Technology is often designed to help us move faster.

Faster communication. Faster work. Faster answers. Faster access to information.

But what if the next evolution of technology isn’t about helping us do more?

What if it is about helping us become more aware?

That question sits at the center of Lyle Maxson’s work. A technologist, entrepreneur, and futurist, Lyle has spent years exploring the intersection of artificial intelligence, immersive technology, mental health, consciousness, and human potential. His work is guided by a philosophy he calls benevolent technology, a framework for using exponential technologies to propel humanity forward while deepening self-awareness, emotional intelligence, presence, and human connection.

Now, as the founder and CEO of ABOVE, Lyle is taking that philosophy into a new frontier with what he calls Reflective AI.

The Question Behind Everything: Can Technology Make Us More Human?

Lyle’s career may span seemingly different worlds, but he says there has always been a through-line.

Benevolent technology.

For Lyle, the question isn’t simply whether a technology is powerful. It is what we choose to do with that power.

“How do we utilize all this exponential technology to actually propel humanity forward?” he asks.

That distinction becomes increasingly important as artificial intelligence becomes embedded into everyday life.

The prevailing conversation around AI often centers on productivity, efficiency, automation, and convenience. Lyle is interested in a different possibility: using technology to help people become more connected rather than more distracted.

His goal is not to create technology that replaces the human experience.

It is to create technology that strengthens it.

We’ve Been Tracking Everything Except the Human Experience

When Jules asks Lyle what people may be missing in the larger technology conversation, he points to an emerging category that remains relatively unfamiliar: consciousness technology.

Most conversations about “tech for good” tend to revolve around familiar categories such as education, physical fitness, mental health, physiology, and longevity.

Consciousness technology is different.

Lyle explains that its evolution has happened in waves.

The first wave emerged in the 1980s with biofeedback and neurofeedback, giving people ways to understand brain activity, brainwave states, and how those states could be influenced.

The second wave arrived through more educational and experiential technologies in the 2000s and 2010s, including meditation-oriented tools and platforms such as Muse, Headspace, and Calm.

Now, Lyle believes we are entering a third wave.

AI and spatial computing are making it possible to create experiences that are far more personalized and connected to an individual’s actual growth journey. Rather than simply providing generalized guidance, technology can begin responding to the person using it.

And that opens up an entirely different question:

What if technology could help us understand not just what is happening in our lives, but why?

From Video Games to “Upgrading the Real-World Avatar”

Lyle’s interest in this space didn’t begin with artificial intelligence.

Earlier in his career, he worked in video game publishing and became fascinated by the possibility of using games for something beyond entertainment.

He explored what he described as “Games for Good,” designing experiences intended to create positive mind-body effects, including meditation and physical fitness-related games.

His thinking was simple but unconventional: instead of spending all our time upgrading fictional characters inside virtual worlds, what if technology could help us upgrade the real-world avatar that is ourselves?

That idea eventually led him into digital therapeutics.

Lyle and a co-founder took intellectual property they had been developing in gaming and moved into medical technology, exploring clinical trials and FDA-regulated digital therapeutics at a time when the category was still relatively new.

From there, his path continued into immersive technology.

Lyle connected with partners and members of Meta’s executive team, eventually receiving a significant grant to build a consumer VR education platform. The vision was to transform traditional e-learning into what he called “vLearning,” moving from passive, two-dimensional experiences into social, spatial, interactive environments.

Then came another pivot.

After a sabbatical, Lyle was exposed to AI hardware.

And he noticed the same problem again.

Technology was becoming increasingly powerful, but much of its focus remained on productivity.

What was missing was mindfulness.

What was missing was connection.

“How do you use these technologies, not to just make people more productive, but actually make them more connected?” became the question.

Meet Reflective AI: The Technology That Acts Like a Mirror

That question ultimately became ABOVE.

The term “Reflective AI” came from the way Lyle and his team were thinking about the technology.

Lyle had been calling the AI they were developing a mirror.

A friend eventually gave the concept a name: Reflective AI.

The distinction matters.

Lyle doesn’t see AI as something that should make every decision for us. In fact, he describes himself as leaning closer to the Luddite side of the technology spectrum than the techno-optimist side.

He doesn’t believe technology is going to save humanity.

Instead, he is interested in using technology intentionally.

As the team developed the underlying AI infrastructure for ABOVE, they became increasingly aware of the bias present in existing AI systems. Different foundational models can produce different answers based on what they have been trained on, the information they contain, and the perspectives embedded within them.

For a tool intended to help someone understand themselves, Lyle believed that was a problem.

So ABOVE was designed around a different premise: make the technology as objective as possible and minimize the lens of bias, dogma, or unsolicited advice.

Instead, it reflects the person back to themselves.

Lyle compares it to having a good friend who can step outside the relationship and offer an honest perspective.

Not necessarily what you want to hear.

But sometimes what you need to hear.

It might surface hard truths. It might reflect patterns. It might point toward ways someone could show up differently.

