“Sometimes the most powerful force in the universe is someone with nothing to lose.” That line from Mike Sielski’s new book, Going the Distance: Stallone, Philly, and the Story of Rocky, stuck with me. This week, the Philadelphia Inquirer columnist joins me to talk about the complicated young man behind Rocky Balboa and the unlikely circumstances that brought the movie to life. We start with why Rocky arrived at exactly the right moment for a country that could use something to feel good about - a little like Ted Lasso did decades later - and work our way into a Hollywood origin story that has acquired some generous embellishments over the years.

We get into Stallone’s turbulent upbringing, the financial arrangement that helped put him in the starring role, and Henry Winkler’s story about saving a script that apparently wasn’t Rocky. There’s also the invention that made those famous running scenes possible, a car battery doing some crucial supporting work, and the email that finally got Stallone talking. Along the way, Mike shares how a memorable night at Veterans Stadium with Bill Lyon helped shape his career. And we get to a question anyone who has shared a childhood favorite with their kids will understand: Does Rocky still work if you’re seeing it for the first time today?

📚 Chapters

00:00 Introduction
00:51 Why America Needed Rocky
03:43 Making Rocky on a Shoestring Budget
05:57 The Steadicam, the Steps, and a Car Battery
10:17 Bill Lyon and an Unforgettable Night at the Vet
13:13 Sportswriting, Access, and Accountability
15:38 Does Rocky Still Work for a New Generation?
18:46 Stallone’s Turbulent Childhood
21:57 Separating the Facts from the Rocky Myths
25:32 The Deal That Put Stallone in the Starring Role
28:56 Hell’s Kitchen and Paradise Alley
30:14 Henry Winkler’s Story About Saving Rocky
32:09 Getting Stallone to Answer His Emails
36:11 Sasha Stallone and the Interviews That Didn’t Happen
37:33 SilentPunt Lightning Round: Cuff, Link, and Adrian
40:40 Mike’s Book and Where to Find Him

Follow Mike on X: @MikeSielski or on Substack: .

Prefer to watch? Check us out on YouTube:

So instead of a retired Jedi, you are getting a 51-year-old man whose constitution won’t allow him to walk past a public bathroom without thinking, “I should probably go, just in case.”

We’ve even finalized our campaign slogan. We’re just having trouble fitting it on a yard sign.

If you’re anything like me, you see plenty to worry about. Democracy. Corruption. Whether anybody involved in running our country has ever read a book that didn’t include scratch-and-sniff pop-ups.

Meanwhile, a super nice man in a huge green truck comes to my house every week and takes away my garbage. For free! Which is how I describe things I’ve already paid for through taxes.

I gather the things I no longer want in my home - chicken remnants, coffee grounds, whatever vegan shit my daughter and I refuse to eat - and put them in a container. Then I move that container to the end of the driveway.

A truck arrives.

The garbage leaves.

No questions asked. No judgment. No need to explain why we bought another bag of spinach when the previous six bags ended their lives this way, too.

They just take it. The container even has wheels. My contribution to the entire operation has been reduced to walking alongside my own garbage. And even then, sometimes I still consider it a pain in my ass to walk the bin 50 feet to the curb.

This is the kind of leadership you can expect from me.

🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸

Then there’s the hot water.

I walk into a room in my house, turn a handle, and water comes out. Already heated. For me to stand under. Ostensibly for as long as I’d like. I know exactly how hot it is because the digital temperature control module has more computing power than the Apollo program.

99 degrees and I’m cold. 105 and I feel like I’m being heated by water from a solar flare.

But I’m willing to compromise. As long as that compromise comes between 101 and 103 degrees Fahrenheit. I believe this makes me uniquely qualified to represent the American people.

When it comes to my economic platform, I plan to run on Canadian whisky. I realize this raises questions. Bear with me.

I love Crown Royal Canadian Whisky. I also like Costco’s Kirkland Canadian Whisky. Which is really good and costs significantly less. Most nights, I pour myself a glass of one or the other.

When I choose Kirkland, I feel good because I’m saving money. When I choose Crown, I feel good because I’ve worked hard and I deserve it. Either way, I end up with whisky and a favorable assessment of my character.

Crown really ought to be using that in its advertising. Maybe they need a brand ambassador if this public service bullshit doesn’t pay off. I heard Hennessy just let their guy go.

🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸

Which brings me to the most significant development of this campaign. The hot dogs at Kwik Trip. I used to love Kwik Trip roller dogs. There was something reassuring about seeing them there, turning slowly, attending to their business. Not getting burned, just ready at a moment’s notice. The Minuteman Militia of suburban sprawl.

Then this summer the rollers disappeared. I was pissed. Why does everything good always have to go away?

But the dogs weren’t removed permanently. Just re-homed. Like these two lovable dipshits:

The replacement dogs were already in their buns, wrapped in aluminum foil, sitting in the hot food case. Eventually I tried one. Because Kwik Trip apparently knows what I want better than I do.

Steve Jobs walked so that Kwik Trip could run.

I owe the American people an apology: the new dog was better.

The one problem with the roller dogs had been the buns. Sometimes they were stiff. You’d open one and it would break at the crack, leaving you with two separate pieces of bread and an infrastructure problem.

You could still eat it. But you had to manage it. I don’t want to manage lunch people. I have jobs1. Inside the foil, though, the bun gets steamed. It gets softened. No cracks. The entire thing functions as intended.

Something I already loved had been improved upon, and my initial response had been anger. I had formed a strong opinion about the new hot dogs before actually eating a new hot dog.

Please keep that in mind when questioning whether I possess the instincts necessary for public office. I adjusted. I examined the evidence. I ate additional evidence to make sure.

I now fully support the new system. I’m even willing to acknowledge that the people responsible may have known something I didn’t.

My campaign advisers have asked me to stop saying that.

🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸

There are serious things that need fixing. Real human beings - neighbors even - who need help. Immediate help.

There are also people who need to be held accountable. But I’d like to enjoy some portion of the life I’m so worried about. Maybe even acknowledge the people who keep showing up to make it work. The people driving the trucks. Keeping the water running. Standing behind the counter while I conduct my independent assessment of their ultra-processed phallic-shaped meat.

I appreciate them. And the more I think about all this, the less certain I am about the first part of my slogan.

We may need new signs.

I’m Henny Hiemenz, and I approve this message.

🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸

P.S. If this made you laugh, forward it to a friend who could use one. My campaign is relying heavily on word of mouth because we blew the entire budget on the yard sign.

Being a Green Bay Packers owner won’t pay your mortgage. It won’t even get you season tickets. But it does give you a stake in one of the strangest arrangements in professional sports: a community-owned football team surviving in a league of billionaires. Tom Nelson, author of The Green and Gold Standard: A People’s History of the Green Bay Packers, joins me to talk about how a small Wisconsin city pulled that off - and the people who repeatedly stepped in when the team needed saving.

We get into Tom’s first trip to Lambeau, courtesy of a school janitor; the complicated Curly Lambeau; a coach whose film study required an investigation; and a franchise that occasionally confused honoring its past with hiring it. We also discuss Tom’s work helping save a Wisconsin paper mill, his approach to writing history, and why he believes private equity could present a serious challenge to the Packers’ future. Football provides the setting, but the questions reach well beyond it: what makes something belong to a community, and what does it take to keep it there?

📚 Chapters

00:00 Introducing Tom Nelson and The Green and Gold Standard
01:12 What Does It Mean to Own the Packers?
03:34 Tom Nelson: Public Service and Saving a Paper Mill
06:52 A Janitor, Season Tickets, and a Lifelong Packers Fan
08:30 Lee Remmel and Maria’s Packers Connection
09:58 The Thanksgiving Game That Helped Save the Packers
13:54 Passing the Hat—and Passing the Football
15:11 The Complicated Curly Lambeau
18:15 Jack Vainisi: Laying the Groundwork for Lombardi
22:06 When the Packers Couldn’t Let Go of the Past
25:53 Dan Devine and the Toothpick Test
27:51 Bob Harlan and the Reinvention of Lambeau
30:55 Private Equity and the Packers’ Future
37:03 Writing Books While Holding Down a Day Job
40:08 Research Rabbit Holes and an Ice Bowl Dispute
43:00 Closing Thoughts

🎥 🎬 🎥 🎬 🎥 🎬 🎥 🎬 🎥 🎬 🎥 🎬

You can also watch this conversation on YouTube, where, as far as I can tell, the audience mostly consists of my mother.

Come keep her company.

Yup, that’s Snoop Dogg. Selling Skechers. The official sneaker of getting to the airport three hours early.

