Maher had asked Biden a fairly simple question: Had he ever apologized to his father for the situation his addiction and behavior created for him politically?

“Every day,” Biden responded.

Biden then began talking about one of the cruel ironies of addiction and recovery. The addict who survives gets to tell the redemption story. They get sober. They get healthy. In Hunter’s case, he gets to go on television and podcasts and talk about how much stronger he is now.

But the people he hurt don’t necessarily get the same clean ending.

“The real harm happened to all of the people around them,” Biden said.

He talked about his daughters, who lost their uncle Beau to brain cancer in 2015 and then, shortly after, effectively lost their father to addiction.

“I was not there for them, and I can never make up for that,” Biden said.

He talked about his dad, the former president, who had already buried one son and then went to bed night after night not knowing whether his other son would still be alive in the morning.

“Guilt is an appropriate thing.”

There was something almost countercultural about hearing someone say that.

We spend a lot of time talking about forgiveness, redemption, and learning to forgive ourselves. And all of those things have value. But Biden was describing something harder: the idea that becoming a better person doesn’t erase what you did when you were a worse one.

Some things can’t be made right. Some pain can’t be repaid. Sometimes guilt is the appropriate response.

And sometimes, Biden told Maher, “the greatest amend that you can make is just living a life by doing the next right thing.”

“That’s what I hope I’m doing right now.”

I found the exchange profoundly moving.

Not because it absolves Hunter Biden of anything. It doesn’t.

In fact, I think the reason it affected me was precisely because he wasn’t asking to be absolved. He was acknowledging that recovery doesn’t rewrite the past. Unconditional love doesn’t mean love without consequences. And becoming someone your family can rely on today doesn’t give them back the years when you weren’t.

It was also the latest moment in which I found myself thinking something I never expected to spend much time contemplating:

What are we to make of Hunter Biden?

For most of the last decade, Hunter Biden has existed in American politics less as a person than as an idea.

There were legitimate questions about his foreign business dealings. He made millions of dollars doing business in places like Ukraine and China while his father was one of the most powerful people in the world. Hunter himself has acknowledged that the Biden name opened doors for him. It was reasonable for journalists and congressional investigators to ask who was paying him, what they thought they were buying, and whether his father’s public position ever intersected with his son’s private business.

But on the right, those legitimate questions metastasized into something much larger.

Hunter became the central character in an elaborate mythology about the Biden family, peddled by a right-wing media ecosystem that thrives and profits off unfounded conspiracies. With Hunter, the story was that he was operating an international influence-peddling enterprise with his father, that Joe Biden was secretly profiting from foreign money, and that together they represented one of the great corruption scandals in American history. Farther out on the conspiratorial fringe, the claims became considerably more bizarre.

Years of investigations produced plenty of unflattering information about Hunter Biden. They showed a man who benefited from the access his last name afforded him, conducted business with questionable people, failed to pay his taxes, struggled with a devastating addiction, and exercised spectacularly poor judgment.

What they did not establish was the sweeping conspiracy that had been built around him.

To Democrats, meanwhile, Hunter was something different but not necessarily more human: a liability. The troubled son of a president whose addiction, legal problems, foreign business dealings, and very public personal failures could hurt the party’s fight for power.

The right had every reason to make Hunter Biden larger than life.

The left had every reason to make him disappear.

Neither required hearing much from Hunter Biden himself.

That has changed.

Hunter Biden is suddenly everywhere.

After spending years as one of the most talked-about—and least heard-from—people in American politics, Biden has embarked on an extraordinary media run. He’s sitting for long-form interviews and podcasts, speaking with a candor that feels almost jarring after years in which he was largely kept out of public view.

And people are listening.

Not just those who share his family’s politics. Biden is getting attention, and at times appreciation, from people across the political spectrum.

When I recently interviewed the independent journalist Andrew Callaghan, whose Channel 5 interview with Biden helped kick off this strange new chapter, I asked him what he makes of it.

“I think it’s because people are just tired of the gloves being on, and they really just want to see people speak authentically,” Callaghan told me.

Hunter can be funny and angry, thoughtful and stubborn. He can be remarkably self-aware about his addiction and the damage he caused, yet strikingly less reflective when it comes to his father. He remains fiercely defensive of Joe Biden, seemingly unwilling to acknowledge the flaws that contributed to his political downfall or grant much legitimacy to his critics. Hunter can interrogate his own failures with surprising clarity. He seems far less willing to do the same with his father’s.

And then there is the strange ideological terrain Hunter now seems willing to wander into.

He sat with Tucker Carlson, whose descent into increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories has only accelerated in recent years. During that conversation, Hunter said he “loves Candace,” referring to Candace Owens, another prolific conspiracy peddler who has built a large audience promoting outlandish claims.

But Hunter also seems eager to build bridges in the other direction. He said he doesn’t want to fight Hasan Piker, the hugely influential left-wing streamer, and suggested Democrats are making a mistake by alienating figures like him. Hunter’s argument, essentially, is that there is a bigger fight that should supersede those disagreements: stopping what he sees as the common enemy of Trump’s increasingly authoritarian—and, in Hunter’s telling, fascist—politics.

It makes for an unusual persona. And maybe that’s what people are appreciating.

The journalist, influencer, entertainer, and even politician are blending together. The people who thrive in that environment are often the ones willing to take risks and reveal more of themselves, for better or worse.

