Front Row Dads with Jon Vroman

There is no greater leadership than the example of a life lived, says Kevin Walton. He is a father, a spiritual guide, and one of our guest leaders at FRD Live 2026.

Ali Jafarian talks with Kevin about what embodiment means, the book his mom gave him that made him say "I'm not crazy," and the dream that gave him the name Creatorhood. Then they get to how Kevin fits being a man, a father, and a teacher into one life. He looks for harmony instead of balance, and when he is away teaching for days he says...

For years Rudi Riekstins left his faith, his marriage, and his two babies at the office door, and walked in every morning pretending to be a company man. Then he stopped pretending.

Ali Jafarian sits down with Rudi, a leadership coach, father of two, and one of our guest leaders at FRD Live 2026. They get into what your family feels when you walk in the door, the day someone wrecked his wife's car in the middle of his son's big flag football day, what his father-in-law told him before he could ask to marry his daughter, the...

Jon has spent ten years telling men to put family first. For the last two months he's worked dawn to dinner, some weeks seven days straight, and he thinks that's okay.

This is Walk With Jon. No studio, no script, no editing. Just Jon on an early morning walk by a pond in his neighborhood, talking to you the way he would if you were buddies and you asked him, "What's real in your world?" You'll hear wind and a few geese. That's part of it.

His answer this morning: there are seasons when a...

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Ryan Levesque runs meeting rhythms for a living. So he installed one at home, and he knew that if he walked in announcing it, it would go badly. 

He rolled it out the way he rolls out anything at the company. One piece a week for six or seven weeks, with his kids at four and seven and his wife the skeptic. What they ended up with is seven p...

Mark Groves is 46 years old, and the conversation he keeps coming back to happened in a car when he was in his twenties with his father. 

He had gone to his father complaining about a girlfriend, and he had said something to her he is not proud of. His dad told him that a relationship is a separate entity. There is you, there is her, and there is the thing between you, and that third thing has to be cared for. Mark still remembers exactly where he was sitting.

That is the point of th...

Jon asked a pediatrician of thirty-five years for the formula for influencing your kids. She gave him three words.

Dr. Meg Meeker, author of Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters, says her job is to speak to dads on behalf of their children. So Jon asked the question every man here eventually asks, which is some version of just tell me what to do. She gave him a list. Attention, affection, acceptance. Whether your child is two or twenty-two or fifty, they want the same three things from you, and the third one is where most of us quietly...

Every couple has a dance, and most men have never seen the steps written down.

One of you closes the distance and gets louder. The other creates distance and shuts down. What makes it a loop rather than an argument is that each one's way of coping is precisely the thing the other cannot tolerate. Mark Groves names it, then takes it apart: Gottman's four horsemen, why men stonewall more than women do, and the single sentence that breaks a defensive pattern even though saying it feels awful.

Then the harder half. Groves admits he...

Jon walked into a band meeting with seven things to do and walked out with one.

Episode 4 of Walk With Jon. No studio, no script, no guest, no editing. Jon Vroman walking the lake in downtown Austin on a Wednesday afternoon, thinking out loud. The audio is rough on purpose: traffic, wind, and footsteps are part of the deal.

He recorded this straight out of his monthly band meeting, where he put business on the table. Two things he admits he hasn't always done well: saying his truth out loud instead of withholding it to...

She calls it puberty in reverse. It can last a decade. And most husbands have no idea it's happening.

LIVE WITH DR. HIRSCH, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8TH. 

She is joining the Front Row Dads community for a live session with Q&A on how men can support the women in their lives through menopause. Free for members, and a limited number of guest passes for everyone else. Details at frontrowdads.com/menopause

Dr. Heather Hirsch is board-certified in internal medicine, founded the Menopause and Midlife Clinic at Brigham and Women's Hos...

Most of us don't have a plan for our marriage. We have a repair schedule.

Something breaks, we patch it, things are fine for a while, and then we sit there quietly waiting for it to break again. Lance Salazar lived in that loop.

He describes a defeatist stretch where even when things were okay, he was just wondering when it was going to go bad.

So he and his wife stopped fixing and started designing, borrowing the thing they already knew how to do in business: decide what you want, build a pl...

Jon's eleven-year-old had been more anxious than usual, and his wife told him why.