The technology isn’t supposed to tell you who to become.

It is designed to help you see yourself more clearly.

What If Your Wearable Could Tell You the Why?

Lyle describes ABOVE as the “first wearable for your mind.”

That positioning becomes clearer when he compares it with the wearables people already know.

Today, people can track sleep, steps, activity, fitness, blood markers, and other physiological data.

But those measurements largely tell us what is happening.

Your sleep score is low.

Your activity is down.

Your motivation has changed.

But the more interesting question may be:

Why?

Lyle’s vision is to connect the mental, emotional, and relational dimensions to the physical data people are already collecting.

Why was your sleep score bad?

Could it have something to do with the argument you had with a coworker three times this week?

Why aren’t you motivated to work out?

What else is happening beneath the surface?

ABOVE also encourages users to use the device as an audio journal, whether they’re driving, walking, beginning their morning, or simply processing their thoughts.

The more insight a person gives the system into how they think about the world, the more it can reflect those patterns back to them and potentially help steer better outcomes.

That is where the concept becomes bigger than a wearable.

It’s not simply measuring the body.

It’s creating a feedback loop for awareness.

Technology as Training Wheels for Consciousness

Lyle doesn’t position ABOVE as a replacement for human relationships or existing personal-growth practices.

Instead, he describes it as supplemental.

A friend of his calls it “training wheels for consciousness.”

The idea is that the technology can help people notice things they may otherwise miss, while still bringing those insights back into the real world and into relationships with actual humans.

That distinction is particularly important to Lyle because he sees a darker side to the rapidly evolving relationship between humans and AI.

He believes we need to keep a human in the loop rather than allowing AI to make our decisions for us.

He also raises concerns about AI companionship and the speed at which artificial systems can create attachment and intimacy, particularly when platforms are designed around keeping users engaged.

For Lyle, that is precisely the wrong direction.

The goal shouldn’t be deeper dependence on technology.

The goal should be deeper connection with ourselves and with other people.

The Missing Piece in Personal Growth Might Be Personalization

Traditional personal-growth tools can be incredibly valuable.

Meditation apps. Books. Courses. Retreats. Therapy. Workshops.

But they generally offer a generalized experience to a large group of people.

AI introduces the possibility of something different: personalization at scale.

Instead of giving everyone the same meditation, the same lesson, or the same reflection, technology can begin responding to an individual’s unique patterns and growth journey.

For Lyle, that’s where consciousness technology becomes particularly interesting.

The technology isn’t the destination.

Awareness is.

Two Years to the Starting Line

Building ABOVE wasn’t an overnight experiment.

By the time Lyle and Jules spoke, the company had been roughly two years in the making.

And even after all that work, Lyle joked that they had only just reached the starting line.

The wearable had launched approximately six weeks earlier, making the conversation less about celebrating a finished product and more about stepping into the beginning of an entirely new experiment.

That may be one of the most revealing parts of Lyle’s story.

For someone working at the frontier of technology, there is still a willingness to admit that the work is unfinished.

The product is evolving.

The category is emerging.

And the larger question remains open:

Can technology genuinely help us become more conscious?

Beyond What Society Says We Should Want

Near the end of the conversation, Jules asks Lyle what living an unconventional life means to him.

His answer brings the entire conversation full circle.

“Following your Dharma.”

For Lyle, living unconventionally isn’t simply about rejecting conventional paths for the sake of being different.

It is about following purpose and passion regardless of what society says you should do.

He acknowledges that this path can be more difficult than choosing comfort, convenience, or the job that appears safe from the outside.

He remembers a tarot card he used to pull regularly: “Not all that glitters is gold.”

The lesson stayed with him.

Look beyond the superficial markers society tells us to pursue.

Follow your heart.

Follow your passions.

And, importantly, build something that supports not only yourself, but your community and the world around you.

Use that as your North Star.

The Future of Technology Might Be More Human

Lyle Maxson’s work sits at an unusual intersection.

Technology and consciousness.

Artificial intelligence and self-awareness.

Wearables and emotional intelligence.

Innovation and the deeply human need for connection.

But perhaps the most unconventional part of his philosophy is that he isn’t asking us to choose between humanity and technology.

He’s asking us to rethink what technology is for.

The next generation of technology doesn’t have to pull us further away from ourselves.

It can help us notice.

Reflect.

Understand.

And ultimately, connect.

The future may not belong to the technology that captures the most attention.

It may belong to the technology that helps us become more aware of where that attention is going in the first place.

A Special Giveaway for Unconventional Life Listeners

As part of the launch of ABOVE, Lyle is giving one lucky Unconventional Life listener an ABOVE wearable.

Because ABOVE had not yet launched its subscription at the time of the interview, Lyle is also including a free one-year subscription for the winner.

Connect with Lyle

• Go Above AI: https://goabove.ai/
• Website: https://lylemaxson.com/
• Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/lylemaxson
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lylemaxson/
•  

For years, Brent J. Freeman played the game of success exactly as society had taught him to play it.