Hunter has said he has no intention of ever running for office. But could someone with his background—someone who has failed very publicly and is willing to talk honestly about those failures—actually win? Maybe.

The barriers between celebrity, media, and politics have already collapsed. Donald Trump became president. Influencers increasingly shape political discourse. Politicians have become content creators themselves.

After years of political consultants, message discipline, talking points, and carefully calibrated public personas, there is a premium on people who seem incapable—or unwilling—to stay on script.

Whatever the reason, we’re hearing from a Hunter Biden who is much harder to reduce to the character that either side created for him.

And I keep coming back to those five words:

“Guilt is an appropriate thing.”

There’s no claim in that sentence that the past doesn’t matter. No demand for forgiveness. Just an acknowledgment that you can’t undo what you’ve done. You can only decide what you do next.

Or, as Hunter put it, live your life by doing “the next right thing.”

Maybe that’s what he’s doing.

Maybe it isn’t.

But after years of being told what to think about Hunter Biden, we’re finally hearing enough from the man himself to decide what we make of him.

A few friends and I had planned a trip to Placencia, a narrow peninsula along Belize’s Caribbean coast where we’d spend our days flyfishing in the gin-clear waters.

But whenever I travel, I have a hard time being somewhere without wanting to understand something about the place beyond whatever brought me there.

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Before the trip, I started reading about Belize and came across the story of the Garifuna—an Afro-Indigenous people whose history stretches from West Africa to the Caribbean to the shores of Central America.

I knew almost nothing about them.

That curiosity eventually led me online to Cynthia Ellis Topsey, Ambassador-at-Large for the Garifuna Nation in Belize.

I reached out and told her I was coming to Belize and wanted to learn.

She agreed to help.

What I didn’t fully appreciate at the time was the effort she was making to do it. Cynthia lives near San Ignacio in western Belize, close to the Guatemalan border, about three hours from where I was staying. She traveled all the way to the Placencia Peninsula to meet a stranger who had sent her a message on the internet because he wanted to understand her people.

We met in Seine Bight, a predominantly Garifuna community just up the road from Placencia.

And over the next several days, we developed a routine.

I’d head out fishing with my friends in the morning. When we got back, I’d make my way to Seine Bight and spend the afternoon and evening with Cynthia.

She walked me around the community. She introduced me to people. She showed me plants used for food and medicine. She explained traditions. We ate together. And mostly, I listened.

Slowly, Cynthia began telling me the story she had traveled three hours to help me understand:

How did the descendants of Africans and Indigenous people from a Caribbean island more than 1,500 miles away end up here, on the coast of Central America?

The answer begins with a story.

Two versions of the beginning

“There are two versions,” Cynthia told me before recounting Garifuna history.

The version most commonly told begins aboard a slave ship.

Sometime in the 17th century, the story goes, a ship carrying captive West Africans wrecked near Saint Vincent, the mountainous Caribbean island the Garifuna call Yurumein. Survivors made it ashore and were received by the Indigenous people living there.

Over time, Africans and the Indigenous population mixed. Europeans would later call their descendants the Black Caribs. Today, we know them as the Garifuna. Cynthia described a culture that carried pieces of both worlds—African ancestry combined with an Indigenous Caribbean language, cuisine, and knowledge.

Cassava is one example.

Cynthia kept returning to it as we walked through Seine Bight. Cassava isn’t simply food in Garifuna culture. Its cultivation and preparation connect the Garifuna to the Indigenous Caribbean world from which much of their culture emerged.

But Cynthia also wanted me to understand something important: the shipwreck is not the only origin story.

There is another tradition—one that rejects the idea that the African chapter of Garifuna history necessarily begins with Europeans putting Africans in chains.

In versions of that tradition, Africans were themselves explorers and expert navigators who crossed the Atlantic and reached the Americas before Columbus.

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It’s a powerful idea, particularly for a people whose history has so often been recorded by colonial powers. But it’s also important to distinguish oral tradition from what historians can establish through documentary and archaeological evidence. Scholars have debated the shipwreck story itself; there is no known eyewitness account confirming the famous wreck, and other evidence suggests Africans reached Saint Vincent through multiple routes, including people escaping enslavement on neighboring islands. Claims of pre-Columbian African voyages to Saint Vincent remain controversial and have not been established by mainstream scholarship.

Cynthia wasn’t particularly troubled by that uncertainty.

“A lot of it has been passed on to us orally,” she told me. “Our story, you have to balance it… with what is written archival and what we have passed on from generation to generation.”

That tension—between an archive largely created by outsiders and a history carried inside a community—would come up again and again.

A people who would not be enslaved

Whatever the precise circumstances of their beginning, by the 18th century the Black Caribs were a powerful, autonomous population on Saint Vincent.

And they had something European colonial powers increasingly wanted:

Land.

After Britain gained control of Saint Vincent in 1763, British planters coveted fertile Black Carib territory for plantation agriculture. The result was a series of conflicts now known as the Carib Wars.

Cynthia described the resistance more simply.

“We refuse to succumb to enslavement of any kind,” she told me. “We were always at war to maintain our freedom.”

The terrain helped.

Saint Vincent is volcanic, steep, and densely forested. Cynthia described the Garifuna as masters of fighting in the mountains, using knowledge of the landscape and guerrilla tactics against European forces unfamiliar with the interior.

