Last week on the podcast I introduced you to NSA intelligence officer turned author Lizzy Wright. Lizzy co-wrote her first book, Aggressively Human, with husband Steve Wright. One of the challenges she talked about in writing the book was humanizing Steve. He was/is a Greek God who has for all intents and purposes lead a charmed life. However, like all of us, Steve has had his share of hard times. But early in the book those things hadn’t happened to him yet.

Below is an excerpt from early on in the book that I think shows some great humanizing. The scene takes place in the early 80s in Dallas. Steve, a rookie with the Cowboys, is staying with all the other rookies for pre-season camp in a local hotel. At one point during camp there was a very large nursing convention going on at the same hotel. Which is how he and a few teammates found themselves at the hotel bar, making what they probably believed to be excellent life choices.

At one point in the evening Steve needed to excuse himself and use the restroom. Where he promptly, and violently, shit his pants:

“Nothing at my disposal could handle this predicament unless it involved industrial cleaning equipment. My task was figuring out how on earth I could get up to my room unnoticed. It had also dawned on me that I had left my wallet on the table with the cute nurses, but that was an impossible retrieval mission given the circumstances. Forget my wallet; I wasn’t going back to that table now, you couldn’t drag me.”

Upon sneaking out of the bathroom, still in his soiled pants, he snuck his way into an elevator:

“I took a position against the side wall, closest to the exit, next to a hot nurse who I had eyed at the bar earlier. As the doors slid shut, everyone started looking around, wondering why the elevator smelled like an outhouse, followed by a hunt for the culprit. The nurse surmised that it was emanating from me and inched away…So much for that potential hookup.”

Funny story, right? But it also does the job Lizzy wanted of humanizing Steve in a way the rest of the early part of the book couldn’t.

It also reminded me of something I didn’t fully understand when I was younger, especially when I first started coaching. You don’t get to grow into authority. Eventually it just gets dumped in your lap. And from that moment on, whether you feel ready or not, you’re expected to act like the version of yourself that deserves it.

I learned that the hard way at one of my first jobs.

Throughout high school and college, I was coached by guys who essentially did what I mentioned a few lines ago. No explanations, no pats on the back…just perform. And your reward for doing so was that you didn’t get your ass ripped.

They say that a bully is a bully because they themselves were bullied at some point. And that people who are abusive were probably abused themselves. That’s about the best way I can describe my early coaching style: mimicking what I was used to.

On the first day of practice as the running backs coach at a new job, one of my freshmen, Russell, left his helmet on the ground while the group ran to midfield to grab a drink. Because this wasn’t how we hydrated:

It was more like this:

So, the guys had to run about 35 yards, grab their drink from the MacGyver’d water trough, and jog back. By the time they got back I was holding Russell’s helmet. As the group gathered around me, intently listening for the next drill set up, I handed Russell back his helmet.

“I’m handing this to you nicely this time. If you ever leave your helmet on the field again I’m going to throw it into the fu**ing woods.”

That was that, and away we went practicing. As an aside, running a drill session for the running back position is usually about as fruitless as me watching opera. Nobody’s getting anything out of either activity. Guys that can run the football can run the football, guys that can’t…can’t.

Anyway, that period came and went, and off the group headed for another water break. And wouldn’t you know it, that sucker Russell left his helmet again. I can still remember the words that ran through my head:

“Shit. Now I gotta throw his helmet in the woods.”

….then:

“Am I really gonna throw his helmet in the woods?”

This internal debate ping-ponged around my head until the group returned. Going back on my word, on the first day of practice and in front of the entire group, eventually became a non-starter. As the guys gathered around me, holding Russell’s helmet again, I casually turned my back to them and chucked the helmet as far into the surrounding woods as I could. When I turned back to them it was on to the next drill.

The only other thing I remember from this episode is that the very next day, what should have been the second day of a four year career for Russell, he didn’t show up for practice. He had quit and went home after the previous day’s practice.

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So often in life we are trying to be some version of ourselves that we think others want us to be. Or need us to be. Especially in environments like locker rooms and practice fields. But not just there.

Jobs. Relationships. Any place where you’re handed responsibility before you’re sure you’re ready for it. Places where you don’t get eased into anything. You just look up one day and realize you’re the one expected to know what you’re doing. And so you act like you do.

That’s what I was doing that day. And in a different way, it’s what Steve was doing too.

Because even in his story, the one involving the inadvertent incontinence, he still gets on the elevator like he’s supposed to be the same guy he was ten minutes earlier.

The Cowboys rookie. The guy at the bar. The version of himself everyone expects.

The hard part isn’t becoming that guy.

It’s figuring out when you don’t have to pretend to be him anymore.

🐾 👇🏼 🐾 👇🏼 🐾 👇🏼 🐾 👇🏼 🐾 👇🏼 🐾 👇🏼

If you missed last week’s pod with Lizzy you can check it out here:

SilentPunt

From Hunting bin Laden To Published Author

SilentPunt Podcast #211 / April 8, 2026…

Listen now

11 days ago · 13 likes · 8 comments · Henny Hiemenz

And if you’d like to read all about Steve Wright’s exploits (other than shitting), check out Aggressively Human.

“Yeah, I can probably fit that in.”

📰 Weekly newsletter.
🎙️ Every-other-week podcast.
📖 A book on John Matuszak that occasionally taps me on the shoulder like, “Hey bro…remember me?”

And soon, I’ll be helping coach high school football (long-story), which means my free time is about to take a Lawrence Taylor–sized helmet to the sternum.

So I’m making a small adjustment.

Going forward, SilentPunt is going to run on an alternating schedule:

• One week: newsletter

• One week: podcast

You’ll still hear from me every week, just in a slightly different rhythm.

The goal here is simple: keep the newsletter sharp, keep the podcast growing, and finally make a real push to finish the Matuszak book the right way.

For months now, I’ve been researching and writing, writing and researching, amazed by his story, but struggling to pull it all together.

Then last week, something finally clicked. Or at least I think it did. And now I need to give myself the space to flesh that out. I’ll share pieces of that process as I go…not everything, but enough to bring you along.

Back next week with a full post.

Until then, pace yourself. Unlike me.

If you’ve reached the Sally Field portion of this newsletter, “you like me, you really, really like me,” take that as a sign to send this to one other person.

Refer a friend

And also, dogs:

Most of you don’t know Lucy. She was our sweet and spunky Yorkie, who passed away a few years ago. RIP Boo.

Discover how Lizzy Wright transitioned from a career in intelligence to becoming an author of memoirs and fiction, weaving her personal experiences with her professional expertise. In this episode, Lizzy shares insights on morality in espionage, the challenges of writing memoirs, and her exciting upcoming novel, Saffron Spy.

(If you listen on Apple or Spotify, I’d really appreciate a follow there this week. The way their algorithms work, follows help other people find the show.)

Resources & Links:

• Lizzy Wright’s Official Website

• Aggressively Human book

• Marinovich book

  Thanks for reading SilentPunt! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

NO KINGS: The System Isn’t Scared of Your Sign

Why outrage without sacrifice doesn’t do a damn thing

I read a line from Greek philosopher Epictetus earlier this week that kept echoing in my head as I thought about this piece:

“Anyone who can be restricted, coerced, or pushed into something against what they will is a slave.”

We hear that and think of force: something obvious, something we would notice. But what if coercion doesn’t feel like pressure? What if it feels like convenience? What if it looks like normal life? Because if that’s the case, we’re not being pushed. We’re being guided. And we’re willfully going along with it.