He became an entrepreneur. He built companies. He chased impact, made money, lost money, and kept moving. From the outside, the picture looked impressive. But eventually, the achievements stopped answering the question that mattered most:

What if the life you’re building isn’t the life you’re actually meant to live?

That question would send Freeman on a decade-long exploration of neuroscience, mindfulness, subconscious programming, and human transformation—and eventually lead to The Alchemy of Joy, his upcoming book and the philosophy that now shapes his work.

When the Life You’ve Built Doesn’t Feel Like Yours

Freeman has been an entrepreneur for two decades. He launched his first company at 22 and spent years pursuing the things that many people are taught to want: financial success, achievement, and impact.

But even impact, he realized, could become another version of the same chase.

The problem wasn’t necessarily the ambition itself. It was what was happening underneath it.

Freeman began recognizing the subconscious programs that had shaped his decisions and behaviors. Society had handed him a definition of success, and like so many people, he had internalized it without necessarily questioning whether it was his own.

Then came a moment he could no longer ignore.

He woke up one morning in a San Francisco penthouse. He had a Mercedes in the garage and a multimillion-dollar company. By every conventional measure, he was winning.

Then he walked to the window and wondered if he should end his life.

“From the outside, I was crushing it,” Freeman recalls. “But from the inside, I was crushed.”

The realization was devastating—but it was also the beginning of something new.

Freeman describes the experience as a “dark Tuesday of the soul.” Rather than continuing with his meetings that day, he canceled them and went to the beach. He watched a sunset—something he realized he hadn’t done in years—and began writing down the things that brought him joy.

He called it his List of Joy.

At the top of the list was Italy. The rest was made up of the experiences, places, and simple moments that genuinely lit him up.

And the realization was almost painfully obvious:

He wasn’t doing any of them.

The Programming Beneath the Pursuit

That day changed Freeman’s understanding of his own life.

He had grown up relatively happy despite losing his mother to cancer when he was seven. But as he looked back at his life, he began seeing repeated patterns—particularly around abandonment.

His mother had died when he was young, and he developed what he calls a core narrative of abandonment. As he examined his relationships and experiences, he noticed the same pattern appearing repeatedly.

Eventually, he confronted an uncomfortable possibility.

He was the common denominator.

That realization led to one of the central questions behind his life’s work:

If we were programmed unconsciously, could we consciously reprogram ourselves?

Freeman decided to find out.

For the past decade, he has immersed himself in the study of neuroscience, mindfulness, meditation, and human transformation. He studied under Joe Dispenza for a decade and traveled with Tony Robbins for a year, while using his own mind and body as a testing ground for what actually worked.

The goal wasn’t to collect inspirational ideas.

It was to separate the signal from the noise.

And eventually, he began developing what he describes as a new operating system for personal life—one that could help people change the subconscious patterns that had been running in the background.

The Hidden Cost of Living in the Red

The deeper Freeman went into his own transformation, the more he began connecting emotional patterns with physiology.

He describes chronic stress as a state in which the body enters a cortisol-driven fight, flight, or freeze response. That state is useful when you’re facing an immediate threat. The problem, he argues, is when it becomes your normal operating condition.

Freeman experienced the consequences personally.

He says his inflammation was measured at 600% higher than normal, he gained more than 40 pounds, and he experienced issues connected to an undiagnosed autoimmune disease.

Eventually, he realized that the answer wasn’t simply to think differently.

He needed to learn how to work with his physiology.

That became central to his understanding of joy.

“Joy is not experienced in fight-flight, or freeze,” he explains. “Joy is experienced when we are present.”

And that leads to perhaps his simplest definition of the entire philosophy:

Joy is the absolute value of the present moment.

The Joy You’re Looking For Might Already Be Here

Freeman’s definition of joy isn’t about pretending everything is wonderful.

It’s about being present enough to actually experience what is happening.

During the interview, Freeman is sitting in an RV in Wyoming on his honeymoon. Jules is in Boulder, Colorado. He notices the fireplace behind her, the surroundings, the scenery outside his RV.

There is joy available in that moment.

But if his mind moves backward into everything that went wrong—or forward into everything he needs to accomplish—he misses what’s happening right now.

Freeman frames it simply: depression lives in the past, anxiety lives in the future.

The present, by contrast, is where we can actually experience life.

And the present doesn’t have to be perfect.

It can be perfectly imperfect.

That distinction is at the heart of Freeman’s philosophy. Joy isn’t the reward waiting at the end of achievement. It is something that becomes available when we stop abandoning the moment we’re actually living.

From High Beta to Flow

Freeman takes the idea further by explaining how different states of brain activity relate to the way we experience life.

He describes beta as the conscious, awake state and high beta as the fight-or-flight state. Alpha, he explains, is associated with flow—the state people can experience while skiing, snowboarding, running, or working out.

Theta is a deeper, hypnotic state where Freeman believes people can begin accessing and reprogramming subconscious patterns.