It got me thinking: What would be the equivalent endorsement for me? What’s the most ridiculous thing a balding, middle-aged white dude from the suburbs could shill?

Then it hit me:

Henny for Hennessy.

That is indeed a Hennessy hat. Why do I have a Hennessey hat? That’s a question for another day.

This is how I’d imagine the commercial shoot at my house would unfold:

Director: Picture this: Midnight in your basement, the party’s just getting started.

Me: Why?

Director: What do you mean, why?

Me: What were we doing from seven to midnight?

Director: Hennessy is about nightlife. Anything can happen.

Me: Not a party that starts at midnight.

Discussing how many guests are coming to the party:

Me: How many people are we talking?

Director: Numbers don’t matter. It’s a vibes thing.

Me: Tell that to my wife.

Director: There isn’t an actual guest list.

Me: Okay, but whoever comes needs to pull all the way up in the driveway. We can fit three cars if everyone parks properly.

Director (checks notes): Let’s forget the party for a minute and focus on you. Look around, puff out your chest - act like you own the place.

Me: I do own it. Well, not technically yet, but at 2.8 percent we’d be stupid to pay it off now.

Director: Just project confidence.

Me: I mean, you’ll never see that rate again. 30-year fixed rates are at like 7% these days.

How to be a Hennessy man:

Director: Think of yourself as a man who knows what he wants. A guy who isn’t afraid to take a stand.

Me: Like I did with our bed pillows?

Director: Uh, maybe something a little -

Me: We each had two. Kim wanted to get a third. Like three for each of us! I said, “No. Absolutely not. That’s ridiculous.”

Director: Okay. There’s the attitude. Hold on to that.

Me: Then she asked me why, and I’m like, I dunno, that many pillows just bothers me. She said, “Well, you leave your shit all over the house, and that bothers me. We can stick with two pillows if you start picking up your shit.”

Director: And?

Me: Let’s move on.

While he reconsidered his next scene, I got up and turned off the kitchen lights.

Director: Why’d you do that?

Me: There’s nobody in there.

Director: Yeah but they were lighting our background.

Me: The background isn’t doing anything.

Director: It helps create atmosphere.

Me: Atmosphere doesn’t pay my utility bill.

Director: We’re leaving the lights on.

Me: Whatever. I’m itemizing these expenses.

Then he asked if we could try filming in the master bedroom. Something about that being “where the magic happens.” I’d forgotten he was once a producer on MTV Cribs.

Director: Now we’re talking. Hennessy is about appreciating the finer things.

Me: We have a duvet.

Director: Good. Luxury. Comfort.

Me: And a duvet cover.

Director: Sure.

Me: And now a blanket over the duvet cover.

Director: Uh, why?

Me: To keep the duvet cover clean.

Director: Isn’t that what the duvet cover is for?

Me: No, that keeps the duvet clean. The blanket keeps the duvet cover clean. Try to keep up.

Director: What’s getting it dirty?

Me: The dogs drool on it. Occasionally somebody drags an ass across it.

Director: One of the dogs?

Me: Sure.

For the last scene he wanted a shot in the basement.

Director: We’re going to keep this very simple. No party. No bedroom. Just you, the hat, and the bottle. All you have to say is “Hennything is possible.”

Me: I can handle that.

Director: Great. Look into the camera.

Me: Ready.

Director: And… hold on.

Me: What?

Director: Are we finished upstairs?

Me: I think so.

Director: Then why are the lights on up there?

I looked directly into the camera.

“Hennything is possible.”

This week’s book recommendation is David Sedaris’s Happy-Go-Lucky. That signed copy? I had to pick it up week’s after the signing he had years ago in Milwaukee because I was unable to attend. From what I heard he took my absence in stride.

This week’s piece made me think of the way Sedaris writes about his family…I still wonder why any of them still tell him anything. If I were related to him, I’d spend Thanksgiving dinner discussing the weather. And then I’d still probably wind up in his next book as the asshole who wouldn’t stop talking about the weather.

Let’s just say their efficiency would be considered troublesome at Chick-fil-A.

I can’t believe that I, the same person who now reads every news article with more than a healthy dose of skepticism, walked into that CVS actually believing I’d be back outside in under five minutes.

The store’s entrance should’ve been my first clue. A set of heavy red doors framed by white brick gave off more of a full-body cavity search vibe than a ‘hey we’re here to help’ one. Luckily, there were no workers immediately inside the doors there to search me for a concealed shiv.

In fact, it appeared there were no workers at all. No one behind the counter. And no one seemingly in between the crooked and haphazardly filled aisles.

A sign outside offered me a vaccine and five dollars off a twenty-dollar purchase. Which is CVS’s way of saying: We care deeply about your health, so long as you buy some rubbers and breath mints.

The entire reason for my trip was to pick up a prescription that the automated text I received from CVS said was ready. But it wasn’t. Because, of course it wasn’t.

Also, probably because the American healthcare system seems to be one small rectal exam after another. Death by a thousand cuts? More like death by a thousand lubricated index fingers.

Speaking of lubrication, while I waited for my prescription, I was seated across from a beautifully curated display. Plan B occupied the top shelf. KY beneath that. Condoms at the bottom. CVS had arranged the entire American sexual experience in reverse chronological order: consequence, stimulant, prevention.

It was less retail display and more deconstruction of a 21-year-old’s Saturday night.

Pharmacies didn’t always used to be this way. Early American apothecaries actually prepared medicines by hand. And by the late 1800s, carbonated water was believed to have medicinal value, so these drugstores began installing soda fountains. Eventually, neighborhood pharmacies became a third space, where kids would go to get malts, adults would eat lunch at the counter, and everybody knew the pharmacist's name.

America had done what America did so well prior to our need to optimize everything and turn it into an app; we had stumbled upon a useful idea. If someone is sick, give them medicine and feed them a chocolate shake.

I, for one, cannot think of places like this without my mind drifting to Gower’s drugstore from It’s a Wonderful Life. A young George Bailey working behind the counter and a much-too-sexualized 12-year-old blonde girl giving him googly eyes. The place, if slightly off-kilter, what with Gower’s old man vibes and Violet’s pre-pubescent lusting of George…still comes off warm - busy and alive.

Yes, Mr. Gower is drunk with grief, and nearly puts poison into a child’s prescription after learning that his son has died. Hey, I never said this was an OSHA training film. But even with an intoxicated pharmacist one capsule away from manslaughter, Gower’s still appears to have more employees, warmth, and community than the average modern CVS.

Somewhere along the way, we removed the soda fountain, the lunch counter, and the owner’s name from the sign. In exchange, we added a drive-through, insurance companies, and one exhausted employee responsible for all of it.

Corporate America helped drive the neighborhood pharmacies out of business, perfected the model, expanded it nationwide, and then apparently lost interest in operating the very monopolies they now controlled.

The modern pharmacy feels like the store everyone abandoned fifteen minutes before a disaster movie begins. Which brings me to the film World War Z.

Brad Pitt’s daughter needs asthma medicine while zombies are overrunning the city. He enters a pharmacy amid looting, sirens, and the collapse of civilization. Yet he finds the medicine and gets back out with less difficulty than most of us encounter trying to refill a prescription on an ordinary Tuesday.

The undead may have been ravaging Philadelphia, but no one asked Brad Pitt to wait forty-eight hours while they faxed the pediatrician.

The one thing that saved my own CVS visit was the music. The entire playlist was absurdly good. First, “Disarm” by the Smashing Pumpkins played. Then came the real surprise: Thompson Twins, “If You Were Here,” from the final scene in Sixteen Candles.

In that carpeted fluorescent bunker, it sounded magnificent.

The song took me back into the entire John Hughes universe - Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Long Duk-Dong, and all those exquisitely lonely teenagers who still believed there was enough time before the credits to say the right thing and make tomorrow better.

Even their sadness leaned toward something. There was still a prom, a parking lot, or maybe even a hot guy waiting beside a Porsche.

Now it sometimes feels as though each morning merely delivers an update explaining which part of life has gotten worse since yesterday.

Still, for four minutes, CVS gave me a little 1984 optimism. It did not fill my prescription or free any Mucinex D from a locked case, but it reminded me of a time when heartbreak came with synthesizers and could be resolved before the janitor folded the chairs.

Eventually, I received my small paper bag and walked back through the red prison doors.

I am not asking CVS to bring back the soda jerk. I would settle for enough employees to answer the phone, a working computer system, and a waiting area that does not face the complete life cycle of regrettable sex.

Pharmacies once understood something about waiting. They gave you a stool, a soda, and another human being to talk to.

We optimized away all three.