….Or are we?

We like to believe in free will. It’s foundational to how we see ourselves: Americans, many of us Christians, raised on the idea that our choices are our own. But author Chuck Klosterman complicates that comfort when he states:

“Free will is a detriment to the man who doesn’t realize he’s confused.”

Take a beat and let that quote sink in for a moment.

I know you couldn’t possibly be confused. Nor could I. But what about the other guy?

That confusion is the part we rarely interrogate. We assume we’re choosing, but we don’t spend much time examining the systems shaping those choices. The rhythms of our lives…what we buy, how we spend, what we prioritize…feel self-directed, but they’re often just deeply ingrained patterns reinforced over time. What we call freedom can quietly become habit, and habit left unexamined, can start to look a lot like obedience.

🙈 🙉 🙊 🙈 🙉 🙊 🙈 🙉 🙊 🙈 🙉 🙊

Most Americans live inside a system that nudges them to buy more than they need…not through force, but through incentives, expectations, and identity. You work to earn, earn to spend, spend to keep up, and keep up so you don’t fall behind. It doesn’t feel like coercion; it feels like participation.

“Upwardly mobile” comes to mind.

That’s how it hooks you. The system doesn’t need chains if it can convince you that this is success. And once you believe that, stepping outside of it doesn’t feel like freedom, it feels like losing.

This is what makes moments like the “No Kings” protests feel significant. People step outside the loop, at least temporarily. They gather, they speak, they signal that something isn’t right. Visibility matters, and collective action creates a shared awareness that individual frustration never quite can.

But history is consistent on this point: a single day of protest, no matter how large, is a statement, not pressure. If everyone goes home and resumes the same behaviors the next morning, the system doesn’t have to respond. It simply absorbs the moment and waits for it to pass. And most of the time, it does.

Part of the reason it passes so easily is because we’ve become exceptionally good at arguing sideways. We don’t stay on problems long enough to solve them. Instead, we pivot, we counter, we redirect.

You don’t like what Donald Trump is doing? What about the Democrats who did XYZ? You point out a flaw? It’s always been flawed. You suggest a fix? What about this other issue you haven’t addressed?

This is whataboutism, and it’s undefeated. Every argument gets rerouted before it can land, which means nothing ever has to change. We don’t resolve problems; we get stuck comparing them.

It didn’t always work this way. There was a time when a limited, imperfect solution could still be accepted as progress. Car accidents used to kill far more people than they do now, so we introduced seatbelt laws. We didn’t eliminate risk entirely, but we reduced it meaningfully. At the same time, thousands of people still die every year from swimming, and we didn’t ban swimming. We understood the difference between manageable risk and preventable harm, and that understanding was enough.

Now, if a solution isn’t perfect, or if it doesn’t address every adjacent issue, it’s dismissed as insufficient. And “insufficient” has quietly become the enemy of “better.”

This is where protest often stalls out. After the signs and chants, there’s a second question that doesn’t get asked nearly enough: what happens next? More specifically, what are you willing to stop doing?

That’s where things shift from collective energy to personal responsibility. It’s one thing to show up and express dissatisfaction; it’s another to examine your own participation in the system you’re criticizing. That shift is uncomfortable, because it requires trade-offs. It requires you to give something up.

🙈 🙉 🙊 🙈 🙉 🙊 🙈 🙉 🙊 🙈 🙉 🙊

This is also where Scott Galloway’s idea of “resist and unsubscribe1” lands with a little more weight. His argument is simple: if you want to push back on a system, stop funding it. Cancel subscriptions, change spending habits, redirect your attention. Use your wallet and your time as leverage instead of just your voice.

It’s not loud, and it doesn’t come with the same social reinforcement as protest, but it asks a sharper question: if you’re angry at a system, why are you still feeding it?

Protest says, “I object.”
Unsubscribing says, “You’ll feel this.”

And systems don’t change because they’re criticized. They change because they stop working.

If there hasn’t been a fully organized, structural response from Democrats to Trump, part of the explanation may be less about courage and more about incentives. Truly dismantling the systems that enable power accumulation would require tearing down mechanisms that benefit both parties. Campaign financing, media ecosystems, influence networks…these aren’t partisan tools; they’re structural ones.

Disrupting them would be costly to the people profiting, Democrats included. So the more realistic strategy for them is patience. Let outrage build, let elections cycle, and position yourself to regain control within the same framework. The rhetoric may change, but the incentives often remain.

And if we’re being honest, most of us aren’t exactly pushing for systemic change either, not if it comes with real sacrifice. We say we want things to be different, but not at the expense of cheap gas, reliable Wi-Fi, and two-day shipping. We want reform that doesn’t inconvenience us, change that doesn’t alter our lifestyle in any meaningful way.

That’s not hypocrisy. It’s human. But it does set a ceiling on what’s possible.

Consider how expectations have shifted. What used to feel like a splurge now feels like Tuesday. The baseline has moved, and we’ve moved with it, rarely asking whether any of it is necessary.

You can see this same dynamic play out in higher education in states across the country. For years, there’s been political pressure to keep taxes low, which has led to reduced public funding for state university systems. But these schools still need to operate, so they adapt…most notably by increasing out-of-state enrollment, since those students pay significantly higher tuition.

Then, a high-achieving in-state student (3.9 GPA & 30+ ACT) doesn’t get into UW-Madison, and the reaction is anger. What often gets missed is the connection between those realities. You can’t consistently reduce public investment in a system and then be surprised when that system looks elsewhere for revenue. The outcome feels disconnected from the cause, even though they’re directly linked.

This is the thread running through all of it. We want outcomes without fully owning the inputs. We want lower taxes and fully funded institutions. We want systemic change without personal disruption. We want to protest the machine while continuing to benefit from how it produces.

That doesn’t make us uniquely flawed.

It just makes us participants.

🙈 🙉 🙊 🙈 🙉 🙊 🙈 🙉 🙊 🙈 🙉 🙊

If Epictetus is right, the question isn’t whether we’re being forced; it’s whether we recognize the forces acting on us at all. The most effective systems don’t rely on pressure; they rely on alignment, on making their incentives feel like your own personal choices.

The research on protest movements shows that change comes from sustained participation, not isolated moments. And participation isn’t just showing up; it’s withdrawing, disrupting, and altering behavior over time. Pressure is created when systems stop functioning as expected, not when they’re briefly interrupted.

(This, by the way, is why strikes work.)

We say we don’t want kings. We say we value freedom. We say we believe in free will. But free will only matters if you recognize when you’re not actually using it. Otherwise, it becomes exactly what Klosterman warned about, a liability disguised as a gift.

We don’t need millions of people to show up once.

We need fewer people to live differently for a long time.

And that starts with a question that’s a lot less satisfying than a chant:

What are we willing to stop?

🛑 🛑 🛑 🛑 🛑 🛑 🛑 🛑 🛑 🛑 🛑 🛑

This week’s book recommendation is Chuck Klosterman’s “But What If We’re Wrong?” I picked this book not because of the quote from him earlier in this piece (that was from a different book). I did so because if what he posits in this particular book is correct, the biggest mistakes we’re making right now are the things we’re actually most certain about.

And that might include what we currently think counts as resistance.

We were gone for a handful of days this past week for a cheer comp and some family R&R. So here are the kiddos at camp:

Featuring:

(Click their links and subscribe to them all. No pressure, but also…do it):

(click this link to find Jon)

(click this link to find Liz)

(click this link to find Matt)

📺 📺 📺 📺 📺 📺 📺 📺 📺 📺

1) Where did you grow up?

