F*ck The Standard

Craig Sotkovsky responded to the World Trade Center on 9-11. He came out of it with lung cancer, GERD, PTSD, and a government program that kicked him off healthcare over a paperwork technicality. He rebuilt his life in Mexico on $350 a month and wrote a book called Everybody Pays a Vig about the price everyone pays for the life they're avoiding. In this episode, Craig and Rob go after everythi...

Every year we say never forget, and every year fewer and fewer of us remember what happened the day after. On September 12th, 2001, this country did something it hasn't done since. Nobody asked who you voted for before they helped you. Strangers gave blood, hugged each other, and asked one question: What can I do to help? Twenty five years later, I look at what we did with the time the victims...

CJ Plain spent sixteen years driving truck while chasing a music career on the side. Then a half inch chain snapped on the side of a highway in Denver and caught him across the forehead hard enough to kill him. He survived. What came after nearly broke him anyway. He lost his income overnight, and he spent three years fighting a disability system that already had the paperwork proving his injury....

His stepdad pulled him out of therapy as a kid because men don't do that. He carried that line for 20 years, through an abusive household, a marriage that mirrored it, a custody loss, and a drinking problem that started when he was 10. Willie Thornton doesn't tell the clean version. He tells you about the night he got in his car with nowhere to go and no reason not to keep driving. He tell...

They're telling us the truth. That's the biggest lie there is. Season two is back! Paul Simard is a death doula and a men's coach who spends his life sitting with grief, dying, and the lies men are taught to carry , starting with the idea that everything about death, and everything about being a man, has been safely outsourced to someone else. He tells the story of the day he missed hi...

JoJo Lynn came out of eight years of severe clinical depression and built a podcast to make sure other people did not have to survive in silence the way she did. In this episode, she walks through two divorces, narcissistic abuse, the loss of a stillborn daughter, and the sudden death of her best friend; then traces the slow, unglamorous process of rebuilding herself from that stack of losses. The...

Kimberly Love is a six-time published author, a licensed pilot, a radio host with a nine-year track record, and a woman who spent years as the invisible support system in her own marriage before she finally reclaimed herself. In this episode, Kim talks about childhood abuse as a foundational experience, how she dissolved her own creative identity to prop up someone else's goals, the specific m...

David Jarvis spent 21 years in the British Army before a medical discharge in January 2022 forced him to rebuild everything from scratch. He was three months into his training when he watched a fellow soldier die in the bunk beside him, days after 9/11. That moment, and the PTSD it helped create, followed him through three tours of Afghanistan and two decades of using busyness as a coping mechanis...

In this episode of Fuck the Standard, Rob sits down with Dean Griffin, also known as the Travelling Veteran, a British Army veteran who served in Bosnia and Iraq before being medically discharged in 2003 with PTSD. When he asked what support he would receive, the answer from the Ministry of Defense was, nothing. What Dean built over the next two decades is the core of this conversation. He returne...

Deepak Saini walked into adulthood as the chronically ill, morbidly obese kid who kept telling himself the next thing would eventually fix everything. The next job. The next raise. He lost thousands of pounds over his lifetime running the yo-yo cycle and never once stopped to look at what was actually driving the pattern underneath it all. Then in 2014 his back gave out. He could not bend at the w...

Season 2 opens with a solo episode. No guest, no script to hide behind, no filter. This one is about the political outrage machine, the echo chambers you built yourself, the news channels that stopped reporting and started flattering you, and the generation of kids we're raising on screens while we fight strangers online. It's not about who's in office, and it never was, it's about...

Laura Ferri grew up in a house where love came with conditions and threats, where her mother used suicide as a manipulation tool so consistently that Laura carried the guilt of it into her thirties without ever questioning whether it was hers to carry. She built a life anyway. She got married, raised three kids, built a career, started a podcast, wrote a book, and kept showing up for everyone arou...

Most addiction recovery conversations stop at sobriety. This episode starts there. What Rob McCarthy and Mike Jarrell examine in depth is the psychological architecture that makes addiction necessary in the first place, and what a real, self-directed rebuild looks like when institutional support is absent, resources are zero, and the damage stretches back to early childhood. Mike Jarrell spent nea...

