The Upgraded Man

Every episode of The Upgraded Man ends the same way. There is a journal. The guest reads what the last guest wrote, answers it honestly, then leaves one line for whoever sits in the chair next. They do not get to know who that is.

This week it is Florian Kemmerich, impact investor, author of On Vocation, and co-founder of Human Planet. He is a father of five, a former paratrooper, and a man who has moved close to a billion dollars of capital into places most investors will not go.

The entry waiting for...

Training after 40 does not take an hour. Dr. Tommy Rhee, a sports chiropractor who has spent nearly twenty years working on pro athletes, lays out the exact fifteen minute workout a man in his 30s and 40s should run.

Tommy has worked on Olympic sprinters, NFL players, and UFC fighters. He is the founder and CEO of RheeGen and the author of The Future of Regenerative Medicine. In this stretch he stops explaining and starts prescribing. What to do in the gym at this age, how few minutes it really takes, and what the soreness two days...

How to prepare your family if you die, before anything happens. Ray Hilbert, founder of Exhale Vault, had the insurance, the plan, and the logins all in his head. Then a life insurance letter came back stamped rejected.

Ray Hilbert co-founded Truth At Work in 1998, led it for over twenty years, and now coaches Christian business owners with Kingdom Factor. At 56 he was in perfect health. A routine blood test for a life insurance renewal showed an elevated PSA. A few months later the urologist said cancer, and maybe 4 to 6 months. Three weeks after that, his wife...

Men need more empathy, and Joel Bein says the discomfort you feel when you hear that is the proof. This is Joel's Upgraded Man Journal entry, the handoff every guest makes at the end of the show.

Joel Bein is the founder of Human Liberation and host of The Joel Bein Show. He works with entrepreneurs to clear the subconscious beliefs behind self-doubt and overworking. Every guest reads what the last guest left in the journal, answers it, then leaves one line for whoever sits down next.

The entry waiting for Joel came from relationship...

What AI can't replace is your identity and your vocation, and Florian Kemmerich says that is now your biggest economic asset. This is Florian's Upgraded Man Journal entry, the handoff every guest makes at the end of the show.

Florian Kemmerich is an impact investor, the author of On Vocation, and the co-founder of Human Planet. He is a father of five and a former paratrooper who has moved close to a billion dollars of capital into places most investors will not go.

Every guest reads what the last guest left in the journal, answers...

How to stop settling for mediocrity when your life looks fine from the outside. Dr. Matthew Kutz, author of Becoming EPIC, tells Chris Anderson why the man who is not failing is in the most dangerous spot there is, then tells the story that proves it.

Dr. Matthew Kutz is a clinical professor at Florida International University, a keynote speaker, and the author of the award-winning Contextual Intelligence. Three years ago a bike crash sent him to the doctor for chest pains. The doctor found advanced prostate cancer. He had no symptoms. He wrote Becoming EPIC during 40...

What to say no to. That is the question relationship coach Paul Roseberry leaves in The Upgraded Man Journal for the next guest. This is the short Friday Journal episode, the handoff from one guest to the next, with host Chris Anderson.

Paul Roseberry has coached nice guys for more than ten years, and he is also a standup comedian. Ralph Brewer, the guest before him, works with couples and left this question in the Journal: what have you done for yourself today?

Paul's answer was two words. This podcast. Not rest, not a workout...

How to stop feeling not good enough, done live instead of talked about. Joel Bein, founder of Human Liberation and host of The Joel Bein Show, walks Chris Anderson through clearing the "I'm not good enough" belief on The Upgraded Man in about 15 minutes.

Joel helps entrepreneurs clear the subconscious beliefs behind self-doubt and overworking. He calls "I'm not good enough" the most common belief on planet Earth. In this cut Chris puts his own on the table: a podcast doing better than most that still does not feel like enough, a business that is not multi-million...

Chris Anderson sits down in the studio with Michael J. López, an organizational change consultant, keynote speaker, LinkedIn Top Voice, and author of Change: Six Science-Backed Strategies to Transform Your Brain, Body, and Behavior. Michael spent more than a decade at Big Four firms leading transformation programs, played college football, and started his own company at 50 with his wife five months pregnant. He is 53 now, with one-year-old twins. 

This one is for the man who sets the same goal every January and quits it every February. Michael says the problem is not your willpower. Your brain ha...

Self care for men gets treated like a waste of time. Ralph B., founder of Help For Men and author of The Dead Bedroom Fix, tells Chris Anderson on The Upgraded Man why that guilt is wrong, and why the men who take a time out get more done.

