A Fiercer Delight with Matt Gordon

What if the busiest season of your life is also where joy finally shows up? Garrett Holzum has three daughters in volleyball and softball, a wife running her own dietitian practice, and a calendar that sends him through the door at 8 or 9 most nights. The thing that used to feel like a burden is now where he finds the most happiness.

Garrett and Matt kick things off by being 15 yards apart and 33 minutes late, like a scene out of The Office. From there they get into doubleheaders, the car rides where a teenager finally opens up, and why happy hours lost their pull. Garrett also explains HYROX, the fitness race he and his best friend Josh are running in Dallas this November, which has Matt proposing a mystery hot dog eating station.

Matt talks about the tension between ambition and contentment, and why comparison is such a quiet thief of joy. Garrett shares how his wife keeps him grounded by reminding him that the house they live in now was the dream they chased in a Toyota Camry ten years ago. They also talk about gratitude, a Helen Keller line about counting what you've been given, and why hard workouts with no music or TV can be a gift.

Plus: Matt's "be anxious once" trick for the meetings and talks you dread, and what happens when he tries a 10-minute run with everything turned off.

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What if the good stuff is always happening just on the other side of a wall? Matt records this one with a party going on next door, then sits down with Joe Ellison, a self-described problem solver and the most contrarian guy they know at work, to talk about how he learned to let people in.

Joe traces his 100 miles an hour or nap personality back to his grandfather's woodshop and a book of Variety Puzzles. He says no to a small group invite again and again in 2012, finally says yes, and ends up in more than 100 of them. Along the way there is a frozen ball of bees, a saltwater aquarium that flooded his basement three times, a Survivor binge that started with arm surgery, and 12 concerts this year, including AC/DC with the Foo Fighters opening and The Who in St. Louis, solo.

Matt and Joe dig into how perspective shifts between 23 and 45, why the people around you shape you more than you think, and what happens when your kids move out and boredom shows up. They also wrestle with whether serving others is ever truly selfless, using a toddler's dropped shoe at a restaurant as the test case. The through line is that joy tends to live in small places, like a dog in the morning, a walk with your wife, or a loud show you go to alone.

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What happens when the movement you love disappears in one step across a Walgreens parking lot? Lindsay Butcher teaches Jazzercise, loves to run, and spent seven months relearning how to live without either.

Lindsay started Jazzercise as a customer in 2016, became an instructor in 2020, and taught her very first class to an empty room after auditioning by video. Then her Achilles ruptured while she was walking into Walgreens with her daughters. Her husband ran over from the golf course, and two strangers who happened to be nurses helped get her into the car. During recovery she scooted down to her home gym to do core work and shadowboxing on her knees, and she asked her oldest daughter to tell her, "buck up, buttercup."

Matt and Lindsay talk about the hard lesson of letting people help you, and about how much joy those helpers get from doing it. They also get into being an out-loud fan of things, from Taylor Swift (three weeks after surgery, Lindsay traveled to Germany to see her) to Peloton to pretty notebooks. Along the way you'll hear about her daily coffee, journal, and list of five things she's grateful for, and about the Buffalo Wild Wings job that changed how she talks to strangers.

Plus: the one-line idea from a Peloton instructor that Lindsay keeps coming back to, about what we get good at when we practice.

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What does 23 years of marriage still look like when you catch each other smiling from across the room? Ronnie and Liz Lee sit down together, a rare double guest on the show, to talk about what makes their partnership work.

They met as friends at Columbia College, bonded over mahjong and basketball in her dorm room, and reconnected years later at one of Ronnie's East Campus house parties. Liz recommends Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings and Mistborn for weekend reading, while Ronnie has moved on to UFO podcasts and reruns of Alone. They also tell the story of building a backyard volleyball court just so their family of four could play together.

Ronnie and Liz talk about mutual respect, feeling fully accepted, and staying curious with each other instead of trying to change one another. They talk through how joy and happiness do not have to be opposites, and how the small, ordinary parts of a life together (chores, coffee in bed, slow Saturday mornings) matter as much as any big moment.

Plus: Ronnie's daily gratitude practice, and the lesson he learned on hundreds of miles of recruiting road trips with his youngest son.

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What if the smile you give the world could finally match the one you feel inside? That's the question a middle school journal entry planted in Angie Sanders long before she had words for it.

Angie talks with Matt about the children's book "Have You Filled a Bucket Today" and the idea that every person carries an invisible bucket that our words and actions either fill or drain, herself included. She and Matt trade notes on Jonathan Haidt's image of the elephant and its rider, her treadmill habit of watching Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and the ten minute guided dance she does behind a closed door every morning.

