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The microphones were already running. Cam looked at me and instead of opening the episode, he asked what was wrong. I had gotten dressed, gotten ready, and did not want to record, and I couldn't tell him why.

We published that conversation instead of the one we planned.

What we found: I wanted to record to keep a streak that did not exist. I invented it. And underneath that was something much older, a compulsion I've had since childhood to get up and help the second I see someone I love working. I could not sit still in a house where Cam was in his office being productive. So I would go into mine and invent tasks. Small ones. Ones that anybody could have done.

Cam's response is the part I keep replaying. He tells me my actual job right now is to be, not to do, and I spend most of the hour quietly arguing with him about it.

In this one:

- The Japanese office rule I was unconsciously following in my own house

- Why he says the days I lie down are the days he gets the most done, and the pattern that made him believe it

- Something about cherry blossoms, and how long they actually bloom

It is not a polished episode. It is a real one, and I cried in it, and we ended it by watching Avatar with popcorn.

For the ongoing version of these conversations, explore The Board: https://www.theboardwalks.com/the-board

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thehoganshow.substack.com

There's a moment about halfway through where I start crying about the X composer, that small text box you type a tweet into. I built my whole way of writing inside it. Brain to post button, no editing, nothing in between. Since we came off the platforms, everything I write goes into a Google Doc instead, and it has felt like a small death I did not expect to grieve.

Before that we lay out what 2025 actually cost us. We ended three communities in one email. I stepped down from hosting the walks on their third birthday, right when I loved them most, and handed them to Julia, who was quietly dropping hints that she was pregnant. We locked the laptops in a closet for two weeks and came out knowing exactly what had to go.

Then the episode turns into something we did not plan, which is the two of us coaching each other in real time.

In this one:

- The two week screen detox, and how to approximate it if you have a job and cannot go dark

- Cam names his real block, and it isn't fear of being seen

- The image of a wave pouring into a red solo cup, and why that is the actual pain

We start in a pumpkin dress joking about a benefit concert and end somewhere neither of us expected, with a solution that took ninety minutes and one cry to find.

For the ongoing version of these conversations, explore The Board: https://www.theboardwalks.com/the-board

It took me a full hour to say a number out loud to the man I live with. Not an hour of hesitating. An hour of me starting the sentence "okay, I'm going to tell you how much I weigh" and then not finishing it, on a loop, while Cam sat there being infinitely patient about it.

That's near the end. Before that we walk you through the year we gained the weight on purpose: the pizza, the ice cream nearly every day, the bowl of ground beef with barbecue sauce that Cam made me in the early days that I still call one of the reasons I fell in love with him.

Cam gained thirty pounds. I crossed a number I had spent my adult life certain would end me, and nothing ended. We were happier than we'd ever been.

In this one:

- Why the phrase "she let herself go" is backwards, and what we were actually doing

- The one thing I ate every single day for years, and the math I used to keep myself in line

- A scan that told me a number I had spent a decade demonizing is the number my body is happiest at

We're heading in the other direction now, on purpose, and running a six month experiment built entirely around the question: what if it could be easy? No classes. No rushing. Nothing that spikes my cortisol on the drive over.

We have no idea if we're right.

For the ongoing version of these conversations, explore The Board: https://www.theboardwalks.com/the-board

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A woman wrote about her marriage ending like a house fire. She told her husband there was smoke. Nothing. A room is burning. Nothing. Half the house. Nothing. Only when she said this is the last room left did he finally move, and by then there was no house.

That story sits at the center of this one, and it explains something Cam said that I could not stop turning over: men process their whole lives on light switches. On or off. Fit or fat. Rich or broke. Fine, fine, fine, she wants a divorce. The check engine light being yellow does not count. It has to go red.

We came in planning to talk about weight and this took over instead.

In this one:

- Why "I asked you to take the trash out" is almost never actually about the trash, and what the real sentence underneath it sounds like

- The idea of space: who has it in a relationship, why it is rarely equal, and why "he should just know" is only obvious to the person who has it

- A couple from this season of Love is Blind who acted this out on camera, and what almost nobody watching correctly named

There's also a moment where I tell Cam about a man who spent ninety minutes listing what was wrong with me, and what he was actually trying to say underneath it.

For the ongoing version of these conversations, explore The Board: https://www.theboardwalks.com/the-board

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thehoganshow.substack.com

I have hundreds of videos of myself walking around my bedroom. Not for fun. I filmed them on an iPad in high school to check how my back looked in my uniform, door locked. I also practiced sitting in backless chairs so nothing would press when I sat down at school. I was still running versions of that ritual three years ago.

The story I'm most embarrassed by: I overslept on a walk morning, people were already gathered and texting me, and I stopped to put on a full face of makeup before I left. Thirty minutes late to my own event, because being seen without it was not an option my body would allow.

Cam has a phrase for what happens in front of the mirror every morning: a 128 point inspection. Men, he says, get one question. Women get a hundred, and failing any one of them can take the whole day.

In this one:

- The moment in high school where the whole thing started, and what I gave the credit to

- What I could feel in a woman's face on a Zoom call, and why it made me feel close to her instead of judgmental

- A man at the McDonald's drive thru named Matthew who kept saying something I could not compute

I'm recording this with almost nothing on my face, which was months of very small, very uncomfortable steps. Cam is not making me do any of it, though I make it sound that way roughly every episode.

For the ongoing version of these conversations, explore The Board: https://www.theboardwalks.com/the-board

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thehoganshow.substack.com

A woman who has not posted anything online since 2011 messaged me wanting to hang out. My whole body went tight, and it took me the length of this conversation to understand why.