Every Friday, the last guest leaves something in the Upgraded Man Journal and the next guest answers it. Thomas Edwards left this for Ralph: “God put you here to play one game in life that matters. And that’s your game. No one else’s. All you have to do...

How to say no to your wife without blowing up your marriage. Chris Anderson names the man listening who says yes to everything, and relationship coach Paul Roseberry talks straight to him for fifteen minutes. This is the best stretch of the full conversation, cut so a man can hear it on one drive home.

Paul Roseberry has coached nice guys for more than ten years, and he is also a standup comedian. He does not tell you to get louder. He tells you what to say, when to say it, and why she has been waiting...

Andrew Menechian is the guy who trains the trainers. He is Head of Fitness at FitCommit AI, a former IFBB Australasian Men's Physique champion, a powerlifter with an unofficial Australian under 90 kilo raw deadlift record, and a coach who has mentored more than 100 personal trainers. He started teaching himself training at thirteen and has not stopped since. 

And for five years, he was sure he was a hard gainer. He trained hard. He got stronger. He did not grow. Then an Olympic weightlifting coach looked at what he was eating and told him the truth. He gained t...

This is The Upgraded Man Journal. It is the ritual that runs through every episode of this show. One book, passed from guest to guest. Each man reads the question the last one left behind, answers it honestly on camera, and then leaves a new question for whoever sits down next. It is short on purpose. It is not short on weight.

Tim McDonald, a stage IV colorectal cancer survivor and screening advocate, left this one: what have you survived in life that you didn't call surviving in the moment?

Thomas Edwards Jr, author of...

Sexless marriage is not really about sex. Ralph B., founder of Help For Men and author of The Dead Bedroom Fix, tells Chris Anderson on The Upgraded Man that the bedroom is the last thing to go cold, and by the time it does, something else has been dead for years.

Ralph B. is known online as Dad Starting Over. He rebuilt his life after a divorce that blindsided him, then wrote the book that hundreds of thousands of men in dead marriages have picked up. He talks to men who have gone twenty and thirty years...

Chris Anderson sits down with Steve Barton, a high performance coach, creator of The Game of Ten, and co-author with his son Spencer of The Father, the Son, and the Aha Moment. Steve spent about thirty years running the floral business he took over from his father in Maine. He got certified through the Gestalt International Study Center in 2015 and trained in Miracle Minded Coaching with Marianne Williamson in 2021. He turned seventy the day before this record.

This one is for the man who is harder on himself than anyone else has ever been, and calls it...

Work smarter not harder is easy to say and hard to live, and stage 4 colorectal cancer survivor Tim McDonald had to get sick to learn it. In this Journal entry he reads what the last guest left him, agrees with half of it, and tells you plainly why the other half almost broke him.

At the end of every episode of The Upgraded Man there is a physical journal. The guest reads what the last guest wrote, sits with it, and writes something for the man who comes next. Same book every time, passed hand to hand...

This is a Best Moment episode. One section pulled from a longer conversation because it stands completely on its own.

Ask a man how he feels and you will usually get one of two answers. Fine, or nothing. Then something small happens and the anger shows up out of nowhere. Thomas Edwards Jr says that is not a character problem. It is a skill nobody taught him.

Thomas is the author of The One Up Effect and spent over a decade as The Professional Wingman, the coach the media called the real life Hitch. In...

Chris Anderson sits down with Dr. Tommy Rhee, a sports chiropractor who has spent nearly twenty years working on some of the most abused bodies in professional sport. Olympians, NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB players, PGA and LPGA golfers, UFC fighters and pro wrestlers. He is the founder and CEO of RheeGen and the author of The Future of Regenerative Medicine.

This one is for the man who is doing everything he was told to do. He trains. He eats decent. He is proud of the effort. And he still feels worse today than he did five...

At the end of every episode of The Upgraded Man there is a physical journal. The guest reads what the last guest wrote, sits with it, and then writes something down for the man who comes next. Same book every time, passed hand to hand. No prep. No script.

This week it is Nate Spangle, founder of Get Indiana and host of the Get IN. podcast. He built a media company out of a three thousand dollar truck he did not own when he announced the idea, and he is the first guest to write in the...

In 2020 a doctor told Tim McDonald he had cancer and that it had already spread to his liver. A few months later an oncologist told him something worse. She said she was going to put him on a chemo that gave him the highest quality of life, because he only had three years left to live.

Tim did not say anything out loud. In his head he said four words. That's your story, not mine.

