Send us Fan Mail

The roles flip. This time Brian Penn holds the mic, and co-founder James Gass tells the story behind the easy laugh.

It starts light: a nervous softball guy getting talked into a wood-bat baseball tournament by their mutual friend Chuck, climbing out of the passenger seat, taking one look at Brian and thinking, "I can't win these guys over with my playing — I'll win them over with my kindness." Forty years of guitar. "Prince over everybody" . Dave Winfield, the Blue Jays, and coaching both his daughters from the bottom of the lineup to leading off in center field.

Then Brian asks about the darkest moment, and James goes to a place he says he rarely talks about. The grandfather who practically raised him, gone. His parents divorced. Siblings out of the house. A two-story home traded for a drug-infested apartment complex, a three-to-four-mile walk to school because a bike wasn't in the budget, an eviction, an extension cord run from a neighbor's apartment for power, and stretches with no food. A father with a good job and a phone he didn't pick up. And, at 13, a night in a bathroom that could have ended the story — and the moment right after, when something snapped, and he walked out, picked up his guitar, and started playing like nothing had happened.

"To say music saved my life is no doubt."

What he built from there — work at 13, a sister and two cousins who took him in, a father who's now more friend than parent, brothers he talks to across an ocean — is the reason this podcast exists. His advice for the world isn't complicated: acceptance. We have far more in common than the 20% we blow up into a mountain.

In this episode:

• How Chuck's four-year recruiting campaign accidentally started a podcast
• Guitar vs. baseball, 40 years later, still undecided
• Coaching his daughters Madison and Ava — his favorite sports memory, period
• The lowest of the low, told plainly
• Why forgiveness is a gift you hand yourself
• Vulnerability isn't weakness

Everybody has a dark cloud. There's a solution to everything, and there are people out there who will pick you up.