At Least It'll Be a Good Story with Peter von Kahle

Louis Fabrizi moved to Nashville at 19 with four guitars, a suitcase, and a plan to become a touring musician. It worked — right up until the day he got an email from Capitol Records in a P.F. Chang's parking lot and simply never went back. Not even to return the uniform.

Louis is one of my oldest friends — we met at a bus stop in eighth grade — and his story has more chapters than most: the DIY tour he booked from a Caribou Coffee at 18, the Marine Corps phase ("let's go diffuse bombs"), calling his mom from a Nashville Walmart to ask where all the cowboys were, the Brad Paisley email that came one week too late, and asking his future wife out three times before Toronto changed everything.

Then it gets real: the darkest season of his life (it started with a positive pregnancy test), the moment his wife helped him off the floor, and how a guy who plans everything ended up moving to the middle of nowhere, Texas, to build a house with his own hands — having never built one — and accidentally waking up a custom home builder.

There's also a thunderstorm, a loose railing I will never let him forget, and crab cakes with Bob Goff.

Recorded on take two, because the first three hours were just us chit-chatting. We think this one's better. You'll never know.

Cali Ryan was a dental hygienist and mom of four who posted online for ten years with nothing to show for it — then one 20-second video about finding out she was having twins went viral, and now she's an accidental influencer with a manager and a lot of twin moms in her DMs. Her husband's reaction to the twin scan is the title of this episode.

Cali and I grew up in the same church, were in show choir together (we were the stars), and I filmed her wedding nine years ago after nearly being diverted to Venezuela. We get into: the professional case for flossing, told through an analogy I'll never recover from. The witching hour that starts at 6:30 a.m. Four girls, one vasectomy, and a daughter who wants to be called Snake Bite. Crying in the Joanna Gaines section of Target. Instagram jail (I was told my behavior was "too erratic and out of control"). The hard first year of marriage and the changes that rewrote everything. And the question Cali's still answering: what do you call yourself when the identity keeps changing?

Stick around after the outro music for the lollipop incident, Texas Roadhouse fresh off a C-section, and the thing I learned from YouTube the day my first son was born.

Still not sponsored by Sonicare.

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Sam Pyo spent a flight from Athens to Rome (with Peter present) convinced the man behind him was a terrorist. I told him he wasn't. Then Italian authorities arrested the guy in the Rome airport, in front of both of us, holding his mug shot on a piece of paper.

We recorded this in a trailer in the woods in Grayling, Michigan, and it's mostly about a documentary shoot in Greece where nothing turned out to be what it looked like. Sam and I filmed the Footsteps of Paul documentary with Lon Solomon across Greece, Turkey, and Rome. Along the way we met a man named Paris who told us he was one of the most successful singers in all of Greece and who now runs a beach hut that three people know about. We met a driver named George — the second George — who takes you to a gas station, doesn't buy you coffee, and wants to talk to you about Monopoly and Bitcoin. We spent a night in Thessaloniki marveling at how much fun Greeks are, right up until the Greeks started chanting for the Florida Gators.

Also in here: an airport where I had no tickets, a producer who limited me to three questions for the entire ten-day trip, an American flag suitcase, a game of Subway Surfers, and Sam standing at a urinal in Rome wondering whether God was calling him to be a hero.

Sam has never listened to a podcast. Seemed like the right guest.

Tom Pounder was Peter's youth pastor at Cedar Run Community Church starting in 2003. He's still one of Peter's closest friends, which is what this episode is actually about — when did the kid you were trying to keep out of trouble become the friend you grab sushi with every month?

Tom and Peter go deep on the Seinfeld-inspired driving range break-in (which Tom, it turns out, worked at), the infamous Boston mission trip Peter wasn't on but everyone won't stop talking about, the night they got a Christian band to play a New Year's Eve party that turned into weeping worship, and the time someone called the church to try to get Tom fired. Tom shares his story too — how a mission trip to Alabama building a barn for abused and abandoned teenage girls changed his life, why he wasn't smart enough to be a computer major, what it was like being a divorced pastor with four young daughters, and what cleaning out his late dad's house in Gettysburg taught him about his brothers.

Also discussed: whether Brady Shearer is Canadian, why a church stage somewhere in Peter was lucky enough to grow up with in his youth group.

Huge in Nairobi, as always.

Episode 8.

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Adam Henry had 31 jobs before he turned 26. Now he's a sheriff's deputy training new recruits and he's hoping this one sticks.

Adam is a friend from book club. We've known each other for years and I still learned more about him in this conversation than I had in all that time combined. We get into all of it - the Christmas tree farm, the overnight call center, getting his tie cut in half on his first car sale, going to kindergarten twice ("I was highly successful twice"), and somehow ending up wrestling a drunk driver awake in his own barn at 6 in the morning.

Along the way there's a lot: his dad fighting a fisher cat at midnight with a grilled cheese in his hand, my chicken farming, a turkey that faked her own death, a $10 mini horse Adam paid for on Venmo, the police academy that has a few fake stores, and a long debate about how each of us would want to be found dead in a way that would keep police guessing for decades. Mine involves a pie. His involves a Christmas tree box.