Jon: Dobbs Ferry, New York.

Liz: In the land of 10,000 lakes, Prince, and the biggest mall in the states: Minneapolis, MN. And yes, sometimes I still say “Oof-da” when I’m done eating.

Matt: Pinson, Alabama. Same high school as Bo Nix. We absolutely did not have an NFL QB when I went there.

2) Favorite 80s movie:

Jon: That’s like choosing a favorite child! I guess, Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Liz: There’s no possible way I could name just one. But off the top of my head: Back To The Future, Better Off Dead, Coming To America, The Neverending Story, and Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom.

Matt: Raiders of the Lost Ark.

3) First celebrity crush:

Jon: Donna Dixon.

Liz: “Chachi” on Happy Days, “Bobby” on The Brady Bunch, or “Ricky” on Silver Spoons. When you’re 6 years old, you crush on the characters, not the actors.

Matt: Elisabeth Shue. She’s still a 10.

4) First R-rated movie you were way too young to watch, but did anyway:

Jon: Saturday Night Fever.

Liz: Does Temple of Doom count? Because that movie should’ve been rated R. But it wasn’t my choice, my teenage aunt brought me and my older brother to see it. I was a 9 year old in the theater watching a man’s heart get ripped out of his chest before being lowered into lava while alive. But I’m not traumatized at all. It’s just the first movie that always comes to mind when GenXers discuss which films they were too young to see, was probably responsible for exacerbating my insect phobia, and made me not eat soup for years.

Matt: The Breakfast Club. How I learned about high school, before junior high. I was quoting that movie to classmates years before they saw it.

5) Favorite fast food / snack / candy from the era:

Jon: Twix.

Liz: Fruit roll-ups, pixie sticks, Smarties, Nerds, Hostess Fried Fruit Pies1, and a McDLT with the new ch-ch-ch Cherry Coke (remember the jingle?).

Matt: On Fridays, my elementary school had a popcorn-and-Coke special for $0.50 each. I treated myself to a few of those with chore money.

(Yo Matt, in 2nd grade at Sts. Simon & Jude we got soft pretzels for a dime. Just sayin’.)

6) A place you got dropped off to be left alone for hours, and told, “I’ll pick you up later”:

Jon: The Galleria Mall in White Plains, NY.

Liz: I was never dropped off somewhere to be alone, I was always dropped off at the mall or the rollerskating rink with a friend or to meet a friend. When I was little I’d go the playground alone sometimes but there were always other kids there. Unless by “to be alone” you mean without a parent or older sibling. Then that happened pretty much everywhere!

Matt: Local neighbor’s house who had a shortened full court, complete with a 9’ indestructible bball hoop. Lotta pick up hoops played there. My folks never picked us up later cause that was the only other place we’d be.

7) First concert you ever went to, and who you went with:

Jon: The Grateful Dead in the Meadowlands with the late, great Adam Schlesinger (Fountains of Wayne) and his dad, Steve.

Liz: Weird Al Yankovic. I went with a boyfriend when I was a teen.

Matt: Pearl Jam, Springfield, Mass. Went with my gf at the time, who was a big PJ fan too. Outstanding show.

8) Favorite appointment viewing TV show (remember, no DVRs back then):

Jon: Mork and Mindy.

Liz: Who’s the Boss, Family Ties, The Cosby Show, Diff’rent Strokes

Matt: 1a) Monday Night Football, 1b) Miami Vice on Friday night.

9) Favorite rerun to watch:

Jon: Seinfeld.

Liz: Three’s Company, which I ran home from the bus stop to watch every day after school, starting around 8 years old. Other faves include Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch, Happy Days, and Good Times.

Matt: Cheers. My father loves that show. When I’d visit him in the summer (in CT) he’d always have it on early evening before Sox games on TV38. Shout out to the Jimmy Fund.

10) Where did you have your first kiss? Details?

Jon: Nantucket Island. What happens in Nantucket, stays in Nantucket.

Liz: In true Gen X fashion, I had my first kiss at the mall. We were both 14, my crush and I stood by the bushes outside while waiting for our parents to pick us up and that’s when we kissed. I remember being thrilled, but we were “going together” for as long as you’d expect two silly young teens to be boyfriend and girlfriend: two weeks. Which, to be fair, feels like a month at that age.

Matt: Skate Haven roller rink. 6th grade. Andrea Whiteman. Her friend Angela came with us and nudged me over the finish line. I didn’t find out til months later, at a church social, Angela wanted me to kiss her too.

I’ll see y’all in Nantucket,

For the love of all move courts, did you listen to Ginger or not? How about you? Tell us your answers in the COMMENTS for cryin’ out loud.

Also, if you’re not a subscriber, join the idiocy below. (Dogs further below)

How do you become a writer with no connections, no plan, and no clear path?
📚
In this episode, bestselling author Luke Epplin (Moses and the Doctor, Our Team) shares how he went from a small town in Illinois to New York City, and eventually to Random House and a USA Today bestseller.
⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:15 Small-town Illinois → wanting more
6:40 Choosing Washington University
10:30 Moving to NYC after 9/11
16:45 First jobs (nanny, tutor)
20:10 Breaking into Random House
27:30 Becoming a writer (the long game)
35:00 First book + getting an agent
42:00 Writing Moses and the Doctor
50:00 Advice for aspiring writers
📚 About Luke Epplin
Luke Epplin is the author of Moses and the Doctor and Our Team. His work has appeared in national publications, and he is a USA Today bestselling author.
🎙️ About SilentPunt
Stories and ruminations intended to provoke thought, laughter, and the occasional WTF.
👉 Subscribe for more conversations like this:

Subscribe now

Comment of the week

(for the simple fact that I cannot read it without picturing my 81-year-old dad reading it and being like, WTF does any of that gobbledygook mean?)

Book Recommendation

• With opening day right around the corner, this one’s for baseball fans only. And one I’m pretty sure you haven’t heard of.

  

  

We Were Forgotten. Maybe It Helped.

Spring, 1987. Southeastern Pennsylvania. 7th grade. Baseball season.

I’m standing outside Stetson Middle School as my teammates get picked up one by one. Pretty soon, I’m the only one left. Ten minutes pass. Maybe fifteen. I start to think I should call home. I walk to the doors.

Locked.

It may seem hard to believe, but back then, when adults were done being contractually obligated to ensure your safety, they just left.

Sometimes even the country.

Don’t believe me?

I’m writing this in a public library two hours from home. I drove my daughter and her teammate across state lines (to Illinois, land of the FIB1) for cheer practice. They’re 16. They both have cars.

We still drive them.

We carpool them down for practice 2-4 times per week. The exact number of which is decided whimsically by their cheer overlords.

I mean their coaches.

When it is my turn to drive I am happy to do so. On the way down the girls have their headphones on, so I listen to podcasts. On the way back, I get to hear the latest cheer gossip.

Win-win.

But I’m also glad to do it because I’m happy my daughter has the opportunity. She had reached an ability level at her previous gym (which, not for nothin’, was five minutes from our house) that required her to go somewhere else to continue to grow.

However, I sometimes feel something other than happiness when I think about how she’s being raised versus how I was. And maybe it hits a little harder because I’m still very much someone’s kid, too. I talk to my parents a lot. I live half a continent away, and I miss them.

