How Your Old Solutions Became Your Current Problems featuring Gary John Bishop
Release Date: 07/13/2026
Finding Your "Why Not" When Everything Feels Unbearable featuring Baruch HaLevi
The Dad Edge Podcast
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 man...
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Raising Kids Who Have "A Battle" Worth Fighting For featuring John Sapiente
The Dad Edge Podcast
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 brand...
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Why Rusty Relationships Keep 78% of Men Stuck featuring Marc Hildebrand
The Dad Edge Podcast
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...
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What Your Kids Learn From Watching You Eat featuring Abbey Sharp
The Dad Edge Podcast
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...
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Controlling What You Can When Everything Else Falls Apart featuring Khalil Zahar
The Dad Edge Podcast
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 started...
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What to Do When Your Teen Is Struggling Mentally
The Dad Edge Podcast
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 tactic she's...
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The Unspoken Expectations Quietly Wrecking Your Marriage featuring Jessica & Larry Hagner
The Dad Edge Podcast
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 I took over bill...
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Loneliness Is a Crisis and the Answer is Community featuring Don Ross
The Dad Edge Podcast
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 gospel reaching every ethnic...
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The One Word That Quietly Makes or Breaks a Marriage featuring Jessica & Larry Hagner
The Dad Edge Podcast
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 sports...
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Present Fatherhood That Always Beats Perfect Fatherhood featuring Randy Keith
The Dad Edge Podcast
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 began, why he chose 50-50 custody when his...
info_outlineGary John Bishop is the New York Times bestselling author behind Unfuk Yourself* and Stop Doing That Sht*, whose books have sold over 4.5 million copies and whose audiobooks alone have topped 2 million. Making his sixth appearance on the show, the Scottish philosopher and personal development author joins Larry to break down his newest book, Now What, and challenge the entire premise of self-help.
This conversation gets into why chasing the next fix keeps you stuck, how your old solutions quietly become your current problems, and why self-invention beats self-improvement for good. If you're a dad who's done all the work, read all the books, and still catches himself asking why life feels the same, this one will reframe how you see time, identity, and being present with your kids.
Timeline Summary
[1:02] – Gary returns for his sixth appearance and the "Larry and Gary Show" reunion
[3:13] – The line that started it all: solving your life instead of living in it
[5:23] – Why the book slapped Gary around as he wrote it and questioned everything he knew
[6:38] – Realizing most of what we call fulfillment is actually just relief
[8:03] – Now is not a time, now is a place, and now is eternal, but you're not
[11:28] – How Gary scrapped a finished manuscript and rewrote the guts in 30 days
[14:20] – The difference between having knowledge of something and truly knowing it
[22:12] – How old solutions become current problems: work ethic turning into workaholism
[27:03] – Larry on his son's graduation and why he felt joy instead of regret
[29:52] – The meerkat in the cathedral and why context is your one true superpower
[32:16] – Alan Watts on standing in a river with the past and future always here
[36:13] – Self-invention over self-improvement and why the "self" isn't broken
[41:20] – Declaring who you are as accomplished and letting it call you forward
[48:00] – What to do when the people closest to you resist the new version of you
[53:03] – Why we prefer the certainty of misery over the uncertainty of joy
[1:00:26] – The simplest way to teach kids this thinking through better questions
5 Key Takeaways
- Stop Solving, Start Living — Most people spend their whole lives fixing the problem in front of their face, then wonder why relief never comes. A life you create still has problems, but they're the right ones.
- Old Solutions Become New Problems — The job, the relationship, the work ethic you built to fix an old pain often becomes the very thing troubling you now. Recognizing that pattern is how you stop repeating it.
- Context Is Your Superpower — You can't always change what's happening, but you can shift the context you hold it in. Mandela sat in the same cell for years and chose to experience it as a life of service.
- Self-Invention Beats Self-Improvement — You aren't a broken, fixed thing that needs better habits. Through language you can declare who you are right now and let that identity call new actions out of you.
- Teach Kids to Question, Not to Comply — Instead of correcting kids, ask them where they heard that, what they're making it mean, and what else it could mean. "Now what?" asked honestly and repeatedly shifts any story.
Links & Resources
- Episode page and all links — https://thedadedge.com/1503
- Join the Dad Edge Alliance — https://thedadedge.com/join
- Dad Edge Boardroom Goal Setting Intensive — https://thedadedge.com/goals
- Now What by Gary John Bishop — available wherever books are sold
- Gary John Bishop's website — https://garyjohnbishop.com
- Follow Gary John Bishop on Instagram — https://instagram.com/garyjohnbishop
- Follow Gary John Bishop on TikTok — https://tiktok.com/@garyjohnbishop
Enjoyed This Episode?
If Gary's idea that "now is a place, not a time" cracked something open for you, don't let it stop at a listen. Send this episode to a dad who's done all the work and still feels stuck, and try asking your kids one of Gary's questions this week. If the show keeps delivering for you, follow, rate, and leave a review so more fathers can find these conversations.