Against Reduction’s Substack: Grit & Glory, Performance Culture Undressed Podcast

Ep3- Crafting Character with Antony Graf

Deane Code — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 23:23:02 GMT

Thank you for tuning in!!

Grit and Glory- Performance Culture Undressed is a podcast about the real price of excellence and what it means to define success on your own terms. Each episode brings a combined experience in physique sport, contact sport, and high-pressure professional life to conversations that are honest, embodied, and unafraid. Deane and Edwin two athletes, two insiders, one conversation that doesn’t pull punches.

In this Episode: Crafting Character with Antony Graf

10x US National Team, Pan Am Games Silver, Two-time Olympic Alternate, Martial Arts School Owner and Author.

Selection systems do not simply identify the best athlete. They produce winners through institutional momentum, visibility, and timing that no individual fully controls. Anthony Graf was the best Taekwondo fighter in America who did not become an Olympian. Multi-national team selections. A Pan Am Games silver medal. Two Olympic alternate designations. A rivalry with one of the most decorated martial artists in American history. And then, when the competitive chapter closed, he did something the consolation story never accounts for: he built. A school. A compound. A book for the parents sending the next generation into the same system that shaped him.

In this episode, we are here to ask what three decades inside elite sport actually taught one person about what the system is, what it costs, and what you owe the next generation once you know the answer.

Antony Graf’s book, Whispers of Wisdom: Crafting Character Through Mentorship and Story Telling is available here.

"Whispers of Wisdom" serves as your essential mentorship and parenting toolkit, helping you navigate your actions and understand your children better. Emphasizing awareness and positive influence, this guide offers time-tested stories and fables, imparting lasting life wisdom and fundamental values. It's your go-to resource for fostering meaningful connections and nurturing essential character traits in both yourself and your children: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CW62NQZH?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback

#GritAndGlory #PerformanceCulture #Grit #ElitePerformance #AthleteMindset #BuiltNotBorn #CompetitiveEdge #RealTalk #NewPodcast #SportsPodcast #HighPerformance #MindsetMatters #AthleteLife #PerformancePodcast

Liked what you see?

Consider becoming a paid subscriber or buying me a coffee…whatever keeps the signal going. Share this podcast episode with someone who may need it in their lives. They might need to know they’re not the only one.

Buy Me A Coffee

The Room Is Now Open

Deane Code — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 12:09:09 GMT

The first three episodes of Grit and Glory were built without guests on purpose. Before we opened the room to anyone else, we needed you to know what this show stands for, what it is willing to say, and what it refuses to pretend. We talked about grit, the real version, not the motivational poster version. We talked about glory and the gap between what performance culture promises and what it actually delivers. We talked about elders and what gets lost when a culture decides that only the new deserves attention. That foundation is now in place.

What comes next is the part we have been building toward since the beginning. Starting next week, Grit and Glory brings guests into the conversation. People who have earned their perspective by living inside the systems we examine. People who have competed at the highest levels, built things from nothing, navigated transitions that had no roadmap, and come out the other side with something honest to say about what the process actually taught them.

Every guest on our list so far carries a specific argument about what excellence really requires and what the industry built around excellence consistently fails to provide. Here is who is coming.

spent his competitive career being the one of the best Olympic Taekwondo fighters in America in his era. A national team selections. A Pan Am Games silver medal. Two Olympic alternate designations. A documented rivalry with Steven Lopez, the most decorated athlete in American martial arts history and arguably the best in the sport ever. His competitive record is unusual. What he built after competition is what brings him to Grit and Glory. A martial arts school in Miami. Juice Athlete Compound, a performance training organization built for athletes by someone who understands what athletes actually need. And a book for parents which may be the most structurally important thing on that list; Graf understood that the system reproduces itself through the next generation, and someone has to tell the truth about what that system is before the next round of children are fed into it.

is the founder of Breath Is Medicine and one of the clearest diagnosticians of what high-performance culture does to the body when no one is paying attention to the cost. Her work sits at the intersection of breathwork, somatic healing, and nervous-system regulation. In Grit and Glory’s language, it is a structural intervention. The body is the site where everything the system refuses to account for eventually arrives. Lauren’s work with breathwork, and nervous-system literacy addresses the damage that discipline-as-extraction leaves behind. Lauren’s work corrects that without apology. She is also connected to Deane’s own experience at the contrast therapy session that sparked the Performance Lab concept, which means this conversation has a live thread running through it before it even begins.

