Life can change in an instant. For Mark Marrott, that moment came when he suffered a devastating 40-foot fall in 2008. The severity of the accident led to multiple surgeries and left him wheelchair-bound for a significant time. Doctors even discussed the possibility of leg amputation. Yet, against all odds and a 97% fatality rate, Mark's story is one of incredible resilience, determination, and the refusal to let his inner critic dictate his limits. Mark’s journey over the pa

Randy Bishop told me he'd wear his heart down to his elbow. Just not all the way down the sleeve. He spent twenty years in ministry. He was the music guy. He was the one standing up at the front, holding things together, speaking about community and honesty and faith. And inside, he was falling apart in ways he couldn't say out loud. Not to his congregation. Not to the men around him. Not really to himself. Then one Easter Sunday in 2025, he woke up at four in the morning

I've been doing KneeToKnee long enough now that I have a library of conversations I keep going back to. Not because they were the most polished or the most technically interesting. Because something in them has stayed with me. This episode started as an experiment. Instead of a new guest, I went back through four of those conversations and pulled the moments that made me stop. The moments I've thought about since. I wanted to see if there was a common thread. There was. A

I've had a lot of conversations on KneeToKnee. This is one that caused me to pause. Andrew went through eight treatment programs before he found anything that actually worked. He was arrested for the first time his junior year of high school. He spent years in and out of the legal system. And at his last incarceration, he wrote a memoir, finished it five minutes before he walked out the door, and came home a different person. The Seeds That Change Everything One of the f

I've had a lot of conversations on KneeToKnee. Most of them leave me thinking. This one with StreTch Rayner left me feeling like I needed to get right to the gym. StreTch is a personal trainer and health coach based in Australia. He's the kind of guy who walked away from a corporate computer science career because it felt hollow, built a gym in London with over 300 members, genuinely loved his work, and then ran himself straight into the ground doing it. Chest pain. Anxiety

When Brad Barton told me I had to have his wife Melissa on the show, I knew it was going to be a different kind of episode. Melissa is a therapist, a couples therapist, and yes, a sex therapist. And I told her right at the top of the episode, we are going to say that out loud and not flinch. But here is the thing. This conversation ended up being about something that goes way deeper than the clinical category she works in. It was really about a question that sits underneath

Before Eric Robinson and I even hit record, I already knew this episode was going to be something different. We got on a pre-call to go over a few things and ended up talking for a solid fifteen minutes about marathons, back injuries, and the weird ways men find ways to keep pushing even when the thing they used to do is gone. That right there told me a lot. Eric's story doesn't follow the usual path. He started as a pastor, leading a church specifically built for people wh

I've been doing this podcast long enough to know when a conversation is going to stay with me. Darren Parry was one of those. Darren is the former chairman of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation. He's an educator at Utah State University, an author, and the man who finished a book his grandmother started before she passed. That book tells the story of the Bear River Massacre, the largest massacre of Native Americans in U.S. history, which happened on January 29, 18

I've had a lot of guests on KneeToKnee. Each one brings something that sticks with me. But when I finished my prep for my conversation with JD Tremblay, I sat back and thought, "Okay. This one's different." JD is one of only three people on earth who have completed the Epic Deca, ten Iron Man-distance triathlons over ten days on six different Hawaiian islands. For context, each Iron Man is 140.6 miles of swimming, biking, and running. Multiply that by ten, throw in flights

Ryan Reichert looked the part. Lieutenant Colonel. Fortune 500 job. Multi-six-figure salary. From the outside, the transition out of the military looked like a success story in progress. Inside, he was the loneliest he'd ever been. That's the thing about identity crises. They don't announce themselves. They just quietly take pieces of you until one day you look in the mirror and don't recognize who's looking back. Ryan and I talked about this on a Saturday morning, both of us

F or a big chunk of my life, I had a nagging feeling that sometimes I just didn't work the way other people did. Social situations that other guys seemed to cruise through would leave me needing to recharge. I'd prep for a speech by scripting the whole thing out, word for word, and reading it a dozen times — while other people walked up with three bullet points and owned the room. I'd check out of a party at 11:15 while everyone else was just kept cruising. I'm an introvert

I have done quite a episodes of KneeToKnee at this point, and every now and then one of them catches me off guard in the best possible way. This was that episode. Brad Zeeman and I go back several years. We worked together at a staffing company that eventually became a software company, and I was famously the guy breaking the software on a regular basis while Brad was the one patiently walking me and everyone else through it. Again. Every time. With the same level of calm and

When our previous guest on KneeToKnee, Doug Nielsen told me I had to get Kurt Francom on the podcast, I didn't know exactly what to expect. I knew the name. I'd heard of Leading Saints. But what I didn't anticipate was walking away from a 22-minute conversation with my brain spinning in all the right directions. Kurt is the founder of the Leading Saints podcast — over 20 million downloads, which in the podcasting world is a pretty significant number — and more recently a bo

I've said more than once on this show that the conversations I didn't know I needed are usually the ones that stick the longest. This was one of those. Kathy Kinghorn runs Therapy Utah, and she came on to the podcast at the recommendation of her son Jeff, who has been telling me for a while that I needed to sit down with her. Jeff doesn't oversell things, so I took that seriously. What I didn't anticipate was how directly the conversation would land for the kind of man this

When I first heard the phrase 'warrior heart,' something in me perked up. Not because I'm particularly warlike, but because somewhere in the back of my mind I think I've always known that the life I'm living has to mean more than just getting through the day. That's exactly what my conversation with Doug Nielsen cracked open for me. Doug is a certified speaking professional, a licensed psychotherapist, and the co-founder of Warrior Heart — a men's retreat program inspired

There are some conversations that remind you why staying in touch with the right people actually matters. My recent episode with Marshall Murdock was exactly that kind of conversation. Marshall is a life flight helicopter pilot based out of Idaho, a longtime friend, and one of those people I genuinely mean it when I say I should call more often. We first met somewhere around 30 years ago, which is a little disorienting to say out loud. We’ve shared everything from church miss

I've had a lot of great conversations on KneeToKnee, but every now and then someone comes in and says something that just settles into you. That happened with Lou Ogunyemi. Lou — whose full name is Olaolu Ogunyemi — is a U.S. Marine officer, an award-winning author, and the founder of Parent Child Connect. He also happens to be one of the most thoughtful guys I've talked to about what it really means to lead your family and your team. I was honestly looking forward to this on

I've been in a lot of rooms. Conference rooms, auditoriums, corporate training spaces, and everything in between. I've led workshops, given keynotes, and sat knee to knee with some remarkable people. But my conversation with Rebecca Courtney this week genuinely shifted something for me. Rebecca is a Facilitation Coach at AJ & Smart — a Berlin-based company founded by her brother Jonathan Courtney that specializes in workshop design, facilitation training, and building commu

I've had a lot of great conversations on KneeToKnee, but every once in a while someone sits down with me and I walk away genuinely different. That's what happened when Brad Barton joined me. I've known Brad for close to 20 years. We crossed paths through the National Speakers Association, and I'd always known he was an exceptional human being. But sitting down with him on the podcast — really talking — reminded me why I started this show in the first place. Brad grew up o

I know how that sounds. Trust me. When I started putting this episode together, my mom summed it up best. I was telling her about the topic — how to support an introvert spouse — and she didn't miss a beat. Her response was something like, "Mark, we all already knew you were one." Fair. But here's the thing: even though I'd known it for years, I hadn't truly understood what it meant until I dug into the science. And once I did, things clicked into place — about myself, about