The Kyle Thiermann Show

Adam Delehanty is the founder of Ghost, a ghostwriting agency that helps business leaders find the language their ideas deserve. He started his career in politics, learning how the right words can move people to action. Since then, he’s spent a decade partnering with some of the most brilliant minds in technology and culture, including Duolingo, Hinge, GLG, and R/GA. He's based in New York, holds a B.A. in English from Brown and an MBA from Columbia, and his background is a mix of go-to-market strategy, brand storytelling, and copywriting. Ghost is best known for culture books: long-form artifacts that capture how the most innovative organizations think. As Justin McCleod, Founder & CEO, Hinge said, “Adam and his team changed Hinge forever. They helped us nail our values and transform our story into a book that defines our culture to this day.”If you dig this podcast, will you please leave a short review on Apple Podcasts? It takes less than 60 seconds and makes a difference when I drop to my knees and beg hard-to-get guests on the show. I read them all. You can watch this podcast on my YouTube channel and join my newsletter on Substack. It’s glorious. My debut book, ONE LAST QUESTION BEFORE YOU GO, is available to order today.Kyle Thiermann is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I also take payment in surf wax. Get full access to Kyle Thiermann at thiermann.substack.com/subscribe

Forest Troop is a new story I wrote for Adventure Journal about a trip I took to remote British Columbia with a group of female pro surfers. The editor, Stephen Casimiro, kindly let me read the story to my podcast audience here. Adventure Journal is a quarterly print magazine with the weight and quality of a coffee table book. The sensibility is literary and unhurried, with long-form essays and photography on skiing, climbing, surfing, overlanding, and the psychology of why people chase adventure at all. Regular contributors include Terry Tempest Williams, Robert Macfarlane, Peter Heller, Chris Burkard, and David Roberts. You can subscribe to Adventure Journal here. You won’t regret it. If you dig this podcast, will you please leave a short review on Apple Podcasts? It takes less than 60 seconds and makes a difference when I drop to my knees and beg hard-to-get guests on the show. I read them all. You can watch this podcast on my YouTube channel and join my newsletter on Substack. It’s glorious. My debut book, ONE LAST QUESTION BEFORE YOU GO, is available to order today.Kyle Thiermann is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I also take payment in surf wax. Get full access to Kyle Thiermann at thiermann.substack.com/subscribe

Christopher Ryan, psychologist and author of Sex at Dawn and Civilized to Death, is a wandering storyteller and long-form interviewer. They riff on shamelessness and building courage, digital connection as social junk food, fragility among young men, daily practices to feel alive, and why passion, competence, and saying no shape a meaningful life.

Steve Hawk is a longtime surf and outdoor journalist, former editor of Surfer magazine, Sierra, and Stanford Business magazines. His first novel, Nearshore, is out today. Described as a churning mix of literary suspense and coastal noir, where the clash between land and sea unearths Silicon Valley’s darkest secret, the book is both a window into NorCal’s insular surf culture as well as the plausible threat of a terrorist attack on San Francisco. Hawk will be doing a bunch of book events in the coming months where you can go see him in person, including Bookshop Santa Cruz on August 19th. In this podcast, we explore Hawk’s writing process, his jump from non-fiction to fiction, and how a health scare taught him the new meaning of a deadline. If you dig this podcast, will you please leave a short review on Apple Podcasts? It takes less than 60 seconds and makes a difference when I drop to my knees and beg hard-to-get guests on the show. I read them all. You can watch this podcast on my YouTube channel and join my newsletter on Substack. It’s glorious. My first book, ONE LAST QUESTION BEFORE YOU GO, is available to order today. Get full access to Kyle Thiermann at thiermann.substack.com/subscribe