You have been more stressed at work. He is a reflector. He picks up on your energy. 

Bryan Post takes that and does something more useful than reassurance. Your son has his own part, formed long before this week. You have yours. And the moment you take his behavior personally, you lose the ability to be present for him, because you have made his stuff your stuff. He gives the actual words to use, and the reason they work: all behavior ari...

Nobody got married hoping to work on it.

That is where Ted Lowe starts. After a long day of working hard, the last thing anybody wants is to work some more, so telling a man his marriage needs more work tends to land like a chore. His alternative is a habit he calls serious fun, built on simple accounting: you cannot make withdrawals from a relational account you never deposited into. And the hard times come, and they require withdrawals.

Then he asks the question that gives this episode its name.

Jon takes the s...

Geoff Woods set a goal of thirty-six date nights with his wife, tracked it all year, and then had to admit it wasn't working.

What he found instead was the idea he spent years teaching at The ONE Thing: find the one domino that makes everything else easier or unnecessary, and knock that one over first. In his marriage it wasn't the date nights. It was a cup of coffee at 5:30 in the morning, before the kids were awake, on the couch, looking each other in the eye and asking How are you doing.

This is...

Nobody claws their way out of rock bottom alone.

Want a taste of what Front Row Dads is actually like? Come sit in on a live Brotherhood Experience. It's 60 minutes on Zoom with Jon and a few other dads, free, and it's the easiest way to find out whether a room like this is for you. You don't have to share, and you don't have to prepare. Dates and sign-up at frontrowdads.com/experience

Matt Aitchison was expelled from high school, arrested in college, and facing real jail time. He is quick to say that m...

Five versions of you are already running your marriage. The work is building the sixth.

Want a taste of what Front Row Dads is actually like? Come sit in on a live Brotherhood Experience. It's 60 minutes on Zoom with Jon and a few other dads, free, and it's the easiest way to find out whether a room like this is for you. You don't have to share, and you don't have to prepare. Dates and sign-up at frontrowdads.com/experience

Dr. Kelly Flanagan says we each carry five versions of ourselves: the lover, th...

Every marriage is sitting on one of five levels right now. Here is how to find yours and how to climb.

Want a taste of what Front Row Dads is actually like? Come sit in on a live Brotherhood Experience. It's 60 minutes on Zoom with Jon and a few other dads, free, and it's the easiest way to find out whether a room like this is for you. You don't have to share, and you don't have to prepare. Dates and sign-up at frontrowdads.com/experience

Recorded live at one of our online summits, Jayson G...

Most date nights quietly die for the same reason, and it isn't love. Nobody scheduled it.

Want a taste of what Front Row Dads is actually like? Come sit in on a live Brotherhood Experience. It's 60 minutes on Zoom with Jon and a few other dads, free, and it's the easiest way to find out whether a room like this is for you. You don't have to share, and you don't have to prepare. Dates and sign-up at frontrowdads.com/experience

Jim Sheils wrote The Family Board Meeting, and he and his...

The thing you keep telling your kid to stop doing might be exactly what they're built for.

(Want a taste of what Front Row Dads is actually like? Come sit in on a live Brotherhood Experience. It's 60 minutes on Zoom with Jon and a few other dads, free, and it's the easiest way to find out whether a room like this is for you. You don't have to share, and you don't have to prepare. Dates and sign-up at frontrowdads.com/experience)

Giovanni Marsico has spent his career helping people find and use their gifts, a...

Four men. Same question. Two completely different answers: is it powering through strength, or is it avoidance?

Want a taste of what Front Row Dads is actually like? Come sit in on a live Brotherhood Experience. It's 60 minutes on Zoom with Jon and a few other dads, free, and it's the easiest way to find out whether a room like this is for you. You don't have to share, and you don't have to prepare. Sign up at frontrowdads.com/experience.

We pulled four opposing takes from across ten years of the archive a...

Quick test: how do you deal with your neediness? If you just cringed, you found your enemy emotion.

(Want a taste of what Front Row Dads is actually like? Come sit in on a live Brotherhood Experience. It's 60 minutes on Zoom with Jon and a few other dads, free, and it's the easiest way to find out whether a room like this is for you. You don't have to share, and you don't have to prepare. Dates and sign up at frontrowdads.com/experience)

Psychiatrist Dr. Laura Dabney has spent her career working w...

