Fight-or-Fl1ght

Satchel B. Moore does not sell jeans. He sells time. In a small shop in St. Paul called Science and Kindness, he repairs denim on machines that are eighty, maybe a hundred years old. They do not work great. They work the way they used to work, and that is the entire point. This conversation is about denimology, the nearly lost American practice of reading raw selvedge denim like a diary. A crease...

Cancer doesn't knock. It's not a companion, until it is. Who thinks that way? This episode is an exploration of the vulgarities and vagaries of unknowing. Will there be a tomorrow? Who cares for my loved ones if not me? Is faith a load-bearing support, even for one who lost the path? "This too shall pass" — not as finality. Not an epitaph. A verb, for the life still to be lived....

Twenty years inside the machine. New Balance. PUMA. K-Swiss. Kering. Pre-IPO diligence on Canada Goose and Moncler before those names meant what they mean today. A seat at every table that mattered. Then a creative yearning. A soulful need to inform, to build, to author something entirely his own. Call it misalignment. Call it vision. A restlessness that operational success could not quiet. Starti...

Robert Bradshaw stands where power meets fragility. He does not provide answers. He creates the conditions for them. He has spent years navigating the moral complexity of the military, the trauma of special operations, and the cold architecture of political leadership. The human soul fractures when it is stretched across these environments. Empathy is the casualty when the mission demands total de...

He ran 500 missions. Nobody asked him who he was. Diego Ugalde gave fifteen years to Naval Special Warfare. Three wars. NATO partnerships. Hundreds of lives changed by the decisions he made in the dark. And when he walked away from all of it, he looked back at the whole thing: realized he had been a stranger to himself. This is NOT a war story. It IS what happens after. What it costs to give every...

Some creatives iterate. The great ones innovate. So what's the difference? Is it mandate? Short-term profit grabs versus building something that lasts? Is it the people — designers who move culture versus those who mine it for trend cycles and move on? Kevin Beard has lived both sides. Four design careers. Olympic medals won in shoes he designed. A motorsports footwear brand built from nothing...

WHO SELF FUNDS, PRODUCES, AND OPENS A BRICK AND MORTAR RETAIL STORE and expects to make money in today's market? Naive? Or transformative? You decide. Myles sits back down with Erick DeLeon, founder of Of The Lion in South Minneapolis. Erick is betting that authenticity, community, and curation will always beat convenience: You might just agree. They dig into the seismic shifts breaking retail...

S2E23 | He Came Home From Vietnam. Nobody Asked If He Was Okay | Keith Cole He came home in 1967. No one asked. Somewhere after that, he lost his faith. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just gone. And with it, everything else followed. Slowly. Quietly. The way things unravel when the anchor slips. He kept moving. Marines do. Built a career. Built a life. Until he couldn't hold it anymore. Ke...

Grief is a portal. Not a pit stop. Dr. Laura Berman is not here for clinical platitudes. She brings a jagged understanding of the vibration of loss and the quantum mechanics of love. After the tragic loss of her son, Sammy, to a fentanyl overdose, Dr. Berman moved past the professional shine of her career. She found the dirt. Grounding. The somatic. The cellular reality of how grief lives in the b...

What is the one thing a TOPGUN pilot is never contemplating? Surrender. Period. Sit with that for a moment. Wiz Buckley. Top 1% of all Naval aviators. Boots on a bathroom floor. Despair. No altitude. No exit. His next sortie, the antithesis of 15 years of training and every primal instinct:Letting go. What happened next is why you are here. The most self-sufficient human the military can produce a...

What happens after the rescue? Most people remember the headline. 93 days. Somalia. SEAL Team Six. President Obama gave the order. The raiders went in at night. They brought her home. What most people do not know is what came next. Jessica Buchanan was 32. A teacher. In Somalia to help children avoid land mines. Abducted at gunpoint. Held in the desert. Starving. Threatened. Waiting. The rescue wa...

26 times. That is the number of times the phone rang to tell Ryan Lavarnway to pack his gear and move. Eight different jerseys. 26 separate call-ups. To the casual observer, that is ajourneyman’s life. To the professional, that is a masterclass in readiness and the refusal to let a moment pass without conviction. We spend our lives chasing greatness, approval, and connection. We fit ourselves into...