Steve Knapp was drinking on the drive to work, during his lunch hour, on the drive home, and through the entire evening. In his late thirties, that was his daily life. Then his wife found the credit card bill. What happened next was not rock bottom, it was a choice. He turned to her and said: that's all me. From that moment, nearly five years of transformation began. In this episode, Steve and Rob...

Dan Ahlborn has been a real estate investor for 16 years. He's failed forward through most of them, made mistakes, learned the hard way, and built something real. Two moments nearly ended him: a foreclosure notice on his own home while he was in the business of helping others avoid them, and a business partnership that evaporated overnight leaving him with 30 days to figure out everything from scr...

Kimberly Stevens calls herself a Hall of Fame winner and a Hall of Fame loser, and she’s earned both titles the hard way. A University of Iowa swimmer who set Big Ten records and won national championships, Kimberly also survived child loss, two divorces, four years in the hospital with her daughter before a liver transplant, breast cancer, and home foreclosure, then rebuilt her life from the grou...

Angie Hawkins (author of Running in Slippers and Inner Glow Coach) joins Rob McCarthy on F*ck the Standard to share the moment that forced her to confront the belief that had been running her entire life: “I don’t deserve to be loved.” Raised by emotionally unavailable parents, Angie developed people-pleasing tendencies, perfectionism, and a deep lack of self-worth that followed her into relations...

Richard Lynch is a licensed clinical alcohol and drug counselor, EMDR practitioner, advanced grief specialist, and long-term recovery advocate who works inside a large Department of Corrections treatment program. He’s also lived addiction, trauma, prison, and rebuilding firsthand. In this powerful conversation, we break down: The real root of addiction (hint: it’s trauma, not weakness) Men’s menta...

Mark Maselli was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease — the same disease that killed members of his family before 40. Dialysis was waiting. Instead, he chose something different. After receiving a live kidney transplant, Mark trained for 450 miles… and ran the Las Vegas Marathon just one year later. In this episode, we break down: The truth about dialysis and kidney failure Live organ donation vs...

Men’s mental health is collapsing, and most men are pretending they’re “fine.” Burnout, divorce, suppressed trauma, and suicide are silently destroying fathers and husbands. In this episode, Rob sits down with Jonnie Jensen, founder of the High Value Man Project, to break down the real crisis facing modern men, and what it actually takes to rebuild after burnout, divorce, or emotional breakdown. T...

Melanie Whittaker grew up in a controlled home with a narcissistic parent, learned early what emotional manipulation looks like, and made a decision most people never do, she rebuilt her life on her own terms. In this episode, we break down: • Growing up with a narcissistic mother• Breaking generational trauma patterns• Learning to rebuild identity after emotional control• Surviving the 2009 econo...

Addiction recovery isn’t always dramatic, sometimes it starts with a phone call. Jeremy thought he had a lung anomaly. He spiraled into alcohol, self-destruction, and the mindset that if cancer didn’t take him out, he would take himself out first. Then a stranger answered the phone, gave him the brutal truth, and everything shifted. In this episode, we break down: The real psychology behind addict...

In this episode of The F*ck the Standard Podcast , I sit down with Dr. Robb Kelly, a neuroscience-based addiction and trauma specialist whose story carries as much weight as his work. Dr. Kelly didn’t study addiction from a distance. He lived it. After growing up in a working-class environment in Manchester, England, his life unraveled through alcoholism, homelessness, losing his children, and bei...

Most guys don’t realize they’re on autopilot until life starts breaking in half. This episode is with Uncle Jimmy — Boston union man, union vice president, host of Uncle Jimmy’s Podcast — and he’s lived the version a lot of us brag about: 7 days a week, 16 hours a day , convinced the whole operation would collapse without him… while his marriage and life were collapsing quietly in the background....

Most rebuilds don’t fail because they’re hard, they fail because the blueprint gets punched in the mouth and most people walk away. When this podcast launched, the original blueprint was simple: four solo episodes, then guests. That was the plan. But rebuilds rarely honor your plans. This fifth episode wasn’t on the schedule, and I wasn’t delaying the guest episodes to make room for it. That’s exa...