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.

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.

Christopher Ryan, Ph.D is a big thinker buddy of mine who is a van lifer, wisdom dispenser, troublemaker, host of the podcast Tangentially Speaking, and co-author of Sex at Dawn and Civilized to Death. Even before co-authoring the New York Times best-seller, Chris was on a wild ride. After receiving a BA in English and American literature in 1984, he spent the next two decades traveling around the world, pausing in unexpected places to work at decidedly odd jobs (e.g., gutting salmon in Alaska, teaching English to prostitutes in Bangkok and self-defense to land-reform activists in Mexico, managing commercial real estate in New York’s Diamond District, helping Spanish physicians publish their research). In his mid-30s, Chris decided to pursue doctoral studies in Psychology. Drawing upon his multi-cultural experience, Chris’ research focused on distinguishing the human from the cultural, first by focusing on shamanism and ethnobotany—studying how various societies interact with altered states of consciousness and the sacred plants that provoke them—and later, by looking at similarly diverse cultural perspectives on sexuality.

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.

This is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Or just drop a coin in a fountain and wish me one year of good luck.

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.

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.

Hello friends, enemies, and AI spam robots. We did one of our first-ever live podcast events at The Lighthouse in Venice, California, a swanky campus for creators where extravagant secret handshakes surely exist. The podcast focused on how to write a book specifically, but could be applied to any creative project generally. I had a great time talking in front of a live audience (probably because I’m the youngest of five and crave attention), and I look forward to doing more. For the three percent who don’t know, Adam Skolnick is an award-winning independent journalist and author covering adventure sports, environmental issues, travel and human rights for The New York Times, Outside, Playboy and Lonely Planet. He is the author of One Breath, the ghost writer and narrator of David Goggins’ smash hit memoir and audiobook Can’t Hurt Me, and most recently his debut novel, American Tiger, a story about an escaped tiger in the LA area. Adam and I do ocean swims together. Sometimes I let him win.

This podcast is in partnership with The Waking Up App. Use this link for $30 bucks off the most profound meditation course I’ve ever come across.

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.

This episode is with Amy Baldwin, a Somatic Sex and Relationship Coach (trained in the Somatica® Method), Certified Sex Educator, and host of the Shameless Sex podcast. Amy has a passion for promoting shame-free, pleasure-focused sexuality education while emphasizing the deep emotional and energetic forces behind great sex and intimate connection, offering everything from how-to workshops to erotic empowerment retreats. She’s a fan favorite of this show and has been on many a time. Her new course, Intimacy Rewired, is available for pre-signup now.

This podcast is in a new partnership with The Waking Up App. Use this link for $30 bucks off the most profound meditation course I’ve ever come across.

Lastly, I am hosting a live podcast with author Adam Skolnick tonight (6/3) at The Lighthouse in Venice, CA. Come by if you want to hear two bookish people talk about how to take a project from conception to completion. Event details here.

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.

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.

Michael Chernow is a New York City restaurateur, entrepreneur, and television host who has spent over two decades building one of the more recognizable names in the city's food scene. He started in restaurants at thirteen, worked his way up through the ranks as a bartender and bar manager at Frank in the East Village, and earned his degrees in Culinary Arts and Restaurant Management from the French Culinary Institute. In 2010, he co-founded The Meatball Shop with his childhood best friend, a concept that grew into a six-location empire complete with a critically acclaimed cookbook and one of the more inventive beverage programs in the city. In 2015, he launched Seamore's, a casual seafood restaurant built around fresh, sustainably sourced fish. He has since expanded into wellness with his WellWell drink brand and television with A&E's Food Porn. Having now sold a number of businesses, Michael Chernow is a seasoned businessman and is the host of the Kreatures of Habit Podcast. In this episode, we focused on Michael’s growth trajectory from individual contributor to manager of large teams, how he negotiates deals with brands, and the power of asking for help.

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.

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.