No Stage, Just a Chair

Brian
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I spend most of my week being the guy with an answer. Clients hire me for it. My kids expect it. Most of my life doesn't actually run that way. I've never hidden that. It just doesn't get much room. No Stage, Just a Chair is the room. Everywhere else, the searching is for someone: a decision that has to get made, a kid who needs an answer at ten at night. Here it isn't in service of anything. I bring in whatever I haven't gotten to the bottom of, and I don't get to the bottom of it here either. I keep getting up different than I sat down. 🎧 New episodes weekly on YouTube, Spotify, and App

  1. 2d ago

    Homesick for a Tent on Television

    My kids laugh at me for watching The Great British Bake Off. It’s not a show I’d ever gravitate toward, and I couldn’t tell you a single thing anyone has made on it. But the other night, one of the bakers was crying, and not because they lost. Because of which other baker got sent home. There it is. I felt something watching it that I wasn’t expecting, and it made me hope. 🎧 No Stage, Just a Chair For people who are changed by the search for truth. Full episode on Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Spotify. Before You Listen: - What’s the last thing that made you hopeful, and were you looking for it? - What do you quietly expect from people? - Who do you know that cries at other people’s wins and losses?

  2. Oct 20

    A Gift or a Bill?

    Some nights I’d wake up to a little pile of blonde hair on the pillow next to me. My youngest never said a word. He’d climb in under the covers sometime after I fell asleep, and I’d find him there. We’d lived in a small apartment for about two years when we found a house for us. Right neighborhood, right street. I sat the boys down and told them we were moving. My youngest looked at me and asked, “Why are we moving into a new house, Dad?” I said they were getting older and I wanted them to have a little more room. He grinned. “You realize we’re still gonna end up in your bed, right?” I laughed a little. He was serious. I thought I was handing him what he wanted. He’d just told me what he actually wanted, and he’d been telling me every night. He wasn’t asking for space or things. He wanted closer. And I can see now that we didn’t pick the house, we picked the life. The street, the school I could see from the front porch, everybody who walked past it. 🎧 No Stage, Just a Chair For people who are changed by the search for truth. Full episode on Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Spotify. Before You Listen: - Your kid asks for a ride, a snack, five minutes. What are they actually asking for, and when did you last answer that instead? - You can name what your house cost. Can you name what the street gave your kids, and would you have paid for that on purpose? - Who is already living inside a decision you made years ago, and does it feel to them like a gift or a bill?

  3. Oct 13

    It’s Easy to Be Wrong From the Couch

    A man who’s been in the music industry for thirty years sat down at a dinner table with me in Nashville and said, “I don’t think anybody really cares anymore. I don’t think anybody wants to make great music. They just want to make a living and get rich.” He really believed it. All week I’d been around young artists full of hope. They had goals, and they knew where they wanted to go. Then this man, who isn’t playing anymore, told me what thirty years of disappointment and hurt and probably a thousand good reasons had left him with. It made me sad to hear. Somewhere in those thirty years he’d stopped believing. I disagreed with him out loud. He said, “Give it time, you’ll see that I’m right.” Then I got in the car. The harshness I’d just argued against at the table was waiting for me there, alone. I’d like to say I was strong enough to shake it off. I’m not sure that’s what happened. 🎧 No Stage, Just a Chair For people who are changed by the search for truth. Full episode on Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Spotify. Before You Listen: - When disappointment teaches you something, how do you stay engaged instead of jaded? - What’s the difference between hope you can say in a room and hope you can still find in the car? - What truth keeps you hopeful?

  4. Oct 6

    Lost People Walk in Circles and Swear They're Going Straight

    I was never a very good Boy Scout. My best friend could tie every knot. I mostly liked camping out and making s'mores. But I still remember the rule for when you're lost. Don't trust your sense of direction. At 33, with kids on the way, I felt lost. My dad had always looked ten feet tall and bulletproof, no gaps in the armor. I kept holding the mess I felt up against the man I could see. Then I started asking around. Friends, mentors, counselors. Nobody felt like they had it together. Nobody. When I'm lost, I grab. What helps is slower than that. Something far enough away that it doesn't move when I do. A few trusted people. A few things I've known about myself for a long time. In a world where everything moves, our landmarks have to be true. 🎧 No Stage, Just a ChairFor people who are changed by the search for truth.Full episode on Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Spotify. Before You Listen: What's the biggest decision you've made just to stop feeling lost? Who asks you the hard question because they love you, and who asks because they like being right? What did you know about yourself at 15 that's still true?