Also: how Adam built a men's book club through Craigslist ads, used bookstore solicitation, and a Twitch Discord. The 12 Days of Christmas as a labor analysis. And the Backstreet Boys vs. 98 Degrees ad-lib debate that closes the episode.

Have a listen. And shoutout to Nairobi.

Peter's little sister Claire is a licensed therapist — which means this episode was always going to turn into a session. Within the first two minutes, they're debating whether an Instagram therapist named Shannon knows what her handle looks like to the rest of the internet. From there it's childhood chaos (the Von Kahle kids once taped every doorway in the house and called it Tape Day), their dad's emoji-only birthday texts, and the question Peter probably should've thought harder about before asking on mic: "What is a therapist?"

Claire explains therapy speak, calls Peter a suppressor to his face, and shares the story of walking into her own therapy session already crying and telling her therapist "I'm fine." Peter opens up about his five-year-old son Royal's anxiety — including the lunch where Royal looked up from his pizza and asked, "Hey, if mama dies, I don't need to go to school anymore, right?"

They also cover EMDR (invented by a woman watching birds in Central Park — "we're making it all up, but it works"), IFS and parts work, the hermit crab graveyard, why therapists are always working themselves out of a job, and the tension between faith and feelings. Peter was prom king. Claire was better at basketball. They end on a conversation about names that's quieter and more honest than either of them expected.

Melanie Tatum was a Baltimore Ravens cheerleader - not once, but twice - and she never tells anyone. I'm not even sure how I found out about it.

She was a gymnast her whole life who thought she had no chance of making an NFL cheerleading roster but wanted to give it a try. So she taught herself to fly. Went to grad school. Then she taught herself to dance. And she made the cheer team both times on her first try.

This episode is a conversation about a world most people know nothing about: what NFL cheerleading actually looks like from the inside. Melanie talks about the tryout process — hundreds of people show up, and at the end they send you down a hallway where your number is either on the wall or it's not. She talks about game day — rolling a full-size suitcase through Baltimore from Fed Hill in matching outfits six hours before kickoff, getting ready in a locker room with metal lockers and a laminated name tag on a magnet to make it feel homey. She talks about the pay, the rules (if a player gets on your elevator, you get off), and why she has a take on the cheerleader pay debate that might surprise you.

Then the conversation goes somewhere neither of us planned. Melanie talks about losing a pregnancy, losing her spot on the team, and trying to figure out what God was doing in all of it. It's honest and real and it's the heart of the episode.

We also talk about Baltimore, doing the Ray Lewis dance at her wedding, high school prom kings and homecoming court, and an unexpected shoutout to Switchfoot.

This is At Least It'll Be a Good Story.

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A Job with Less Stress with Eric Robinson

Eric Robinson spent 12 years in Christian ministry — youth pastor, associate pastor, church planter — before telling his wife he needed a job with less stress. So he joined the FBI. For 24 years, Eric worked drug cartels in Chicago, SWAT operations across the Midwest, crimes against children, white collar fraud, counter-terrorism, and everything in between. He's now retired and releasing a book called Irreverend.

In this conversation, Eric talks about what it's like to bust down a door as an FBI breacher ("the most important and least valuable person on the SWAT team"), how pastoral skills translated to getting confessions out of criminals, a surreptitious search warrant where his team stole a million dollars of cocaine from a drug supplier's apartment, a white collar case involving a bond supposedly worth a quadrillion dollars, preventing mass shootings, the reality of working crimes against children, and a story so disturbing that even seasoned agents couldn't top it.

He also weighs in on the Nancy Guthrie case, explains how people actually end up on the FBI's radar, and reveals what retirement looks like — obviously, it involves the Milwaukee Brewers and a career in senior modeling.

Fair warning: there's one story in this episode that earns its content advisory. You'll know it when you hear it.

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Paul Granger hasn't received a paycheck since 2018. He has a wife, kids, a mortgage, and a 1905 house that was the least energy efficient thing one inspector had ever seen — and he does full-time volunteer ministry with no salary. Peter sits down with Paul to find out how that actually works, and some of the answers don't have explanations.

They get into the stories behind God's creative provision — $100,000 in home repairs through community programs nobody else would apply for, unsolicited checks that showed up in the mail, and a wedding client who emailed eight years late to pay an old invoice right when Peter needed it most. Peter tells the story of dodging the Brazilian Navy up a creek in the Amazon and stumbling into a woman who'd been praying for five years for someone to stop. Paul shares what it was like when God asked him if he'd be willing to do something for decades, have nobody notice, die looking like a fool, and hear "well done" on the other side.

This one goes deeper into faith than the first two episodes. If that's your thing, you're going to love it.

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Website: https://www.wheredidyouseegod.com

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Peter sits down with longtime friend Ryan Day — writer, sports journalist, and the man who got Flagler College on Facebook. They cover Ryan's journey from starting a Capitals Twitter account to writing for SB Nation's Big Cat Country, the time NFL security called him about a tweet, how getting suspended in 10th grade turned him into a drummer, spending a week living homeless for a college journalism piece, the night they should have gone to Manhattan, and a Costco receipt that may have been typed up in Microsoft Word. Plus: a Baltimore pop quiz nobody asked for.