Richard Pierry

There's something I've come to believe deeply: the best education happens when books and travel collide. Before heading to Medora, North Dakota for a behind-the-scenes tour of the forthcoming @TRPresLibrary, I started listening to @BretBaier's biography, "To Rescue the American Spirit: Teddy Roosevelt and the Birth of a Superpower." I listened to about half before landing. Picked back up driving through the Badlands. Finished the final hour departing from Theodore Roosevelt Regional Airport in Dickinson. Hearing Roosevelt's story while standing in the very landscape that shaped him was something I wasn't fully prepared for. Theodore Roosevelt wasn't simply a president who happened to visit North Dakota. The Badlands transformed him. After personal tragedy struck early in his life, he came west searching for renewal, challenge, and purpose. That rugged frontier helped forge the resilience, conservation ethic, and fearless spirit that would define his presidency — and his legacy. That's the power of place. You can read about a person's character in a book. You can admire it from a distance. But when you walk the same ground, breathe the same air, and see what they saw — history stops being information and starts becoming something you feel. This is precisely why I've built both a book club and travel experiences into Fearless Journeys. Either one alone creates real value. But combine deep reading with immersive travel — and layer on genuine human connection with authors, historians, local innovators, or people profoundly rooted in a place — and learning reaches an entirely different level. Education was never meant to be confined to a classroom. Or even just a book. From Theodore Roosevelt National Park — the only national park named after a person — to the Presidential Library set to open on July 4, 2026, Medora is one of those rare American towns where history still feels viscerally alive. Bret Baier's book is excellent. I highly recommend it. Due to my own transformative experience here — including building some meaningful local connections — I now have the inspiration to bring a Fearless Journeys group trip to the Badlands in the future. While fearlessness is often associated with figures like Teddy Roosevelt, walking that rugged landscape confirmed something I've long believed: fearlessness cannot be downloaded or taught in a seminar. It is forged through the friction of lived experience, the discomfort of unfamiliar terrain, and the decision to keep moving anyway. Roosevelt didn't find his fearlessness in a library. He found it here, in the Badlands, in the mud and the wind and the solitude. Some lessons can only be learned that way. Have you ever had an experience where a book and a destination came together in a way that changed how you saw both? I'd love to hear about it — drop it in the comments or send me a message.

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🔥It’s UP!!🔥 Big Yellow! - Inside the Spirit Airlines REPO Operation youtu.be/moEixIux1b0

NEW from @IraStoll @NickKristof father fought for the Nazis during WWII — something he admitted in his 2024 memoir, Chasing Hope "When I was growing up and other kids talked about their dads heroically battling the Nazis, I kept quiet. I didn't want to admit that my father had actually fought for a year on the same side of the Nazis." freebeacon.com/media/times-co…