Kyle Auffray

Kyle Auffray signed with four NFL teams, then built an event series for men who have nowhere to go when things come apart.

Brad had read about The Forge, liked what he saw and asked Auffray in on a connection, with neither of them sure what to expect. They spent the first stretch of the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast on bees. Auffray keeps thirteen hives on a farm in Georgia, pulled seventy five gallons of honey this year and had honey out in the truck. Both of his girls have been stung, repeatedly, because they do not listen. His two year old walks straight up to the hives and has so far been left alone.

The Forge started last year as an event built on five pillars: faith, family, finance, fitness and fatherhood. Five speakers come in, each takes one pillar, and the room breaks open from there. It grew faster than the plan did. Inside four months the social following was near fifty thousand, and a partnership with Breaking Barriers put a resources hub behind it so that a man who says he is struggling has somewhere to be sent. There have been events in Arizona and at Stone Creek Church in Alpharetta, with Cabo coming in three weeks and Atlanta on November fourth, and requests out of Texas, Florida, Tennessee and New York. Auffray admits he is still working out the business model and building the plane while flying it, which he says he hates doing, and that he is running multiple businesses and raising three kids on top of it.

He was a college walk on who transferred schools and watched coaching staffs get fired. There was no NIL money then. He earned a scholarship, went undrafted, dealt with injuries and came out the year of the lockout, which is how he describes his odds of reaching the NFL as roughly zero. He signed four contracts anyway, with the Cardinals, Patriots, Browns and Raiders. What stayed with him from the locker rooms was the other thing he saw. The best athletes on his teams mostly came from troubled places, and the off field stuff got swept under the rug because the man could play. Then the career ends and all he has ever been is a really good football player, with nothing to hang his hat on. Auffray moved into sales, then venture capital with Comcast, then private equity, and found the same men in different clothes, running hard with broken marriages and no time with their kids.

At the first Forge event, about a hundred people in the room, opening speaker Jason Cisneros asked who wanted to stand up and say why they were there. A man nobody knew stood up. He had seen the promo video on Instagram and driven twelve hours from Miami the day before, and he said that if he had not come he was going to kill himself. Cisneros stood in silence and let the room sit with it. When men come to Auffray now saying they are depressed, he tells them he is not a doctor, and to go to the gym every day for a month, and that he does not care whether they work out while they are there.