Mark Sponsler grew up on an avocado farm outside Miami. One day an avocado ricocheted off his window shutters during a storm, and something clicked. He’s been obsessed with weather ever since. He graduated from Rollins College in 1980 with a degree in Business Administration, then spent years managing software projects for companies like Rockwell International and Lockheed-Martin. Not exactly the resume you’d expect from the guy who predicts Mavericks swells down to the hour. In 1998, Mark launched Stormsurf. It started as an email thread between local surfers. Now it’s the source big-wave surfers actually trust. Stormsurf has consulted on IMAX films, Nightline, 48 Hours, and was the lead forecasting source for the movie Chasing Mavericks. If you dig this podcast, will you please leave a short review on Apple Podcasts? It takes less than 60 seconds and makes a difference when I drop to my knees and beg hard-to-get guests on the show. I read them all. You can watch this podcast on my YouTube channel and join my newsletter on Substack. It’s glorious. My first book, ONE LAST QUESTION BEFORE YOU GO, is available to order today. Get full access to Kyle Thiermann at thiermann.substack.com/subscribe

Adam Skolnick, an award-winning journalist and author known for adventure sports reporting and books like One Breath and American Tiger, walks through how to take creative projects from spark to finish. He talks about spotting ideas you can’t ignore. He shares research tricks, daily writing hacks, handling doubt and rewrites, and when to seek editors or agents.

Amy Baldwin, somatic sex and relationship coach and Shameless Sex podcast host, explores pleasure-focused, shame-free approaches to intimacy. They talk sobriety’s effects on presence, how desire is about feeling wanted, playfulness and consent, sex-party culture, mature masculinity, and Amy’s six-week Intimacy Rewired course.

Leor Weiss has been training jiu jitsu since 2007, when, at eighteen, he walked into a gym and began what would become a near two-decade education in controlled violence. He now holds a second-degree black belt under Daniel Gracie and teaches at the Renzo Gracie Academy in Brooklyn. What distinguishes Weiss from the more monastic practitioners of his discipline is the breadth of his curiosity. He has traveled to Japan not for tournaments but for forests. He is devoted to the films of David Lynch. He is drawn, above all, to people whose circumstances bear no resemblance to his own. In this wide-ranging podcast, we talked about Leor’s arc from non-athletic gamer to black belt, his knack for teaching, and the crossover between jiu jitsu and surfing. I said it in the podcast and I’ll say it again: Dude’s got the gift of gab.If you dig this podcast, will you please leave a short review on Apple Podcasts? It takes less than 60 seconds and makes a difference when I drop to my knees and beg hard-to-get guests on the show. I read them all. You can watch this podcast on my YouTube channel and join my newsletter on Substack. It’s glorious. My first book, ONE LAST QUESTION BEFORE YOU GO, is available to order today. Get full access to Kyle Thiermann at thiermann.substack.com/subscribe

Michael Chernow, NYC restaurateur and entrepreneur who co-founded The Meatball Shop and launched Seamore’s, shares stories about growing from chef to manager. He talks about negotiating deals, building a personal brand and investing via content. He explains the surprising power and etiquette of asking for help, plus how family, sobriety, and priorities shaped his approach.

A comedian who found his footing at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York, where he spent the better part of a decade as a house writer and performer, Matthew Starr belongs to a generation of entertainers who were formed by the rigors of institutional improv and then quietly outgrew the institution. His most recent project is The Best Man’s Ghostwriter, an Audible Original he created, wrote, and directed, featuring a cast that includes Glen Powell, Nicholas Braun, Ashley Park, and D’Arcy Carden. He has also, since 2016, run Write Your Pilot!, a workshop for writers attempting their first television pilot. In this conversation, we talked about the art of improv, writing for audio narrative, and navigating the shifting sands of screenwriting in the Hollywood industry. Sharp thinker. Good dude. Easy convo.If you dig this podcast, will you please leave a short review on Apple Podcasts? It takes less than 60 seconds and makes a difference when I drop to my knees and beg hard-to-get guests on the show. I read them all. You can watch this podcast on my YouTube channel and join my newsletter on Substack. It’s glorious. My first book, ONE LAST QUESTION BEFORE YOU GO, is available to order today. Get full access to Kyle Thiermann at thiermann.substack.com/subscribe