And unfortunately, I don’t think Jake Ryan is coming to sweep us off our feet.

This week’s book recommendation is Chris Nashawaty’s Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story. It tells the story of how the cult classic actually got made, and more importantly, the story of the people who made it.

This was certainly an enjoyable read and a real page turner. However, what impressed me the most was the amount of research that must’ve gone into writing it. This man brought serious Doris Kearns Goodwin energy to a book about a movie with a floating Baby Ruth.

The story of Vince Lombardi’s Packers usually arrives in the voice of John Facenda: frozen breath, muddy jerseys, and giants doing battle on the tundra. But after the cameras left, a group of young women was doing much of the work that made those football lives possible.

This week, I’m joined by mother-daughter authors Laura Kostelnik Biskupic and Katherine Biskupic, authors of Lambeau Ladies: The Boundary-Breaking Women Behind Lombardi’s Packers. We talk about the women who helped integrate Green Bay, created communities for young football families, cared for injured players, packed brown-bag lunches, raised children, and supported one another through a life that offered very little money or security.

We also get into Marie Lombardi’s influence, the famous mink-stole photograph, Careful Drive, Packer “Holy Roller” parties, Cherry Starr’s rubber cockroach, and the Spam sandwiches that may - or may not - have fueled a dynasty.

It’s a Packers story, but more than that, it’s a story about friendship, race, family, invisible work, and the people football history too often leaves just outside the picture.

📚 Chapters

0:00 Introduction

0:45 How the Lambeau Ladies Story Began

5:15 The Drive That Inspired the Book

8:30 Researching and Writing a Forgotten History

11:40 The Cherry Starr Few People Knew

13:04 The Women Who Helped Integrate Green Bay

14:36 Marie Lombardi: The Queen of It All

16:59 Spam Sandwiches and the Work Behind the Dynasty

18:50 Lore Lane, Careful Drive and Holy Roller Parties

22:06 Mink Stoles and the Making of Titletown

24:04 The Lambeau Ladies’ Legacy

28:44 Writing Together as Mother and Daughter

30:21 Lightning Round: Cockroaches, Curfews, and Lambeau

38:32 Final Thoughts

However, I’ve devised a foolproof concept for rejecting credible reporting before it can disturb my opinions. This six-step process works for all manner of uncomfortable thoughts: politics, medicine, neighborhood Facebook groups - and, most recently, professional sports.

Step 1: Decide whether you like the reporter.

Last fall, Pablo Torre’s independently produced podcast reported that basketball star Kawhi Leonard was being paid under the table. Twenty-eight million dollars under the table, to be more precise.

And NBA rules say things like backdoor endorsement deals for no-show jobs are illegal. From scrolling TikTok I learned that the basic gist of the Clippers’ misbehavior was something they called “salary cap circumvention.”

I call it an unusually successful side hustle. I was also paid under the table once - five dollars per lawn in 1991 - but none of my customers owned an NBA team. Twenty-eight million dollars would have required 5.6 million lawns, before edging and bagging.

For months, I brought Torre’s reporting up while other people tried to discuss their golf game, their remarkable children, or why you really need to brine the meat first.

The response was usually:

“Isn’t that Torre guy just talking shit?”

This comforted me. Evidence takes time. Disliking someone is like getting a table at Denny’s: available immediately.

Step 2: Put everything into the content blender.

The computer in my hand presents me with an investigation, a team denial, a meme, and a man speaking from a parked F-150 - all inside the same glowing rectangle.

So I treat them all accordingly. Which means I treat them equally.

“Pablo uncovered documents” becomes “Pablo claims.” Then “Pablo has a theory.” Then “I find Pablo annoying.”

Case closed.

The internet gave everybody a printing press. But it did not give us a reliable way to decide whom to believe.

So, I mostly use facial expressions.

Step 3: Ask for institutional validation.

In May, Pablo Torre and his staff received a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on this story. This was disconcerting. Although I cannot pull from memory any other human who’s won such a prize, I have the faint memory that it once meant something.

So I had a choice to make: reevaluate my feelings on Torre, or assume the Pulitzer has devolved into the shitty political abyss like everything else around it. Which, my friends, is like fish in a barrel.

Fuck that Pulitzer.

Even better, two weeks ago ESPN gave me a lifeline. Their sources, who I assume to be as unassailable as Deepthroat himself, stated that the NBA had thus far found no wrongdoing by the Clippers organization. I treated their threadbare reporting as gospel, because news stories fuse to my prefrontal cortex the moment they agree with me.

At the time, the NBA refuted the story, stating there were “numerous and significant inaccuracies,” but I was no longer taking opinions by that point.

Remember: when credible sources conflict, you do not examine the nuances.

Nuance is for communists.

Step 4: Demand official proof.

On Wednesday of this week, the NBA formally announced the results of their investigation. They concluded that Ballmer and the Clippers showed a pattern of misconduct and committed multiple rules violations. They fined the Clippers $30 million, stripped them of five first-round draft picks, and suspended Ballmer for a year.

This was all an extremely elaborate way to say that the podcast guy might have a point.

But I did not panic. In the face of overwhelming evidence, there is only one thing to do: double down.

• $30 Million? Slap on the wrist.

• Five first-round picks? Name me one guy from last year’s draft.

• Balmer’s suspension? He’ll probably just run the team from his megayacht.

Always remember, choose whichever explanation protects your original opinion.

Step 5: Say, “It’s only basketball.”

This argument is like Novocain:

Public corruption? All politicians are crooked.

Corporate fraud? Rich people always get away with things.

Basketball scandal? Name me two Clippers.

Some may say, “Where does the evidence lead?” I say, “Where are we eating dinner tonight?”

Besides, powerful people don’t need me to believe them. They only need me to distrust everyone trying to prove them wrong. And that, dear friends, is a service I’ll happily provide free of charge.

Step 6: Move on with your revised opinion being the only opinion you ever had.

Honestly, I consider this my superpower. Now that the hammer has dropped and the Clippers have been found guilty, I can explain that I saw this coming all along. I was never fooled, I just needed to see facts.

Fortunately, memory is flexible. Like space-time, bend it enough and you can travel from one spot to the next, instantaneously.

So yes, perhaps Pablo Torre was talking shit.

He was simply doing so with twelve months of reporting, 3,487 pages of documents, and a Pulitzer Prize.

The rest of us usually just bring a meme sent by our cousin.

I knew Pablo Torre was right all along.

Just don’t scroll up.

This week’s book recommendation is The Midrange Theory: Basketball’s Evolution In The Age Of Analytics, by Seth Partnow. While the piece I wrote above was designed to be digestible to non-basketball fans, this one may not be. That being said, you didn’t have to be a fan of baseball to enjoy Moneyball. This book isn’t exactly like that though - think less Brad Pitt, more Jonah Hill.

That’s all for now folks. Se ya’ next week.

Joe Palumbo has been a national champion, an All-American, a lawyer, an NFL intern, a sports agent, a wealth manager for professional athletes, and a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt. Somehow, that’s only the setup.

We talk about NIL money, why some athletes handle wealth better than others, the recurring dream that college football gives you one more year of eligibility, and the point in middle age when your body begins escalating the messages. Then the conversation turns to what football taught men of our generation to hide - and how Joe and his family are using Kristin’s Fund and a free football camp to teach boys a healthier version of strength.

Interested in supporting Kristin’s Fund? Click here.

📚 Chapters

0:00 Introduction

1:38 Joe Palumbo’s path from Ithaca to the NFL

3:57 Inside the Jets, Chargers, and NFL league office

8:11 Becoming a sports agent

11:28 Leaving agency life for wealth management

13:17 NIL and teenage athletes making real money

15:31 Why some athletes handle money better than others

18:42 Jiu-jitsu, middle age, and listening to your body

24:58 Coach Butterfield and the 1991 national championship

27:49 Why former players still dream football isn’t over

33:55 Kristin’s Fund and preventing domestic violence

39:50 Teaching boys a healthier version of masculinity

45:59 Why speaking up is leadership

49:29 How the camp works—and how to support it

52:31 Private equity comes for youth sports

So this newsletter will have to suffice.

Pre-season high school football camp has been taking up about eight hours of my day, between actually being there and prepping for it. That is certainly better than when it was my full-time job at the college level. Except for the fact that when I was doing that, the only other thing I was trying to be reasonably good at was not being a shitty husband and seeing my daughter while she was awake.

There were mixed results with that.

When I was younger, if a particular day or week involved some nights with four hours of sleep, so be it. That was not necessarily a healthy system, but it was technically a system. At fifty-one, four hours of sleep is no longer a sacrifice. It is a threat to the public.

