Tyler has been a fan of David for a long time, and even has one of David's prints hanging in his office. David Hayward (the Naked Pastor) is a pastor turned artist painting, drawing, and thinking about what it takes to be free to be you. He has been creating art and working towards freedom with this community for over 10 years now.

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Matthew Distefano came to this conversation through the Quoir Publishing family, with a bag of Star Wars tattoos and a mind that has spent years pressing through the hard questions that a lot of people are afraid to ask out loud. We talked about what happens when the theology you inherited stops adding up, and what it looks like to push all the way through cynicism and anger into something that actually feels like life.

Matthew grew up with hell, the rapture, and a God who didn't quite make sense to a kid watching his dad be a deadbeat. Those early questions never went away. They just got more developed. Eventually, through philosophers like Renee Girard and theologians like Richard Rohr, he found a language for what he had always sensed: that we create God in our image, and then imitate that image back into the world. When he stopped doing that, the whole universe opened up. Star Wars stopped needing to be a Christian allegory. Hiking stopped feeling like it was happening under the shadow of eternal consequences. Curiosity became the engine instead of fear.

We spent a good part of this conversation on something I find myself circling with people all the time: the difference between deconstruction as a destination and deconstruction as a season you move through. It is easy to trade fear for anger and think you have arrived somewhere. Matthew has not done that. He farms, he parents a teenage daughter deep in the Star Wars lore, he co-owns a publishing house, and he holds his spirituality loosely, like something simmering on the back burner rather than something to perform. That is a rare thing. This was a good conversation.

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Sam Jolman has been on Tyler's list for a long time. They share a city, a community of helpers, and a lot of the same clients who have quietly made their way to both of them. Tyler first heard Sam's name at one of the lowest points of his life, at the top of a therapist referral list he never got to use. What a gift, he said, that it worked out the way it did. Because now they get to be friends.

This conversation went a lot of places. They talked about what it means to be a person on a journey in an age when there are a thousand podcasts and reels telling you how to fix yourself faster. Sam has been doing this work for twenty years and his word for it is slow. Healing is slow work. The cold plunge feels good in the moment but it is the long relationship with the cold that actually changes you. That distinction matters, and it showed up everywhere in this conversation, in how we hold shame, in how we talk about masculinity, in how we approach the things we are most afraid to look at in ourselves.

Sam's book, The Sex Talk You Never Got, is about recovering the lover in every man. Not the mechanical version of sexuality that most people were handed, but the version that is about desire, wonder, passion, and the heart's deep need to be wanted. It is a brave and honest book from a brave and honest man. And this was, without question, one of the most alive conversations Tyler has had on this podcast. Sam has a move in his therapy office where he throws two fists in the air to celebrate his clients. By the end of this one, it felt mutual.

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