His broader point is that modern high performers can become accustomed to operating in high beta.

They’re always responding.

Always solving.

Always producing.

Always preparing for what’s next.

They become so accustomed to running their lives in the red that they forget what it feels like to slow down.

For Freeman, learning to access presence isn’t about becoming less ambitious. It’s about creating the internal capacity to experience the life that ambition is supposedly building.

The One-Minute Window

Freeman doesn’t believe transformation has to begin with an elaborate retreat or a complete life overhaul.

During the conversation, he gives listeners a practice they can begin immediately: what he calls the One-Minute Window.

The exercise takes about 60 seconds.

Put one hand on your heart and one over your sternum. Slow your breathing and make the exhale longer than the inhale. Freeman specifically describes a six-second inhale, four-second hold, and eight-second exhale, repeated three times.

Then focus your attention on something around you. Zoom in on it.

Finally, bring up an elevated emotion such as gratitude, love, or appreciation.

The purpose is simple: interrupt the momentum of whatever state you’re in and return to the present.

Freeman sees this as a fundamental skill—not unlike practicing your footwork before the fourth quarter of a game.

You don’t want to wait until your nervous system is overwhelmed to learn how to regulate it.

You practice beforehand.

You Don’t Have to Burn Your Life Down

Perhaps one of the most compelling aspects of Freeman’s philosophy is that his answer to conventional success isn’t to reject success altogether.

He isn’t telling people to quit everything, abandon their careers, or start their lives over.

In fact, he emphasizes the opposite.

The work is about learning how to live the life you were meant to live without burning it all down.

Freeman has co-founded more than 20 companies. Most of them failed. A few succeeded.

His story isn’t one of perfect execution.

It’s one of experimentation, failure, heartbreak, grief, and eventually learning how to work with those experiences rather than allowing them to define him.

He calls this process Joy Judo: taking what life throws at you and learning to transmute it into something meaningful.

That’s the “alchemy” in The Alchemy of Joy.

Joy isn’t about eliminating hardship.

It’s about changing what you do with it.

A Book Built to Be a How-To Guide for Joy

Freeman’s upcoming book, The Alchemy of Joy, grew partly out of an idea he had after reading The 4-Hour Workweek years ago.

He wondered: What if there were a how-to guide like that—but for joy?

The result is a step-by-step framework for reprogramming the subconscious mind, built around Freeman’s personal experiences, frameworks, and practices.

Each module includes an accompanying meditation, and Freeman designed the meditations to be accessible even to people who have never meditated before. They incorporate binaural beats and music to help listeners enter the desired state.

The intention is to move the work beyond intellectual understanding—to integrate it “from the head to the heart.”

The Alchemy of Joy is scheduled to be released on September 15, 2026, and will be available through Amazon and bookstores.

But Freeman is clear that the book isn’t really the destination.

It’s an invitation into a journey.

The Harder Path to Love

Near the end of the conversation, Jules asks Freeman what he’s most proud of in this season of his life.

The answer isn’t a company.

It’s his marriage.

Freeman shares that he and his wife, Michelle, experienced profound heartbreak. They broke up three months before their wedding in Italy and went their separate ways, doing individual work to grow and evolve.

Eventually, they came back together and chose one another again.

For Freeman, that choice wasn’t the easier path.

It was the harder one.

He credits Michelle with being willing to “sit in the fire” with him—to do the work individually and as a couple and transform what they had experienced into the joy of their marriage and their life together.

It is a fitting example of the philosophy he has spent years teaching.

You don’t always get to choose what happens to you.

But you can learn how to work with what happens.

The Road Less Traveled Is About Sovereignty

In the rapid-fire portion of the interview, Freeman describes himself as a “super dork” who geeks out on neuroscience, quantum physics, nature, and everything from the “woo-woo” to grounded science.

That combination reflects his larger philosophy: curiosity without needing to fit neatly into one category.

When Jules asks what living an unconventional life means to him, Freeman’s answer is remarkably direct.

It’s about doing what lights you up rather than following “the program” that tells you what you should do.

It’s about choosing with sovereignty.

Not conforming.

Not fitting in.

Not measuring your life against someone else’s definition of success.

Instead, Freeman believes in getting still enough and quiet enough to hear your own heart—and then building a life you can look back on and genuinely describe as an amazing ride.

In his work, he uses a self-eulogy exercise to help people gain that perspective.

The question is simple:

When you reach the end of your life, what will you want to say about the ride?

Because, as Freeman puts it, you only get one shot.

There is no dress rehearsal.

The Giveaway: A Signed Book and One Hour With Brent

For one Unconventional Life listener, Brent is offering more than a copy of The Alchemy of Joy.

One lucky participant will receive a signed copy of the book plus a complimentary 60-minute Zoom session with Brent.

The coaching session can focus on whatever is present for the winner—a challenge they’re facing, something they’re working through, or simply whatever they want to talk about. Freeman describes it as an opportunity to give someone access to the kind of coaching he provides to CEOs, entrepreneurs, and executives.