A few days ago, while my daughter had her legs in an MRI machine1, I sat in the waiting room watching practice film. The day after that, I was in Starbucks gameplanning because our power was out.

I was working in that waiting room, and in that Starbucks, because I cannot function on four hours of sleep anymore. If I do that now, I become a person who should not be allowed to operate a motor vehicle, answer an email, or speak to his family without legal representation.

When I was younger, four hours of sleep was sometimes just part of the job. So was occasionally being like the boss in The Bear (more on that later).

Back then, I could justify almost anything in the pursuit of winning a game. Maybe age has made me wiser. Mostly though, I think it has just made me less willing to use winning as permission to be an asshole.

My time crunch now is not caused by football. It is caused by me. When I see something that is wrong, or fixable, I want to help. I’ve never been very good at just punching a clock.

Except for the six months I spent loading trucks at UPS. I was perfectly content clocking the hell out of that place.

What I hadn’t anticipated before getting back into coaching was how difficult it is to do something casually when you know how to do it seriously.

At our scrimmage last week, my job consisted of sitting in the press box and helping. There was also a laptop in front of me streaming the game in real time. After each offensive series, we could watch each play from multiple angles to determine what had happened.

Back in my day (yup, just said that), we determined what happened by gathering four coaches with four separate and partial views of the game, and asking them to reconstruct it like Oliver Stone and the Zapruder Film.

Nobody saw the entire play. And if you did, it meant you were shirking your responsibilities. “Sorry Coach, I missed it,” was a somewhat common retort to the age-old question of, “What the fuck just happened!?!”

And as in life, sometimes guys were wrong. Particularly when it was their group that might have been responsible for an issue. The phrase “That wasn’t my guy” has probably been spoken on more football sidelines than “BLOCK SOMEBODY!” has been shouted from the stands. But when everyone was on the same page, eyes in the right spot, and unattached emotionally from the outcome…we usually got it right.

This was an objectively worse way to get information. It also may have been a better way to learn how to do it.

One of the abilities that I learned from doing it the old-fashioned way was to make adjustments mid-series. That is, before the iPad. Maybe the defense had lined up incorrectly to a formation, and we wanted to run it again before they could get to the sideline and correct it.

Football has changed. For better or for worse is up for debate.

My body has also changed. There is no debate about that…the replay is conclusive. It can no longer survive coaching the way I once coached. But my eyes can still see the game the way all those years taught them to see it.

The game is consuming, but so is competence. I mean, maybe not for everyone. But I’ve never figured out how to be good at something casually. I kinda have to be all in. I think, maybe, a lot of people are built that way.

That feeling is satisfying. But it is also dangerous. Being useful makes it harder to establish limits. Now that my football brain is awake again, it doesn’t understand that it’s supposed to operate only during designated part-time hours.

Last night, we won our first game. I got home past midnight, into bed at 2am, and was back up by 6:15am. Football may have instant replay, but it still has no respect for the duration or quality of my REM sleep.

🥃 🏈 🥃 🏈 🥃 🏈 🥃 🏈 🥃 🏈 🥃 🏈

Is it possible to love something without letting it own you? I don’t know the answer to that question.

I also still don’t know whether I am going to keep a journal this season. At the moment, life seems to be journaling me…mostly in the form of an overstuffed calendar, a laptop full of film, and a wife who occasionally needs to remind me that football is no longer helping pay our bills.

Perhaps this can count as my first entry.

And here’s that bit from The Bear I promised…

🥃 🏈 🥃 🏈 🥃 🏈 🥃 🏈 🥃 🏈 🥃 🏈

Speaking of football’s remarkable ability to make people certain about things they may not actually understand, earlier this week I also posted my conversation with Fred Segal, the creator of Freezing Cold Takes. We talked about sports, overconfidence, bad predictions, and why very smart people can become very sure of themselves in almost every part of life.

SilentPunt

Nobody Gets Fired For Bad Predictions

SilentPunt Podcast 221 / August 20, 2026…

Listen now

2 months ago · Henny Hiemenz

DOGS

Fred Segal has spent a decade preserving the predictions sports media would rather forget. As the creator of Freezing Cold Takes and author of the new book Freezing Cold Takes: College Football, he has built an archive of certainty gone bad—from coaches crowned too early to games declared over before they were.

In this episode, Fred and I talk about why coaches rely on “coach speak,” what Bobby Ross’ journey from “Bobby Loss” to national champion reveals about judging people too soon, and how Fred’s years as a lawyer—and his father’s enormous collection of old sports magazines—prepared him for this work.

We also get into what today’s sports-media environment has lost: context, mystique, independent access, and the patience to see more than one clip or one bad play. Fred revisits the Peyton Manning–Charles Woodson Heisman race, shares a spectacularly ill-timed piece of BYU trash talk, and considers whether the culture of keeping receipts has made commentators any more careful.

Spoiler: nobody gets fired for bad predictions.

📚 CHAPTERS

0:00 Intro music and episode setup

0:47 Why “an incomplete history”?

2:36 Choosing what made the book

3:23 Why coaches use coach speak

4:37 Bobby Ross becomes “Bobby Loss”

8:11 Charlie Weis and premature coronations

9:01 How a lawyer created Freezing Cold Takes

10:38 Fred’s dad and the magazine archive

11:14 What modern sports media has lost

13:03 Too much access, less mystique

14:40 One bad play becomes a whole narrative

16:03 Manning, Woodson, and the unknown unknowns

18:25 Trash talk that aged terribly

20:05 Cameras, performance, and lost authenticity

21:06 Do receipts make pundits more careful?

Phil Villapiano has stories. About growing up on the Jersey Shore and watching Bruce Springsteen perform before most people knew his name. About being drafted by the Oakland Raiders without knowing exactly where Oakland was. About surviving the brutal practices and even longer nights of the Raiders’ legendary training camps. And, of course, about spending the rest of his life arguing with Franco Harris over what really happened during the Immaculate Reception.

In this episode, Phil joins me to discuss his new memoir, Just Tackle Baby, and the remarkable life behind it. We talk about John Madden, Al Davis, John Matuszak, the glorious chaos of the 1970s Raiders, and the unlikely friendship Phil developed with Franco after finding himself on the wrong side of football’s most famous play.

Phil also explains why the title of his book means more than making tackles. Whether it was football, a 35-year career in shipping, writing a memoir, or dealing with the problems life continues to present, Phil has approached everything the same way: prepare, compete, and tackle whatever is in front of you.

📚 Chapters

0:00 Intro: Phil’s very New Jersey morning

0:40 Bruce Springsteen before he was famous

3:53 The night Springsteen sang “Jersey Girl”

6:06 How Just Tackle Baby became a book

9:58 The hard work of writing a memoir

15:02 From the Jersey Shore to Bowling Green

22:56 Drafted by Oakland - and needing an atlas

26:44 The Raiders’ brutal, beer-soaked training camps

32:52 Why Phil couldn’t keep hating Franco Harris

37:11 “If I don’t drop my arms, there’s no Immaculate Reception”

40:18 Franco’s 4:07 call every December 22

42:42 The interception that sealed the Sea of Hands game

47:02 Christian Bale, Nicolas Cage, and the Madden movie

51:23 Why Just Tackle Baby is bigger than football

53:26 Closing thoughts

Therefore, you also might not see the world through the same lens as a 51-year-old bald man whose brain is perpetually trapped in 1995. While I’m not sure if that is a result of kick-out blocks, Natty Light, or the traumatic emotional repression brought on by the Catholic religion, I have chosen not to seek treatment.

One of the side effects of my condition is seeing pretty much every life situation through the lens of the show Seinfeld. Walk nine miles on a torn meniscus and broken leg? Yes Henny, it is certainly coherent to compare yourself to George saving the beached whale.

Shopping for potato chips at the grocery store? Absolutely, there is totally shrinkage.

Or, how about eating a yummy peach, and all day long walking around with the words “MACKINAW PEACHES JERRY!!” and “they’re real, and they’re Spectacular!” bouncing1 around your damaged but still mildly functional brainal capacitor.

Because goddammit that peach was real AND spectacular. Whether or not it was from Mackinaw is irrelevant to my condition.

Anywho, you’ve been warned. Keep reading this wildly unhinged rant at your own peril.

🥃 🐾 🥃 🐾 🥃 🐾 🥃 🐾 🥃 🐾 🥃 🐾

A few years ago I started writing again. I won’t bore you with those details, but I will tell you that I imagined myself as Kramer - basically, working for free.

I would just start acting like a writer and see what happened. It was my very own version of ‘fake it till you make it’.

Demented and Sad?

