Scott Shadian joins Matt Zeigler on The Intentional Investor to tell the extraordinary story of helping evacuate 1,200 vulnerable Afghans during the fall of Kabul and explain how decades in diplomacy, conflict zones, research and communications shaped his view of broken systems. They trace his path from a struggling student and Southern California punk rock kid to the White House, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sayara and Emergence Field Labs, exploring civil war, social cohesion, narrative, AI, qualitative data and why systems fail when they can no longer see or learn from themselves.

Jason Isbell's "Relatively Easy" is a decade old, but it might be the most honest song about modern American life written so far. Matt Zeigler and historian Joseph Moore unpack why a man who starts with total freedom and an angry heart ends up in jail with a lonely one - and what that arc reveals about the prisons abundance builds for us.

When Stan Druckenmiller's AI-written op-ed landed in the Wall Street Journal, it nearly pushed Adam Butler to stop publishing altogether. Ben Hunt called an Office Hours - and the (virtual) room filled up fast. What they found, once they sat down together, was a question bigger than how we should be using any single tool. What covenant does a writer make with their own thinking, and what does it cost to outsource it?

Ben Hunt and Matt Zeigler explore why a world dominated by AI and influencers makes it harder to develop authentic role models and trust your own judgment. They discuss writing as a tool for discovering what you actually think and feel, the difference between influence and example, and why authenticity, restraint, and consistent action matter more as technology increasingly offers to think for us.