IMHO: When did creative agencies become "soul"-blind? Most sell technical prowess, optimize location scouting, and script for the sizzle while missing a heartbeat. They polish the pixels. Whitewashing the Human Condition for clickbait, likes and worse. S2E17: Vicki and Mark Leffingwell at Humnkind Films operate from a different frequency. They protect that je ne sais quoi intertwined in earned tal...

"There are two types of pain in this world: The pain that hurts, and the pain that alters." In 2006, Brian Morrison crossed the finish line of the Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run in first place—only to be disqualified for receiving physical assistance in the final yards during a total metabolic collapse. In this episode of The Fight-or-Fl1ght Podcast , we go beyond the "Pain C...

We are curating a world of comfort and designing the soul right out of the next generation. Patrick Whalen is a walking contradiction to the modern architecture of schooling. A Marine. A Hopwood Award winning poet. A Master of English Literature. He is an enigma to some and a warrior to others, but fundamentally he is a sculptor of ideas. Patrick sees the crisis in our schools for what it is. Obes...

He spent a career hunting the world's most dangerous threats. Yemen. Iraq. Afghanistan. Sarajevo. Naval Special Warfare. SEAL. Captain, U.S. Navy. Then a physician handed him a diagnosis. Prostate cancer. Everything he knew about threat assessment, mission planning, and the will to survive got redirected. Not toward an enemy combatant. Toward a disease that doesn't negotiate. He's in r...

For 25 years, one designer shaped the way the world looked — and almost no one knew his name. Peter Yee was Oakley's first trained industrial designer. Hired by founder Jim Jannard in 1993, he built the visual language of one of the most iconic brands in sports history — the Eye Jacket, the X-Metal Romeo, the Over the Top, the Time Bomb watch, and the Oakley "O" logo itself. Over 110...

April 7th, 2003. Baghdad. Col. Kim "K.C." Campbell's A-10 Warthog takes a direct hit. Hydraulics destroyed. Manual reversion. Flying on cables alone. Three hundred miles back to base in an aircraft that had no business staying airborne. She landed it. But this isn't a war story. It's a masterclass in the frameworks that work when your plan falls apart and everyone's looki...

"The sum is greater than the parts." We held this episode for a week. Some conversations need to breathe before they hit the air. This is one of them. Dropping on International Women's Day, S2E11 features Suzanne Xena Lesko. This isn't your standard influencer self-help chatter. This is an exploration of a presence that defies conventional stereotypes. Suzanne represents a striki...

What does it mean to tell the truth when your camera is the only witness? Jim Fabio has spent 30 years answering that question—through war zones in Haiti, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan as a U.S. Air Force Combat Camera Officer, behind the lens at the NFL Network, and as an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker who refuses to let forgotten stories die quietly. In this episode, Jim breaks down what it really...

Nine years. U.S. Army Special Forces. 7th Group. Multiple global deployments in environments designed to kill the signal. Ryan Garay kept the team connected anyway. Then he took the beret off. Walked into rooms he wasn't supposed to be in yet. And figured it out. Since transitioning, he's driven over a billion dollars in defense technology impact and spent years quietly building something...

What if every decision you've ever made... was already made for you? In S2E8, Myles sits down with Dr. Valerie Starratt — biobehavioral scientist, statistician, and recovering academic turned real-world operator — and the conversation will mess with your head in the best possible way. Dr. Starratt spent nearly two decades as an experimental scientist, writer, and professor at Florida Atlantic...

Sammy Chapman was 16. Curious. Industrious. Business-minded. Then he connected with a dealer on Snapchat. One pill. Fentanyl. Gone. What his father Samuel discovered afterward changed everything: Snapchat knew. They knew drugs were being sold. They knew kids were dying. They knew their design facilitated it. They chose not to warn anyone—because warning would hurt their bottom line. This isn't...

What separates those who perform under pressure from those who collapse? The answer lives inside your brain — and Dr. Allison Brager has spent her career proving it. Dr. Brager is a neuroscientist working at the intersection of military operations, sleep science, and elite human performance. She's studied soldiers in combat, humans pushed to the edge in Antarctic isolation, and the genetic cod...

A Subaru-sized boulder breaks from the glacier. Kaare has 2 seconds to capture it—no safety net, just the shot. This is what separates real storytelling from manufactured content. Dan and Kaare from FIELDBORN Creative don't make "content." They document the moments most brands would never risk—because the story demands it. In this episode: → Why Patagonia doesn't sell jackets (th...