The Unhinged Father

When you're a kid, friendships just happen. You're thrown into the same room as other kids and you figure it out. When you're an adult — especially an adult who's moved away from where you grew up, has two kids, works full time, and coaches sports — making real friends is a completely different thing. And most people just quietly stop trying and call it being busy. Robbie opens...

There's a version of parenting where you're so focused on discipline and rules that your kids are well-behaved but secretly afraid of you. And there's a version where you're so focused on empathy and connection that your kids run the house. Robbie thinks both are missing the point — and in this episode he gets into what the middle actually looks like when you're living it,...

It's 4am on Christmas Eve. Robbie's got a mile-long to-do list, a head full of congestion, and two kids who are absolutely losing their minds with excitement. He recorded this one anyway. Because it's Christmas and that's what you do. This is a short, lighthearted one — a quick holiday check-in, some honest reflection on a hard year that ended with some genuinely good news, and...

There's a conversation happening in culture right now about fairness — about how standards have been unequal, how certain people have been held to higher expectations than others, and how we need to fix that. Robbie agrees with the problem. He just disagrees with the solution. Because the answer to unequal standards isn't to lower the bar for everyone. It's to raise it. This is a di...

Robbie was doom-scrolling on his birthday eve when a reel showed up claiming that if your marriage is hard, you married the wrong person. The account had 35,000 followers. He went down the rabbit hole. He disagreed with pretty much all of it. And then he recorded an episode about it. This isn't a rant against women or divorce or any of that. It's a direct pushback on a specific type of c...

Robbie's back from Thanksgiving. He's tired, the holiday chaos is just getting started, there are birthdays and baby showers and Christmas and New Year's all stacking up, and he's recording this episode partly just to stay consistent and partly because he needed to process out loud. That's kind of the whole deal with this one. This is a shorter, more candid episode about t...

Robbie's pastor mentioned a "He Gets Us" ad that ran during a baseball game — "Umps are people too." It was a throwaway moment. It sent Robbie down a whole train of thought about watching parents absolutely lose their minds at little league umpires, the time he volunteered to ump a game of six-year-olds and nearly had an emotional breakdown, and what that says about how we...

Last week there was no episode. Not because nothing was recorded — Robbie sat down every single day, got five or ten minutes in, and deleted it. Every time. Because it wasn't right. Wasn't perfect. Didn't sound the way he'd imagined it. Until he realized that the inability to get out of his own way was the episode. This is one of the most honest episodes in the TUF catalog — ab...

It's Thanksgiving Eve. Robbie's recording this with a ton on his plate — literally and figuratively — and he's been thinking about what gratitude actually means when life has genuinely been hard. Not the Instagram version. Not the motivational poster version. The real version, where you've had a rough year and you're still trying to find the thing to be thankful for withou...

Robbie sits down with Myer Krah — ten-year military veteran, anti-terrorism specialist, dad of four boys including twins, and host of the Here4TheDads podcast — for a conversation that happened exactly the way the best ones do: two dads who just met, talking about things that actually matter, with no agenda and no filter. Myer found TUF through the algorithm, reached out almost immediately, and th...

Robbie recorded this one the morning it dropped, hadn't slept great, had a big interview episode coming the following week, and just wanted to check in honestly. Every year since 2020 has felt harder than the last. He used to wonder if that was just him getting older and more pessimistic. Now he thinks it's just true — life gets more complex, more expensive, more demanding as you accumul...

It's the day after the election. Robbie doesn't care who you voted for. He does care that you voted. What he's tired of is the performative outrage, the virtue signaling, the people who post "get out and vote, doesn't matter who" and then spend the rest of the day calling the other side subhuman. He's exhausted by all of it. This episode is his honest debrief. Th...

It's Halloween Eve. Robbie's in an orange shirt. There's a skeleton mask on the bed behind him. His family has had decorations up since mid-September when it was still 110 degrees outside. He's been mapping the trick-or-treat route with his kids for weeks. He takes this holiday seriously and he is not embarrassed about it. This is a fun, seasonal episode that doubles as a real...