Most of us are being pulled in both directions at once: trying to be present for our kids, while also showing up for the people who raised us.

It doesn’t leave much space. Not real space. The kind where you sit with something. Or someone. Mostly, it leaves you with fifteen minutes here and there.

Enough time to scroll.

📲 📳 📲 📳 📲 📳 📲 📳 📲 📳 📲 📳

Back at Stetson Middle School, I would’ve given anything for more reps. Another practice. Another game. That unfulfilled passion for sports is probably what led to my first career as a coach.

As some of you know, I host a podcast. Occasionally on the show we’ve talked about the strange place in time people of a certain age, like me, inhabit. We grew up in a world run by, and catering to, adults. We had our little corner of the world, and needed to find a way for that to make us happy.

And mostly we did.

I spent some time earlier this week researching the 1985 movie The Goonies. The kids who made up The Goonies are a great example of enjoying their little corner of the world. Their parents expected them to be home at night, but what they did on their own time was their business.

Locked in a freezer with a dead body?

…Deal with it.

Accosted by escaped felons?

…Adapt.

Locked in a basement next to a chained-up monster?

…Make friends with it.

Fast-forward 35 years or so, and we are not the Goonies. We are the parents. But our kids aren’t Goonies, are they? Because we are trying our best to give them what we might have missed out on.

But what are they missing out on by us doing so?

☀️ 🏴‍☠️ ☀️ 🏴‍☠️ ☀️ 🏴‍☠️ ☀️ 🏴‍☠️ ☀️ 🏴‍☠️ ☀️ 🏴‍☠️

The sun has by now set, all those years ago, on the main entrance of Stetson Middle School. My exasperated mother arrives to pick me up. I know better than to ask what happened. Unlike my child, who will send me a series of texts if I’m so much as thirty seconds late to pick her up.

The ride home with my mom is quiet. Quiet is good. The only other option I can see in this scenario is yelling. Yelling is bad. When we arrive home I found out why. My mother’s ire is pointed squarely in the direction of my oldest sister. Apparently she had been the family representative assigned to pick me up that evening.

“No, Mom, I went to the school, and the baseball field, there was nobody there,” she replied defensively.

After an escalating back-and-forth between the two of them, we figured out the problem: My sister went to the wrong school. Whether she, in fact, didn't know where her younger brother attended school is still strangely up for debate.

So, upon going to a different middle school and not finding me (nor any other soul…which quite possibly-maybe-definitely shoulda been a red flag), she went home.

And alerted no one.

So there I sat.

🕰️ ⏰ 🕰️ ⏰ 🕰️ ⏰ 🕰️ ⏰ 🕰️ ⏰ 🕰️ ⏰

I grew up in a time when kids were expected to figure things out on their own, even if that meant sitting outside a locked school, wondering if anyone was coming. Now I spend hours driving my daughter across state lines so she doesn’t have to.

Somewhere along the way, we flipped from leaving things to chance…to eliminating it entirely. I’m grateful for what she has. But I do wonder what gets lost.

Independence?

Resilience?

Maybe even the ability to make friends with the monster in the basement.

And if I’m being honest, I’m not sure how much of this is about her…

…and how much is about me, not wanting her to ever stand alone outside a locked school.

Almost a year ago I turned 50. I’ll spare you the obligatory jokes, aside from this one:

While I was prepared for some of the things that you lose when you get older (hair, strength, hearing, and a general vitality for life that makes living in these godforsaken times palatable), I was wholly unprepared for the things I would gain.

However, most of the things I’ve gained are really net losses. Things like ear hair, back hair, and a pretty strong disdain for people under the age of thirty. None of these ‘gains’ are helping.

The law of conservation of energy states that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, only transformed. While it is true that I’ve lost much of the hair on my head, and I’ve gained some in my ears, it has not been a 1-to-1 trade-off.

Like, yes, I have hair in my ears, but not as much as I’ve lost on my head. So what gives? Where has the rest of that energy gone?

I have a theory, and no, it does not include disproving one of the foundational tenets of modern science. I don’t even know if this theory holds true for the rest of humanity. But I think it’s true for me.

I think that extra energy has found its way into my brain. Last week, I introduced you to this beautiful girl who taught me a thing or two about meditation.

As I mentioned in that piece, part of the impetus behind me taking up meditation is to clear my mind of the random thoughts that seem to haunt me like the ghost of William Hung.

And they are not only thoughts, sometimes they are songs. Or more precisely, snippets of songs. On most mornings, I have some random line or two of a particular song in my head. For no apparent reason. Earlier this week, it was this little ditty:

“You are blind as a bat, and I have sight.”

If you don’t recognize those lyrics it is probably because your brain function is fully intact. Kudos to you. Because those lyrics were sung 44 years ago at 11:30 pm Eastern Standard Time. Around that time, Paul McCartney1 and Stevie Wonder collaborated on a duet called “Ebony and Ivory.” The song was a call for racial harmony, using the black and white keys on a piano as a metaphor. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that version.

What I did hear, 44 years ago, was the satirical version of the song Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo performed on Saturday Night Live. Murphy as Wonder, and Piscopo as an aging Frank Sinatra, recording what purports to be a new album. Instead of the veiled use of a piano as metaphor, Piscopo’s Sinatra decides they should just cut to the chase and sing about Stevie Wonder being black, and him being white.

Piscapo-Sinatra sings to Murphy-Wonder as they are both sitting at a piano,

“You are blind as a bat, and I have sight.”

At the beginning of the skit, Piscopo needs to be introduced as Mr. Sinatra, because he bears so little resemblance to Frank. Eddie on the other hand, as you can see above, needs no introduction when he enters.

As soon as Eddie starts singing, it is a little shocking how good his voice is. So good in fact, that the audience starts clapping shortly after he begins. Hard to believe his singing career didn’t take off…

You probably could’ve gone the rest of your life without knowing that existed. You can thank me later. Although, if I’m being fair, his follow-up to that, Party All The Time, is kind of a banger.

Aside from the ‘blind as a bat’ line, there is really only one other funny part in the entire skit, and it’s unintentional: Piscopo giving off huge white-guy vibes by clumsily snapping his fingers out of tune with the music.

I initially intended to add the YouTube link to this skit at the end of this. But after watching it again, I realize that would be unkind. Aside from the couple of laughs above, it’s not SNL’s best work.

So instead, I’ll just leave you with dogs. Because dogs are great. And drop me a ❤️ or a comment if you had fun with this!

If you missed last week’s piece on meditation and Garnet, you can read it here:

I don’t sell stuff or ask for anything in return. I know this is a foreign concept.

This week’s book recommendation is Howard Bryant’s Kings And Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America. Two reasons you should read this book:

1. You take an interest in: US history, sports, the civil rights movement, the Cold War, or McCarthy-ism.

2. Do you know who Paul Robeson was? Neither did I previously. Once you read this book you’ll understand why, and what that says about us.

This is not a sports book. It is a human book.

My Meditation Coach Weighs Fifty Pounds and Likes Belly Rubs

How a traumatized shelter dog finally shut my brain up.

This past Monday afternoon I found myself lying in wet grass, rubbing the belly of a fifty-pound shelter dog. As the thawing Wisconsin turf saturated my ratty old jeans, I heard myself say outloud, “holy cow girl, I love you too!”

Now, how in the world does that relate to meditation? Bear with me…

Recently, I’ve been working very hard to become a better meditator. As I’ve gotten older, the constant chatter of my brain has become harder and harder to turn off. If you need any verification of this you will receive it in next week’s post. These song lyrics are a sneak peek:

“...sticks and stones may break my bones, but chains and whips excite me.”