Maybe.

And if you got that last reference without the spoiler, you’re my people.

Now that we’re friends, I need you to do the thing that friends do: help me move.

Relax. Your lower back is safe.

Help me move from being Kramer to being Jerry’s friend Seth. If you don’t remember who Seth was - congratulations!!! You still have a fully functioning pre-frontal cortex!

Seth was Jerry’s old friend, who Jerry convinced to skip a very important meeting at his job to join him for lunch. When Seth is subsequently fired for missing the meeting, he winds up working at Kenny Rogers Roasters.

The thing is, Seth likes working at Kenny Rogers Roasters. Not because he was making a shit ton of money. But because he was working at a happy, fulfilling job. He wasn’t making fast food, he was making good food quickly.

I’m not writing War and Peace. Hell, I’m not even writing one of those smooshy gooshy girly books with Fabio on the cover. Although I personally know several housewives in Wisconsin who would devour that shit.

For the record, my wife is not one of those housewives. She’s a boss-ass bitch who has somehow remained ensconced in marital bliss with the man responsible for the previous paragraph.

Anyway, no disrespect to housewives, romance novels, or Fabio’s magnificent sternum. Every book deserves a reader. Even, theoretically, mine.

Which is where YOU come in. If you subscribe to SilentPunt because you like my writing, or because you like my podcasting, I’m cordially inviting you to forward this email - or better yet, TEXT it! - to one other like-minded human. There has to be more than two of us, right???

Ok, just checked…Substack currently says there are about 570 of us. But apparently like only 43% of you open my emails. To the other 67% I say:

Whhhyyy am I asking you this? Simple really:

No no no, I kid, I kid.

Seriously though, I’m asking you this because I am currently looking for an agent to help me sell my book. And agents look at things like how many people subscribe to you as a gauge of whether or not whatever you produce might be sellable.

All this talk of subscribers, agents, and sellability suddenly has me feeling like Nicolas Cage in The Family Man: “I’m going into arbitrage, Kate. Turns out, I have a knack for it.”

Shout-out to all of my peeps on here who have already lent me a helping hand, it means more than you realize. And an extra-special shout-out to the three of you who read and provided feedback on a sample of my book. I’m not naming names here so your inbox isn’t inundated with assholes asking for help (like me).

In summary (see what a great writer I am? I’m using a phrase we all learned in 9th grade NOT to begin a summary with), I was debating how to close this. Then I realized there was only one appropriate ending for this dumpster fire of a newsletter: one last image.

So, here’s what I - and Kenny Banya - think of all of you:

I read David Epstein’s Inside The Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, in its entirety on one transatlantic flight…which is either a strong endorsement or proof that being trapped inside a metal tube with nowhere else to go is an excellent literary constraint.

I was drawn to this book for two reasons: First, Epstein’s first book, Range, is one of my all-time favorites. And second, constraints (and the ability to overcome them) were a major factor in my career as a football coach.

This book landed at a particularly useful moment for me, as I try to write a book while also writing a newsletter, recording a podcast, coaching football, and apparently holding an unpaid position in the Seinfeld Reference Department. Not to mention being a dad and husband - the two most important jobs, which I naturally left out of the first draft of this paragraph. I’m sure many of you can relate.

🥃 🐾 🥃 🐾 🥃 🐾 🥃 🐾 🥃 🐾 🥃 🐾

You’re still here???

At 157 pounds, JJ Birden was never supposed to last nine seasons in the NFL. In this conversation, the former Kansas City Chiefs receiver explains how he turned speed, preparation, and a stubborn desire to prove everybody wrong into a career that included catching passes from Joe Montana.

Birden also opens up about his less-documented years after football: business successes and failures, the coffee shop he owned despite not liking coffee, and the life-changing decision he and his wife made to raise five nieces and nephews alongside their three children. Those experiences helped shape his new book, Beat the Coverage: Six Strategic Steps to Win in Business and Life, a practical framework for recognizing opportunities, preparing with purpose, and performing under pressure.

📚 Chapters

0:00 Introduction

0:55 First pass from Joe Montana

3:51 From a 133-Pound Track Recruit to Oregon Football

5:51 Putting in the Reps for Life After the NFL

10:15 Coffee, a Search Engine, and Learning Business on the Fly

13:02 How JJ and Raina Went from Three Children to Eight

16:11 Know the Field—and Draw Up the Game Plan

19:36 Evolving as a Receiver and Catching His First TD from Montana

22:03 Why Beat the Coverage Is Different from His First Book

24:54 Playing to Your Strengths and Covering Weak Spots

27:21 SilentPunt Lightning Round

31:14 Joe Montana’s Endorsement

34:02 Where to Find JJ and Beat the Coverage

It may be worse for my neighborhood.

I used to think dog walking was mostly about exercise, fresh air, and giving an animal the opportunity to inspect the same mailbox post for four consecutive minutes. Three weeks without it has revealed the truth: the walks were actually a neighborhood public-safety program designed to suppress my get-off-my-lawn-ness.

Without the walks, I’ve been sitting more, driving more, and monitoring neighborhood activity with the vigilance of Adam, our resident HOA-Stasi officer. If his champagne-colored Buick makes a second pass by your house, he has opened a file.

Expect a sternly worded email by close of business.

At dog-walking speed, my neighborhood is full of families enjoying summer. From behind a windshield, those same families appear to have released dozens of small, erratically moving insurance claims into traffic.

Suburban Wisconsin summer is mostly brat smoke, lawn stripes, and the quiet knowledge that somewhere behind a parked Tahoe, a wannabe Lance Armstrong is gathering speed.

The first sign is usually a wheel.

You don’t see a child. You don’t see handlebars. You see three inches of front tire and immediately understand that someone with no income, no driver’s license, and only a developing awareness of mortality is about to make a major transportation decision.

One of the great pastimes of summer is driving slowly through your own neighborhood, knowing that at any moment a child on a bicycle may rocket out of a driveway with the serene confidence of someone who has never heard the phrase “claims adjuster.”

They never ease into the road, either. There’s no cautious roll to the end of the driveway. No pause. No left-right-left.

They launch.

Everything else in my Midwestern neighborhood is carefully controlled - the lawn height, the mailbox color, the approved shades of beige. The children, meanwhile, enter traffic like they’ve been fired from a T-shirt cannon.

And the driveway launch is only the opening maneuver.

Next comes the diagonal intersection crossing, in which a fourth grader enters from one side of the road, looks backward over his shoulder, and somehow continues traveling forward toward a location no civil engineer could have predicted.

Adults tend to view an intersection as a place where two roads meet. Children view it as an episode of Fixer Upper on HGTV - more open concept than a ranch house after Chip Gaines finds a sledgehammer.

Then there is the one-handed cruise: one hand on the handlebars, one hand holding an iPhone, both feet wearing Crocs, and the helmet either missing entirely or resting as far back on the head as possible, so as not to distract from his beautifully coiffed Lamma helmet.

The child cyclist’s understanding of traffic law begins and ends with one fact: you have brakes.

Meanwhile, every adult driver in the neighborhood has adopted the posture of a bomb technician. Every trip to Kwik Trip becomes a suburban Hurt Locker: 17 in a 25, right foot poised over the brake, eyes scanning the gaps between parked cars, radio turned down as though silence improves peripheral vision.

Somewhere nearby, Brayden is preparing to enter traffic like Kramer entering Jerry’s apartment.

After a few weeks on alert, ordinary neighborhood objects begin to look like intelligence:

An unattended bicycle lying in a yard becomes a warning.

A basketball rolling toward the street becomes the opening scene of a driver’s-ed film.

A recycling bin is no longer a recycling bin. It’s a cloaking device.

Suburban Wisconsin drivers don’t need self-driving cars. We need cars that can detect when a parked car is being used as tactical cover by a junior member of SEAL Team Schwinn.

Eventually, despite the reduced speeds, lowered radios, and constant surveillance, one of the neighborhood’s uninsured operators breaches the perimeter. The most emotionally complicated moment comes after you slam on the brakes and make prolonged eye contact with the child who just crossed in front of you.

You’re attempting to communicate several things through the windshield:

I am glad you are alive.

I am furious with you.

Where are your parents?

The child’s expression communicates only one thing in return:

Why is that creepy bald guy staring at me?

To be clear, I’m thrilled these kids are outside. I simply believe that any child wishing to enjoy a spontaneous summer afternoon should file a route plan with the village by 4:00pm on the previous business day, and remain at least one Subaru-length from all public roadways.

My sudden interest in neighborhood traffic safety may also contain a small conflict of interest: professional jealousy. For almost three weeks, my knee has adopted the Mitch McConnell doctrine: block all forward movement and wait for everyone else to give up.