During this period, the Black Caribs also navigated a complicated world of shifting European alliances. They weren’t simply fighting “Europeans.” Britain was the principal colonial power they resisted during the Carib Wars, while the Black Caribs at times allied with the French.

One of their most famous leaders was Joseph Chatoyer, also known as Satuye, who led resistance against British expansion.

The British eventually prevailed.

Chatoyer was killed in 1795. The resistance collapsed the following year.

And then came the part of the story that explains why I was hearing it from Cynthia in Belize instead of Saint Vincent.

Exile

The British rounded up thousands of Black Caribs and removed them from Saint Vincent.

They were taken to Baliceaux, a tiny island in the Grenadines.

Conditions were catastrophic.

Disease, malnutrition, and exposure killed an enormous portion of those confined there.

Cynthia told me that Baliceaux occupies a place in Garifuna consciousness that is difficult for an outsider to fully appreciate. Garifuna make pilgrimages there. She described it as a place where the bones of their ancestors remain.

“So it’s in our psyche,” she said.

“Everybody has that memory in our DNA.”

The survivors were eventually put aboard British ships.

In 1797, roughly 2,000 Garifuna reached Roatán, an island off what is now Honduras.

From there, they spread along the Caribbean coast of Central America.

Honduras.

Guatemala.

Nicaragua.

Belize.

The exile that was intended to break the community instead created a diaspora.

More than survival

As we walked through Seine Bight, Cynthia showed me another part of the story.

Plants.

A lot of plants.

Neem. Aloe. Lemongrass. Oregano. Mango. Coconut.

At one point she stopped at a plant she said had saved her life as a child. She had become gravely ill in the remote Maya village where she was born, she told me, and a Maya woman showed her mother a medicinal plant to use.

“This plant saved my life,” she said.

To Cynthia, that wasn’t just a nice childhood story. It was part of a worldview.

“We live with the plants as a way of life,” she explained. “The plants are like people, like entities… They are part of our being.”

Food comes from the earth and ocean. Medicine grows around you. Knowledge passes from one generation to another.

It made something Cynthia said later make more sense.

“We’re more than survivors.”

Survival, to her, isn’t merely the fact that descendants of the people sent away in 1797 are still alive.

It’s that Garifuna culture survived with them.

The language survived.

The drums survived.

The dances survived.

Cassava survived.

The ceremonies survived.

The relationship with ancestors survived.

“We have our language that we speak,” Cynthia told me. “And all of us can speak that language, even if we cannot speak it.”

She didn’t mean that literally.

You can “speak” Garifuna, she explained, through “our food, our outfits, our customs, our festivities”—through the way a person carries themselves in the world.

The world has noticed.

In 2001, UNESCO proclaimed the language, dance, and music of the Garifuna a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. In 2008, they were incorporated into UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Garifuna music itself tells something of the people’s history—a fusion of African and Indigenous Caribbean influences, carried alongside a language belonging to the Arawakan linguistic family.

But international recognition doesn’t guarantee survival.

Migration, discrimination, economic pressure and declining transmission of the Garifuna language to younger generations all present new challenges.

The irony is striking.

The Garifuna survived the British Empire.

Now one of the pressures is modernity itself.

A nation scattered across coastlines

Today there isn’t one Garifuna homeland in the conventional sense.

There is Yurumein, the ancestral homeland.

There are communities stretching along the Caribbean coast of Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, and Nicaragua.

And generations of migration have created another Garifuna geography in the United States, where substantial communities continue to maintain the language, music, dance, food, and celebrations of their ancestors.

There is something remarkable about that when you remember where the Central American chapter began: with a relatively small population of survivors deposited on Roatán in 1797.

From there, Garifuna communities expanded along hundreds of miles of Caribbean coastline.

And there is something fitting about a people shaped by the Caribbean becoming a people connected by it.

Garifuna communities became known for their maritime knowledge. Boats connected villages, families, and economies. Garifuna sailors learned to navigate the reefs and shoals of the western Caribbean.

Which brings the story back, in a strange way, to what Cynthia was trying to explain to me about origins.

Whether one begins with shipwrecked Africans, escaped Africans, Indigenous Caribbean navigators, or the older oral traditions of Africans crossing oceans themselves, movement is everywhere in the Garifuna story.

Across oceans.

Across islands.

Through mountains.

Into exile.

Along coastlines.

And eventually, around the world.

Still here

Each time I went back to Seine Bight, Cynthia seemed to have something else she wanted to show me.

A plant.

A person.

A story.

A piece of history.

By the end, what struck me wasn’t simply that Garifuna culture had survived.

It was the ordinariness with which that survival was happening around me.

It wasn’t locked inside a museum. It wasn’t confined to the pages of a history book.

It was in people’s kitchens and yards. In language. In music. In the knowledge of which plant could be medicine. In the food being prepared. In the people Cynthia introduced me to. In the stories an elder tells someone younger.

More than two centuries after Britain removed the Black Caribs from Saint Vincent, Garifuna communities still stretch along the Central American coast and far beyond it.

Their culture has endured colonialism, warfare, exile, migration, and assimilation.

But Cynthia didn’t want admiration alone.

When I asked what she wanted someone in the United States who knew nothing about the Garifuna to understand, her answer was straightforward:

“Respect and honor and support in terms of preservation of who we are and what we have contributed—not just to the country, but to the world.”

I had gone to Belize to fish.

Cynthia had traveled across the country to tell me a story.

I’m glad I listened.

Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with President Trump at the White House for the first face-to-face meeting since with war in Iran started.

It feels like an unsettled question hangs over Washington: Are the United States and Israel still moving in lockstep, or are their interests beginning to diverge?

To explore that question, I sat down with Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon.

We discussed the speculation surrounding the relationship between Trump and Netanyahu, whether Israel believes regime change in Iran is still a realistic objective, how closely Jerusalem would coordinate with Washington if diplomacy resumes, and whether Netanyahu faces domestic political pressure to continue military operations.

I also pressed Ambassador Danon on issues that have become increasingly contentious in American politics: the growing skepticism toward the U.S.-Israel alliance, whether Israel is preparing for a future with less bipartisan support in Washington, the debate over Saudi Arabia obtaining U.S. nuclear technology, and whether Israel’s security priorities come at an economic cost for Americans.

Throughout the conversation, Danon repeatedly argued that the U.S. and Israel remain closely aligned, rejected the idea that Netanyahu and Trump are on different paths, and defended Israel’s approach to Iran and the broader region. At the same time, I challenged him on some of the biggest criticisms facing the Israeli government—from changing American public opinion to questions about nuclear policy and the long-term political consequences of the war.

Watch the full interview, and as always, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Watch full interview.

One of the biggest political upsets of the 2026 primary season happened Tuesday night in Denver.

Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros defeated 15-term incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette, toppling one of Congress’ longest-serving Democrats and delivering another victory for the party’s insurgent left.

Kiros is just 29 years old and wasn’t even born yet when DeGette was first elected to Congress.

I sat down with Kiros just before Election Day to press her on the ideas driving her campaign and the questions many voters have about the Democratic Socialist movement.

Our conversation covered everything from Medicare for All and campaign finance to artificial intelligence, taxes, immigration, Israel/Palestine, and the rise of anti-Semitism. Kiros argued that the biggest obstacle facing Democrats isn’t a lack of progressive ideas—it’s the influence of corporate money inside the party. She repeatedly contended that lawmakers who accept corporate PAC donations cannot realistically deliver policies like Medicare for All, even if they publicly support them.

I also challenged her on whether those proposals are politically realistic, how she’d pay for them, whether middle-class Americans would ultimately face higher taxes, and what she would actually be able to accomplish in a Republican-controlled Washington.

On foreign policy, Kiros defended making Israel and Palestine a central issue in her campaign, calling for an end to what she described as the genocide in Gaza while emphasizing dignity, peace and security for both Israelis and Palestinians. She condemned both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, rejected the harassment of political opponents over their views on the conflict, and argued that criticism of the Israeli government should not be conflated with Judaism or Jewish people.

Kiros’ victory is another sign that the ideological battle inside the Democratic Party is far from over. If Tuesday night’s result is any indication, it’s a conversation that will only become more important in the months ahead.

Here’s our full interview.

A few months ago, the Animal Welfare Institute asked me to help create a short film celebrating its 75th anniversary. I’ll admit that before taking on the project, I knew little about the organization’s history. What I discovered was the story of a remarkable woman named Christine Stevens.

Stevens founded AWI in 1951, at a time when concern for animal welfare was often dismissed as a fringe issue. She possessed a rare combination of idealism and pragmatism. Rather than demanding the impossible, she focused on finding achievable ways to improve the lives of animals and building coalitions capable of making those changes happen.

Along the way, she helped drive some of the most important animal protection legislation in American history, including the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, the Animal Welfare Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the Endangered Species Act.

What struck me most while making this film was how much of her approach still defines the organization today. In an era when public discourse often rewards outrage over results, AWI’s staff continues to focus on the difficult, often unglamorous work of advocacy: building relationships, conducting research, finding common ground, and pushing for incremental improvements that add up over time.

The film also reminded me of something I think about often as a storyteller. History tends to remember movements, institutions, and legislation. But behind many of those accomplishments is a single person whose persistence, vision, and determination changed the course of events.

Christine Stevens was one of those people.

The video above tells her story, along with the story of the organization she founded and the work it continues today.

I hope you enjoy it.

PS. If you’re passionate about protecting animals, check out the campaigns AWI is currently working on. They could use your help.

So I figured it could be an interesting conversation. But this late in the campaign (election day is June 16th), the candidates have been asked all the important questions a million times. So I figured I’d try to explore some topics and question framing that hadn’t already been done. The campaign asked for a heads-up on some of the questions, but I refused. I didn’t want canned answers from a campaign. I wanted to see if I could get a better idea of who the candidate really is.

We ended up talking about the major fault lines shaping the race: the demographic coalitions forming behind the candidates, the appeal of democratic socialism among some DC voters, public safety and youth crime, the role of government programs in addressing disorder, how the city should respond to the Trump administration, cooperation with ICE, the National Guard's presence in Washington, and whether voters looking for a DC version of New York's Zohran Mamdani should instead support Janeese Lewis George. Throughout the conversation, McDuffie sought to position himself as a pragmatic progressive focused on public safety, economic opportunity, and governing a city under increasing pressure from the federal government.

Give it a watch and let me know what you think.

For decades, Black Democrats and white Republicans in the South operated within a political arrangement that shaped congressional maps across the region.

Republican-controlled state legislatures often drew majority-Black congressional districts with unusually shaped boundaries — districts designed to concentrate large numbers of Black voters into a single seat.

The strategy served both sides.

