A Life Worth Working | Guest: Andrew East | Former NFL Long Snapper, YouTube Creator & Family Media Entrepreneur
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What You’ll Learn in This Episode
How getting released from the Kansas City Chiefs after 3 months — while his wife Shawn Johnson was selling out arenas — became the most transformative moment of his life
Why Andrew turned a humiliating rock bottom into what he now calls an “unshakable confidence”
What his father’s day-long rites of passage ceremonies taught him about raising boys — and what modern fatherhood is missing
What it means to redefine success when you’re married to an Olympic gold medalist
About Andrew East
Andrew East is a former NFL long snapper who played for the Kansas City Chiefs and several other teams over a five-year professional career. He studied civil engineering at Vanderbilt University, where he was a two-time captain of the football team. He is married to Olympic gold medal gymnast Shawn Johnson East, with whom he has built Family Made — a wholesome, intentional family media network reaching over 10 million followers across platforms. He is also nearly finished with his PhD in psychology and co-hosts the podcast Couple Things with Shawn.
The Kid Who Wanted His Name in Lights
Andrew East grew up with a simple dream: play professional football and be the hero of the team. He was “footloose, fancy-free, rolling with the punches.”
At Vanderbilt, he showed up as the worst player on the team by a mile. He almost transferred. Instead, he stayed — and eventually became a two-time captain. He wasn’t going to be the quarterback. He wasn’t going to be the star. He was going to be the person who made the star’s job possible. He found his niche in one of the most specialized, invisible positions in all of sports: long snapper. The guy who snaps the ball through his legs on field goals and punts. The guy nobody knows until he messes up.
That lesson — finding and maximizing your specific niche even if it’s not the glamorous one — turned out to be a blueprint for the rest of his life.
The Humiliation that Changed Everything
Andrew signed a multi-year contract with the Kansas City Chiefs as a rookie. He remembers the moment vividly: he thought he had done it. Mission complete. He was in the NFL.
Three months later, he was cut. Ten thousand dollars in his pocket instead of millions.
Meanwhile, his now-wife Shawn Johnson — whom he had just started dating — was on a nationwide gymnastics tour, performing in sold-out arenas for tens of thousands of fans every night. Standing ovations. Screaming crowds.
Andrew was home alone on the couch. Unemployed. Nobody quite knowing what to say to him at family events.
“I felt useless and desperate. For about three months, I was just like a sad guy on a couch.”
But on the other side of those three months, something shifted. With the help of people who stuck with him and spoke encouragement into him, he started to slowly rebuild a confidence that felt, this time, like it was truly his own.
“Once I made it through that and realized I can contribute more to the world than just football — or just the one thing — I unlocked a new door. I shifted from self-doubt and pity to eager curiosity. Wait, there’s so much more to life. I just have to go look.”
Andrew East’s story is about what happens after the dream doesn’t go the way you planned — and what you find on the other side of that failure if you’re willing to sit in it long enough to learn from it.
It’s also a rare public conversation about intentional fatherhood, the crisis of male direction and belonging, and what it looks like to build a family media enterprise not as a brand exercise but as a genuine act of service.
About the Podcast: A Life Worth Working
A Life Worth Working is hosted by Michelle Weise, a writer on the future of learning and work, and Dana Allen Walsh, an executive coach and pastor. Each week, they talk with guests who open up about the messiness, transformation, and wonder of their work lives — what they call the soul of work.
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