I spent the better part of this past Monday morning with those lyrics playing on a loop inside my oft-rattled skull. Which was especially annoying because I have no idea when I last heard that song. Rihanna clearly built an earworm with that one.

Needless to say, my efforts at meditation have been wholly lacking in efficacy.

I’ve realized that this has been a problem my entire life. As a young person I mostly quieted my mind by watching TV and playing sports. In early adulthood it was my career, along with marriage and parenting.

In recent years, I’ve picked up golf as a hobby. One of the things I love about it is that I find the entire round meditative. I am outside, with beautiful scenery, and completely focused on the task at hand.

By the end of the round, whether I break eighty or blow up and shoot a hundred, I feel refreshed. However, despite its meditative qualities, I cannot devote four-plus hours each day to it.

My wife has made that abundantly clear.

So I’ve been reading books, listening to podcasts, and even trying acupuncture in an effort to quiet my brain. Most meditation advice says the same thing: we’re rarely in the present. We’re replaying the past or planning the future.

So I started small. Five minutes every morning.

As many of you know, I’m a volunteer dog walker once a week at a local animal shelter. Dogs are awesome for so many reasons. One of which is that they’re never replaying yesterday or planning tomorrow. Mostly they’re just focused on whatever is happening right now.

Because I’ve been there a while and am one of the only non-elderly/male volunteers, I’ve worked my way up to walking the “red” dogs. “Green” and “yellow” dogs, anyone can walk. They’re the ones who are docile and excited to see people, regardless of who they interact with.

Red dogs, however, are…a lot.

Usually, they are some combination of:

🐾 Big
🐾 Bad on a leash
🐾 Jumpy
🐾 Mouthy

Kinda like a middle-aged man who’s been told meditation will fix everything.

When I first started volunteering at the shelter, and wasn’t allowed to interact with the red dogs, I assumed it must’ve been because they were mean or aggressive. As it turns out, they’re usually just traumatized.

I realize that saying “just” before traumatized might sound insensitive. But if you think about it, being “traumatized” is a heck of a lot better than being inherently “bad.”

A lot of the red dogs arrive terrified of humans. The shelter works slowly to retrain that instinct with patience, treats, and small exercises like rewarding eye contact.

Which is how I got to know Garnet.

I’ve been walking Garnet for two or three months now. She’s a red dog.

When I first met her, I thought she seemed reasonably happy to see me. She’d spin in circles and wag her tail. Over time, I realized she was happy to see me mostly because she was learning something important:

Humans = treats.

One of the exercises we do with the treats is something to encourage eye contact. I’ll hold a treat out to the side while the dog sits and waits for it. For red dogs, their eyes are usually locked on the treat.

We’d rather they look at us. So we wait. Eventually, they glance up, and that’s when they get the treat. Sometimes they need a reminder. Usually it’s just saying their name.

When Garnet first started doing this with me, I could tell the eye contact was purely transactional. Like,

“Fine dude, here are my eyes.

Now give me the goddamn treat.”

Not dissimilar to most workplace dynamics.

But over time something changed with Garnet’s eye contact. Her gaze softened and lengthened. What before had felt like a thousand-yard stare was now a look of what can only be described as affection.

“Give me the goddmaned treat” had turned into, “maybe this guy ain’t so bad.”

This past Monday, the same day as my song lyrics, I saw Garnet again. The beginning of our time together was business as usual. Then, about halfway through the walk, she started getting closer to me.

She’d sniff the ground near my feet, linger, and then look up, making unrequested eye contact. This happened a few times.

Eventually she stopped completely and leaned her entire body up against my legs. When I bent down to pet her she rolled onto her back. At that moment there were two possibilities:

#1: She was being submissive because she was scared of something.

…or

#2: She wanted a belly rub.

It was number two.

I bent over and rubbed her belly, speaking softly to her for a good two or three minutes:

“Oh, hi Garnet, this is sooo nice.”

“You like belly rubs, huh? Well, aren’t you just the sweetest little thing in the world?”

She alternated between wriggling around on her back and lying still. She didn’t seem like she wanted it to stop, and with my surgically repaired back beginning to complain, I decided to take a chance and get down in the wet, still-dead grass with her.

There was some nervousness in doing so. Not because I thought she’d be aggressive, but because she is a fifty-pound ball of muscle.

One of my favorite shelter dogs ever, a gorgeous tank of a pittie named Ava1, once split my lip clean open with her cannonball of a head when I bent down too quickly and she jumped up to greet me.

Ava was fine. My ego required stitches.

Lesson learned.

I got to the ground safely with Garnet, and we continued the belly rub. After about ten minutes or so she decided she wanted to get up and walk again. We completed our loop, and I brought her back inside to put her back in her area. Upon unleashing her, I realized something:

During my entire time rubbing Garnet’s belly, I wasn’t planning for something later in the day. I wasn’t replaying some perceived slight from years ago.

I wasn’t thinking about anything really. I was just there.

With her. Completely immersed in the short white hairs on her belly, and the silly, sloppy, and happy look on her face.

Two creatures lying in the grass, neither of us worried about yesterday or tomorrow. Occasionally catching each other’s eyes and feeling goodness.

Just existing. And it was…delightful.

🐾 🐾 🐾 🐾 🐾 🐾 🐾 🐾 🐾 🐾 🐾 🐾

The next morning, I woke up and attempted my five minutes of meditation again. Five minutes turned into twenty. For most of that time, my brain was still pulling me here and there.

But in between those moments, there were small pockets of quiet. At one point I imagined myself in one of the most peaceful places I’ve ever been.

And then suddenly I wasn’t there anymore. I wasn’t anywhere. My brain had finally stopped narrating everything.

That’s when I realized something. That place meditation books keep talking about? It wasn’t mystical. Or difficult. Or something to strive toward.

It was just this.

Being exactly where I was.

The same place Garnet had been the entire time.

This week, I talk with Professor Spalding about the strange world of quantum mechanics. We dive into the famous double-slit experiment, probability, photons, black holes, and why reality behaves far differently than common sense suggests.

Plus, how quantum technology is already shaping our future.

Remember, all episodes of this podcast and accompanying newsletter are FREE. Always. If you are enjoying the content and would like to support my efforts, please subscribe below.

Anyone remember the guy on the right?

Or maybe you recognize him more like this….

Well, I’m writing a book about him! It’s an unbelievable journey from small-town Wisconsin kid to Hollywood icon gone too soon.

Let me know if you’d read it in the comments!

Everything is Terrible, Except It Isn’t

Another Day in Paradise

Earlier this week I realized the second season of one of my favorite shows had dropped. It’s called Paradise (on Hulu). At the end of the first episode of the first season, a cover of Phil Collins’s “Another Day in Paradise” plays over the closing scene. The rhythm is restrained, almost processional.

It’s an amazing version of the song, arguably better than the original. Read till the end, and I’ll show you.

The irony is that the song’s title is doing most of the work. The show you are watching initially looks like paradise. But what Collins was writing about wasn’t paradise at all. It was about homelessness, and the way we train ourselves not to see it. The way suffering becomes background noise. The way you walk past someone in crisis and convince yourself you didn’t see them.

Collins wrote the song at the tail end of the 1980s, a decade still remembered for tremendous economic growth. Two years prior to the song’s release, Gordon Gekko uttered the phrase that would come to symbolize the decadence of the time:

“Greed is good.”