Connect with Brent:

• Website: https://brentfreeman.com/

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joywithbrent/

• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@SirBrentFreeman

• LinkedIn: https://www.youtube.com/@SirBrentFreeman

Brent is also inviting people to reach out through Instagram with questions, ideas, and topics they’d like to hear more about as he builds the next chapter of his work.

Because for Freeman, the journey toward joy isn’t about reaching some final destination.

It’s about learning to be here for the ride.

For Tara Cappel, travel was never simply about getting somewhere else. Growing up in Sun Valley, Idaho, a beautiful but relatively isolated community, travel became her way of discovering different cultures, meeting people unlike herself, and imagining lives beyond the one she knew.

That curiosity would eventually become the foundation for FTLO Travel, the modern group travel company Cappel founded in 2016 for solo travelers in their 20s and 30s. Today, FTLO brings together solo travelers through curated small-group experiences designed around connection, culture, and adventure. The company says it has welcomed more than 8,000 travelers and built more than 35 curated itineraries, with more than 4,000 five-star reviews.

But Cappel’s entrepreneurial story didn’t begin with a business plan that everyone believed in.

It began with an idea people told her wouldn’t work.

The Idea Everyone Told Her Was Wrong

Before FTLO existed, Cappel had spent time in fashion and later worked in operations for a startup focused on sustainable promotional products. That experience gave her something invaluable: a crash course in what it actually takes to build a company.

But travel remained the through line.

She had studied abroad in high school, taken a gap year, and continued looking for ways to experience the world. Eventually, she became fixated on a question: What if group travel were designed specifically for millennials?

At the time, the conventional wisdom was that millennials weren’t interested in group travel.

Cappel heard it directly from people in the travel industry.

“Millennials don’t do group travel,” they told her.

She wasn’t convinced.

She was watching her generation reprioritize their lives. People in their 20s and 30s were traveling, delaying traditional milestones, pursuing experiences, and looking for connection in new ways. Cappel saw a gap between what the industry assumed young travelers wanted and what she believed they were actually looking for.

And once the idea took hold, she couldn’t let it go.

“I couldn’t not do it,” she says.

That conviction became the first ingredient in FTLO.

Building FTLO Between 8 P.M. and 2 A.M.

Cappel didn’t immediately leave everything behind and become a full-time founder.

She worked her regular job during the day and built FTLO at night.

From roughly 8 p.m. until 2 a.m., she worked behind the scenes to turn the idea into something tangible. With little money to invest, she learned how to build the website, figure out SEO, handle design, and piece together the early business herself.

It wasn’t glamorous.

But she was energized by it.

There was something about building the idea that made the long hours feel different.

That distinction matters. Entrepreneurship is often romanticized as freedom, but Cappel’s early experience looked much more like relentless work. The difference was that the work was connected to something she deeply cared about.

She wasn’t simply escaping a job.

She was moving toward something.

And she had already learned from her previous startup experience that businesses don’t come together by magic. Someone has to figure out the details.

Don’t Just Sell the Trip. Solve the Reason Someone Won’t Take It.

One of Cappel’s most useful entrepreneurial insights comes from a framework she encountered early in FTLO’s development: the Jobs to Be Done theory.

The premise is simple but powerful.

People aren’t necessarily buying the product itself. They’re using a product or service to fulfill a deeper need.

For FTLO, the product might look like a group trip.

But the real problem was much bigger.

Someone might want to visit Sardinia but think:

I don’t have anyone to go with.

FTLO solves that.

They might think:

I don’t speak the language.

FTLO provides local trip leaders.

They might think:

I don’t know where to go or what to do.

FTLO handles the itinerary and logistics.

In other words, Cappel wasn’t simply creating vacations.

She was removing the obstacles between people and the experiences they wanted.

That philosophy remains central to FTLO’s approach today. The company describes its experience as being at the intersection of travel and community, with itineraries intentionally designed not only around destinations but around bringing people together.

For entrepreneurs, the lesson extends far beyond travel:

The strongest businesses don’t just sell something people want. They make it easier for people to become who they already want to be.

The First Version Didn’t Work—and That Was the Point

FTLO’s success can make the early years easy to forget.

They were messy.

Cappel initially thought she’d be running international trips within six months of launching. Instead, it took about a year and a half to run the first international trip.

She went back to the drawing board.

She experimented with local trips.

They didn’t make money.

Some were sold at roughly half price and at a loss.

Her early marketing efforts flopped, too.

There was no single breakthrough moment that suddenly transformed FTLO into a sustainable company.

Instead, there was testing.

Then tweaking.

Then more testing.

And more tweaking.

Eventually, Cappel found a model people were willing to pay for.

That process became one of the most important lessons she carries from the experience: get your first customers as early as possible, use their feedback to improve the offer, and don’t spend heavily on marketing until you’ve established that people actually want what you’re selling.

A compliment is not validation.

A paying customer is.