  5. Sep 29

    We Replace What Matters With What We Can Control

    I sit down for coffee with a friend who works in influencer marketing. She immediately launches into a long list of questions. Cliffhangers. Three-second hooks. Click for the next. The best practices. She wasn't wrong about a single one. Every tactic on her list gets people to click. And my answer to all of them was no...because clicking and thinking are just two completely different jobs. We lean on best practices because they hand us something comforting: control. We trim the edges, predict the outcome, and protect ourselves from looking foolish. But smooth away every flaw and script every second, and what's left is safe and completely empty. The moments we actually remember don't happen because we managed the risk. They happen in the gaps. In an unpolished show, a stranger shouting "I love you Fiona!" from the balcony, a handmade bowl where the flaw shows where the hand was. If we're not careful, we replace the things that actually matter with the things we can control. 🎧 No Stage, Just a ChairFor people who are changed by the search for truth.Full episode on Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Spotify. Before You Listen: Where are you defaulting to "best practices" just to keep yourself safe from being seen?What unscripted moment in your life are you missing because you're trying to manage the outcome?When was the last time you left enough room in your day for something real to get in?

  6. Sep 8

    How to Stop Shrinking Yourself to Fit In | I Make Myself Smaller So I'm Not Too Much

    I see a guy across the mall and I think, that man is really tall. Head above everybody. Then he gets closer and closer, and by the time he reaches me I'm three inches taller than he is.It stuns me every time. Every single time.For about four seconds I get to see myself the way a stranger does, and then it's gone.I built a rhythm a long time ago. Ask the dumb question. Say bad ideas only so nobody has to go first. I'm completely willing to look foolish. Foolish is cheap.What I'm not willing to do is take up the space I actually take up. I hedge the idea before it leaves my mouth. I mark it down so the room can price it at whatever I already decided it was worth.It's not that I'm afraid of being wrong. I'm afraid of being too much.That guy across the mall, unmistakable from a distance. Get close enough and I realize I've been him this whole time.🎧 No Stage, Just a ChairFor people who are changed by the search for truth.Full episode on Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Spotify.Before You Listen:- Who assumes they've got all of you because you never go quiet?- What do you hold back the second a conversation gets close enough to matter?- Where do you mark yourself down before anyone else gets the chance?

  7. Sep 1

    How We Accidentally Isolate Ourselves | How to Disappear Completely

    There's a version of a full life you can hold in one hand. The phone lights up, the game is on, the group text keeps moving, and for a while it's enough. It feels like being with people. Then the room goes quiet, and I catch myself from somewhere above the couch, looking down at one man alone in it, and the wanting comes back. Not for more of what I've already got. For the one thing all of it was standing in for. I can be reached all day and still slip out of being known. I've said for years that nothing replaces a handshake, and I believe it more the louder the world gets. But believing a thing and reaching for it turn out to be two different distances, and the second one asks something of me every time. I sat three feet from the same stranger for half a year before I ever turned my head and broke the silence. I can still feel how small that reach was, and how long I let it wait. Nobody decides to disappear. You take the easy road enough nights in a row that it stops feeling like a road. It feels like a Tuesday. I'm known. Most of us are, at least by someone. That's the part that makes this easy to miss. You don't fall out of people's lives in one loud moment. You drift, a night at a time, and each one feels like nothing, and the drift never once announces itself. 🎧 No Stage, Just a Chair For people who are changed by the search for truth. Full episode on Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Spotify. Before You Listen: - When you reach for your phone at the end of a long day, are you reaching for people, or for the version of them that asks nothing of you? - What actually separates a night you needed from a night you took the easy road? -Who have you sat close enough to know for months, and never did?

  8. Aug 25

    How to Catch Your Own Blind Spots | Who's Close Enough to Tell You You're Wrong

    I met a guy last week who could have been a client, and I spent the whole conversation quietly deciding he wasn't worth it. He's from a market close enough to ours that I already knew how it was going to go. I've spent years watching people from that part of the world treat this work like it's cheap. So I walked him through how we do things with every guardrail already up, and I felt fine about it. Came back, sat down with Taylor and my guys, and blew the whole thing off in about four sentences. Taylor didn't argue with me. He just kept saying he didn't understand why I was doing it that way, and I kept answering him, and somewhere in the middle of answering I could hear it. None of that felt like judgment from the inside. It felt like knowing. Years of real experience that had quietly stopped being accurate, and there's no alarm on that. Good reasons are exactly where it hides. I was 16 the summer I grew nine inches. Size 12 shoe to a size 16. Spent that whole year stepping over the free throw line, certain I knew where my feet were. Nothing was broken. What was true just expired. Assumptions based on good reasons. I'm grateful Taylor was in the room. 🎧 No Stage, Just a Chair For people who are changed by the search for truth. Before You Listen: What have you stopped calling an assumption because it's been right for so long? When you're certain, what does it feel like from the inside? When you were wrong, did it feel any different? Who's close enough to tell you, and have you made that easy or expensive for them?

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About

I spend most of my week being the guy with an answer. Clients hire me for it. My kids expect it. Most of my life doesn't actually run that way. I've never hidden that. It just doesn't get much room. No Stage, Just a Chair is the room. Everywhere else, the searching is for someone: a decision that has to get made, a kid who needs an answer at ten at night. Here it isn't in service of anything. I bring in whatever I haven't gotten to the bottom of, and I don't get to the bottom of it here either. I keep getting up different than I sat down. 🎧 New episodes weekly on YouTube, Spotify, and App

Information

  • Creator
    Brian
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    58
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Brian
  • Show Website
    No Stage, Just a Chair