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Blake Kasemeier (@blakeoftoday) joins Sam and Cole this week — content creator, BJJ black belt, garage gym owner, dad of two, and friend of the show.

A long awaited conversation with Blake after two failed attempts (our fault, not his)! We cover Blake's transition into fatherhood, what he had to give up, and what he gained in the process. We compare notes on home gym setups, alternative music backgrounds, screen time, and how to construct a life that fits your unique skills and aligns with your values as a family. We talk about how depression in his 20s and the loss of his mother led him to be more vocal about his emotions in a way that ultimately reduced the power they had over him.

We are big fans of Blake and highly recommend following him on IG/YouTube.

Thanks for listening!

If you're getting value from the podcast, please leave a rating or review — it helps other dads find this when they need it.

Sacrifice isn't part of fatherhood. It's the point.

Sam and Cole get into something nobody told them going in: giving up what you want isn't a tax you pay for having kids — it's the actual goal. Sam and Cole talk through years of quietly shutting down the versions of themselves that want a 2-hour gym session, extended hunting trips, songwriting careers, and why that used to feel like loss and now feels like the win.

They trace it through the hard stretches that don't resolve into anything — the weeks where the baby's not sleeping, the wife's laid up, and nobody hands you a trophy at the end of it. Cole reframes it from the other direction: not sacrifice, but selfishness, and how easily that default takes over if you let it.

They also get into what it actually looks like to be the guy your family can rely on no matter what — and why giving yourself credit for showing up, even quietly, even when no one's watching, matters more than people think.

If you're getting value from the podcast, please leave a rating or review — it helps other dads find this when they need it.

If you died today, would you be happy with the example you set?

That question started this whole podcast. One year later, Sam and Cole go back to it — and the honest answer is still no. Which is kind of the point.

This week they walk through the questions that built the show: what your family would actually say about you if you were gone, what you've modeled as most important versus what you've just said out loud, and whether you've built a well-rounded example — not jacked with no emotional skills, not soft with no backbone.

They get into sobriety as a non-negotiable for a lot of guys, over-indexing on fitness as a way to avoid the harder emotional work, and the gap between what you tell your kids to do and what you actually do yourself.

Go write your own answers down before you talk yourself out of it.