Before we were together, Cam sent me a podcast episode he had just recorded, one where he laid out every problem he had ever had, current and past, without softening any of it. I read the text in the bath and thought, who does that?

That instinct is the through line of this whole episode, and the reason the show has a new name.

Listen Before Love was forty episodes I am genuinely proud of. But love is maybe ten percent of who we are, and the rest kept spilling out sideways or not getting recorded at all because it didn't fit the box we'd built. Meanwhile we were running a gratitude community with a call every single day for 230 days, plus a men's circle, plus a dating group, plus a walk in seven cities. All of it worked. All of it got half of us.

In this one:

- The twelve houses we were each half decorating, and the moment we understood the problem

- What a year of trying to be coaches actually taught us, and why we stopped

- The reason the deepest episodes were always the ones where we talked about what was happening that week, not what happened three years ago

There's also a thing we both blurted at the same time in the same silly voice, which is now, apparently, the show's opening.

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

Akaash finally wrote and posted a long piece he had been circling for months. Within five minutes a stranger replied with six tweets systematically taking it apart, and then unfollowed him. He spent two hours spiraling and got close to deleting his account.

That's the setup. The episode is what happens when Cam slows the whole thing down and walks him back through it beat by beat.

Because the interesting part isn't the reply. It's the ladder Akaash went down after reading it: disappointment, then anger, then a flash of pride, and then shame at himself for feeling any of it. He knows precisely how a free person would have handled that comment. Living in the distance between that and his actual reaction is the real thing he's dealing with.

In this one:

- The question that finds where his "supposed to" was installed, and what his childhood city talked about at every dinner table

- Why he calls the people whose approval he's chasing a blob he invented in his own head

- The irony that lands about halfway through, when we realize what his original post was actually about

There's a moment near the end where Cam suggests Akaash set the whole thing up for himself on purpose. You can hear it land.

His last line: I feel like I'm going to float away.

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

There's a psychic I love and trust, and I avoided calling her for a year. Not because of her. Because we met her through a person who is no longer in our lives, and something in me decided that made it disloyal. She sent me a "thinking of you" message and I let it sit.

Meanwhile I signed up for three other people's waitlists and got nothing back. The message eventually landed: nothing comes through until you reach out to Susie.

So I did. What she said in that hour was almost verbatim what I had already been hearing on my own, which turned out to be the actual point.

In this one:

- What Cam found when he went through my phone (two thousand messages, a thousand missed calls) and what changed within about a day

- Why he says he can feel the difference between me doing something out of joy and doing it to cope, and the Diet Coke example that made it obvious

- The sentence we now say to almost everyone, which reliably makes people do a double take

We also get into a theory that "show me your ChatGPT history" is about to become the new "show me your screen time," and why the squeamishness you feel about that question is worth paying attention to.

The last ten minutes turn into Cam naming things he is proud of himself for, out loud, which he finds genuinely uncomfortable.

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

I have a root growing out, a crimp in my hair from sleeping in a ponytail, zero makeup, and I had been crying about ten minutes before we started. Cam hit record anyway, and would not let me brush my hair. I told him it felt like a prison. He would like the record to show he is not holding me hostage.

The rule I've unconsciously lived by my whole life: I can be seen when I look good, or I can be seen when I feel good. One of those has to be true. Today neither was, which is exactly why this one matters to me.

In this one:

- The difference between speaking from the scar and speaking from the wound, and why nearly everyone you admire only does the first

- A question I asked Cam mid-episode that named something I'd noticed about him for months and never said out loud

- Why I keep disappearing for months at a time, which I finally understood while sitting here

We also get into the writing competition I won at eight years old and what it did to my relationship with creating, plus a stretch where we list every rom com we watched this month like two aliens studying human behavior.

It's the least polished thing we have ever put out and Cam says it's already his favorite.

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

I woke up full of energy and immediately started walking Cam through my ideas for where to put a link in an email automation. He was half asleep. He let it go about a minute, then said, hey baby, I don't want to talk about this right now.

My throat closed. He was still holding me, so he felt the exact second my whole body went into fight or flight. Instead of pulling away, he held on tighter and said nothing.

That's how it went with the two of us. Then we rewind and run the same morning as our earlier, less regulated selves: me locked in the bathroom crying on the toilet, him standing on the other side of the door figuring out what to say.

In this one:

- The exact words Cam would say through that door, which contain zero questions

- Why "are you okay, did I say something" is the worst possible opener, and what it actually communicates

- The voice a lot of women slip into after they've suppressed the cry, which he calls the HR rep

The whole thing hinges on something small: that you almost always already know what you said. The scan back through the last five minutes is available to you. Most people just refuse to do it.

We role play both sides, including what regulating looks like from inside the bathroom before you open the door.

