The Symposium

In 2016, a friend of mine named Sean Conner had the nerve to gather his friends and ask something of them.

He sent an email to about ten of us.

Congratulations! You’re all enrolled in the Danger School!

So what is it? Well, it’s a little like Make-a-Wish for our dying inner child + fire! + a splash of danger = full aliveness.

NOTE: This is the one and only planning email you will receive for Danger School. If you don’t follow up I’ll take that to mean you’re basically a pussy and hate fun. (Sorry, but it had to be said.)

Sean Conner, 2016

We showed up. Ate nachos. Drank beer. Planned something just outside our collective comfort zone, just enough to make it exciting and memorable without killing anyone.

That weekend on Vashon Island, eight men became something. Not immediately, not dramatically. But by the time we left, we had, in Sean’s words, “coalesced into a band of supportive and close friends.”

Danger School lasted two adventures. Then life happened. People moved. Jobs consumed everything. The energy to organize the next thing never materialized.

We’d built something real and had nothing to hold it.

Sean has moved on to other things. The dream never died. It is reborn now as something bigger, the same spirit, a wider reach. Not just for our friends. For all men.

Every model we have for men is broken.

Church is bullshit. The machismo culture is bullshit. The men’s wellness industry is bullshit. None of it holds men to a genuinely higher standard. None of it asks anything real.

And the result is predictable: men who don’t hold themselves accountable, and don’t hold each other accountable. A slow downward spiral that affects everyone around them: their families, their communities, the future.

No institution is stepping up and saying: we expect more of you, and here’s the structure to make that real.

So we’re building one.

The Symposium is a men’s club that requires something of you.

It costs you in character, in time, and in money. In return, it gives you brotherhood, camaraderie, and genuine growth. And over time, something more concrete: chapter spaces to work and meet, properties to retreat to with your family, places that belong to the men who built them.

It is chapter-based. Each chapter has a leadership structure that holds members accountable and mechanisms to report when something isn’t right. There is no pastor. There is no doctrine. There is a shared code that every member agrees to live by and be held to: ethics, service, and how you treat other people.

We took what church got right: community, ritual, a shared code, the expectation that you show up and give back. We went deeper on service and accountability. We left the theology behind.

The long vision is a global network: chapters in cities, destination properties for retreats and family gatherings, spaces that members help build and can use. An institution that outlasts any of us.

But more than the real estate: a generation of men who are empathetic, service-oriented, and genuinely accountable to each other and to the world they live in.

Men in The Symposium must be good people. Helpful people.

That means community service: real service, tracked and expected, not performative. It means giving to the order and to each other. It means living by a code of ethics and conduct, and being held to it by your chapter. It means showing up, consistently, not just when it’s convenient.

It costs money. It costs time. Those costs are real and intentional. They are part of what makes belonging here mean something.

Brotherhood. Physical access to chapter spaces: co-working, meeting rooms, gathering places. Access to Symposium properties for retreats, getaways, and family time. And men who actually know you and won’t let you hide from yourself.

If you don’t give a damn about other people, this isn’t for you.

If you believe some people deserve less, less dignity, less opportunity, less of anything, this isn’t for you.

We don’t preach tolerance. We expect it, fully, as a baseline condition of membership. You either believe every person deserves the same shot you got, or you belong somewhere else.

In twenty years, if this works: chapters in every major city. Properties on multiple continents. A network built by men who held each other to a standard worth holding.

Not a lifestyle brand. Not a subscription. An institution that asks something real of the men who belong to it, and gives something real back.

“Get way more out of it than you put in.” Sean said that in the first Danger School email. It’s still true. It’s the whole idea.