The Dad Edge Podcast
The Dad Edge Podcast is a movement. It is a strong community of Fathers who all share a set of values. Larry Hagner, founder of The Dad Edge, breaks down common challenges of fatherhood, making them easy to understand and overcome. Tackling the world of Fatherhood can be a daunting task when we try to do it alone. The mission of The Dad Edge Podcast is to help you become the best, strongest, and happiest version of yourself so that you can help guide your kids to the best version of themselves. Simple as that. Everything you need and all...
Proximity Is the Only Parenting Philosophy You Need (Here's Why) featuring Rick Jordan
This week I sat down with Rick Jordan, a self-made entrepreneur, CEO, keynote speaker, and host of Frequency with Rick Jordan. Rick went from financial struggles and nearly losing his home to building a company from the ground up and taking it public without outside investors or private equity, and he has made more than 1,200 media appearances on networks like Fox, Bloomberg, NBC, CBS, and ABC. He is also a dad of three, including twins.
We talk about his one word parenting philosophy, proximity, and how to connect with a teenager by entering their world. Rick shares...
Staying Vigilant Without Making Your Family Anxious featuring Sam Rosenberg
This week I brought Sam Rosenberg back to the Dad Edge for a special Q&A with the guys in our Alliance. Sam is a former Marine Corps officer and the founder of Live Ready. He spent years protecting heads of state, CEOs, and celebrities, and he has trained tens of thousands of people to recognize threats before they become emergencies. I learned a ton from his first episode, so I wanted the men in our community to put their own questions in front of him.
We cover how to build situational awareness in your kids with...
Your Wife Needs You to Stop Fixing Things & Start Listening featuring Jake Kastleman
This week I'm doing something a little different. Instead of interviewing a guest, I'm replaying a conversation I had as the guest on Jake Kastleman's podcast. Jake runs No More Desire, a porn recovery platform, and we went deep on marriage, fatherhood, and learning to face our emotions instead of numbing them. I share the night I lost my temper with my four year old that led me to start the Good Dad Project, and why I now believe being a husband and a father are skills we can learn.
We get practical on connecting with your...
How Trapped Emotions May Show Up as Physical Pain in Your Body featuring Dr. Bradley Nelson
This week I sat down with Dr. Bradley Nelson, a holistic physician, USA Today bestselling author, and founder and CEO of Discover Healing, the creator of the Emotion Code, the Body Code, and the Belief Code. He's a father of eight, a grandfather of seven, and a great grandfather, and he opened with an incredible story about how his wife's first daughter, placed for adoption before they met, found them and was officially adopted into the family at 47.
We got into his newest book, The Heart Code, which he wrote with his wife Jean, and the idea...
Shaping Results by Establish Purpose & Values featuring Nick Friedman
This week I sat down with Nick Friedman, the original college hunk behind College Hunks Hauling Junk and Moving, a company that started with a beat up cargo van the summer before his senior year of college and has grown to more than 200 franchises and over $300 million a year in sales. Nick has been on Shark Tank and Undercover Boss, is a two time Emmy Award winning producer, and is a dad of four who has been married since 2013.
We got into the culture he built at work and the one he tries to build at home...
Willpower Alone Will Never Fix a P*rn Problem (Here's Why) featuring Steven Wolt
This week I sat down with Steven Wolt, the founder of Valor Recovery, a virtual coaching program that helps men overcome pornography abuse and compulsive sexual behavior. Steven is a husband, father, and entrepreneur who spent decades fighting a private war with sexual addiction while looking successful on the outside. After hitting rock bottom in 2008, he rebuilt his life and now uses that story to help other men get free.
We went underneath the shame, the secrecy, and the promises of I'm done. Steven explained why willpower alone fails, why porn abuse is really an intimacy disorder...
Spontaneous or Responsive Desire in Marriage (What the Difference is) featuring Dr. Diane Mueller
This week I sat down with Dr. Diane Mueller, a board certified sexologist with doctorates in natural medicine and acupuncture and oriental medicine. She is the host of the Libido Lounge and a best selling author and international speaker who helps committed couples who went from passionate lovers to feeling like roommates. She looks at the whole picture, including hormones, stress, kids, menopause, communication, and life transitions.
We got honest about how easily intimacy slips off track, including my own sadness since our first son left the nest and the drinking habit I traced back to it...