Getting off the couch requires planning. Stepping off a curb feels like something that should be discussed with my medical team. Putting on a sock occasionally involves audible negotiation.

Meanwhile, a nine-year-old is launching off a curb like Johnny Knoxville if the stunt coordinator were also nine and the entire production budget had been spent on Gatorade. These children treat their knees as unlimited natural resources. I currently regard mine as a third-string wide receiver: they’re technically part of the team.

But also, they kind of suck.

That may explain the jealousy. They trust their knees, their balance, and the braking systems of complete strangers.

I have therefore begun construction on a bicycle-control tower in my front yard.

Adam’s champagne-colored Buick has already made two passes.

P.S. Before my knee injury turned me into neighborhood traffic enforcement, a shelter dog named Garnet briefly convinced me to stop narrating everything and live in the present. You can read that piece here: “My Meditation Coach Weighs Fifty Pounds and Likes Belly Rubs.”

After a recent trip to Greece, I felt compelled to revisit Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire. It’s one of those historical novels that makes the ancient world feel immediate rather than preserved behind glass. Pressfield is less interested in marble-statue heroics than in fear, discipline, sacrifice, and why people stand their ground when leaving remains technically available.

It also pairs surprisingly well with this week’s newsletter. The Spartans display roughly the same indifference to personal safety as suburban children on bicycles, though they are better organized and considerably more likely to maintain formation. Read it for the sharp prose, the brutal battle scenes, and the deeply human portrait of people confronting impossible odds…then remember it the next time you nearly flatten a mop-headed 10-year-old cruising on his Huffy.

For the many new readers here: the basic rhythm at SilentPunt is that one week I write an essay, and the next I talk to someone interesting. The subjects bounce between middle age, marriage, parenting, sports, and whatever fresh indignity adulthood has provided lately.

🥃 📚 🥃 📚 🥃 📚 🥃 📚 🥃 📚 🥃 📚

Jason Botts grew up dreaming of spending one day in the major leagues. He eventually played parts of four seasons with the Texas Rangers - yet by the time his career ended, that original dream had somehow become a ten-year standard, and what once would have felt impossible no longer seemed like enough. We talk about why high achievers keep moving the goalposts, how timing and opportunity shaped his career, the fight-or-flight reality of living on baseball’s roster bubble, and what his friendship with Rick Ankiel taught him about the mental side of the game.

(You can read Jason’s excellent writing at Have Bat Will Travel)

The conversation eventually turns to the harder question of what happens after the uniform comes off. Jason opens up about losing his identity, finding a second act through mentoring and writing, and raising two baseball-playing sons without making his career the standard they must meet. We also cover conversations with his cousins from left field in an almost-empty Oakland Coliseum, an 18-hour Mexican winter-ball bus ride, and why he would rather face Aroldis Chapman at 105 miles per hour than throw batting practice to a frustrated teenager.

📚 Chapters

0:00 Making the Majors—and Still Wanting More

5:02 The Oakland Coliseum and the Memories That Last

12:00 Sammy Sosa, Ian Kinsler and the Role of Opportunity

14:17 The Mental Game: You Don’t Have to Be Perfect

18:52 Rick Ankiel, the Yips and “One More Chapter”

22:58 From Ballplayer to Mental-Performance Mentor

24:49 Life on the Roster Bubble: Years of Fight-or-Flight

28:42 Retirement, Identity Loss and Finding Writing

33:19 Raising Sons in the Shadow of a Pro Career

36:25 When His Son Wanted to Quit Baseball

40:12 Preparing Kids for Life Beyond Sports

42:36 The SilentPunt Lightning Round

45:16 An 18-Hour Mexican Winter-Ball Bus Ride

47:41 Finding a Baseball Community on Substack

This, thankfully, ends today.

Ladies, I know many of you are struggling right now with what the medical establishment calls “perimenopause,” a mysterious transitional phase involving hormones, sleep disruption, hot flashes, mood changes, brain fog, night sweats, and the sudden urge to murder your husband because he had the audacity to ask you yet again where the scissors were.

But what if I told you perimenopause is not a problem?

What if I told you it is actually an opportunity?

More specifically, what if I told you it is an opportunity to purchase my 12-week Female Hormone Dominance Protocol for $97, or four payments of $32, because math is also going through a transition.

Now, I should be clear: I am not a doctor. I have never been a woman. I have not personally experienced perimenopause, menstruation, childbirth, breastfeeding, or the quiet rage of being asked where the ketchup was by someone staring directly at the ketchup.

But I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

The problem with modern women is not that their estrogen, progesterone, cortisol, thyroid function, and nervous system are changing in a complex biological cascade that can last for years.

The problem is mindset.

Most women approach perimenopause reactively. They say things like, “I’m exhausted,” or “I don’t feel like myself,” or “Why, all of the sudden, am I sweating more than a whore in church?”

This is victim language.

A high-agency woman does not “have a hot flash.” She enters a spontaneous thermogenic activation window.

The first step is reframing:

She does not “wake up furious.” She receives a cortisol based push notification from God.

She does not “forget why she walked into the pantry.” She is practicing neurological minimalism.

The second step is getting morning sunlight directly into your eyes before checking your phone, because the sun has been rising for 4.6 billion years, but apparently needed a guy in Vuori joggers to explain that the sun works better if you suffer first.

Now, some of you are saying, “I have children. I have a job. I have aging parents. I have a body that feels like it is being run by a substitute teacher.”

That’s fine. You just need to wake up earlier.

Once awake, begin with box breathing, cold exposure, and the quiet belief that suffering counts as strategy.

Cold plunging is essential because nothing tells a woman’s endocrine system to calm down like sudden aquatic violence before sunrise.

Also, hydrate. But not with water.

Water is municipal hydration. You need venture-backed hydration.

You need electrolytes.

Preferably mine.

My supplement, Lady Salts, was designed specifically for women navigating midlife hormone optimization by a team of researchers I have described as “world-class” but will not be named for legal purposes.

Each packet contains sodium, magnesium, trace minerals, powdered confidence, and a faint aftertaste of financial dependency.

Use code BROEXPLAINS10 for 10% off your first order.

Now, we need to talk about strength training. Women in midlife absolutely need strength training, which is why I, a man who learned this fact during a YouTube interview with another man, will now deliver it as though I descended from the sauna carrying two tablets that said: “respect the kettlebell.”

Lift heavy, recover harder, and never confuse exhaustion with information. Your body is not warning you.

It is negotiating.

And we do not negotiate with inflammation.

Chronic fatigue is really just unprocessed victimhood leaving the body.

Of course, none of this works without sleep. Sleep is the foundation.

If you are not sleeping, simply improve your sleep. Avoid screens, alcohol, and pesky feminine hormones. It is also preferred that you not sleep beside someone who performs a full-body exorcism every time he rolls over.

If night sweats persist, ask yourself: have I invested enough? Not emotionally. Financially. Because having symptoms is one thing. Paying a man to organize them into three tiers is transformation.

And transformation requires proximity, accountability, and a recurring billing relationship.

That’s why I created three simple tiers:

The Awareness Tier — $97
A downloadable PDF titled “Is This Estrogen or Excuses?” which explains that your symptoms are real, but also maybe your fault.

The Protocol Tier — $397
Everything in Awareness, plus 14 videos where I explain your endocrine system using football terminology, military leadership principles, and a dry-erase board I clearly bought for this.

The Inner Circle — $997
Weekly group coaching, private community access, and the opportunity to be misunderstood by me in real time.

🥃 🥃 🥃 🥃 🥃 🥃 🥃 🥃 🥃 🥃 🥃 🥃

Perimenopause is not happening to you. You are allowing it.

I know that sounds harsh, which is also something my wife, whom I love and who continues to choose me for reasons I try not to overanalyze, has gently explained while asking me to become a better listener.

Or something like that.

I don’t really remember.

For too long, women have been told this stage of life is something to survive.

I have one word for that:

You should not merely survive perimenopause.

You should dominate it. Monetize it. Build a personal brand around it.

You should emerge from it leaner, calmer, stronger, fully optimized, and prepared to explain your transformation on a podcast hosted by a man who nods solemnly while staring at your tits.

Because ultimately ladies, this is not about hormones. It is about discipline, preferably yours, monetized by mine.

The female body is not confusing. It is simply under-coached.

So the next time you wake up at 2:47 a.m. drenched in sweat, filled with rage, wondering whether today is the day you finally tell Susan, her Pilates mat, and her entire moisture-wicking worldview to fuck all the way off, remember:

You are not broken.