Skipper Kelp ( ) is one of the more genuinely remarkable reinvention stories in American combat sports, and almost no one outside that world knows it yet. Black belts in Taekwondo and Karate before he ever put on boxing gloves. Two National Golden Gloves championships. An Olympic hopeful who fought Todd Foster at the trials. A professional career under Top Rank Boxing that ended at 27 after a medical scare forced his retirement. And then: Nevada’s first MMA gym, built from nothing at a moment when MMA was not yet the cultural force it became. Training sessions with BJ Penn, Chuck Liddell, Tito Ortiz, Randy Couture, and Rampage Jackson at the exact moment the sport was inventing itself. A broadcast career that put him at the desk for Canelo versus Crawford. Skipper Kelp’s life is not a sports story. It is an infrastructure story. He has built something at every stage of his career and the thing he is building now; as a coach, broadcaster, and businessman — is the most instructive chapter of all.

Larry Sunderland has spent over 30 years constructing the infrastructure that American soccer needed and did not have. He built the first fully integrated professional player development pathway in MLS history at the Chicago Fire. He moved to the Portland Timbers and did it again in a smaller market with a different player pool. He spent seven years at FC Cincinnati building their academy from two teams to a full U13 through U18 structure with a residency program and a documented pathway to the first team. He just departed FC Cincinnati in June 2026. He is the only coach in the United States to win national championships at U14, U16, U18, and U20. He has developed more than 50 professional players. And he is also the father of a son he chose to send to Spain for development rather than into the American academy system he spent his career building; the most honest thing he has ever said about the limits of what he built. Larry Sunderland will come to Grit and Glory with no institutional loyalty to moderate what he says. That is the conversation we have been waiting for.

Hayden Lyn Canizalez and Lawson Sunderland story is the rarest kind of American in European football:

Hayden Lyn: one who went in through the grassroots Spanish pathway and stayed long enough to be shaped by it. As a teenager he played in Catalonia, Valencia Region and Extremadura, navigating the Tercera División Nacional and the regional Spanish football pyramid at the same age most American players were still deciding between club teams and college visits. His career as a player eventually gave way to something more structurally ambitious: sporting director at Plasencia Femenino in Spain, Coaching at the historic Doncaster Belles in England, Head of Player Management, strategic planning analyst at Prospect Sports Solutions, and founder of Next11, a football development technology platform built to address a specific gap he identified from years inside the development system. He is now coaching at the Villarreal Las Vegas Academy. Hayden redirected the same intelligence that made him a player into a different kind of problem. That redirection is the Grit and Glory argument made into a career.

Lawson is 24

years old, currently playing for FC Dordrecht in the Netherlands, and in possession of one of the more unusual American player development pathways of his generation. He went through the Chicago Fire and Portland Timbers academies as a teenager, and then to Spain: Levante UD, CE Sabadell, CF Damm, UE Sant Andreu. He returned to the United States and signed with Inter Miami II, made his MLS debut, won a Supporters’ Shield, and trained alongside Messi, Busquets, and Alba. Then he moved to Europe again, signing with FC Dordrecht in January 2025 on a development contract built for players moving upward. He is a central midfielder; tactically disciplined, physically imposing at six feet three, technically grounded in the Spanish possession-first philosophy.

Hayden and Lawson will appear together in the same episode. They shared clubs, shared the same Catalan football corridor, and for a period shared an apartment in Sabadell. Two Americans who chose the hardest version of the football dream, not because it was the fastest path or the most institutionally supported, but because it was the most honest version of what they were trying to become. Their conversation together will be unlike anything else in this guest arc.

This is the room Grit and Glory has built. Every person in it has earned the right to speak honestly about what excellence actually requires. Every conversation will be diagnostic before it is inspirational, structural before it is emotional, and honest before it is comfortable.

The guest episodes begin Wednesday June 22^nd with Anthony Graf. Subscribe on Substack and YouTube so you do not miss a single one.

We have been waiting for a show like this. So we built it.

Deane and Edwin Grit and Glory

Liked what you see?

Buy Me A Coffee

Ep3- Learning From Elders

Edwin Canizalez — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 17:46:39 GMT

Thank you for tuning in!!

In this Episode: Learning From Elders

Performance culture is obsessed with what is new. That obsession is making us dumber and lonelier. The people who have already lived through the arc we are on have things to say that we are not listening to.

