I first met Brian Lee – goldsmith, sculptor, kung fu master, homebuilder, philosopher, village water system operator, farmer, painter and more -- in 1997. I had been in New Mexico a couple of years and was interested in remote living. After being introduced by a mutual friend, I started hanging out at Brian’s off-grid house on the high desert mesa of the Ortiz Mountains near Cerrillos, New Mexico, and having interesting conversations.

At first, and for some time, the conversations were both frequent and pretty one-sided. Brian was about 15 years older than me and had been through several chapters more of life, and as such, was a mentor to me. I would come with a topic, usually about the big choices in front of me, such as starting a family, buying some off-grid land of my own, and what kind of vocation to pursue, as well as what was going inside me – anxiety, depression, and various other remnants of a difficult past. Brian would give me one perspective or another about what I was experiencing, and usually in a way that allowed me to see it very differently, more holistically, and to have some purchase on it I didn’t have before. So of course I kept going back for more. I was hungry for ways of relating to my own internal and external situation more constructively. Most fundamentally, I was hungry to live a life of meaning, and I didn’t quite know how.

My conversations with Brian have continued for nearly three decades, and I now understand them as essentially, a download of sense-making tools. Brian always had an interest, and a unique talent, for connecting philosophy to practical day-to-day reality. The tools I was learning to use were applicable in every aspect of my life. Axioms like, “that which obstructs your path, is your path,” or “a man cannot draw two bows…” were expounded until they became shorthand for layer upon layer of meaning, both implicit and explicit.

At some point, I don’t know exactly when, Brian and I made the rare transition from mentor-mentee to friends and collaborators. As my professional life afforded me more opportunities to do work I cared deeply about, many of the mental models and frameworks to which Brian first exposed me became regular refrains in my approach to business topics like culture and strategy, and, later, in my organizational development and coaching practice. And as I wielded these tools myself, and shared them with others, I have often been asked for my reading list, or for some other way to access the resources that helped me to a somewhat coherent and functional worldview. While I have read some books along the way, (some suggested by Brian,) the conversations themselves were the curriculum.

Through this podcast, I hope to share the tools I downloaded from Brian and their myriad applications, discuss sense-making and lessons learned in our own lives and in general, and help other folks – perhaps especially young men in search of meaning as I was in 1997 – find more traction in their inquiry.

- Boaz Soifer