Black Democrats benefited because these districts increased the likelihood of electing Black representatives to Congress. Republicans benefited because packing Democratic voters into one district made many surrounding districts more reliably Republican.

Now, that system is starting to unravel.

Recent Supreme Court rulings have made it harder for states to use race as a primary factor when drawing congressional maps. In response, Republican lawmakers in several Southern states are attempting to dismantle or redraw some of these majority-Black districts in hopes of gaining additional seats.

The political consequences could be significant.

On one hand, breaking apart these districts could reduce Black representation in Congress. On the other, spreading Democratic voters across multiple districts could make some previously safe Republican seats more competitive — especially in a midterm election environment where the party in power has a historically unpopular president.

Surely, Republicans will attempt to carve up the former majority-minority districts to prevent too many Democratic voters from entering any one district. But there’s only so much they can do.

Take District 9 in Tennessee centered around Memphis. Democrat Steve Cohen won 71% of the vote in 2024. Republicans are trying to redraw his seat by spreading out the 160,000 people who voted for him into surrounding Republican districts. But that’s a lot of votes to spread around and it should present Democrats with opportunities if they can find the right candidates and message.

Now, I certainly understand the concern of Black voters in the south, faced with the prospect of a reduction in Black representation in Congress. And maybe legal battles will go their way.

In the meantime, it seems prudent for them to go on the offensive in these watered-down Republican districts.

Time will tell if they’re up to the task.

Why did we go?

The honest answer is simple: I had seen incredible videos on social media.

Giant silverbacks brushing past nervous tourists.
Infants tumbling through the leaves.
Humans standing just a few feet away from some of the most powerful animals on Earth.

I wanted to do that.

What I didn’t realize at the time is that this very impulse — the desire to see gorillas up close — is part of a complicated strategy that has helped pull one of the world’s most endangered species back from the brink of extinction.

The Long Decline

To understand how we got here, it helps to go back almost a century.

In the late 1920s, American psychologist and primatologist Robert Yerkes joined a scientific expedition to what was then the Belgian Congo.

Yerkes was among the first American researchers to carefully document the behavior of mountain gorillas, which live in the volcanic mountain ranges that stretch across Central Africa.

He wrote with fascination about their intelligence and emotional complexity.

But he also believed those qualities made them valuable — as subjects for scientific experiments and as attractions in Western zoos.

In the decades that followed, mountain gorillas began a long decline.

Habitat was cleared for agriculture.
Armed conflict swept through the region.
Gorillas were killed for bushmeat or caught in snares meant for other animals.

By the early 1980s, the global population had fallen to around 250 animals.

The species was widely expected to disappear.

Dian Fossey’s Discovery

Desperate to save the gorillas, conservationists turned to the work of Dian Fossey, the American primatologist who spent years studying them in the forests of Rwanda.

Fossey became a fierce defender of the animals, battling poachers and confronting anyone she believed threatened the gorillas’ survival. Her uncompromising activism made powerful enemies.

In 1985, she was murdered in her tent at the research camp she had built in the mountains.

But Fossey’s work left behind a crucial insight.

Mountain gorillas, she discovered, could tolerate close human presence — as long as that presence was introduced gradually and carefully managed.

That observation would become the foundation of one of the most unusual conservation strategies ever attempted.

Turning Gorillas Into an Economy

If people were willing to travel across the world to see gorillas in the wild, conservationists realized, perhaps those animals could become economically valuable alive.

Rwanda moved first.

In the late 1980s, the country began issuing permits that allowed tourists to spend a limited amount of time with habituated gorilla families. By the end of the decade, the program was already generating millions of dollars.

Uganda soon followed, expanding on the model.

What began as an experiment eventually turned into one of the most successful wildlife tourism programs on Earth.

Up Close With a Silverback

And that’s how I found myself deep in the Bwindi forest.

The experience is surreal.

We were literally within arm’s reach of the gorillas.

Infants were playing in the leaves at our feet.
At one point, a mother and baby brushed past me as if we were just another feature of the forest.

A massive 400-pound silverback sat nearby, watching calmly.

It’s hard to describe what it feels like to look into the eyes of an animal that shares nearly 98 percent of our DNA.

It’s awe.
It’s discomfort.
It’s wonder.

Mostly, it’s unforgettable.

The Economics of Conservation

None of this happens by accident.

In Uganda, visitors pay about $800 per person for a permit that allows them to spend one hour with a gorilla family.

We went twice.

The money funds the entire system: local guides, park management, conservation programs, and armed ranger patrols that protect the gorillas from poachers.

Uganda issued more than 40,000 gorilla permits in 2025, generating over $30 million in direct revenue.

About 20 percent of park revenues are shared with nearby communities, creating a financial incentive to protect the animals and the forests they depend on.

And the economic ripple effect goes far beyond the parks themselves — supporting hotels, drivers, restaurants, and small businesses throughout the region.

A Complicated System

The system isn’t perfect.

Some communities say they don’t receive enough of the tourism revenue. Others were displaced decades ago when national parks were created to protect gorilla habitat.

There are also ongoing concerns about disease. Because gorillas share so much of our DNA, viruses carried by humans could potentially spread to them.

Even the rules meant to prevent that — like maintaining a seven-meter distance — can be difficult to enforce when curious gorillas decide to wander closer.

A Rare Conservation Success

Still, the results are hard to ignore.

