It’s about a man talking to another man who’s falling apart. Not fixing him. Not lecturing him. Just telling him: I’ve been there. It gets better. Trust me on this.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

I’ve been looking for that conversation my entire adult life and didn’t know it. I rarely found it. Men don’t tend to talk that way — not honestly, not without persona, not without the armor we put on when we were teens and never took off.

This is my attempt to start it.

Here’s what I know about the men I’m writing for.

Some of us have built things. Maybe a business, maybe a career, maybe a family, maybe all three. We followed the script — work hard, lead well, provide, achieve. At some point, when things didn’t go as planned, we suddenly realized we weren’t sure who we really were underneath it all.

Maybe it was a firing. A divorce. A health scare. A birthday with a zero on the end. Maybe it was nothing dramatic — just a slow, creeping sense that the life we built doesn’t quite fit the man we are.

Some of us aren’t there yet. Things feel fine. They felt fine for me too. I was crushing it in my career, I have a smart, beautiful wife, two great kids, a nice house, accumulated wealth, I was living the “dream” in Jackson Hole. I had no idea anything was wrong. I had earned everything I was taught to value, thought was important. The map I had been given got me there.

Until the map of my world went dark.

The Wall Street Journal ran a piece last month about three new prestige TV shows — Rooster, Your Friends and Neighbors, DTF St. Louis — all built around the same character: accomplished men who are flailing, confused, unable to figure out what being a man means in 2026. The critic’s conclusion was that these men never figured it out in the first place.

I’d go further. Most of us were never given the tools. We were handed a script and told to perform it. When the script stopped working, our relationships with ourselves were broken.

This platform is about what’s underneath.

My version of the crisis looked like this.

I was 58. I’d started businesses, led teams, raised capital, built things, raced motorcycles, raised a family. I was CEO of a company I started and Chairman of another. I’d also spent nine months planning a 12,000-mile motorcycle journey through the Andes — Colombia to Tierra del Fuego, the full length of South America. I shipped my bike to Bogotá with three buddies and flew south to start riding.

Then, while I was already on the road, I was fired from the company I co-founded by a board vote I didn’t see coming. A thirty-year friendship cracked in the process. My wife was furious. My internal map — the one that had always told me who I was and where I was going — went dark.

And I was in the middle of the Andes with nowhere to go but south.

I know I was lucky. Most men can’t ship a motorcycle to Bogotá when their world falls apart. They keep working and churning while everything burns. If I don’t bring something useful back from those miles — something that works for the man who can’t leave — then it was just an expensive escape.

Somewhere on a 16,000-foot dirt road in Bolivia, the slow and uncomfortable realization arrived: I had been living a life built from other people’s beliefs about me. The road didn’t let me look away from it.

Something cracked open. Not immediately. Not dramatically. Miles south of where it started, I stopped running the old calculation — what’s next, what’s broken, how do I fix it — and started listening instead. My wife. My kids. Friends I’d kept at arm’s length for years. They’d been there the whole time. I just hadn’t had the room; I didn’t make the room.

I’m writing a book about it called Honest Miles. This newsletter is where I’ll share it as it comes together — scenes from the road, reflections on what the road meant, and the larger conversation I think we need to be having about men, identity, and what it costs to live inside a script that was never really yours.

Any Major Dude is for men who are done pretending they have it figured out.

Not men who are broken. Not men who are victims. Men who are willing to look honestly at how they got here and what they want the next chapter to look like.

If you’re a man looking for your map, or a woman trying to understand the man you love, I’m glad you’re here.

We’ll talk about the road. About leadership and what it costs when the thing you built your identity around is gone. About friendship — real friendship, the kind most of us stopped having somewhere in our forties. About marriage. About what it means to be a man right now, in 2026, when the old script is dead and nobody has handed us a new one.

That last part is the one I keep coming back to.

I don’t have a system. I have 12,000 miles and some things I learned the hard way.

Any major dude will tell you.

Subscribe if you want to hear it.

— Shaun

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Next week: Chapter 1. Bolivia. Fourteen hours of riding, a dark neighborhood, and the two words that changed everything.

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