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

Cam can be across the kitchen with his back turned and know the exact moment my face goes cold at something on my phone. He says there is no such thing as hiding your energy from someone who lives with you. Emotions are just energy in motion, and everyone in the room is already swimming in yours.

So we role play it. I open LinkedIn, see another event lifted nearly word for word from the walks, and go quiet. He comes over. What he says next is the piece I want everyone to steal.

In this one:

- The one sentence swap that changes everything: not "what can I do to cheer you up," but something almost nobody thinks to offer

- Why women bring the whole story, in detail, when the man listening thinks he is being handed a problem to solve

- The reason certain conversations leave you drained afterward, which has nothing to do with the topic

There's also a stretch where I put myself on blast: I notice almost everything and I don't always say it. If that's you too, this is the challenge.

Cam calls uncomfortable conversations his special interest. He is not joking, and I have never been more grateful for anything.

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

The homework was simple: upload my human design chart, read what comes back. ChatGPT got every number wrong. I corrected it, ran it again, and the corrected version told me that my actual gift is to be wildly in my own rhythm and to give women permission to live cyclically.

My reaction was not relief. I was a little pissed. I knew it was true, and I had spent a decade proving the opposite.

What follows is Cam reading my consistency record out loud like evidence at a trial, and me slowly realizing that the thing everyone praises me for might also be the thing I am hiding inside. Control feels like safety when your early years were unpredictable. A checkbox next to the word "being" is still a checkbox.

Then I do something about it. Fourteen days, all screens in a closet, calendar cleared, staying home on purpose.

In this episode:

- Why the corrected chart made me angry instead of validated, and what that anger was protecting

- The three anniversary walk that becomes my last as Austin host, and what happens the very next morning

- Three free things she already does to make silence: the shower with no audio, the drive with no audio, and the breath that has to travel from the chest down into the belly

Cam brings the lions: lying around vibing, one burst of hunting, back down. "The luxury of life is space in your day."

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

It started as a normal work session with our new general manager. It turned into what Cam and I call a cook session: hours of question after question, because two coaches in a room could feel Cam holding something back.

What came out is that the man on camera is not the man in the kitchen. Cam has been broadcasting the laser: serious, direct, teaching, the guy people struggle to make eye contact with. He built that persona at fifteen, borrowed from every grind set template he could find, and it worked well enough that nobody noticed it was a fraction of him.

"I look back at some of my reels and I'm honestly kind of disgusted at it."

My version of the same question is smaller and sneakier: why do I say "hi everyone" before I say the thing I actually picked up the phone to say?

In this episode:

- The test you can run on your own content in about ten seconds, and what a gap between the video and the person actually means

- The grocery store guy who winds up before he speaks, unloads something enormously personal within five feet of the automatic doors, and what that performance is really asking for

- The fart conversation: what my mother told me about women, mystery, and allure, and why a bathtub argument about a bodily function turns out to be about shame everywhere else

Cam's line on it: if you would do it alone, that is the baseline. Everything else is negotiation with people who may not be worth the negotiation.

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

People ask us constantly how our relationship feels the way it does, and neither of us has ever been able to answer it well. This episode is the attempt. I warn you upfront that it might be clunky, because asking someone who is living something to describe how they live is like asking water about wet.

What we land on is a piece of advice Cam got from his aunt years ago, on the phone, in the middle of a relationship that was not working: if both people are fully focused on serving the other, both people end up with everything they need. It took him from about seventy percent to a default setting.

Then we take it apart honestly, including the parts that make the idea dangerous. Service only works if both people are actually givers. I have watched too many women hold up their end while a man quietly tapers off around month six.

In this episode:

- Why we have no chore list, and my read on what trash-related anger is really about

- The steak rule: what happens when one of us wants something and the other does not, and why it never turns into a negotiation

- The Russian gymnastics coach living in your head, and why the person you attract is matching that voice rather than your resume

There is also a question Cam asks near the end that is harder than it sounds: would the highest version of you still want to be with your person?

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

A woman sent in a message that put me right back in my old apartment: she believes her person is coming, most days, and then at noon on a Tuesday she is crying without knowing why.

I know the exact texture of it. I talk about pacing my friend's living room before a second date with a man I was already repulsed by, and about the years of cuddling a pillow and saying "one day, one day" into an empty room.

But the spine of this episode is older than dating. It goes back to a girl in my high school biology class who threatened, daily, to cut off my ponytail in the hallway. I never reacted, never let anyone see it land, and then cried alone with the door shut. That split (steel outside, flood inside) followed me into every relationship I had.

In this episode:

- The exact sentence Cam swapped out when someone he loves is hurting, and why the obvious kind one keeps emotions stuck

- The thing we both do in the kitchen when one of us is visibly frustrated, which the other one always joins

- Two physical positions, one for sadness and one for anger, that I use when I need the feeling to actually move

Also: what the deer does after it escapes the cheetah, and what humans decided to stop doing.

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