Today, more than 1,000 mountain gorillas live in the forests of Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

That makes them one of the only great ape populations on Earth whose numbers are actually increasing.

Their survival rests on a strange and morally complicated bargain.

The world decided that if people were going to care enough to save gorillas, those animals had to be worth something.

And so a system was built around that idea — a global network of tourism, conservation funding, and local livelihoods tied to the fate of a single species.

It’s not pure.

It’s not perfect.

But it might be the most realistic lesson conservation has learned:

Sometimes the surest way to save a species from extinction is to make it more valuable alive in the wild than dead — or locked in a cage.

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The above comment was posted recently on one of my day-in-the-life videos.

I won’t pretend it didn’t sting a little.

It touched an insecurity. The voice that wonders: Is posting vlogs like these ridiculous? Am I too old for this? Should I just stick to what’s safe?

I’m 41. I’ve worked as a national correspondent in Washington. I’ve produced award-winning documentary films. I’ve spent most of my adult life in serious rooms covering serious things. I’m proud of that work.

So yeah — the comment made me pause and question myself.

What am I trying to accomplish by sharing private moments of my life? Is subjecting myself to criticism worth it? Why am I doing this?

The answer is this:

I want to tell big, beautiful stories. The kind of stories that make you laugh. Or go quiet. Or see the world differently.

They require research and care, and the space to follow a thread without knowing exactly where it will lead.

Corporate media organizations — the ones I’ve worked in most of my career — are built for speed and efficiency. They rarely budget for the ambitious, time-consuming, costly projects I find most compelling.

If I want to build something larger, something deeper, I can’t just wait and hope for someone to fund it.

I have to build the foundation myself.

That’s why I share videos like these. They’re about creating the infrastructure that will allow me to tell bigger and bolder stories. They let people see who I am and how I work, so that if I ask for support one day, it comes from a place of trust.

Showing the grind is vulnerable. It would be easier to wait until everything is perfectly polished. But that’s not how independent storytelling works anymore.

The old model was: get hired, get budgeted, get airtime.

The new model is: build trust, audience, and support — then build the story.

So yes, the comment made me think. It made me check my ego. It made me sit with the discomfort for a minute.

And then it clarified something.

If I’m uncomfortable, it probably means I’m growing.

If someone’s questioning it, I’ve struck a nerve.

And if you’re here — reading this, watching, engaging — then this grown man is doing exactly what he needs to be doing.

Building something.

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They’re all connected. Here’s how…

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“I said to the head of Coca-Cola, you gotta go to real sugar.”

That was Trump last summer.

Soon after, Coca-Cola rolled out a new line sweetened with U.S. cane sugar.

Call me a cynic, but I was suspicious. Was this really about taste?

So I started digging.

And I found these guys: Alfy and Pepe Fanjul — heirs to a multibillion-dollar sugar empire.

Through their holdings, the family produces a massive share of American cane sugar. Estimates suggest they account for roughly a third of U.S. cane sugar production, putting them in prime position as Coca-Cola expands domestic sourcing, according to Forbes.

So why would Trump want to help the Fanjuls?

Maybe because they’ve been friends for decades.
Or because the Fanjuls and affiliated entities have directed more than $7 million in political donations to Trump since his first presidential run.

Side note — and this part is wild.

The Fanjuls were also major donors to former President Bill Clinton. In fact, on the day in 1996 when Clinton broke up with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office, she later told investigators she remembered Clinton taking a call from a Florida sugar grower.

That grower was Alfy Fanjul.

And the reason he was calling is where we get to the connection to dead fish.

You’ve probably seen the images: massive fish kills caused by red tide. Beaches littered with rotting marine life. Manatees, dolphins, sea turtles.

Red tide is a naturally occurring algae bloom. But scientists have long warned that nutrient pollution — especially phosphorus — can worsen ecosystem damage and intensify blooms once they reach shore.

Here’s how it works.

Farmers in South Florida use phosphorus fertilizer to grow sugar cane. Excess nutrients can wash off fields into inland waterways. That water moves through the Everglades system and, during major discharges, toward the coasts — where nutrients can act like gasoline on an ecological fire that’s already burning.

Being from Florida, these red tide blooms are brutal to watch. Dead fish everywhere. The smell. Tourism hit. Ecosystems stressed.

For decades, there have been efforts to curb agricultural pollution. But the sugar industry has used its political power to block regulations that could hurt its bottom line.

Remember that call Alfy Fanjul made to President Clinton? At the time, there was a proposal floating in Washington for a penny-per-pound assessment on sugar producers to help fund Everglades restoration. After the call, the idea faced intense political resistance and ultimately went nowhere.

Now, the Fanjuls will tell you they’ve made great strides in cleaning up their operations.

But the science is pretty clear: the amount of phosphorus flowing off sugar farms is damaging ecosystems.

And now that the sugar industry got a sweet assist from Trump, sugar farmers have an incentive to ramp up production.

I mean, hey — it’s a great business. The Fanjuls’ Florida sugar-growing operations made $5.75 billion in 2024.

Coke with real sugar. Trump says, “It’s just better.”

Makes you wonder … better for whom?

Sixteen years ago, I appeared on Larry King Live to discuss the death of Dawn Brancheau.

Brancheau, a trainer at SeaWorld Orlando, was killed by an orca named Tilikum. I spent months reporting that story, examining the darker side of these incredible human-animal performances that many of us grew up watching in awe.