Ask young fathers how to raise great kids and you get 72 steps. Ask the old guys and you get two words: just love them.

(Want a taste of what Front Row Dads is actually like? Come sit in on a live Brotherhood Experience. It's 60 minutes on Zoom with Jon and a few other dads, free, and it's the easiest way to find out whether a room like this is for you. You don't have to share and you don't have to prepare. Dates and sign-up at frontrowdads.com/experience)

David Osborn has built companies, written...

"If we do not initiate our sons, they will burn down the village just to feel the heat."

That African proverb is where this one starts, and Chris Bruno, counsellor, author of The Man Maker Project, and a dad who built a year-long rite of passage for his own son, spends the next twenty minutes showing what it demands of a father.

This is a Deep Cut from a 2024 members-only session: what a rite of passage actually is (they are happening around your son constantly, whether you design one or not), why the passage from...

Having the same realization five times doesn't mean you failed the first four.

Episode 3 of Walk With Jon. No studio, no script, no guest, no editing. Jon Vroman on a walking trail near his house, thinking out loud. The audio is rough on purpose. He even fumbles an old saying mid-walk and leaves it in: "Like I said, these are unscripted mistakes and all."

Jon walked this one listening to his own voice notes from the last five to eight years. A week earlier he'd pulled out a bin holding 30 to 50 journals, most o...

"I would say to my wife, I need to get to the coffee shop by seven, because I couldn't be hassled by the kids in the morning."

For ten years, Jon Vroman has asked the questions on this show. To close the first week of Good Questions, he answers them. This is Jon in the hot seat: how the man who founded Front Row Dads would have introduced himself before it existed (speaker, charity founder, ultramarathoner... and, toward the end of the list, a husband and dad), what he believed fatherhood was in the early years, and...

"Do you ever lose your cool? Do you ever just yell?"

It gets asked point-blank in this one, and the three answers could not be more different.

Ryan Deiss, founder of DigitalMarketer, says he is not a yeller, then tells you exactly where his line is and what happened the one time somebody made his wife feel unsafe in her own home.

Connor Beaton, who leads men's work through ManTalks, traces the charge underneath a man's anger back to what it is actually made of, and lays out his move from a medicated...

"Every decision I've ever made in my life, good and bad, has been in an effort to get my father to tell me he loved me."

This one moves in three parts: the apology you owe your kids, the dance you are still in with your own dad, and the forgiveness that sets you free. It starts at a kitchen table, where a dad raising his voice over math homework suddenly recognizes the scene, because he lived it at his son's age, on the other side of the table.

Psychologist Dr. Kelly Flanagan takes the q...

Give your kids enough that they can do anything, but not so much that they can do nothing.

That Warren Buffett line is where this one starts. You worked hard so your family could have a good life. So how do you keep the life you built from softening the kids you love? This is the first episode of Good Questions, where we pull the best questions dads have asked across ten years of podcasts and member-only conversations, and stack the answers worth keeping. Four dads take this one on: Mike McCarthy on being honest with your...

You can't force a child to make you their mentor. They choose. And most of us are quietly spending that choice on being right.

That's the argument in Hold On to Your Kids by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate, and it's the book two dads in this community keep coming back to. In this Bookshelf, they take it from both ends.

John Berardi makes the case that a child is always looking for someone to guide them through life, and that they get to pick who. You can make a kid put on clothes. You...

The greatest gift you can give your kids has nothing to do with them.

Episode 2 of Walk With Jon. No studio, no script, no guest, no editing. Jon Vroman on a walking trail near his house, thinking out loud, this time with his dog Davy along for the walk. The audio is rough on purpose: wind, footsteps, and a dog on a leash are part of the deal.

Jon has been doing interviews for the Front Row Dads book, due out late 2026 or early 2027, and two of those conversations ended up in the same place...

Fatherhood is a series of windows that open and close. The one you're leaving usually never opens again.

For years we've been asking guests on this show some version of the same question: what do you wish you knew before your first kid? For the last day of NEW DAD WEEK, we pulled four of the best answers and put them back to back. No commentary, just four dads who've been through it telling you what they'd want you to know.

You'll hear from Ryan Levesque, Michael Dietrich-Chastain, Farhan Rizvi, and Matt Baudro.

...