The Danger of Raising Boys Through a Screen featuring Bill Winchester
Bill Winchester is back on the show, and one word kept coming to mind as I read his story: builder. He started with backyard tree forts, married his high school sweetheart Christy at 21, raised three kids, and helped build the church his family worshiped in and the school his kids attended. Somewhere along the way he realized the most important thing he'd ever build was men, which led him to create the Dangerously Good Men rite of passage in Bend, Oregon, and Improving Grounds, where men gather around a fire on Saturday mornings.
We talked about raising...
The Mother's Side Baldness Myth Finally Explained featuring Dr. Goran Jezic
Dr. Goran Jezic is a dual board certified physician practicing in Houston since 1996 who has focused on hair restoration for over a decade, with his team reporting more than 1 million hair grafts implanted. He personally conducts every consultation and specializes in the follicular unit extraction (FUE) method, working with everyday men as well as professional athletes, actors, and celebrities.
In this episode Larry and Dr. Jezic break down why men actually lose their hair, what finasteride and minoxidil really do (and their side effect profiles), and how modern FUE transplants compare to the older strip method and...
The Unspoken Expectations Are Quietly Hurting Your Marriage featuring Michael Bernoff
This week I sat down with Michael Bernoff, a human behavior expert with more than 20 years of study into communication, influence, and language. He's the founder of the Human Communications Institute and the author of Average Sucks, and he started as an average middle class Jersey kid who was told that certain things weren't for people like us. At 19 he discovered that communication is a skill you can learn, and at 21 he met his mentor Jim Rohn, whose success principles shaped decades of his work.
We got practical on the words we use with our kids, our...
How Your Relationship With Yourself Shapes Every Other Relationship featuring Traver Boehm
Traver Boehm is back on the show for the third time, and I still remember his first story like it was yesterday. He's a former professional MMA fighter and bodyguard with a master's degree in traditional Chinese medicine, a hospice volunteer, more than 11 years sober, and the founder of the Uncivilized movement. He's the author of Today I Rise, Uncivilized, and 28 Days in Darkness, and he has now spent 77 days of his life in complete darkness, including 49 straight days in a dark room in Tuscany with no phone, no people, and no clock.
We talk about what...
Why 70% of the Mental Load Still Falls on Mom When Raising a Family featuring Sam Kelly
This week I talked with Sam Kelly, a mom of three, a master's-level art therapy counselor, and the creator of Little Cycle Breakers, about the mental load, the invisible, exhausting job of noticing everything that needs to be done in a house before anyone else even sees it. Sam spent over a year trying to get her husband to share that load the old way, more chore charts, more reminders, more managing, before she realized she was just teaching her own kids to wait for instructions too. That realization became "notice and do," the framework at the center of...
How Your Relationship With Yourself Shapes Every Other Relationship featuring Traver Boehm
Traver Boehm is back on the show for the third time, and I still remember his first story like it was yesterday. He's a former professional MMA fighter and bodyguard with a master's degree in traditional Chinese medicine, a hospice volunteer, more than 11 years sober, and the founder of the Uncivilized movement. He's the author of Today I Rise, Uncivilized, and 28 Days in Darkness, and he has now spent 77 days of his life in complete darkness, including 49 straight days in a dark room in Tuscany with no phone, no people, and no clock.
We talk about what...
How to Raise Confident Kids Who Take Life Seriously featuring Jordan Raynor
This week I sat down with Jordan Raynor, a bestselling author, serial entrepreneur, and one of the leading voices in the faith and work movement. Jordan wrote Called to Create, Redeeming Your Time, The Creator in You, and his newest book, Redeeming Your Goals, and he's the executive chairman of Threshold 360 after stepping down as CEO to write full time. He has been married since 2009, is a dad to three daughters, and he asks a much better question than most goal-setting gurus: who are we becoming while we chase these goals?
We started with the all-boys versus...
Why Apologizing to Your Kids Builds Trust, Not Weakness featuring Adam Ukman
This week I sat down with Adam Ukman, the founder of The Dads Initiative, a media company built entirely around a question almost nobody else in men's media is asking: where's the content for the normal dad? About a year ago, Adam launched The Dads Initiative after noticing men's media split into two toxic lanes, anger and blame, and set out to build a third lane for guys just trying to show up and do their best. His team surveyed more than 1,300 fathers and found that when asked which father figure in media actually reflects who they are, the...