Brancheau was the third person to die in Tilikum’s pool. I knew there was more to consider, especially the morality of keeping such massive and complex animals in captivity

But the truth is, I dropped the ball. As often happens in the daily churn of news, I moved on to other stories.

Gabriela Cowperthwaite did not.

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She dug into the history of captive orcas, interviewed trainers and former SeaWorld employees, and followed the paper trail of money, corporate messaging, and alleged cover-ups. The result was Blackfish, one of the most influential documentary films of the era, which had a profound impact on public perception of marine mammal captivity.

I remember when it premiered on CNN. I waited for the end credits to see who directed it. Then I read everything I could about Cowperthwaite. I was blown away. At the time, she was not a high-profile documentary filmmaker. Blackfish was the leap — the project that put her on the map.

Years later, she spoke in Washington, and I went to hear her. She described bootstrapping the film’s production: raising funds bit by bit, paying her crew but not herself, asking friends for help. She scraped by on grit and determination because she believed the story mattered. She was not going to let the opportunity pass.

Today, Cowperthwaite is a well-known director, and the respect she has earned has opened major doors in her career.

Recently, a young journalist preparing to graduate from college asked me for advice. What I told him is the lesson I took from Cowperthwaite:

Train your eyes and ears to stay alert for the story that has to be told. When you find it, do not let life’s noise pull you away.

That lesson goes beyond journalism. When a real opportunity appears — the kind that could define you — grab it. Hold on. Sacrifice to see it through.

Tiffany Hilton’s life unfolded very differently—at least at first. She grew up in a loving, two-parent home. She was a straight-A student, a cheerleader, a sorority sister. By all outward appearances, she was thriving. Then, without warning, her mother died from an undiagnosed heart condition. The loss shattered her world. Tiffany spiraled into addiction—first prescription opioids, then heroin. She lived in her car. In drug houses. For a decade, she cycled through the pain and turmoil of addiction. Until one day, she decided she could not live that way anymore.

Clawing her way back, Tiffany fought for sobriety and eventually earned a place in law school—after a long, grueling process to prove that her lengthy arrest record belonged to a past life. As a law student, she received word of an inmate in the Florida prison system seeking legal help.

Lavonte was serving time for a burglary conviction. As a transgender woman housed in a men’s prison, she lived under constant threat. One day, guards informed her she would be transferred to a cell with an inmate whose gang affiliation explicitly prohibited association with homosexuals. The inmate warned guards repeatedly that he would attack Lavonte if they placed her in the cell. Lavonte begged to remain alone, but her pleas were ignored.

When guards forced her into the cell, the attack was immediate and vicious. Lavonte was beaten unconscious, left with a concussion, a chipped tooth, and a black eye. While recovering, another inmate suggested she might have grounds for a civil lawsuit. Working from the prison law library, Lavonte taught herself the law, researched case precedent, and filed the suit on her own.

When Tiffany discovered the filings, she was struck by how far Lavonte had already gone—alone, incarcerated, and with no formal legal training. She traveled to the prison to meet her. Lavonte told Tiffany her goal wasn’t just justice for herself, but protection for others like her—so no one else would have to endure the same abuse.

Tiffany took the case pro bono, partnering with a mentor attorney she had previously worked with. What began as a legal collaboration quickly became a friendship.

Together, Tiffany and Lavonte took on the State of Florida in a high-stakes fight for accountability and dignity.

It was an extraordinary honor to tell this story. I am deeply grateful for the trust Lavonte, Tiffany, and their loved ones placed in our team.

I also learned an immense amount through the filmmaking process itself—raising funds, organizing shoots, and spending countless hours in the edit. Eventually, we had the privilege of screening the film before live audiences at festivals. We even brought home a few awards.

But more than anything, it was the camaraderie—between the crew and with our subjects—that will stay with me.

One of my guiding principles as a storyteller is to give voice to people who are too often ignored or silenced. In that sense, this film was profoundly fulfilling.

I’m excited to share that the documentary is now available to watch for free on YouTube. If you’re there, I hope you’ll follow my channel, which will be home to my long-form work as this community continues to grow.

It was incredible to hear from people who have experienced their own pain and loss, and who said the story helped them feel a little less alone. If anything I share here can help someone keep moving forward—even in small ways—that matters enormously to me. My hope is that we can continue healing together.

While the story of what happened with Kade carries a lot of sadness, reconnecting with people from different chapters of my life also brought unexpected moments of joy and gratitude. Those connections reminded me how much history, care, and resilience we all carry—often quietly.

To everyone who has subscribed to this Substack, thank you. Your support truly means a lot. I want this space to feel like a community—one where we can talk honestly about meaningful issues, share compelling stories, and explore ideas with curiosity and respect.

As I continue writing here, I’m going to experiment with different content styles—personal reflections, reported pieces, conversations, and things I’m still figuring out in real time. I’d really appreciate any support, comments, or notes about what resonates most with you. Let me know what you enjoy, what you want more of, or what sparks something for you.

I’m open, and I’m listening closely. I’m grateful you’re here, and I’m excited to see what we can build together.

In high school, I scraped by with grades just good enough to get into a state university in Florida. I remember seeing a newspaper headline: “LET’S ROLL, PRESIDENT URGES.” George W. Bush was talking about invading Iraq as part of the global war on terror. But to my friends and me, rolling meant taking ecstasy. With a grin, I cut out the headline and pinned it up on my bedroom wall. That was my frame; the world felt like a joke.