It isn't her. It's that she has no way to know what the other side of that message looks like, and I have no way to explain it without sounding awful.

Which sent us into the thing we actually needed to talk about: what the word friend is supposed to mean now. Cam thinks the definition we inherited is dead. The one where friendship is proved by frequency, by showing up on Thursdays, by attending the birthday, by texting back within a reasonable window or else it means something.

In this one:

- Our friend Danny, who texts every single time he's in town and gets ignored sometimes, and why Cam says that is the definition of safety

- Walking through Times Square and being able to read almost everyone's emotional state from their shoulders and their feet

- The exact test we use for who gets in a room with us, which has nothing to do with credentials

There's also a hard turn near the end about the difference between wanting people to rise with you and needing them to, and why the second one is not love, however it dresses itself up.

I get emotional about the word friend in here. I did not expect that.

For the ongoing version of these conversations, explore The Board: https://www.theboardwalks.com/the-board

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thehoganshow.substack.com

I have never in my life agreed to go out on a boat. Not once. It reads as a great day to most people and to me it is a specific nightmare: hours with no exit, where I am quietly expected to be the fun one the entire time.

This one started as excitement about something we're building and turned into me getting emotional about something much older, which is what happens when you're the spark in a room. People love the fire, then they want the fire to stay lit, and they want it in a particular mood. Nobody signed up for the whole wave.

Then Cam laid out a mechanic I had never heard put into words, and it reorganized how I understand almost every draining conversation I've ever had.

In this one:

- Why you feel gutted after a "great" conversation, and the direction energy actually moves between two people

- A man at an event who talked with Cam for thirty minutes, walked away thrilled, and never learned his name

- What actually makes a room feel safe, and why a monastery and a prison can look identical from the outside

I also tell the truth about being a kid who felt held hostage in other people's living rooms, and what I now understand I was doing to myself in those rooms.

I cry partway through, and then I skyrocket, and then I notice I don't feel ashamed about it. That noticing is its own kind of progress.

For the ongoing version of these conversations, explore The Board: https://www.theboardwalks.com/the-board

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thehoganshow.substack.com

Akaash has started noticing his own hands. Fingers crossed, toes crossed, shoulders climbing toward his ears, in normal conversations with people who have done nothing threatening.

It happens around anyone he reads as an authority figure, which for most of his life has been almost everyone.

He traces it back honestly: a mother who picked his classes, a father whose career came first, and a childhood where nobody came to his basketball games. He says he did not realize he was allowed to make his own decisions until he was in his late twenties. He also says he loved who he became after a drink, for about ten years, because it let him stop shrinking.

That is the first half. The second half is where Cam does something I did not see coming.

In this one:

- Why he tried to fix the tension by unclenching, and what he noticed was wrong with that

- The specific correlation between how much you resent receiving direction and how much you resist giving it

- The reframe at the end, which he responds to with two words: mic dropThe turn is this: the authority figures are gone now. So who's giving the orders? And what if the resistance he still feels is aimed at the last voice on earth he should be fighting?

He says he used to beat himself up for twenty four hours after ignoring that voice. He's down to about four.

For the ongoing version of these conversations, explore The Board: https://www.theboardwalks.com/the-board

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thehoganshow.substack.com

I asked Cam to cook me on this one. I woke up from a nap, sat down across from him, and told him to explain to the audience what has actually been going on with me lately. He took the assignment seriously.

Here's the setup: there's one piece of work left before we launch the thing we have talked about for months, some days for nine hours straight. It's maybe six hours of work. He has taken every other responsibility off my plate, down to the emails and the car insurance. And I have missed two launch dates and cannot make myself sit down and do it.

His diagnosis is not about discipline. It's that some part of my body still believes that building the next thing means signing up to be available to everyone forever, and no amount of logic touches that.

In this one:

- The reframe he received while napping (it's all downhill from here) and why that's the good news, not the bad

- What happens to a product when you force it out before you're ready, and the 9pm bloodshot-eyes launch we both remember

- What he actually said after three weeks of me announcing "today's the day"

There's a Rudolph metaphor in here that is genuinely embarrassing for me and also completely accurate.

Somewhere in the middle we land on a question I hadn't thought to ask: what would this look like if we treated the waiting like the week before a baby is due?

For the ongoing version of these conversations, explore The Board: https://www.theboardwalks.com/the-board

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thehoganshow.substack.com

Akaash has walked up to a woman he was interested in twice in his life. Once at prom, where his friends had to physically point him in the right direction, and where he asked and then immediately ran away. Once not sober.

Cam's read on the prom story: you were betting on a game rigged in your favor and you still couldn't put the money down.

The part that stuck with me is the meditation group. He saw the same woman there weekly for a month, felt clearly that she had been placed in his path for a reason, and said almost nothing to her. Three weeks later she appeared on his Hinge. He calls that a wink from the universe. I'd call it something less polite.

In this one:

- What happened on his couch one afternoon after he threw out every rule about how to meditate properly

- How he tells the difference between intuition and fear (his word for fear is "dirty")

- The reframe Cam offers near the end, after which Akash says "bruh, I feel very seen right now"

We also get into why "just go get the reps in" is bad advice for someone in his particular position, and where the fine line sits between honoring your intuition and using it as a hiding place.

He says he can already feel the energy of the person he hasn't met yet. That is either the most beautiful or the most inconvenient thing about where he is standing.

For the ongoing version of these conversations, explore The Board: https://www.theboardwalks.com/the-board