Robbie's second born was a sleep terrorist. Average sleep score for the first eight months: three and a half to four and a half hours a night. The first two weeks were closer to two. He's not saying this to scare you — he's saying it so you know he's earned the right to talk about this. This is a practical, real-world episode on sleep training, sleep schedules, and getting your...

Robbie played football in high school. He's a Packers fan. He has cheeseheads in the background of his recording setup. He is not coming after football as a sport. He is coming after the specific version of football fandom where an entire Saturday and Sunday disappears into a couch and a screen while your family orbits around you waiting for the game to end. This is the episode that will prob...

Robbie is an Enneagram 8. His greatest fear is vulnerability. His deepest instinct is to be strong, invulnerable, and impossible to hurt. He knows intellectually that this is limiting him. His gut doesn't care. This episode is the honest tension between those two things — and what he's slowly, reluctantly figuring out about what strength actually means. This one cuts deeper than most TUF...

Robbie was once at 315 pounds. He's been grinding — five days a week at the gym, cardio, 2400 calories max during the week — and still can't break below 270. He's not asking for sympathy. He's asking why the hell his body stopped cooperating sometime around age 30, and what he and every other dad over 35 is supposed to do about it. This is an honest, slightly frustrated episode...

Someone sent in a message about struggling with alcoholism for most of their adult life, getting sober, and now trying to rebuild relationships with adult kids and grandkids who grew up watching the destruction. They wanted Robbie's thoughts. He gave them — honestly and without sugarcoating it, which is the only way he knows how. Robbie is not an alcoholic and doesn't pretend to have tha...

Jeff Fajans reached out after seeing something Robbie posted about listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival with his kids and the way music connects generations. Jeff is a creative momentum coach, a music creator who makes kids music described by people in the industry as "Beastie Boys for babies," and a newly inducted member of the Recording Academy. He and Robbie sat down for the kind...

A parent lost custody of her kids, showed up at his son's school, threatened staff, went live on social media at a gun range shooting targets, tagged the school in the post, and sang a song about school shootings. His blood pressure is still elevated just talking about it. This episode starts there — in the specific, terrifying reality of what happened — and then goes somewhere more important...

Welcome to “The Unhinged Father” podcast! 🎙️ In this trailer episode, discover what this podcast is all about and why it’s the perfect listen for millennial dads, young parents, and anyone navigating the chaos of modern life. Join me as I share real, unfiltered takes on fatherhood, personal growth, and the everyday struggles we all face. Whether you’re here for parenting tips, a good laugh, or jus...

Robbie is not a ray of sunshine. He has a dark sense of humor, a dry delivery, and a natural gravitational pull toward the negative. He also genuinely wants to be a better person and live a better life. This episode is about the specific tension between those two things — and whether the dark humor and the cynicism are baggage he needs to drop or tools he needs to keep. Short episode, genuine ques...

An OG fan of the show — one of the people who encouraged Robbie to start the podcast in the first place — is about to have her first baby and asked for the unfiltered truth on what you actually need as a new parent. So he gave it to her. All of it. The products that actually help, the ones that are overhyped, and the two things nobody tells you about that matter more than any piece of gear you&apo...

Robbie isn't going to tell you what happened. It's personal, it's his family's business, and it's not the point. What he will tell you is that it was significant, it was unexpected, and it forced him to sit in the backyard watching his kids play on a $10 splash pad with $2 Hot Wheels and ask himself the question: if we lost all of this stuff, would we be okay? The answer w...

Some guy on Reddit told Robbie he sounded like he'd achieved parental nirvana. Robbie wanted to punch him through the screen. Then he took a breath, re-read his own response, and realized the guy kind of had a point — he'd accidentally presented himself as someone who had it figured out. This episode is the honest correction of that impression. Nobody has it figured out. The perfect fami...