MAIN CONVERSATION TALKING POINTS (20:00 TO 70:00)

• What do elders know that the optimization industry cannot quantify?

• The second career crisis: what actually happens to elite performers after the peak? This seeds the Second Career Project.

• The difference between experience and wisdom. Not everyone who is old has learned something.

• Mentorship versus coaching: what is the actual difference and why does it matter to people building something real?

• What has institutional memory been lost in your sport or industry and what has that cost the people coming up behind you?

Stay Tune for our upcoming episodes which will include fascination guests including Anthony Graph, Lauren Watkins, Skipper Kelp, Larry Sunderland, and many more!

#GritAndGlory #PerformanceCulture #Grit #ElitePerformance #AthleteMindset #BuiltNotBorn #CompetitiveEdge #RealTalk #PodcastLaunch #NewPodcast #SportsPodcast #HighPerformance #MindsetMatters #AthleteLife #PerformancePodcast

Liked what you see?

Buy Me A Coffee

Available for iOS and Android

Ep2- What Does Glory Mean, Really?

Deane Code — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 08:13:05 GMT

Thank you for tuning in!

In this Episode: Glory is the promise the system uses to keep you compliant. Most people who chase it never stop to ask if it’s actually theirs.

MAIN CONVERSATION TALKING POINTS

Who defines glory… you, your sport, your industry, your audience?
The post-achievement emptiness: why does it happen and why does no one talk about it honestly?
Glory as external validation vs. internal standard
The commodification angle: when your glory becomes someone else’s product
Pull from the Collaboration Edifice here: bodies as brands, leaders as slogans

Stay Tune for our upcoming episodes which will include fascination guests including Anthony Graph, Lauren Watkins, Skipper Kelp, Larry Sunderland, and many more!

Liked what you see?

Buy Me A Coffee

Available for iOS and Android

Ep1-Maybe She's Born With It... Maybe It's Grit

Deane Code — Fri, 01 May 2026 02:29:11 GMT

Thank you for tuning in!

In this Episode: Grit is real. The way it is sold is a lie. The system rewards the appearance of grit while extracting from the people who actually have it.

MAIN CONVERSATION TALKING POINTS

When did grit serve you and when did the system use it against you?
What is the difference between grit and stubbornness and who gets to decide which is which?
Is grit innate or built? The maybe she is born with it provocation.
Feed in survey responses collected from IG and Substack before launch. What are your listeners already saying about grit?
Where does the performance industry reward the appearance of grit over the real thing?

Liked what you see?

Buy Me A Coffee

Co-host: Deane Code

After two decades of working at PR firms I got serious about my passion for weightlifting to become a health & wellness coach. I’m proof that it’s never too late to start taking care of your body.

Subscribe to Deane

Available for iOS and Android

Introducing Grit & Glory- Performance Culture Undressed Podcast

Deane Code — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 12:31:18 GMT

Grit and Glory. Thursday, April 30th.

Performance culture has a business model. It sells you the language of excellence while building systems that extract from the people who actually pursue it. It rewards the appearance of grit over the real thing. It monetizes the gap between who you are and who it tells you to be.

We have both lived inside that gap. From different angles, different bodies, different industries. And we have spent enough time comparing notes to know the pattern is not accidental.

Grit and Glory is what happens when two people who have earned their calluses decide to stop being polite about it.

The first three episodes are just and . No guests, no warm up acts. We wanted the foundation visible before we built anything on top of it. We talk about grit; what it actually is, what the system does with it, and what it cost us personally. We talk about glory; the version we were sold and the version we eventually had to build ourselves. And we talk about the elders. The people who already lived through the arc we are on and what we lose when we stop listening to them.

From Episode 4 onward, we bring in guests from across the world. Different sports. Different disciplines. Different relationships to what excellence actually demands. People who have earned the right to speak about it honestly.

Against Reduction’s Substack: Grit & Glory, Performance Culture Undressed Podcast

Ep3- Crafting Character with Antony Graf

In this Episode: Crafting Character with Antony Graf

The Room Is Now Open

Ep3- Learning From Elders

Ep2- What Does Glory Mean, Really?

Ep1-Maybe She's Born With It... Maybe It's Grit

Introducing Grit & Glory- Performance Culture Undressed Podcast

Grit and Glory. Thursday, April 30th.

Episode 1 drops Thursday, April 30th. Subscribe now. The conversation is already overdue.