The Five Pillars That Rebuilt My Marriage featuring Justin Pickering
Justin Pickering spent nearly two decades in U.S. Army Special Forces, retiring as a Green Beret Sergeant Major with the 7th Special Forces Group, earning a Purple Heart and five Bronze Stars along the way. He's now an entrepreneur, real estate investor, and author of The Deliberate Mindset, a book built from his own collapse and recovery after coming home from his final deployment.
In this episode, Justin joins Larry to talk about the moment his youngest son didn't recognize him after his final deployment, the flashback that sent him to check himself into a psychological...
What Happens When Success Stops Feeling Like Enough featuring John R. Miles
John R. Miles is a Naval Academy graduate, combat veteran, and former Fortune 500 executive who went on to found Passion Struck and write Passion Struck and the upcoming The Mattering Effect: Creating a Life of Meaning and Worth, a Next Big Idea Club selection curated by Susan Cain, Malcolm Gladwell, Daniel Pink, and Adam Grant.
In this episode, John joins Larry to talk about what he calls "the slow fade," the quiet erosion that happens when a man's sense of worth gets tied entirely to what he produces. He shares the story of walking in on an...
The Financial Drift Nobody Warns New Dads About featuring Chris Schuett
Chris Schuett is a Brooklyn dad of two, the COO of Little Cinema, and the author of You Are Now the CFO of a Very Small Family, where he writes about what he calls "the financial drift," the slow, unintentional neglect of a family's financial foundation. He's also the writer behind the New Family CFO newsletter, sharing what he's learned building his own financial system from scratch.
In this episode, Chris joins Larry to unpack why dads put off wills, life insurance, and college savings until "later" quietly becomes years, how to talk to your spouse about...
The Three Step Formula That Stopped a Relapse featuring Michael Lassman
Michael Lassman had millions of dollars, a successful Wall Street career, and by every outward measure had made it. Then alcoholism took nearly all of it away. In this deeply honest conversation, Michael walks Larry through his descent, his years long estrangement from his children, and the long road back through a twelve step program, faith, and eventually writing two books about what he learned along the way.
What makes this conversation land so hard is how much Larry opens up in return. He shares a recent, still raw season of using alcohol to cope with his...
Why Peacekeeping and Peacemaking Are Not the Same in Co-Parenting
This week's Wednesday Q&A tackles a single question, but it's one that touches a lot of co-parenting dads. A member named Mike wrote in about a genuinely tricky situation. His ex-wife coaches their daughter's softball team and wants her fully involved, but Mike is also trying to build his own relationship with his daughter through something they both love, jiu jitsu. The two schedules keep colliding, and Mike is left wondering how much effort he should really be putting into supporting an activity that's eating into his own time with her.
Joe took the lead on...
Why Winning at a Resented Life Is More Dangerous Than Failing featuring David Gerber
David Gerber opens this episode with a story that stops you in your tracks: a wild lioness charging at 50 miles an hour, stopping just six feet from him, in the African wilderness where he spends weeks each year tracking lions on foot, not to hunt them, but to experience a level of presence and aliveness he says he's never found anywhere else. David is an executive coach at Novus Global who works with pro athletes, CEOs, and high performers, but the real heart of this conversation is what led him there: a divorce five and a half years ago...
How You Can Rebuild Your Marriage Without Starting Over featuring Kaseena Birnbaum
I opened this episode by asking Kaseena Birnbaum about something I'd heard her talk about online: the 72 hour rule, a simple commitment she and her husband made years ago to never go more than three days without prioritizing physical intimacy in some form. What made this conversation different from a lot of marriage talks I've had is how honest Kaseena was about how hard that was for her to actually implement, even though it ended up being, in her words, the single thing that changed their entire marriage.
We got into what was really underneath her own...
Why Only 12% of Marriages Are Actually Thriving
This week's Alliance Q&A is one I think a lot of you will relate to, even if you've never said it out loud. A member named Eric brought a question on behalf of a close friend who's in a genuinely rough season with his marriage, arguments about a job, about help around the house, about who's doing enough for the kids. Rather than treat it as a surface-level scheduling problem, we spent this entire episode digging into what's actually happening underneath, because I've coached enough men to know the surface complaint is almost never the real issue.
<...Finding Your "Why Not" When Everything Feels Unbearable featuring Baruch HaLevi
Baruch HaLevi opens this conversation with a statistic most listeners have never heard: every 13 minutes in America, a man dies by suicide, and men account for roughly 80% of all suicide deaths. For Baruch, this isn't abstract. He's lost family members to suicide across multiple generations, and he candidly shares that he himself came close to the same fate about a decade ago, during a period of profound identity loss after stepping away from 20 years as a rabbi.