Six years later he is still here.

This is the Best Moment from Tim McDonald's episode of The...

Florian Kemmerich spent 15 years climbing the corporate ladder in the medical device world, running companies across Germany, Mexico, and the United States. From the outside, he had won. Then a coaching session put him in a chair across from his five year old self, and that kid told him he was wasting his life. He calls what he found the absent subject of his own education. School gave him every tool to make a living and nothing that told him who he was.

Florian is the co-founder of Human Planet, the author of On Vocation, and the...

At the end of every episode of The Upgraded Man there is a physical journal. The guest reads what the last guest wrote, sits with it, and then writes something down for the next guest. Same book every time, passed from man to man.

Larry Hagner reads the entry Phillip Lanier left behind: "It is better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war." Larry takes it into what it means to be a warrior outside your castle instead of inside it, where the people you love live.

Then he...

This is the most valuable part of our conversation with Nate Spangle, founder of Get Indiana, pulled out as its own episode.

Nate is known across Indiana as a hype man. Big stunts, small towns, a truck, a camera. But none of that is where the story starts. It starts in 2017, when his mom died of cancer while he was in college. He admits he was a self-absorbed 20 year old who talked mostly to hear his own voice. He gave his mom a blank notebook when she got diagnosed and asked her to write down her story...

Joel Bein spent two years clearing more than a thousand beliefs on himself before he ever worked on anyone else. In this episode he does it live, on Chris. Joel finds the belief that has been running Chris since he was a kid, walks him through it on camera, and about fifteen minutes later Chris says the words out loud and feels nothing. Joel is the founder of Human Liberation, where he works one on one with six and seven figure entrepreneurs to permanently remove the beliefs that quietly cap what they earn and what they enjoy. He calls...

The Upgraded Man Journal is the part of every episode where the guest reads what the last guest left behind, answers it honestly, and then writes something for the man who comes next. No prep. No script. Just the question and whatever comes up.

This week it is Phillip Lanier, founder of Your Money Essentials and Core Business Essentials. Before he built and sold a company, he and his wife were homeless. He teaches money now to people who feel behind, and he does it without shame.

The question left for him came from Doctor...

Larry Hagner is the founder of The Dad Edge and host of The Dad Edge Podcast. He has spent more than a decade helping men become better husbands and fathers. In this Wednesday episode, he lays out the order most men get backward at home.

Larry uses an oak tree to explain it. The branches are your marriage, your kids, your work, your friends. The trunk is you. Most men skip the trunk. They selflessly serve everybody else, never lead themselves, and then wonder why the people counting on them still feel hungry and thirsty.

...

Most men were taught that being nice is the same as being good. Paul Roseberry has spent more than ten years showing men that this is the reason a lot of good guys are losing at home. Paul is a relationship coach and former matchmaker who now works almost exclusively with nice guys, and he is also a headlining standup comedian. He is the creator of the SECURITY Method. In this episode he sits down with Chris Anderson to break down why the nice guy has to lose, what security actually means to a woman, and why the word...

When Ralph Brewer's marriage ended in infidelity and divorce, he was left with three young kids, a shattered sense of identity, and no real support system. What started as private journaling and anonymous blog posts grew into a mission to help men navigate divorce, recover from betrayal, and understand why so many relationships quietly die. In this episode of The Upgraded Man, host Chris Anderson sits down with Ralph — self-published author of The Dead Bedroom Fix and founder of Help for Men — for an honest conversation about loss, attachment, and what it actually takes for a man to come back...

Most men do not lose their marriage in one big blowup. They lose it slowly, by being in the house but not actually in the room. In this episode, Chris Anderson sits down with Thomas Edwards Jr, founder of The Professional Wingman and author of The One Up Effect: Gamify Your Life to Win and Have Fun Playing, to talk about why so many high performing men feel like a stranger in their own home, and what it takes to come back.

Thomas built a career the media called the real life Hitch, with more than 400 marriages...

In 2020, Tim McDonald went to an urgent care for a pain in his side. He left knowing he had stage IV colorectal cancer that had already spread to his liver. A second oncologist told him he had three years to live. Almost six years later, after a liver transplant and a long stretch of treatment, Tim is still here, still working, and still traveling with his wife every year.

Chris Anderson sits down with Tim to talk about the mindset that carried him through it, the symptoms he brushed off for months, and what it actually looks...

Nate Spangle never set out to build a media company. He set out to be the first truck in line at the Indy 500. That single idea, filmed on his phone while walking into work, blew up overnight and became Get Indiana, the brand now known across the state for hyping up small towns, local businesses, and the people most folks would drive right past.