You are not alone.

You are not crazy.

You’re just one cold plunge, six supplements, two affiliate links, and a total lifestyle overhaul away from becoming the kind of woman a man on the internet can finally understand.

This week’s book recommendation: The Saboteur by Paul Kix.
I loved this book, partly because it reads like a novel, but mostly because it reminded me why I keep choosing nonfiction over fiction. No offense to made-up people, many of whom have been through a lot, but I would almost always rather read about some unbelievable real-life lunatic I somehow never knew existed.

In this case, that lunatic is Robert de La Rochefoucauld, a French aristocrat who became an anti-Nazi commando, which is already a more interesting résumé than anything LinkedIn has ever produced. The book has escapes, disguises, sabotage, courage, Nazis getting what’s coming to them, and the general feeling that history has been hiding better stories than most screenwriters can invent.

It pairs well with this week’s piece because both are about dangerous confidence, though only one kind is historically useful. The difference is that La Rochefoucauld used his energy to fight Nazis, while today’s male wellness influencer uses it to sell creatine to women trying to sleep through a biological coup.

This week on the SilentPunt Podcast, I’m joined by Christopher Warner, author of Playing for Keeps: Legendary Athletes in Combat During World War II. Since this is a July 4th edition of the show, we talk about athletes who did more than simply serve during the war. These were men who had already become champions, stars, record-setters, and future Hall of Famers — and then found themselves in places where the stakes were no longer wins, losses, trophies, or box scores.

Chris and I get into the stranger-than-fiction life of Barney Ross, Bob Feller’s decision to enlist after Pearl Harbor, Tom Harmon’s survival story, Emlen Tunnell’s heroism in the Coast Guard, Yogi Berra’s D-Day experience, and Chuck Bednarik’s time as a B-24 gunner before becoming “Concrete Charlie.” We also talk about Chris’s own background as an athlete, writer, actor, and historian, and why he wanted the book to move across baseball, football, boxing, track, swimming, bobsled, and more.

📚 Chapters

00:00 — Welcome to the July 4th episode
01:13 — Barney Ross: boxer, Marine, war hero, and survivor
06:59 — Jack Ruby, Stallone, and the strange threads of history
08:15 — Who made the book — and why some famous names didn’t
10:07 — Chris Warner’s path from athlete to writer
13:31 — Bob Feller, family history, and the roots of the book
16:59 — Uncle Tom, glider pilots, and family war history
18:34 — Tom Harmon: Heisman winner, plane crashes, and survival
23:48 — Warren Spahn, false praise, and getting war stories right
26:07 — Veterans’ silence and what they carried home
29:22 — Emlen Tunnell: heroism, race, and forgotten greatness
36:52 — Yogi Berra, D-Day, and real pressure
38:25 — Chuck Bednarik, B-24s, and football toughness
43:02 — Where to find Playing for Keeps and final thoughts

Within about five minutes, everyone starts becoming a type. There is the tough kid, the soft kid, the grinder, the head case, the leader, and the problem child. There is the kid with a great motor, the kid with bad body language, the locker-room guy, the cancer, and the coach’s son. Not that kind of coach’s son, the other kind.

The kind who somehow knows the playbook and also needs to be told not to throw his helmet into a water cooler.

The labels are not always wrong, which is what makes them dangerous. Sometimes the tough kid really is tough, the problem child really has made three grown men stand in a hallway with their hands on their hips, and the kid with bad body language really does look like organized football was invented specifically to inconvenience him.

Most labels begin with evidence, but a label can be accurate and still incomplete, and incomplete is where people usually get interesting.

Coaches use labels because coaches have to survive. You’re sorting through teenage bodies being ravaged by more testosterone than Jose Canseco at a Limp Bizkit concert. A label gets you through the day and gives shape to the chaos. It lets a staff talk quickly about a hundred different people without turning every meeting into a Dostoevsky novel fueled by Diet Coke and sunflower seeds.

The danger comes later, when the label stops being a note and starts becoming a verdict. That’s when the word begins doing more work than it’s earned.

Sometimes the lazy kid is overwhelmed. Maybe the tough kid is terrified. What if the selfish kid is trying to survive something nobody else can see? And how about the natural leader who is not leading as much as performing leadership, because everyone decided he was that guy before he had the courage to tell them he wasn’t?

That, I think, is the part we miss. The label itself is not the sin. We all use labels because the world is too large and too complicated to see every person as a blank page every time they walk into the room. Coaches, parents, teachers, bosses, fans…we all use them, often on ourselves first. The problem is when the label becomes a substitute for curiosity.

That’s when “lazy” means we stop asking why. When the label is “tough,” we stop wondering what it costs. And once we decide he is a “problem,” we stop asking what the problem is trying to tell us.

The longer I coached, the more I realized players were not the only ones being reduced that way. Coaches were too. A head coach is not famous in any real sense, especially not at the small-college level. Nobody is following you through an airport. Nobody is pretending not to notice you at a steakhouse. There are no photographers hiding in the shrubbery outside the Division III coaches’ office, unless recruiting has gotten significantly more aggressive since I left.

But it’s still a public-facing job, and public-facing jobs have a way of turning a person into whatever someone else needs him to be. Players see you through playing time. Parents see you through their sons. Administrators see you through wins, complaints, graduation rates, and whether the offensive line coach said something unfortunate near a buffet.

Alumni see you through whatever the program was when they were young, invincible, and apparently running a 4.6.

To some people, you are the guy who changed their kid’s life. To others, you are the idiot standing between their kid and greatness. Sometimes, in my experience, you can be both of those things to the same family.

I once coached two brothers from the same family, a few years apart, and they gave their father two completely different versions of me. The older son had the kind of experience every coach wants a player to have. He fit, he worked, he grew, and his father saw our program as part of the reason. To him, I was the right coach in the right place at the right time.

Then the younger son came along, and it was different almost from the beginning. He was not the same player or the same worker, and for whatever mistakes I made, I could never quite reach him. Eventually, he quit. Somewhere in there, his father’s view of me changed almost completely. Maybe he had fair reasons. I’m sure I gave him a few.

But I had not become an entirely different person. I had the same temperament, same whistle, and probably the same oversized polo. His angle on me had shifted, and once it did, the story changed with it.

That doesn’t make the father evil. It makes him human, which is more uncomfortable because it means I can’t dismiss him as an outlier. I’ve done the same thing, and so have you. We meet people through the part of them that affects us most directly, then we confuse that part for the whole.

The coach becomes my son’s playing time. The teacher becomes my daughter’s grade. The boss becomes the reason my life is harder. Once that happens, curiosity has to fight uphill because the label has already done the work for us.

This is where sports can teach us something, even while it’s busy teaching us that the prevent defense mostly just prevents joy. Football gives us labels because football needs labels, but the scouting report is not the person. It’s the first attempt at understanding the person, and the first attempt is almost never the final truth.

If that can happen to a small-college football coach, imagine what happens when the person being labeled is famous. Most of us get the mercy of being forgotten. We change jobs, move towns, lose weight, gain weight, start therapy, buy reading glasses…become the kind of person who says “I’m not downloading an app to buy a sandwich,” and eventually the old label loosens.

Famous people don’t usually get that luxury. Their first label gets archived, replayed, mocked, and sometimes turned into a costume. Sports are especially good at this because sports have no patience for a complicated interior life. There’s a scoreboard, a highlight package, and a studio show that has to get to the truck commercial before the next game kicks off.

A full person gets edited into something portable; not always false, and often not false at all, but small enough to say quickly and repeat forever. After a while, the shorthand stops feeling like shorthand and starts feeling like the whole story.

This is part of what has pulled me toward John Matuszak, because he is almost too easy to label. He can be introduced as the former No. 1 overall pick who became a Raider wild man, a two-time Super Bowl champion, and, somehow, Sloth from The Goonies. He’s the kind of person whose life can be made to sound like a triumph, a joke, or a warning…depending on who is doing the remembering.

None of those labels are completely wrong, which is what makes them durable. But none of them are enough. The more I’ve researched him, the less interested I’ve become in proving the labels false, because that would be too easy and probably dishonest. The more interesting question is how many different truths had to pile up before one man became that easy to summarize.

I recognized something in him before I fully understood it. Not because our lives had much in common on the surface; he was a famous, enormous, two-time Super Bowl champion…and I once made a living yelling at 18-to-22-year-olds about pad level. My own life has been slightly less cinematic, unless someone wants to greenlight a very tense independent film about Division III recruiting and ballpoint pen thievery.