Grounded in the work of Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, Baruch and Larry talk through what actually helps a...
Raising Kids Who Have "A Battle" Worth Fighting For featuring John Sapiente
John Sapiente never planned to become a charitable force in the veteran community, he just wanted to play golf with a celebrity at a charity gala. That single decision in 2013 led him to a life-changing weekend with military families, a friendship with Folds of Honor founder Lt. Col. Dan Rooney, and eventually the creation of Volition America, a lifestyle apparel brand that has raised over $2 million for veteran and first responder families by donating 13% of profits, a number tied to the 13 folds of the American flag.
In this conversation with Larry, John shares the origin story behind...
Why Rusty Relationships Keep 78% of Men Stuck featuring Marc Hildebrand
For the second time, Marc Hildebrand flips the format and puts Larry in the interview seat, this time to unpack the five things men consistently say changed everything after joining the Dad Edge Business Boardroom Brotherhood: clarity, challenge, strategy, accountability, and brotherhood. Using real, anonymized member stories, Larry walks through how the group helps a business owner named Taylor rebuild connection with his wife using the four pillars of marriage and three levels of listening, why "rusty relationships" built on enabling friends keep 78% of men stuck, and why vague goals like "more communication" aren't actually strategies.
Larry...
What Your Kids Learn From Watching You Eat featuring Abbey Sharp
Abbey Sharp has built an audience of over 2.5 million people calling out nutrition misinformation as a registered dietitian, and in this conversation she and Larry cut through some of the biggest confusion facing dads right now: the seed oil panic, the rise of "looks maxing" and muscularity-focused disordered eating in men, and how to feed a house full of picky kids without turning dinner into a nightly battle. Larry gets unusually candid about his own relationship with fitness and body image, and Abbey offers a grounded, non-restrictive framework for approaching food that she built out of her own recovery...
Controlling What You Can When Everything Else Falls Apart featuring Khalil Zahar
I've had a lot of impressive guests on this show, but Khalil Zahar's story genuinely stood out to me. He's the founder and CEO of FightCamp, a company he built from a simple idea, wanting to actually measure his own progress as a boxer, into one of the biggest names in connected fitness, with over $100 million raised and backing from legends like Mike Tyson, Floyd Mayweather, and Georges St-Pierre. He's also not married and doesn't have kids, but the lessons he's built his entire career around, discipline, discomfort, and identity, translate directly to fatherhood and marriage.
We...
What to Do When Your Teen Is Struggling Mentally
This week's Wednesday Q&A is a little different, I'm running it solo since my usual co-host Joe couldn't make it, and honestly, it turned into one of the harder, more important conversations we've had. A man in our Alliance named Rich called in with a genuinely difficult situation: his 17-year-old stepdaughter recently went through a breakup, was hospitalized shortly after making statements about wanting to end her life, and Rich is trying to figure out how to support her while also being honest that he's not sure whether what he's seeing is a real crisis or a manipulation...
The Unspoken Expectations Quietly Wrecking Your Marriage featuring Jessica & Larry Hagner
Gentlemen, welcome to the fourth and final episode of this month's series with my wife Jessica, and I want to start by saying thank you for showing up for this one, since August actually had five Fridays this year, which means she recorded a full bonus episode she didn't have to do. Today we're tackling something that trips up more marriages than almost anything else: roles and expectations, and specifically, all the unspoken assumptions about who does what that quietly cause resentment when they're never actually talked about.
Jessica and I get into the finances first, how...
Loneliness Is a Crisis and the Answer is Community featuring Don Ross
Don Ross is the founder of Manhood Tribes, a former pastor of 20 years who now works in digital marketing and has spent over two decades helping men cut through the noise around masculinity and build real brotherhood. Married 22 years with two boys, he's built his work around five marks of manhood and, more recently, helping men prepare for what he believes are the biblical end times.
This is a unique episode. Don walks Larry through the specific signs he sees converging right now, the nation of Israel and the temple, the move toward digital currency, and the...
The One Word That Quietly Makes or Breaks a Marriage featuring Jessica & Larry Hagner
Larry is back in studio with his wife Jessica for the fourth installment of their couples series, recorded the same month they hit 23 years of marriage and 30 years of knowing each other. This time the whole conversation centers on one word that quietly makes or breaks a marriage: alignment. Most couples, Larry notes from a decade of coaching, are misaligned on parenting, money, intimacy, and faith, and never realize it until it derails their connection.