In this episode, Chris Anderson sits down with Nate to unpack how a $3,000 truck off Facebook Marketplace turned into a full media company, and why plain old curiosity is the real engine behind...

Most men were never taught how to be a great father or husband — they were left to figure it out on their own, often repeating the very patterns they swore they'd break. In this episode of the Upgraded Man Podcast, host Chris Anderson sits down with Larry Hagner, founder and CEO of The Dad Edge, who has spent fourteen years building a community and body of work to help men lead their families with intention.

Larry opens up about growing up without his biological father, an abusive stepfather, and the night he crossed a line with his ow...

Ever feel like you're grinding harder than ever and still scraping by before the next paycheck hits? You're not bad with money. The world changed — and most men were never handed a plan.

In this episode of The Upgraded Man Podcast, Chris Anderson sits down with Philip Lanier, a former construction laborer who went from homelessness to selling his own company and now teaches everyday people how to take control of their finances without shame.

Philip gets real about the "death by a thousand cuts" that quietly drains your accounts, the borrowed scoreboard that keeps yo...

You are working harder than ever and the needle still will not move. In this episode of The Upgraded Man Podcast, host Chris Anderson sits down with Dr. Joseph Drolshagen, creator of the SMT method and a 27-year corporate sales veteran turned subconscious performance coach, to expose the real reason most men stall out in business and wealth building. It is not your strategy. It is not the economy. It is the programming running underneath everything you do.

Drolshagen breaks down how 85% of your results are driven by subconscious patterns, why hustle culture quietly sabotages the men...

What does it really mean when a man says, "That's just who I am"? In this episode of The Upgraded Man, host Chris Anderson sits down with Arky Jones, founder of Personality Peak and a lifelong student of stoicism, to unpack why that phrase is usually an excuse rather than an identity. Born in England and now based in Australia, Arky brings a hard-won perspective shaped by military training, a serious injury, and a complete rebuild of his life and purpose. Together they explore how self-awareness, radical ownership, and small daily upgrades can pull any man out of complacency...

At 70 years old, Jeff broke four ultra-distance cycling world records in a single day, and he did it after training for only a few months. On this episode of The Upgraded Man Podcast, host Chris Anderson sits down with the record-breaking cyclist, former aerobatic pilot, and performance coach to take apart one of the most common excuses men hide behind: a lack of motivation. Jeff makes the case that motivation is overrated, and that the real engine behind a life of achievement is learning to enjoy the process, set the right goals, and pivot without shame when something stops...

High achievers don't get stuck because they lack effort. They get stuck because they're moving fast in the wrong direction. In this episode of The Upgraded Man Podcast, Chris Anderson sits down with high-performance coach Tim Kelly to unpack why so many capable men hit a ceiling and what it actually takes to break through.

Tim is a former Navy rescue swimmer, commercial real estate investor, author, and founder of Active Duty Passive Income. After achieving financial freedom and then losing over seven figures, he rebuilt his life around clarity, faith, and disciplined daily action. Now he...

What does it take to turn 325 acres of Indiana woods into a national spirits brand and an "adult Disneyland" that pulls visitors from across the country? In this episode of The Upgraded Man Podcast, Chris Anderson sits down with Jeff McCabe, co-founder of Hard Truth Distilling Co., for a wide-ranging conversation on craft, mindset, family, and the long game of building something that lasts.

Jeff is a Naval Academy graduate and former Navy pilot who went on to run a major part of the business travel and corporate card division at American Express before stepping away to...

In this episode of The Upgraded Man Podcast, host Chris Anderson sits down with Dr. Carla Caturia, a mindset and family relationship expert who has worked with thousands of families to help fathers strengthen their connection with their kids. As the first female guest since the show's rebrand, Dr. Carla brings a fresh, practical perspective to one of the toughest questions dads face: how do I stay close to my kid as they grow up?

Whether you have a toddler, a teenager, or a kid somewhere in between, this conversation gives you a real-world framework for showing...

Welcome to the very first guest episode of The Upgraded Man Podcast. Host Chris Anderson sits down with Dr. Bobby Shelton, a researcher and speaker on self-leadership theory, for a conversation about what it actually takes for a man to like himself again, and why so many high-achieving men are quietly running on empty.

Bobby opens up about the morning he sat in a chair for an hour and a half, refusing to stand until he gave himself permission to start liking who he was. He shares how a wife's blunt comment, 180 pounds of weight loss, a...