Fast forward to today and everything feels terrible. Politics is broken. AI is coming for our jobs. The economy is a house of cards. Student loans have strangled a generation. Phones are rewiring our brains.

We are one push notification away from societal collapse. Or at least that’s how it feels.

But here’s the inconvenient truth: by almost every measurable standard, this is the safest and most prosperous time in human history. Extreme poverty is down globally. Violent crime is down across the board. Medical advances are astonishing.

We carry more computing power in our pockets than NASA used to send humans to the moon. And we mostly use it to argue with strangers and look at cute dogs.

Or monkeys.

That doesn’t mean nothing is wrong. The purchasing power of the dollar has fallen dramatically since 1989, and our standard of living has not nearly kept up with inflation. That matters. But constant economic anxiety isn’t the same thing as total collapse.

Phil Collins was writing about turning away from suffering. We’ve taken a slightly different approach. We’ve chosen not to fix things, but to rename them. A few years ago, “homeless” people became “unhoused.”

The word changed.

The problem didn’t.

Renaming a fire doesn’t lower the temperature.

It’s tempting to decide someone must be orchestrating all of this. That shadowy villains benefit while we bicker over terminology and tweet ourselves hoarse.

Maybe there are some villains. But even so, we still have agency. We don’t need a new word to begin acting humanely. We don’t need a new villain to begin acting responsibly.

We don’t need the world to be perfect before we acknowledge what’s already good.

In the fall of 1989, when Collins’ Another Day in Paradise was making its way up Casey Kasem’s charts, I was in the seventh grade. A Catholic school dropout by the third grade, I was relegated to CCD by then. CCD was our Catholic church’s version of Bible class.

We called it Central City Dump, but what it really stood for, I have no idea.

Most years, the nuns talked at us. Then, in seventh grade, Ms. Thomas arrived. She was young, normal, and had the radical idea that we might learn something if we enjoyed it.

One night, she brought her boom box in and pressed play on Collins’ album But Seriously. We sat there quietly while “Another Day in Paradise” filled the room. The lyrics were haunting. The rhythm somber yet empowering.

It didn’t tell us what to think.

It showed us.

For maybe the first time in my life, I thought about someone else’s life more than my own. At the time my internal priorities were Randall Cunningham, girls, and surviving lunch period.

Empathy for others had not yet entered the equation.

By the following Wednesday, Ms. Thomas was gone. A nun informed us she had been teaching “outside the Bible.”

Maybe she was.

Or maybe she was teaching us to think.

Greed is bad. That part hasn’t changed.

But constant appetite is corrosive too. The endless sense that we are deprived, doomed, and one headline away from ruin. You can acknowledge what’s broken without declaring everything is broken.

You can care about suffering without pretending prosperity doesn’t exist. You can notice what’s working and build from there.

The world will gladly sell you outrage all day long.

But you don’t have to buy it.

🙈 🙉 🙊 🙈 🙉 🙊 🙈 🙉 🙊 🙈 🙉 🙊

Don’t forget to drop a comment or a heart in the comments. ¡Muchas gracias!

• My co-host this week is my old buddy Mark Prel. Mark is a teacher, coach, husband, and father…as well as a big-time Buffalo Sabres fan. If you are into hockey, give him a follow on X at ‘sabresfunstats.’

1. Can boxing be saved?

2. Favorite 80s movies.

3. Bills coaching situation.

4. Challenges of raising boys compared to girls.

5. Listeners of the week.

   ⭐️Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, & YouTube. Please remember to Rate-Review-Subscribe if you are listening on those platforms.

   Forwarded this email? Subscribe to SilentPunt for free here:

Marinovich, written by its namesake, Todd Marinovich, with help from Lizzy Wagner, is the story of the mercurial former USC and Raider QB’s rise and fall. Multiple rises and falls, actually, coinciding with addiction struggles and a love of art. You don’t need to be a football fan to enjoy this one (although it’ll help 😉).

🐾 🏈 🐾 🏈 🐾 🏈 🐾 🏈 🐾 🏈 🐾 🏈

Steven Spielberg Is Responsible for My Crippling Fear of Intimacy

Have you ever had a life-altering realization strike you out of the blue? Like, you’re sitting at Chipotle raw dogging a burrito when you suddenly realize the reason why the phrase “Venus in retrograde” annoys the piss out of you? Well, thanks to superstar writer Shea Serrano, that happened to me earlier this week.

Shea wrote a piece about the epic 1975 film Jaws. In it, he breaks down the opening scene in the film where a beautiful young blonde girl named Chrissie gets eaten by a shark while skinny-dipping, leaving her hammered boytoy passed out on the beach.

Do you remember how horrific that scene was? To say she got “eaten” is like saying Custer had a rough couple of days at Little Bighorn. She wasn’t eaten, she was eviscerated. It is one of those scenes that shakes you to your core. And I’m talking about grown adults.

🦈 🦈 🦈 🦈 🦈 🦈 🦈 🦈 🦈 🦈 🦈 🦈

By the time my parents saved up enough money to purchase a VCR, it was 1984. On very rare occasions, they would have a night out together and leave my older sisters in charge to babysit me.

I have fond memories of watching Solid Gold on TV and having mini dance parties with them on several of these occasions. But with the addition of the VCR came a creeping darkness, as Solid Gold was replaced by renting movies like Jaws.

By the time a young man is in the third grade, he has started to notice young ladies. And while my folks had made the monumental purchase of the VCR, they still hadn’t ponied up for Cable TV. So, no MTV beauties or Skinamax bombshells to ogle either.

I think Suzanne Somers’ character Chrissy in Three’s Company was my first crush. I would say something about the name Chrissy/Chrissey here…what with its different spellings and propensity to designate slutty 1970s-era women…but my sister’s name is Chrisie, so that’d just be weird.

At the time, I think I envisioned myself as the debonair bachelor who wooed Chrissy over Harvey Wallbangers at the Reagle Beagle.

When Chrissie from Jaws started flirting with that sandy-haired himbo and running to the water, stripping off her clothes, I was frozen in what can only be described as pre-pubescent lust. But to my nascent brain, newly introduced to testosterone, it was love.

True love.

My naughty bits were sending signals my prefrontal cortex had never previously received. And all I could think was, “I like this.”

And also, “I don’t think Jesus would be happy with me.”

As the shirtless nicompoop she was flirting with lay passed out on the beach, Chrissy swam elegantly through the surf. Just about the time I thought her body was about to turn to the camera and show me the meaning of life, there was that first tug on her leg.

While watching, I remember thinking maybe she had bumped her leg on something. That lasted a good two seconds before this gorgeous young woman, the object of my sexual awakening, got thrashed about and eventually devoured by what we can only assume by that point is the shark.

🦈 🦈 🦈 🦈 🦈 🦈 🦈 🦈 🦈 🦈 🦈 🦈

When you’re a young boy, you’re nervous around pretty girls. At least the normal ones are. The guys who seem completely comfortable around gorgeous women tend to grow up into gigantic a-holes.

Or President.

Regardless, reading Shea’s piece forced a realization: seeing my first true love disemboweled by a 6,000-pound prehistoric eating machine might explain why, for the next fifteen years or so, I couldn’t form a coherent sentence in front of a girl.

Imagine the neural response I had on the Monday after my Jaws viewing, when I spotted third-grade hottie Mary Elizabeth genuflecting upon entering the pew in front of me. The only thing I can liken it to is those orphan animals at the zoo that imprint on a different species at birth. Like a baby cheetah following a momma golden retriever around.