Larry and Jessica walk through how they actually got aligned over 22 years, from choosing experiences over stuff and a backyard over a...
Present Fatherhood That Always Beats Perfect Fatherhood featuring Randy Keith
Officer Randy Keith is a military veteran, a 15-year law enforcement officer, and the founder of Present Father, a platform that now reaches hundreds of thousands of dads across the world. He didn't set out to build a movement. He built it from the darkest chapter of his life, a high-conflict divorce that put him through false allegations, an order of protection that nearly cost him his career, CPS interviews of his young children, and the terror of dropping his kids off not knowing if he'd get them back.
Randy walks Larry through the night it all...
How We Make Our Marriage Work With Four Kids and a Business featuring Larry & Jessica Hagner
Larry is back with his wife Jessica for the third installment of their Friday couples series, and this one tackles the quiet killer of long marriages: the drift. That slow slide where you get so buried in kids, sports, work, and the house that you look up years later and realize you lost each other somewhere along the way. Married 22 years, they're honest that they've hit those valleys too, and this episode is about how they catch it and climb back out.
Larry opens up about being the avoidant one early on, walking away from hard conversations...
How to Bring Up Sex Without Making Her Feel Like She Failed featuring Cailtin V
Caitlin V is a sexologist, relationship coach, and host of Good Sex on HBO Max who has built a YouTube channel with nearly a million subscribers and over 170 million views, working primarily with men on erectile dysfunction, performance anxiety, premature ejaculation, and the isolation that comes with all three. She started as a sexual health researcher and policy analyst before deciding that change happens in conversations with real people, not in research papers.
This is a live Dad Edge Alliance Q&A where Caitlin takes real questions from married men about a sexless stretch, shame carried into...
The Guardrails That Keep Our Disagreements From Becoming Fights featuring Larry & Jessica Hagner
Larry is back in studio with his wife Jessica for part two of their conversation, recorded the week of their 22nd anniversary. Last week they covered how they met and the crucibles that shaped them. This week they get practical about the daily mechanics of a marriage that works: how they got aligned on parenting, how they resolve conflict, and how they back each other up in front of the kids whether they agree or not.
They're candid that none of it came naturally at first. They walk through the parenting classes that helped early on, a...
The Situational Awareness Skills Every Dad Should Teach His Family featuring Sam Rosenburg
Sam Rosenberg has spent his career protecting some of the most recognized people on the planet, heads of state, CEOs, and celebrities including Warren Buffett, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Tom Cruise. A former Marine Corps officer who moved into close protection in 1996, he's since shifted his focus to teaching ordinary people the same skills he used to guard public figures, through his company Live Ready and his bestselling book of the same name. He's trained tens of thousands of people to recognize threats before they become emergencies.
This one is a genuine masterclass in personal safety, and Sam's...
Small Pursuits That Rebuild a Disconnected Marriage featuring Joe Bailey
This is a Wednesday Wins Q&A, with Larry joined by his longtime co-host Joe Bailey to tackle a question that lands for almost every married dad. Mike from Washington State wrote in about a marriage that isn't broken, no fighting, no affairs, but feels more like two coworkers running a small company called the family. He and his wife talk schedules, kids, and bills, physical intimacy has slowed, and as he puts it, he misses her even though she's only six feet away.
Larry breaks down the four pillars of marriage from Lance and Brandi's work...
Connection Before Correction With Your Wife & Your Kids
This is a special live Q&A recorded inside Apogee, where the hosts turned the tables and interviewed Larry alongside his wife Jessica for a rare joint conversation. Married 23 years with four sons, the two open up about what actually creates safety in a home, and their answer surprises the room: it starts with relentlessly prioritizing the marriage.
From there they get honest about the early years when Larry admits he floundered and didn't lead well, how Jessica learned to call him forward without emasculating him, and why connection always has to come before correction. They talk...
The Difference Between Sight and Vision featuring Harry Psaros
Harry Psaros is an author, neuroscientist, health coach, and third degree black belt, known to Pittsburgh sports fans as the Pit Guru, but the title that matters most to him is dad. He and his wife Michelle have been married 24 years and raised two sons, and it was his journey raising Gus, who's on the autism spectrum, that led him to write his Amazon bestselling, award winning book From Struggle to Strength. He's one of the rare male voices in the autism space, and he doesn't shy away from calling other fathers forward.
Harry and Larry, who's...