Back in the movie theater, images of power and violence filled the screen and snapped me out of my teenage haze. It cracked open a fascination with history, politics, conflict, and the decisions made by world leaders that turn people into statistics. I would never be the same.

I decided to major in political science and got an internship at a local news radio station. Within a few weeks on the job, a reporter took me out to lunch. Over beer and burgers, we dissected the state’s political dynamics. Then we went to a press event where the reporter shoved a microphone into the governor’s face and asked some hard-hitting questions we had discussed. As the governor squirmed, I thought: this seems like a cool job.

After the internship, they hired me, and I caught an early break.

The story of Casey Anthony and her missing daughter, Caylee, had turned national attention to the Sunshine State. Cable news programs were looking for local reporters covering the story to come on their shows and discuss the latest developments. My heart pounded that first time I sat in the studio, bright lights in a dark room, camera aimed at my face. I learned that day about the thrill of live broadcasting, the feeling of having attention focused on me, knowing thousands of people are watching.

The experience I gained reporting on the case helped land me jobs reporting for TV stations in Orlando and Little Rock. Working the local beat, you really get to know a community. You meet everyone—the mayor, police chief, activists, business leaders, and people from all walks of life experiencing their best or worst day. I covered violent crime, corruption, natural disasters, elections, jury trials, high school football, and everything in between.

Life was an adventure. Then life shattered.

My girlfriend got pregnant. We were in our late 20s and in love. We both had good jobs. So we started parenting classes. We had a baby shower. We found out it was a boy, so we picked a name: Kade. We were full of hope for the future, but halfway through the pregnancy, doctors started finding abnormalities. Excitement turned to worry. Every specialist shrugged. Something was wrong, but they couldn’t tell us exactly what.

Kade was born by emergency C-section, a month premature. He was immediately put on a ventilator. His lungs didn’t function properly. For three weeks, he fought. Then, doctors told us there was no hope. They recommended we remove him from life support. Kade died in our arms on Christmas Day, 2013.

It was devastating. The relationship didn’t survive. She moved away.

As I rebuilt my life, I tried to make sense of everything that had happened. I knew that if Kade had survived, he likely would have been severely disabled. That was terrifying, but I was ready to give him the best life I could. When he died, I promised to honor him and to keep his spirit alive by living with more intention and courage than I had before and to inspire people to open their eyes, as one film did for me 10 years earlier.

After the shock of Donald Trump’s first election as president, I moved to Washington, D.C. It was an important time to understand what was happening in the center of power. My time was spent in the halls of Congress, producing, shooting, editing, and reporting live on the turmoil in Trump’s Washington. At times, I did valuable journalism, giving voice to the voiceless and holding power to account. But as news media organizations consolidated, they constantly asked journalists to do more. Every new demand meant less time for original reporting.

Politics became theater—a toxic cycle of outrage and hypocrisy played out daily for the cameras. Days and weeks began to blur: provocation, blame, rinse and repeat. Eventually, I began to feel like I wasn’t living up to my promise. One icy morning, I walked to work on Capitol Hill. It was a new day, but the story would be much the same. My shoes crunched through the slush, snow packed into my jacket hood, and I decided it was time for a change.

I moved out of my fancy apartment and into a friend’s basement to save money. I took Spanish classes and told my boss I wasn’t going to renew my contract. Then, I bought a one-way ticket to Costa Rica.

I spent nine months in Central and South America and went on all sorts of incredible adventures. I sailed the Caribbean Sea and the Galapagos Islands. I trekked across a windswept desert and trudged my way through the Amazonian rainforest. I visited tiny towns in the Andes where tourists rarely go and wandered the slums of giant metropolises. I met locals and foreigners of every stripe—rich, poor, lost, found—always with a camera in hand, documenting everything.

By the time I returned, I knew I wanted to keep telling stories that revealed the world in all its depth—stories that are messy and nuanced, full of contradictions, and take time to fully comprehend.

A friend who ran a production company had seen some of my travel work and invited me to join a documentary series—one that would take us across the globe, telling stories about conservation of the world’s natural resources. It was exactly what I envisioned.

We were in Peru in March of 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Trips to South Africa, the Seychelles, and Indonesia were on the horizon. But that was all gone as the project got canceled and everyone was sent home.

An incredible opportunity had disappeared. I had no job, little savings, and nowhere to live. So I moved home, disappointed and looking for inspiration. I found it by picking up a camera and pressing record. From there came films about history and exploitation, people who survived abuse and addiction, friendships lost, the intimate struggles of families, and portraits of people trying to make the world a better place. Along the way, I raised money, screened at film festivals, and even won awards. It was a whole new world—exciting as it was challenging.

In some ways, filmmaking is the easy part. What has proven far more difficult is getting stories to break through the noise and make an impact in a world dominated by clickbait.

I’m now back in Washington, D.C., just as another Trump administration reshapes the world. The turbulence of rapid technological change, environmental decline, and social disorientation only deepens the questions about our future.

My mission is to understand what’s happening and why. I want to tell big, beautiful stories that make people laugh and cry and open their eyes to the world in all its darkness and beauty.

And I want to do it with curiosity and humility and compassion.

That’s how I return the favor to the filmmaker who inspired me. And that’s how I’ll fulfill the promise I made to myself and Kade.

I hope you’ll come along for the ride.