You're exhausted, so we made this one short.

Two things worth your tired attention. First, a nearly free trick for kids' bedtime that works with their biology instead of against it: no arguing, no negotiating, just light. And second, a genuinely kind word for couples who've been short with each other lately: sleep-deprived people are not their best selves, and that's not a character flaw.

This is part of NEW DAD WEEK, five short episodes for expecting dads and dads in the first year. Free field guide for the whole week at frontrowdads.com/newdad.<...

We asked what advice he'd give a new dad. His answer had nothing to do with the baby.

Steve Olsher's advice for men entering fatherhood is to prioritize your wife, above the kids. It sounds backwards, especially when there's a newborn in the house who genuinely needs everything. But his reasoning is hard to argue with: the most important relationship in a family is the one between mom and dad, and when the two of you are off, the whole house feels it. He also makes an uncomfortable case that nearly every conflict traces back t...

Suzanne Yatim Aslam had postpartum depression after her son was born, and in this conversation she tells dads exactly what it looked like from the inside, including the part almost nobody says out loud: for a while, she blamed her baby for ruining her life. Her husband didn't know. She never asked for help. She just kept saying she was fine.

This is part of NEW DAD WEEK, five short episodes for expecting dads and dads in the first year. We built a free field guide to go with it: the main points from every e...

Your wife is struggling, and everything in you wants to solve it. That instinct is the problem.

Welcome to NEW DAD WEEK. Five short episodes for guys who are expecting or in the thick of the first year. We're starting with Jason Kreidman on the skill that matters most early on, and it isn't tactical. It's empathy, which he calls the single biggest game changer in how he parents and how he loves his wife. He also lands on four words that will save you an enormous amount of grief: do you want me to fix it...

There are two lessons available when something in your life keeps hurting. One is to get tougher. The other is to walk away. Most men only ever get coached on the first one.

WHAT THIS IS

This is the first episode of something new we're calling Walk With Jon.

No studio, no script, no guest, no editing. Just Jon Vroman on a walking trail near his house, thinking out loud. In his words:

"What I don't want to do is stand at my desk anymore at my expensive microphone...

Most men think attraction is something you do. It's something you are.

Dr. Robert Glover, best-selling author of No More Mr. Nice Guy, gives about as direct an answer as you'll get: the feminine is highly attracted to a man who's comfortable in his own skin and knows where he's going. From there he gets into why your own thinking is the thing sabotaging you, why time away with other men comes home as attraction, and why a marriage with no tension or space in it slowly goes flat.

FREE THIS WEEK: We b...

Everyone is talking about the male loneliness epidemic. Here's the less comfortable version: a lot of it is self-inflicted.

Dr. Robert Glover, best-selling author of No More Mr. Nice Guy, gets into what actually keeps men isolated, and he doesn't let anyone off the hook, including himself. He talks about the father wound underneath why men don't trust other men, why some groups of guys go deep for years while others quietly fall apart, and the fear of success that keeps a man consuming information instead of doing anything with it.

FR...

His wife said he hadn't told her he loved her all day. He had screenshots proving he'd said it five times. He kept them to himself, and that was the whole lesson.

Part three of our five-part week with Dr. Robert Glover, best-selling author of No More Mr. Nice Guy, and probably the most immediately useful one. Glover draws the line between a factual statement and an emotional statement, and makes the case that when your wife says something that seems provably unfair, the accusation was never the point. The trigger you feel is the signal.

You think boundaries keep people out. They're actually what lets people get close to you.

Dr. Robert Glover, best-selling author of No More Mr. Nice Guy, runs a full crash course here, and it starts somewhere unexpected: how a lack of boundaries quietly wrecks a man's friendships with other men, not just his marriage. He didn't learn any of this until his thirties, when a therapist laid a string on the floor and started pushing him backward to show him how much ground he gives away.

FREE THIS WEEK: We built a companion f...

The Nice Guy and the jerk are doing the exact same thing. Same shame, different mask.

This is part one of a five-part week with Dr. Robert Glover, best-selling author of No More Mr. Nice Guy, and we start at the root. Glover argues nice guy syndrome has almost nothing to do with being polite. It comes from a belief formed before you could speak, that something is wrong with you, and it shows up as a set of hidden deals you make with the people around you: I'll do this for you, so you owe me...