It works. But everyone involved knows this wasn’t Plan A.

To wit, most third-grade boys don’t choose their first love. They imprint. Like baby cheetahs.

Just dumber and in corduroy.

Fast forward forty-one years, and I have done all of the necessary ‘work on myself’ to become a reasonably well-adjusted husband and father. And by ‘work on myself’ I mean golf, alcohol, and making sure the mantra “yes honey” is emblazoned on my medulla oblongata.

If only my folks had rented E.T.

SilentPunt Podcast, #207 / February 18, 2026

1. How GenX got screwed.

2. Books.

3. Why is there still horse racing?

4. You gotta problem??

   Soooo many great comments from last week’s episode with , thanks to all of our listeners! Special shout-out to for commenting on YouTube as well.

To that end, if you are listening on Apple or Spotify, please follow us there and leave a comment. If you’ve been forwarded this message, you can subscribe for free below.

Sheila is a fantastically talented humor writer based out of Boston (follow her on Substack here). She is also an amazing photographer; follow her on Instagram at wordnerdshe. Or, buy one of her books on Amazon (funny here or pictures here)!

Lastly, this episode of the podcast is just like Mystery Science Theater 3000 in that it is much funnier if you watch it. Did you know that YouTube reaches more eyeballs than basically every TV channel and streaming platform combined? So if you are like my dad and scared of new things, it’s perfectly safe, check it out HERE.

🦈 Batten down the hatches…

⚾️ Baseball fans (And/or people who wake up every morning right now and say f*%k you winter): the season is upon us! Pitchers and catchers report next week.

This week’s episode of the SilentPunt Podcast was an interview with Minnesota Twins pitcher Justin Topa. In addition to being the “Greek God of Ground Balls,” Justin is an absolutely solid dude with an incredible story. Check it out here if you haven’t already.

You can also watch it here if you’d prefer…

⭐️ Speaking of the pod, no Sticker this week, so I’m going to hand one out here. Non-pod listeners, we give out a helmet sticker every week to someone who’s done something good. This week’s sticker goes to…

Brian (the cool kids call him Ang)….who was hired earlier this week as the new Offensive Coordinator for the Pittsburgh Steelers…was one of my first mentors in the coaching profession. I played at Ithaca from ‘96-’98, then stuck around after I graduated to coach in ‘99. That was the year Ang switched to coaching the offensive line, and I was his assistant O-line coach. In addition to being a phenomenal football guy, he was and is a great dude. Kudos to him!!!

🏃🏻‍♂️ Also on the pod, we give out a weekly Gasser. A gasser (or suicide, in GenX terms) is a series of sprints given to discipline an athlete. We, however, give them to someone who has done dumb shit or is maybe just a deplorable human being. This week’s gasser goes to….

Last year I shared with you that Attia’s latest book (NY Times best seller Outlive) was a BIBO (“Book I Bailed On”). I have very few real gifts in life, and even fewer skills to trade upon. However, one skill I have acquired over the years is the ability to spot a charlatan. I’m not saying I told you so, but I told you so…

🧠 As so often happens in life, the people telling you how to live yours are, in actuality, colossal a-holes.

To that end: I am not a charlatan. For the most part I’m a good egg trying to share a reasonable point of view, helpful information, and the occasional laugh with my compadres across the globe. If you have other friends in need of non-charlatans in their lives, feel free to forward this email. ⏩ If someone already forwarded you this…

Random thought: Why are wilted greens a thing? Have you ever had a hankering for some good ‘ol homemade wilted greens?

🎶 Title of a future SilentPunt humor piece: “I Just Saw the Dave Matthews Band live for the 75th Time. And also, I have a deep, unfillable, hole in my being.”

🥃 🥃 🥃 🥃 🥃 🥃 🥃 🥃 🥃 🥃 🥃 🥃

Just a story before you go:

About a year or so ago, we were on vacation in the Caribbean with another family. One day, while we were on our way to take a four-hour boat ride around the island, the seven of us shared a van ride to the dock. We were gonna cruise a little bit, swim a little bit, then meet back up with our driver later in the day.

When we returned to the dock after our cruise was over, our van wasn’t there waiting for us.

“Huh, that’s weird. I’ll give him a call,” said our friend, who had put the excursion together for our group.

The rest of us waited patiently, chatting and absentmindedly listening to the conversation.

Our friend, upon someone on the other line answering her call:

“Hello, we’re waiting for our driver here at the dock. It’s 3:15, and he was supposed to be here at 3.”

….silence as she listens to the response

“Uh, I’m not sure. Oh wait! Yes, yes I know. It was ho-queen.”

….silence again

“Hmm. No, I’m pretty sure it was ho-queen.”

…silence

To us, “Guys, our driver’s name was Ho-Queen, right?”

Us:

“Seriously! They’re trying to figure out who was supposed to come get us. The driver’s name was Ho-Queen, right?”

Then, like a quiet objector standing in the back of a wedding when the words “or forever hold your peace” are uttered, one of the children spoke up:

“Uh, you mean the guy that drove us here?”

“Yes! His name was Ho-Queen, right?”

“Uh, no.”

“What? Yes it was. What do you think it was?”

“His name was Joaquin.”

And thus was born the legend of the ho-queen.

It really is the mother of all monikers. Cut off in traffic?

“Check out this stupid ho-queen.”

Chatting with your buddy on the phone?

“What’s up hoqueeeeen!”

Mad at your wife, but too scared of her to actually be mean?

“Yeah yeah yeah, whatever, hoqueen.”

⛵️ 👑 ⛵️ 👑 ⛵️ 👑 ⛵️ 👑 ⛵️ 👑 ⛵️ 👑

One of these days, I’ll tell you the story of a former player named Malachi. Or, as one of our other coaches called him:

Have a friend who might enjoy the above tomfoolery? Share it with them here:

Refer a friend

Minnesota Twins pitcher Justin Topa joins SilentPunt for a relaxed conversation about the long road it took him to reach the major leagues. We talk about bouncing around pro baseball, keeping at it in the face of adversity, and what life in the big leagues actually looks like once you get there.

If you enjoy the episode, please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen or watch…YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. It helps more than you think!

Honestly, I Didn’t Want Him to Die (ok, maybe just a little)

This past weekend, the world’s greatest rock climber climbed a skyscraper. Alex Honnold first came to worldwide fame with the 2018 release of the documentary Free Solo. The film documented his free solo climb of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park.

I didn’t take much notice of his documentary. To me, rock climbing is like skydiving or bungee jumping. I have no interest in participating in behaviors that cheat death, so I have no interest in watching other people participate. Whenever the topic comes up, I only feel one thing: that whoever is participating in such activities must be deathly afraid of life.

Anyway, last Saturday night, I found myself alone in bed next to our dogs. My wife and daughter were home, but last-minute plans had slightly disrupted our evening. So, I was looking for something to watch. (An aside: when was the last time you went channel-surfing for something to watch? I realized as I did this that I couldn’t remember the last time I had. Streaming TV has become so the norm for me that when I have the chance to watch something, I know exactly what it will be. Is that the same for you?)

After scrolling through YouTube TV and finding nothing, I opened Netflix. The first thing I saw was an ad for “Skyscraper, LIVE,” featuring a photo of Honnold. These days, there are very few things that stop me in my tracks in terms of content. This was one of them.