But I understood something in the search. I understood the feeling of wanting to be accepted without having to keep auditioning for it. I understood wanting someone to see past the useful version of me, the funny version, the tough version, the coach version - whatever version I’d built because it got me through the day - and still choose to stay.

I was lucky. I found that kind of acceptance in marriage. It didn’t fix everything, because marriage isn’t a spa treatment for the soul, and anyone who says otherwise has never argued over the proper way to load a dishwasher.

But it gave me something I had spent a long time needing. It gave me a place where I didn’t have to perform quite so hard, and once I became more comfortable in my own skin, I became more curious. About other people, yes, but maybe more importantly, about myself.

That may be the real thing labels steal from us: not just curiosity about other people, but curiosity about the names we have learned to answer to. Given enough time, a label can become so familiar that it starts to feel like a fact.

We all use labels because we have to. There are too many people, too many stories, too many moving parts, and too many practices where somebody forgot his cleats despite somehow owning fourteen pairs of slides.

We need shortcuts. But every once in a while, it’s worth asking whether the shortcut has become the whole map. Because a label can tell us where the story starts.

But curiosity?

Curiosity is what keeps it from ending there.

QUESTION FOR THE COMMENTS:

What’s a label someone put on you that was partly true, but incomplete? And what did it miss?

This week’s recommendation: Legacy by James Kerr.
As longtime readers know, I generally hate self-help books, mostly because too many of them feel like a LinkedIn post that got into CrossFit1. But Legacy is different. It’s technically about the New Zealand All Blacks, but really it’s about humility, standards, culture, and what a team owes to the people who came before and after it.

It pairs well with this week’s piece because it asks a better question than most leadership books: not “How do I become impressive?” but “What kind of person does this place produce?” Which is less fun to put on a conference lanyard, but probably more useful.

This week on the SilentPunt Podcast, I’m joined by New York Times bestselling author Tim Brown, whose new book, Nolan: The Singular Life of an American Original, is about a lot more than fastballs, strikeouts, and longevity. It’s about myth, toughness, fathers, Texas, aging, and what happens when a man becomes bigger than the facts of his own life.

Tim and I talk about Nolan Ryan’s complicated place in baseball history and why Alvin, Texas, matters so much to the story. We also get into what old-school masculinity gets right and wrong, the sadness of a career ending even after 27 seasons, the Robin Ventura fight, and the Sid Holland story. Finally, we talk about why the Texas Rangers’ 2023 World Series parade still carries Nolan’s shadow, even though he wasn’t really part of it.

📚 Chapters

00:00 — Tim Brown joins the podcast
00:47 — Jim Abbott, Rick Ankiel, Erik Kratz, and Tim’s previous books
07:53 — Why the end of Nolan Ryan’s career was still sad
10:48 — Life without scoreboards
12:44 — Nolan Ryan, John Wayne, and old-school masculinity
15:47 — Why Alvin, Texas became central to the book
17:39 — Biography, mythology, and the Nolan Ryan legend
22:06 — Young athletes, big-city pressure, and social media
24:44 — Texas mythology and why Nolan became “the Texan”
28:39 — The Sid Holland story
31:35 — Robin Ventura, beanball codes, and empathy for both men
35:17 — The Rangers’ 2023 World Series parade and Nolan’s absence
39:39 — Closing thoughts on Nolan’s lasting hold on fans

That blue-and-yellow thing in my hand is the Lilly Pulitzer pen, the same stupid miracle instrument I have already discussed at a length no court would consider reasonable. The important thing here is that, because of the angle, it appears to be under some kind of restraint. Which is unfair. Maverick, unlike the pen, has earned restraints.

My friend Sheila noticed this and commented that it looked like “the pen is chained to the couch like they used to have at the bank,” before immediately accusing herself of being “Abe Lincoln years old.”

First of all, correct. Second of all, I have not stopped thinking about bank pens since. Because what the hell was going on there? At some point in American history, banks decided the public could not be trusted with pens. Not money. Not loans. Not cashier’s checks.

Pens.

A bank is the only place in America where someone will calmly discuss lending you $380,000 for a house while silently communicating, “But don’t get cute with this Bic, dirtbag.”

Bank pens were not placed on counters. They were placed into custody. Which raises the question: how much bank-pen theft was happening in this country?

Was there a wave of ballpoint crime we have refused to confront as a nation? Were men in Members Only jackets casing the lobby, pretending to ask about CD rates while planning to boost a medium-point blue from First National? At some point, a regional manager in 1982 slammed his fist on a conference table and said, “Enough! Chain them all down!”

And everyone just nodded?

Which is insane, because banks are already built around suspicion: vaults, alarms, cameras, silent buttons under desks, tinted windows, and men named Craig who say, “Let me print that for you,” then disappear for twelve minutes.

And still, apparently, the pen was the vulnerability. Also, have you been inside a bank lately?

Not an ATM. Not an app.

A bank.

A full physical bank. With carpet. Desks. Fake plants. A bowl of lollipops no one has touched since the Obama administration.

I went into one recently because we were going on vacation and I needed more cash than the ATM would give me. More importantly, I needed smaller bills, because I was not emotionally prepared to tip a man twenty dollars every time he opened a door. Even though Raul, to be clear, deserved better than being turned into a budgeting problem by a man in flip-flops.

So I walked into the bank.

Maybe banks don’t even chain pens down anymore. I don’t know. The employees looked so startled by my presence that I didn’t want to make things worse by wandering over to the little desk and checking whether the Bic was still under house arrest.

It felt like I had stepped out of a DeLorean holding traveler’s checks. You could almost hear the employees thinking, “Oh my God. One of them came inside.”

And yet they keep building banks.

Everywhere.

New intersection? Bank.

Old restaurant closed? Bank.

Empty lot next to a mattress store? Bank, obviously, because apparently every American suburb is legally required to have three places nobody enters: a bank, a mattress store, and a vitamin shop that feels like a front for elk testosterone.

I don’t understand this. I already have an app, direct deposit1, twelve passwords, and a security question I answered in 2009 with the confidence of a man who thought cargo shorts were formalwear. Another bank is not solving my problem.

What I need is a building where I can walk in and say, “Can someone please explain what the fuck a sump pump is?”

Because I don’t know.

I know I have one. That sentence, however, is the limit of my knowledge.

There is a hole in my basement with machinery in it, and everyone has agreed, through years of Midwestern silence, that I am supposed to understand its purpose. I don’t. But I do know it involves water, electricity, and financial ruin, which I believe was also the original tagline for Waterworld.

A sump pump is one of those homeowner things you are expected to understand the second you own a house. Nobody teaches you. Nobody sits you down and says, “Here is the basement hole that prevents indoor lakefront property most of the time, unless it suddenly decides not to, at which point everyone will pretend this was somehow your responsibility.”

They just hand you the keys and hope shame fills in the gaps. So no, I do not need another bank. I need Dale’s. That’s the store.

Just Dale’s.

Dale’s would not have an app, a rewards program, or a mission statement. It would have a counter, coffee, and a man with forearms who can tell me whether the thing in my basement is supposed to make that sound.

Dale is sixty-two, has owned three trucks, and can identify a problem by listening to it from the driveway. He knows which noises matter and has never described anything as “user-friendly.” He does not need my password.

You walk in and explain the problem.

“My sump pump made a noise.”

Dale nods once.

“What kind of noise?”

“A bad one.”

“They all sound bad.”

“Should I be worried?”

“You got rain comin’?”

“I don’t know.”

“You should know.”

And he’s right. Of course he’s right. Dale is always right.

This is the kind of institution America needs. Not another glass box where four employees sit around guarding a chained pen. I need a place where a man can tell me:

“That’s your garbage disposal.”

“That’s not mold. That’s Wisconsin.”

“Your deck has two summers left, but don’t host graduation on it.”

“No, you don’t need a new furnace. You need to replace the filter, which I can tell from here you haven’t done since Brett Favre was still complicated in a fun way.”

“Stop touching that.”

That last one alone would save American homeowners billions.

The problem with adulthood is not that nobody helps you. It’s that everyone assumes you already know which kind of help you need.

At some point, without ceremony, you are expected to understand escrow, water pressure, tire tread, sump pumps, Roth IRAs, and why the dishwasher smells like a lake. No one teaches you. They just call you a homeowner and let the basement start making noises.

So no, I don’t need another bank, another lobby, or another frosted-glass office where the pen is guarded like it knows who killed Hoffa.

Build Dale’s. Put him behind a counter. Give him coffee. Let him judge me. Chain the pen if you must.

I don’t need another place to hold my money. I need one that can listen to a 10-second video from my basement and tell me whether I’m hearing a normal house noise or the opening notes of financial ruin.