Stay Curious · A Hollow Bone Initiative docuseries
The Doorman & The Invitation
An introduction to the story behind the series.
What happens when you put a former pastor, a nuclear-threat analyst, a professional surfer, a wingsuit pilot, a musician raised Mormon, a private equity veteran, a few entrepreneurs, artists, healers, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, and a dog on 131 acres in the mountains of North Carolina?
Nobody knew.
That was kind of the point.
But before there was a documentary, there were two men who had spent much of their lives asking different versions of the same question.
What if there’s another way to live?
One of them was Stephen Sedmak.
Stephen had already experienced the kind of success most entrepreneurs spend their lives chasing. He co-founded SRS Labs, an audio technology company that went public on NASDAQ and worked with some of the biggest names in consumer electronics.
He understood business. Technology. Money. Building something from nothing.
But somewhere along the way, his attention shifted.
He began writing books, exploring consciousness, questioning the stories people tell themselves, and spending more time listening.
He and his wife Mary had spent years caring for 131 acres of Appalachian wilderness outside Asheville. Their land, Shope Creek, had welcomed children, families, teachers, artists, and friends long before anyone thought about making a documentary there.
Stephen had a name for his role in life.
The Doorman.
He wasn’t interested in becoming anyone’s guru.
He didn’t want to tell people what to believe, what to feel, or what they were supposed to discover.
He wanted to open the door.
And get out of the way.
The other man was Craig Rose.
Craig had spent most of his adult life doing something a little different.
He invited people into rooms they never expected to enter.
In 2002, as a young pastor, Craig walked into the world’s largest pornography convention and started a ministry called XXXchurch.
He wasn’t there because he agreed with everyone in the building.
He was there because he believed the conversations that mattered most were often happening in places nobody from his world wanted to go.
Years later, he challenged that same religious world again, this time by bringing cannabis into conversations about Christianity, healing, and personal freedom.
Then came Rainbow Ridge.
During the pandemic, Craig and his family lived at a retreat property in California, where he helped organize approximately 30 free psychedelic retreats for more than 300 people.
He had watched people from wildly different backgrounds sit together, share experiences, question their assumptions, and sometimes leave with a different understanding of themselves.
But Craig had also been questioning his own identity.
Pastor. Entrepreneur. Author. Father. Rebel.
Who decides who you are?
And what happens when you stop accepting the answer?
By the time Craig and Stephen connected, they had traveled very different roads.
Stephen had the land.
Craig had spent years learning how to bring people together.
Neither needed another lecture about consciousness.
They wanted to see what might happen when people were given the space to experience life for themselves.
So Craig started inviting people.
Not because they were famous.
Not because they were all spiritual.
Not because they believed the same things.
Some were successful businesspeople. Some were artists. Some worked in medicine, wellness, or technology. Some were parents. Some were searching for something they couldn’t quite explain.
Some were there to contribute.
Some were there to participate.
Some came because somebody they trusted said they should.
Craig organized two intimate gatherings at Stephen and Mary’s home.
They called them Camp Mary.
There would be music. Art. Conversations. Food. Time outdoors. Experiences led by people with very different backgrounds.
There wasn’t a single worldview everyone was expected to adopt.
There wasn’t a predetermined transformation everyone was supposed to experience.
There was simply an invitation to show up.
And somewhere in the middle of all this, Craig put two words on a T-shirt.
STAY CURIOUS.
It wasn’t a philosophy that required a membership card.
It wasn’t a religion.
It wasn’t even an answer.
It was permission to ask another question.
Filmmaker Jackson Averett came with his cameras.
And that’s when things got interesting.
Because the people who arrived at Shope Creek weren’t characters somebody invented for a television show.
They had already lived extraordinary lives.
One had spent years studying nuclear threats and healthcare data.
Another had built restaurant companies.
One had competed as a professional surfer.
Another jumped off cliffs and flew through the air in a wingsuit.
A musician was wrestling with the identity he’d inherited.
A woman was finding her way back to her father and writing her story.
A painter was telling everyone to stop overthinking and just create.
And somewhere in the middle of it all was Lion, a dog who didn’t care about anyone’s résumé.
People talked.
They disagreed.
They made music.
They ate together.
They wandered into the woods.
They asked questions they might not have asked anywhere else.
And Jackson kept filming.
There were moments of laughter, uncertainty, connection, and conversations that moved in directions nobody had planned.
The most interesting thing wasn’t whether everybody agreed.
It was that they didn’t have to.
That’s where STAY CURIOUS began.
Not as a ten-episode television concept.
Not as a carefully scripted experiment.
But as two real gatherings, on real land, with real people whose lives had already taken them through remarkable experiences.
And as the footage began to take shape, another possibility emerged.
What if the story wasn’t just what happened during those days at Camp Mary?
What if the real story was who these people were before they arrived?
The worlds they came from.
The things they believed.
The families they belonged to.
The identities they carried.
And what they went on to do afterward.
What if every person in that room had a story worth following?
That became the first documentary and a possible path forward.
Episode One, The Deer Trail, is finished. The other chapters are ideas for where the series could go, not episodes currently being edited or new follow-up stories being filmed. We are focused on releasing Episode One and inviting donations to help continue the work.
Different stories. The same extraordinary collection of people. A rough roadmap whose titles, order and total number of episodes may change.
One episode might explore faith and belonging through a musician’s life.
Another might enter the world of private gatherings, secrecy, and skepticism.
Another might follow fathers and sons trying to understand what gets passed from one generation to the next.
Another might ask what happens when someone stops trying to be an artist and simply starts creating.
And another might return to the man who opened the door in the first place.
Not everyone will agree with what they hear.
Some viewers will recognize themselves in these people.
Others will wonder what the hell they’re watching.
Good.
Because STAY CURIOUS isn’t asking you to believe everything.
It’s asking you to remain open long enough to discover something you didn’t know.
And perhaps to question something you thought you did.
Stephen opened his home.
Craig brought the people.
Mary gave the gatherings their name.
Jackson brought the cameras.
And the people brought their lives.
Nobody knew what would happen.
Now there’s a story to tell.