From a Bedroom Idea to a Global Travel Community

That willingness to iterate eventually helped FTLO grow far beyond its first experiments.

The company now creates curated group trips for solo travelers in their 20s and 30s, with destinations spanning Europe, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, and beyond. Its current model emphasizes not only memorable destinations but the people travelers experience them with.

The company’s own philosophy reflects that emphasis: travel is meant to connect people with places, perspectives, and one another.

And for Cappel, that community component has always been part of the bigger picture.

She wanted to eliminate the common reasons people postpone travel.

No travel partner?

Come with a group.

Don’t know the destination?

The itinerary is already curated.

Don’t speak the language?

There’s a local trip leader.

Don’t know how to plan everything?

That’s handled, too.

The result is a travel experience built around a simple premise: you shouldn’t have to wait for someone else’s availability to experience the world.

Travel Should Give Back to the Places We Visit

Cappel’s approach to travel was also shaped by where she grew up.

Sun Valley is a tourism-based economy, and because it is a relatively small community, the economic impact of tourism is particularly visible.

That gave Cappel an early understanding of something that can be easy to overlook when traveling: the money visitors spend doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

It affects real people and real communities.

As a result, responsible tourism became part of FTLO’s philosophy.

The company says it prioritizes local, family-owned businesses so that more of the money generated by its trips remains in the communities travelers visit. It also emphasizes respectful engagement with local cultures and a positive economic, social, and environmental impact.

For Cappel, seeing the world isn’t about extracting experiences from it.

It’s about entering a place with curiosity and respect—and leaving something positive behind.

What Happens When the Founder Finally Steps Away?

After a decade of building FTLO, Cappel found herself confronting a different entrepreneurial challenge: stepping away.

She’s currently taking a month-long sabbatical, something made possible in part by FTLO’s company policy of offering employees a month-long sabbatical after five years.

For someone who has spent years immersed in the day-to-day details of a growing company, leaving wasn’t easy.

But something unexpected happened.

After stepping away for about a week and a half, Cappel began to feel some of the early passion returning.

Ideas started coming back.

Perspective returned.

The distance created room for creativity.

It was a reminder that even founders who are deeply passionate about their businesses need time outside of them.

For Cappel, that lesson carries a particularly fitting irony: the founder of a travel company needed to step away from work to rediscover what travel and new experiences can do for the mind.

“Go travel,” she tells Schroeder in her own way.

New experiences create connections that can lead to ideas you never would have generated sitting at your desk.

The Founder Is Also a Science Nerd

Behind the CEO and travel entrepreneur is another side of Cappel that emerges during the episode’s rapid-fire round.

If people really knew her, she says, they’d know she’s somewhat nerdy about science.

She can fall into a deep flow state learning about subjects like photons, biology, health, and how the human body works.

It’s a small detail, but an important one.

The woman who built a company around helping people explore the world is herself driven by curiosity.

Travel, entrepreneurship, science—there’s a common thread.

She wants to understand things she doesn’t already understand.

If She Started Over Today, She’d Go Even More Niche

Asked what she’d do if she were starting a travel company today, Cappel doesn’t say she’d try to recreate FTLO.

She’d go narrower.

FTLO originally focused on an age-based niche, but she sees tremendous opportunity in passion-based travel—experiences built around specific interests, creative pursuits, and communities.

It’s a lesson that applies well beyond tourism.

In a world where almost every market is crowded, being more specific can make a business more relevant.

The question isn’t always:

How can I reach more people?

Sometimes it’s:

Who is the exact person I want to serve, and what do they care deeply about?

Cappel also offers a piece of advice that contrasts with her own early leap: aspiring founders don’t necessarily need to quit their jobs immediately.

With today’s technology, entrepreneurs can test ideas, build audiences, and even begin generating revenue before making the full-time jump.

In hindsight, she believes she may have left her day job too early.

Travel Taught Her There Isn’t One Right Way to Live

Perhaps the most fitting moment of the conversation comes when Schroeder asks Cappel what living an unconventional life means to her.

Her answer goes back to travel.

When you see enough of the world, you begin to understand just how many ways there are to live.

Different cultures have different ideas about family, work, success, community, relationships, and what makes a good life.

That realization can make the “right path” you were handed growing up look a lot less absolute.

For Cappel, an unconventional life means stepping outside the expectations of your upbringing or community and asking a more personal question:

What is actually true for me?

Follow your passions.

Follow what inspires you.

Stay true to yourself.

It’s a philosophy that explains both her life and the company she built.

She didn’t simply create a travel business.

She built a company around her belief that experiencing different places and people can expand the possibilities someone sees for their own life.

And perhaps that’s the most unconventional thing about FTLO: it isn’t really selling a destination.

It’s selling the possibility of discovering that your world can be bigger than you thought.

Want to Pick Tara Cappel’s Brain?

If you’re dreaming about starting a travel company, she’ll share the pitfalls she’s encountered, talk through business models, discuss how to find those first customers, and offer insights that could help another entrepreneur avoid some of the time and heartbreak she experienced along the way.