A dude climbing a 1,700-foot building with no ropes?1 “Ok Netflix, ya got me.” I clicked on it and was immediately entranced. The first thing I noticed was Honnold’s hands. As he moved from section to section on the building, they looked to be twice the size of a normal person’s hands. It reminded me of this:

And it wasn’t just the size, it was the grip strength. You could tell how strong it was by the stillness of the rest of his body. One vestige of my coaching career is a habit of evaluating athleticism. Whether in person or on TV (though especially in person), I seem to be constantly evaluating talent.

Occasionally, I will be in a public workout facility and find myself doing it the entire time:

“Her gait sucks; she’s gonna have knee and ankle problems down the road.”

“That dude is on a full sprint and his head is as still as a statue. Wow.”

“Damn, look at her move that weight. Effortless.”

“Look at his back doing that exercise. Disc herniation waiting to happen.”

I found myself doing this with Honnold and being amazed. But there was also the voyeuristic part of it. Any second he could fall. One misplaced finger, one slip of a foot, an unexpected wind gust, and poof, no more Honnold.

It reminded me of the Evel Knievel-type stunts we used to see on the TV of yesteryear. And then I started to feel bad about watching. Because, wasn’t half the fun of watching Knievel the chance that he might fail? And fail spectacularly?

If you don’t remember Evel, how about Jackass? If you ever watched anything within that franchise, you remember, the entire point was to see them get hurt.

Failure in this situation would mean Honnold’s death. Was a corner of my psyche actually silently rooting to see this? Like, in twenty years, when everyone remembers the time that dumbass fell to his death from a skyscraper, I could say, “Hey, I watched that LIVE!”

Or in twenty years, when humanity has elevated itself, and people have realized that doing stupid shit that can kill you only masks some deep-seated self-loathing or trauma, and things like free-solo-ing have gone the way of the flying wedge, I could say, “I knew it!”

When Honnold made it to the very top of the skyscraper, he was perched on a ball-like structure that couldn’t have been more than 3-5 feet in diameter. Bro even took a selfie.

Throughout the entire climb the commentators had talked about the wind, but it was hard to get a true sense of it. There was no mistaking it while he was perched on that ball. You could see the wind swaying his clothes, and even his body, with his gorilla-like feet glued to the ball as if fused by some subatomic force.

Again, this was a tremendous display of athleticism. I marveled at it, thinking:

“How in the world could another human being do such a thing?!”

But I have to admit, my next thought was,

“Well, it’s pretty windy up there, so there’s still a chance…😬”

🌇 🏙️ 🌇 🏙️ 🌇 🏙️ 🌇 🏙️ 🌇 🏙️ 🌇 🏙️

Be honest, you’ve got a friend who thinks just like me, don’t you? Click the link below and share it with them….

Refer a friend

❤️

In addition to Substack, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Heck, we’ve even got a TikTok these days (🤪).

January 28, 2026:

1. Free Solo guy.

2. Madonna, Madonna, Madonna

3. Male plastic surgery.

4. Ice feedback

5. Comment of the week!

• Football For a Buck: The Crazy Rise and Crazier Demise of the USFL, by Jeff Pearlman.

  • Incredibly detailed look at one of my favorite eras of football. Super cool stories from tons of people that you’d hear about in later years. Including the person responsible for the downfall of the league. I’ll let you read the book to find out who that was (hint: he is currently ruining something else these days.)

    

• King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, by Adam Hochschild.

  • Did you know that in the 19th century, the monarch of Belgium, King Leopold, essentially annexed the entire territory of the Congo…for himself? Not even the people of Belgium knew that he had effectively enslaved the entire population, murdering millions and robbing them blind. And oh yeah, he did this all under the guise of being a humanitarian. I shit you not!

    

• The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America, by David Baron.

  • If you want to understand just how nuts this book is, look no further than a New York Times headline from December 9, 1906. It wasn’t meant as hyperbole. It was meant as fact:

    

If you are a sports fan and didn’t check out this week’s SilentPunt Podcast yet, you can find it HERE. Really interesting interview with Brian Fowler, who recently completed his goal of securing two Guinness World Records. (Our next interview will be in a few weeks when we talk with a Major League pitcher…just in time for pitchers & catchers to report. Here comes spring baby!)

🏴‍☠️ 🏴‍☠️ 🏴‍☠️ 🏴‍☠️ 🏴‍☠️ 🏴‍☠️ 🏴‍☠️ 🏴‍☠️ 🏴‍☠️ 🏴‍☠️ 🏴‍☠️

Babies at Bars and Kings in Cakes

Last week we spent three days in New Orleans for a cheer competition. I’ll spare you the gory details of that, aside from these two crazy-awesome photos of my daughter (Newcomers to SilentPunt: My daughter is 16 and would tar and feather me if she knew these were in here, so mums the word, capiche?)

In addition to watching my daughter perform for a total of 5 minutes over 3.5 days, I was able to check out a really cool museum. The National World War II Museum was literally across the street from our hotel. It was amazing!1

Along with lots of educational exhibits, there were some impressive full-scale planes:

🚬 I was strangely fascinated by Hermann Goring’s cigarette box for some reason.

Earlier this week, I chatted with Substacker Joshua Jericho Ramos Levine about the fact that comparing anything to Hitler is usually verboten (see what I did there). For some reason, that, coupled with the Luftwaffe Commander’s cigarette box, made me think of this scene from Forgetting Sarah Marshall…

There was also a reasonably new exhibit:

This section of the museum was strangely captivating.

It is fairly well known that the Nazis plundered the heck out of the countries they invaded. Especially artwork. Which was discussed in a different part of the museum. And I’ll tell you, the curators of this place did a much better job telling that particular story than these yay-hoos…

As bad as that movie was, the story is incredible. I hope to read the book one of these days. It’s essentially the story of the people who tried to save art from the Nazi war machine.

The cherry on top of my museum experience was our hotel. It was called The Higgins Hotel and was military-themed. The hotel was named after the Higgins boat, one of the most important vehicles in the entirety of WWII. The boat is the reason this museum is in New Orleans in the first place. Higgins boats were named after Andrew Higgins… whose shipbuilding operation was based in The Crescent City.

The effectiveness of these boats was incredible. In fact, after the war Eisenhower said, “Andrew Higgins is the man who won the war for us.”

While these boats, designed for troop transport in amphibious landings, were famous for their effectiveness in the war, you may remember them best from the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan.

Here are some cool photos from our hotel:

We also visited Jackson Square….

….where of course I found plenty of these…

And lastly (I’ll spare you Bourbon Street 😷), any quality trip isn’t complete without a visit to a cool dive bar. The Corporation Bar & Grill was just that. Shout-out to our bartender Crystal, who did five shots of Jägermeister in the hour we spent in the bar.

Lots of quality signage in the joint, but these two take the cake:

And, speaking of cake…do you know what a King Cake is? These cakes are usually only available in New Orleans during Carnival (Jan 6th until Fat Tuesday). They are super colorful and feature a tiny little plastic figurine of a King inside. The story goes that if you get the slice of cake with the king in it, you are king or queen for the day.

Just so long as you don’t choke to death first.

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As we were sitting in the Corporation having a cocktail, I received a text from my friend (and occasional Podcast co-host) Jason with a picture. He was in a bar himself back in Wisconsin. Longtime SilentPunt readers will remember that I told you a while back that children were allowed to sit at bars in Wisconsin as long as they were with their parents.

But this is just downright ridiculous….

👑 Merci de lire SilentPunt! 👑