Osteoarthritis of the Knee," New England Journal of Medicine, 2002. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa013259
• The DNA phantom effect: Gariaev & Poponin's original writeup. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281411802_Investigation_of_the_fluctuation_dynamics_of_DNA_solutions_by_laser_correlation_spectroscopy
• The water crystal study: Masaru Emoto background. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335909571_The_experiments_of_Masaru_Emoto_with_emotional_imprinting_of_water
• Limitless by Jim Kwik (book recommendation)

If this is the episode that got you somewhere... we'd love to have you go deeper with us. The Reinvention Project is where we take this exact kind of conversation further, together, with real people, one step at a time. There's a free class, a weekly Circle, or if you'd rather just talk it through one-on-one, that's here too. Come see what's there: kerouacscruising.com/reinvention

You're always welcome at our campfire. Find the blog, the video, socials, Ko-fi, and how to reach us, all linked 🩷💚

We watched a wildfire grow from an airport parking lot. That was the calm part of the week.

The truck is back with a brand new engine and 500 miles on it, and the drive to pick Cara up from the airport turned into watching a wildfire explode near Spokane in real time. Cara spent a week in Florida with cousins she hadn't really known since she was ten, and came home with a strange discovery about sleeping alone after years of never doing it. Two unrelated, unsolicited pieces of recognition landed back-to-back: a review from Tal Gur that brought Cara to tears, and a top-five ranking from Million Podcasts. And back in Idaho, a lost camper key turned into a full break-in operation, complete with a very confused security guard.

What You'll Hear in This Episode:

• The truck's home with a brand new engine, and a shoutout to the mechanic who earned it
• Watching a wildfire grow from a Spokane airport parking lot, and the 600 structures and 50,000 evacuations that followed
• Cara's week in Florida with cousins she hasn't spent real time with since she was ten, and what she learned about herself sleeping alone
• Two unsolicited wins landing back to back: Tal Gur's review and the Million Podcasts top-five ranking
• James's week alone: elk hunt training, a hurt dog, and 42 miles of hiking
• Losing the only key to the camper's front door, and breaking back in with a screw gun while a security guard tried to make conversation
• The plan to start a mobile handyman business for the season, and why it beats relying on DoorDash alone
• Staying present when money gets tight, instead of spiraling into what the future might hold

Resources and Mentions:

• High Caliber Automotive, Hayden, Idaho
• Spokane, Washington (wildfire)
• Kennedy Space Center, Florida
• Lake Pend Oreille, Idaho
• Tal Gur's review: https://elevatesociety.com/kerouacs-cruising-podcast-review/
• Million Podcasts ranking: https://www.millionpodcasts.com/couple-travel-podcasts/

An open door: The stress of an unknown future is what actually steals today's joy, not the hard thing itself. That's not a one-time lesson; it's a practice, and it's the same practice The Reinvention Project is built around: staying present and regulated when the ground is genuinely uncertain, rather than white-knuckling through it. If any of this (the imposter feeling even with a glowing review in hand, the financial stress, wanting to stay present instead of spiraling) is landing with you, come find us. kerouacscruising.com/reinvention

However you found your way here, we're glad you did. The blog, the video, our socials, and how to reach us are all linked.

The engine seized up in a stranger's parking lot. The dogs were still in the truck.

Cara spent her 40th birthday week in Dallas with two friends she's had since school, Meow Wolf, paddleboarding, bungee fitness, and a concert full of the music that used to be theirs. Back in Idaho, James's quiet week alone with the dogs turned into a truck breakdown, a stranded afternoon, and a U-Haul rental. Then a wrong-address DoorDash order left them holding $200+ in groceries nobody asked for.

This episode is the real-time proof of the mindset work they've been doing: not that hard things stop happening, but that the recovery gets faster.

What You'll Hear in This Episode:

• Cara's 40th birthday girls' trip to Dallas
• James's truck dying mid-drive with the dogs inside
• Getting back into DoorDash to cover the gap
• Turning 40 with the family at Iron Pizza, and the baby going missing
• Learning to accept a generous gift without the guilt attached
• The breathing practice that got James through four hours of roadside crisis

Resources and Mentions:

• Meow Wolf, Dallas, Texas
• The Fort Worth Stockyards
• Iron Pizza, Athol, Idaho

The Reinvention Project is what they call their heart project, taking what they're actually living, in real time, and helping you build the confidence to live a life that's true to you too. This episode is that project in motion, not talked about but lived: a truck dying, a gift accepted instead of deflected, a breath taken instead of a spiral. If any part of this is landing, that's the invitation.

We're glad you're here, however you found your way to us. The blog, the video, our socials, and how to reach us are all linked.