And if you’re not building a travel company, there’s still something in it for you.

Cappel is also happy to talk travel—particularly the off-the-radar destinations that may not show up at the top of a typical search.

Connect with Tara:

• Website: https://www.ftlotravel.com/

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/taracappel/

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taracappel/

For Meg Tuohey, the work of repairing relationships began long before she became a psychologist, relationship expert, author, and innovator. It began with a little girl sitting in the passenger seat of a car, looking through the window at a family gathered around a warm dinner table.

The house was lit. The blinds were open. There were several people inside.

Then the car turned the corner, and the moment disappeared.

Tuohey was heading home to a cold, dark house with one parent and no siblings. She remembers the loneliness of that childhood and, more importantly, the feeling that someone might come to help—but nobody ever did.

Years later, those seemingly ordinary childhood snapshots would become part of the inspiration behind her life’s work.

As Tuohey explains in her conversation with Unconventional Life host Jules Schroeder, she eventually decided she wanted to become “the person who came”—the person who could hold space for families and create the warmth, safety, and connection she had once longed for herself.

Today, Tuohey works at the intersection of relationships, neurodivergence, leadership, women, and what she calls wisdom and eldership. Her podcast, Wisdom Stripes, has surpassed 1.8 million downloads and ranked among the top 15 podcasts in Education in the U.S. She has worked with thousands of women and couples across the U.S. and Canada, and her debut book, Heartprint, extends her work to a much wider audience.

But beneath all the professional accomplishments is a surprisingly simple philosophy: the way back to a better life often begins by returning to yourself.

 

The Childhood Memory That Became a Calling

When Schroeder asks Tuohey for the “fly-on-the-wall” moments that shaped her, Tuohey doesn’t begin with a credential or career milestone.

She goes back to childhood.

She remembers seeing that family through the window at dusk and wondering, in some way, what it might feel like to belong to something warm and connected.

Her childhood wasn’t defined only by hardship. There were good experiences, too. But the loneliness left an imprint.

She remembers wishing someone would come and see her, help her, or hold space for what she was experiencing.

Nobody came.

Eventually, that longing became a decision.

Tuohey describes the memories from her hometown as threads that helped form the fabric of her work. Somewhere along the way, she decided she would become the person who could create that sense of warmth and gathering for the families she encountered.

It is a striking example of how purpose can emerge from the most personal parts of a life.

Rather than simply moving past her childhood, Tuohey found a way to transform what she had experienced into a deeper understanding of what people need from one another.

Building a Different Kind of Marriage Repair

That philosophy eventually became the foundation for a relationship-repair model that Tuohey says was unlike anything else she had seen when she created it.

About nine years ago, she developed a group coaching program specifically for women experiencing serious relationship crises—often after they had already tried other avenues for help.

Over time, another major area of focus emerged: neurodivergence.

Today, Tuohey says that approximately 80% to 90% of the people who come through her work either identify as neurodivergent or love someone who is neurodivergent.

Her work now rests on five interconnected pillars:

• Relationships

• Neurodivergence

• Leadership

• Women

• Wisdom and eldership

That final pillar reflects one of the more distinctive aspects of her philosophy: the idea of being the change you want to pass through your generations.

For Tuohey, relationship work isn’t simply about solving today’s argument. It can also be about changing patterns that are passed from one generation to another.

Why Tuohey Doesn’t Meet the Husbands

One of the most unconventional aspects of Tuohey’s model is also one of the simplest: she doesn’t work directly with her clients’ partners.

She designed it that way intentionally.

Tuohey explains that she loves working in groups and believes there are powerful benefits to community. At the same time, she believes working with couples within a group setting would introduce unnecessary complexity and inefficiency.

Instead, she works with what she calls Wise Women.

The concept isn’t about suggesting women are responsible for every problem in their relationships. Tuohey acknowledges the frustration women may feel when they hear an approach that focuses on their own transformation: Why should I be the one who changes?

Her answer is rooted in leadership.

Tuohey believes women can be powerful cultural tone-setters within their homes and relationships. Her work therefore focuses on helping women understand themselves, develop skills, learn how to lead, and ultimately reconnect with who they really are.

Her model combines psychoeducation, practical skills, self-learning, and leadership development.

The objective isn’t to make women carry responsibility that isn’t theirs.

It’s to help them distinguish what is theirs, what isn’t theirs, and how they want to lead from there.

The Hidden Force Behind So Many Relationship Conflicts

For Tuohey, one of the most important questions isn’t simply why couples fight.

It’s why human beings defend themselves.

She sees defensiveness as a central force behind many of the struggles people experience in relationships.

Humans defend themselves against pain. They defend themselves against confusion. And, perhaps most importantly, they defend themselves against the possibility of experiencing even more pain or confusion.

In a new relationship, repairing a conflict can be relatively straightforward because trust and goodwill may still be strong.

But long-term relationships can become more complicated.

Small hurts that aren’t repaired accumulate.