Underneath the laughs, this conversation is about staying steady when life tries to knock you off balance. Angie and Matt dig into humility, choosing curiosity over assumption with the people closest to you, and the strange habit we all have of cutting out the very things that help us most the moment life gets hard.

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What does it look like to live a full, unhurried life, and to keep planting trees you will never sit under the shade of? Wendell Berry, the farmer, novelist, and poet, died this year at 92, and Matt brings back returning guest Brandon Hoops for a special tribute episode.

Brandon first found Wendell Berry through a college roommate and never stopped reading, he now owns more books by Wendell Berry than by any other author. He talks about growing up on Nebraska farmland with his grandfather, how Wendell Berry captured that same slow, rooted life in novels like Jayber Crow, Hannah Coulter, and The Memory of Old Jack, and the time he mailed Wendell Berry a book to sign as a wedding gift for a friend.

Together Matt and Brandon dig into what made Wendell Berry different, a man who turned down literary fame in New York for sixty years on a Kentucky farm, wrote about "membership" and community instead of individualism, and treated slowing down as a discipline rather than an accident. They talk about his fiction, his Sunday walking poems, and the idea of practicing resurrection, planting something good even when you will never see it grow.

Plus: what Wendell Berry said about his own faith when a reporter pushed him for a final word of wisdom.

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What does it take to find real joy in a Wendy's parking lot in Lebanon, Missouri? For Cole Stoecklein, it started as a lucky ritual on drives to Mizzou and turned into something closer to superstition.

Cole talks about growing up between Minneapolis and Bentonville, Arkansas, and how being one of the smallest kids in his class pushed him toward golf, a sport he first learned alongside his dad's friends and later fell back in love with at Mizzou. Along the way is the story of that Wendy's, the cherry vanilla Dr Pepper that became part of the ritual, and how his wife Morgan finally called an end to it.

Matt and Cole dig into what happens when something you love turns into an obligation, and how small, ordinary things can carry real weight and meaning. They also talk through what Cole calls a joy gallery, a practice for holding onto gratitude and good memories, from his wedding day to watching his son George grow up.

Plus: Cole shares an idea he is still working through, a way of finding meaning in the hardest seasons of life, not just the easy ones.

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What do you do when you realize you have lost eight or ten hours to your phone in a single day? Nissi Kunjummen found out at a picnic table with friends, and the number staring back at her started something she is still working through.

Nissi grew up first generation American, with family roots in Kerala, India, where she still goes back every few years to sit with her grandparents and watch cricket. She talks about leaving home for the University of Missouri, using Instagram as a kind of visual journal since she was twenty, and how AI is reshaping the way she and Matt both think about creativity. These days she is also memorizing lines every night as the foreman in a local production of 12 Angry Jurors.

Matt and Nissi dig into why trying new things gets harder as we get older, even when nothing about our identity requires us to stop. There is something in here about feedback, about what people really mean when they say a talk ran too long, and about learning to feel your emotions instead of numbing out to avoid them.

Plus: the note from her director that made Nissi realize something in her performance had finally clicked.

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What if happiness wasn't a mood but a routine? Joe Ferling joins Matt to unpack the six daily disciplines that keep him grounded, and why joy only shows up for people who practice noticing it.

Joe walks through his morning routine: journaling, meditation, prayer, a daily walk, reading, and intentional learning. He talks about quitting social media back in college, the "what else" technique he learned from his boss to get past surface level conversations, and the calendar reminder he set every other Thursday just to appreciate his wife. He also shares how Kobe Bryant's approach to learning from wins, not just losses, changed how he reflects on his own life.

Matt and Joe get into why curiosity might be the most undervalued skill we have, how the internet trains us to have opinions before we have information, and why keeping some disciplines private protects them from turning into performance. It's a conversation about building a life on purpose, one small habit at a time.

Plus: the story behind why Joe's kids yell "Kobe!" when they take a shot, and it has nothing to do with Kobe Bryant.

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Is it possible to spend hours fly fishing and catch nothing, and still call it one of the best days you've had? Nate Johnson thinks so, and he explains why the process matters more than the outcome.

Nate grew up in Cupertino during the early days of Silicon Valley, the son of Nebraska farm kids whose family found their way west when Ford laid his father off in the 1970s. He talks about fly fishing at Bennett Springs, working through a jigsaw puzzle on his dining room table, losing his dad in the crowd at a Dave Matthews concert only to find him four feet from the stage, and coaching his daughter's softball team. He and Matt also compare notes on being introverts who still crave connection, and on raising three strong willed daughters.

Nate's throughline is simple: he finds more joy in the process than the result, whether that is practicing guitar, reading the water on a river, or watching a teammate grow over a season. He talks about the shift from chasing career  toward chasing legacy, and how the people around him have become his real measure of a good life.

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