Over time, those moments can turn into beliefs:

It’s always me.

It’s all up to me.

He doesn’t understand.

I wish…

The problem eventually becomes larger than the original disagreement. It becomes the accumulated pain of feeling unseen, unheard, or misunderstood.

And when people are already dealing with trauma, addiction, neurodivergence, or other significant life challenges, the level of defensiveness can become even greater.

You Can’t Lead While You’re Defending

This is where Tuohey’s relationship philosophy becomes a leadership philosophy.

She argues that defensiveness can prevent people from seeing what’s actually happening. It can interfere with healing, appropriate responsibility, and the ability to distinguish between what belongs to you and what doesn’t.

Most importantly, she believes you can’t lead while you’re defending.

The defensive part of us needs to be heard, understood, and cared for before the person underneath it can emerge and begin leading again.

That distinction is critical.

Tuohey isn’t telling women to suppress their anger, ignore their pain, or simply become more accommodating.

She’s asking a different question:

What happens when you understand the part of yourself that is protecting you well enough that you no longer have to let that protection run your life?

For Tuohey, that is where real leadership begins.

Heartprint: A Guide Back to Inner Wisdom

After years of working with women and couples, Tuohey wanted to find a way to bring her work to people beyond the relatively small number of women she can personally support.

That became Heartprint, her debut book.

The book took five years to construct. Tuohey describes it as a three-part story and a practical guide designed to take complicated ideas and make them simple.

At the heart of Heartprint is the idea that people can develop distance from their own inner wisdom.

Pain and confusion can create defensiveness. Defensiveness can help a person survive and protect themselves—but it can also create distance from who they are.

The book is designed as a step-by-step journey back.

Each chapter includes an activity intended to help readers reconnect with themselves. And for anyone who struggles to hear their own inner wisdom, Tuohey offers a bridge: Elizabeth, the Wise Woman character in the book.

Readers can “borrow” Elizabeth’s wisdom until they are able to hear their own.

The goal isn’t to run away from pain.

It’s to integrate it rather than remain disconnected from yourself because of it.

Tuohey sees that process as part of the universal human experience: moving through pain and finding a way back home to yourself.

From a Deeply Personal Practice to a Global Mission

Tuohey’s work is deeply intimate, but her ambition isn’t small.

She acknowledges that her direct work is intentionally deep and therefore cannot hold a massive number of people at the same level of care.

Her heart, however, is for women and families.

That is why she sees Heartprint and Wisdom Stripes as extensions of the same mission: creating accessible ways for more people to begin the process of reconnecting with themselves.

Her hope for Heartprint is not simply that people read it.

She wants the book to awaken a desire in people to return to who they really are and begin living a life that feels good to them.

It is a deceptively simple goal—and one that sits at the center of everything she does.

What It Means to Live an Unconventional Life

When Schroeder asks Tuohey what living an unconventional life means to her, the answer brings the entire conversation full circle.

For Tuohey, unconventional living isn’t necessarily about rejecting every conventional path.

It’s about full expression.

It’s about being yourself.

And, ultimately, she believes one of the greatest gifts a person can give themselves, their loved ones, and the world is to return home to who they really are and live a life that feels good to them.

That philosophy makes the title Heartprint particularly fitting.

A person’s life leaves an imprint. But before that imprint can be intentionally passed forward, Tuohey believes people need to know who they are.

The work begins within.

The Quiet Rituals Behind the Work

For all the intensity of her professional work, Tuohey’s personal rituals are remarkably grounding.

If you really knew her, she says, you’d know she enjoys cozy reading, a good cup of tea, and a crackling fire.

She also meditates every day—a practice she’s maintained since October 2019. She meditates every night and most mornings, often lying down in the dark.

That practice of returning inward mirrors the philosophy she teaches outwardly.

Before leadership, there is awareness.

Before repair, there is understanding.

Before reconnecting with someone else, there may be a need to reconnect with yourself.

The Message She Would Give Her Younger Self

Near the end of the conversation, Schroeder asks Tuohey what she would say to the lonely little girl she once was.

Her answer brings the entire journey back to that car ride at dusk.

She would tell her:

“I’m coming.”

She would tell her she’s on her way—and that she’s bringing an army of kindness, care, compassion, and love.

And she would promise that little girl she would never be alone again.

It is difficult to imagine a more complete expression of Tuohey’s life’s work.

The little girl who once wished someone would come eventually became the woman who chose to become that person—not only for herself, but for the women and families she serves.

And perhaps that’s the most unconventional part of her story.

She didn’t simply build a career around relationships.

She built a life around answering a question that began in childhood:

What if we could become the person we once needed?

 

Giveaway: Win a Signed Copy of Heartprint

The book can be shipped from America to the winner wherever they are located.

Connect with Meg:

• Website: https://megantuohey.com/

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/megtuoheyofficial/?hl=en

• Book: https://megantuohey.com/megan-book-heart-print/book-order/

• Podcast: https://megantuohey.com/wisdom-stripes/