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 his own daughter, doing the dishes while she told him what happened at school, and not understanding what he'd actually missed until seven years later. He breaks down the lie that your worth comes from your production. And he explains why he stopped chasing healing and started chasing something else entirely.

IN THIS EPISODE- The lie behind male worth, and why production was never the measure- The dishwashing story that took seven years to land- Why rage might be the most useful thing men have been taught to suppress- What healing gets wrong, and why wholing works better

This is part one. Part two is already on the way.

Connect with Paul:

www.paulsimard.co 

https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_simard_the_mythical_man 

www.thecanoe.co 

IG: https://www.instagram.com/living__wisdom/ 

FB: https://www.facebook.com/paul.sim.17

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-simard/ 

Get your copy of F*ck The Script: https://www.amazon.com/-/es/CK-SCRIPT-Caring-Others-Rebuild/dp/B0FQ4F5NBB

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 conversation covers what severe depression actually feels like from the inside, how anger was the first emotion she felt that was not directed at herself, why boundaries only hold when the people around you are willing to respect them, and the grounding technique her therapist gave her that still works when the spiral starts.

JoJo also shares the full version of the blood of the covenant quote, explains why the word narcissist has been so diluted that people who actually lived it have lost their footing, and delivers one of the most practical closing answers in Fuck the Standard history......... SAVE YOUR MONEY!!!

Find JoJo Lynn on all major platforms by searching No Hard Feelings Kinda or NHFK Podcast, or on Spotify at:

https://open.spotify.com/show/4Q2mmRyZspf9Qr40ZGB25R?si=50c7842c244d45c5

Book -- F*ck The Script: https://www.amazon.com/-/es/CK-SCRIPT-Caring-Others-Rebuild/dp/B0FQ4F5NBB

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 moment she realized she was disappearing, and what the actual process of rebuilding looked like after the marriage ended. She also tells the story of getting her pilot's license and what happens when a flight instructor cuts the engine mid-air to see what you are actually made of.

This one runs deep.

Topics covered: identity loss in marriage, divorce and healing, becoming the main character, the foundation metaphor, resilience built through repetition, creative life and self-prioritization, attention span and social media, advice to your younger self.

Get Kimberly Love's books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07H1YY4NW?ccs_id=bac4f071-8ff4-4653-8856-95680ec6f09b

Get Rob's book F*ck The Script: https://www.amazon.com/-/es/CK-SCRIPT-Caring-Others-Rebuild/dp/B0FQ4F5NBB

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 mechanism. When the Army finally let him go, he had no plan, a deteriorating credit score, a family to house, and a fraud charge from his own unit hanging over him.

In this episode, David walks through his five rules for navigating adversity, the moment a Type 1 diabetes diagnosis forced him to actually write those rules down, the six weeks his family spent effectively homeless, and what finally pushed him toward motivational speaking. In September 2024, he delivered the Time for Reflection address at Scottish Parliament. In April 2024, he had just started his company.

This episode covers PTSD in the military, the real cost of a medical discharge, financial literacy as survival, and the difference between responsibility and accountability.

If you are rebuilding something right now, this one is for you.

Connect with David at SpeakingSBC.com

Book: F*ck The Script -- https://www.amazon.com/-/es/CK-SCRIPT-Caring-Others-Rebuild/dp/B0FQ4F5NBB

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 returned to college alongside school-age students, retrained as an electrician, passed every module with distinctions, reached the semi-finals of the Screwfix Apprentice of the Year competition, and then went on to teach at the same college. He now runs his own business, structures his work week around his disability, and serves as an ambassador for the Veterans Charity, the Veteran Community Network, and Andy's Man Club.

Together Rob and Dean cover the "man up" culture and how it keeps men, particularly veterans, from seeking help, the crisis of veteran suicide in both the UK and the United States, the over-medication problem inside veteran healthcare systems, what it means to be willing to receive help, and how hope can survive even when everything else has been stripped away.

Find Dean Griffin

YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram: search "Travelling Veteran"

Website: travellingveteran.co.uk

Fuck the Standard Podcast:

https://open.spotify.com/show/2DlreEYrKuU5uER4F3AIGQ?si=af4421a7ff95456b

F*ck The Script by Rob (the book):

https://www.amazon.com/-/es/CK-SCRIPT-Caring-Others-Rebuild/dp/B0FQ4F5NBB

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 waist. He could not put on his own socks. He could not pick up his three-month-old daughter. The Western medical system ran him in circles with misdiagnoses and ineffective treatments until Deepak stopped waiting and started researching on his own.

What he found was an alternative modality that healed his back and, as a byproduct, eliminated the final 60 of the 100 pounds he had carried his entire adult life and sent his undiagnosed autoimmune condition into remission. He has not been meaningfully sick in a decade. He was not trying to lose a single pound. He was trying to hold his child.

That shift sent him down a different road entirely. He got certified in timeline therapy, NLP, and hypnosis. He left his CPA career behind. He built a health and mindset coaching practice around the core insight that most people are not failing because they lack willpower. They are failing because they are running unconscious patterns that no amount of discipline can override without the right tools and the honesty to look at where those patterns came from.

In this conversation Rob and Deepak cover the full arc: the physical transformation that nobody saw coming from the outside, the limiting beliefs stored in the body as armor around old wounds, the moment Deepak brought his laptop to the hospital while his wife was recovering from giving birth, the scarcity mindset handed down from immigrant parents who were just trying to protect their kids, what men actually model for their daughters whether they intend to or not, and the anger that ran through Deepak's early life that he would do anything to have addressed sooner.

They also get into the softening of an entire generation, the consequences of parenting without consequences, and what true wealth actually looks like when you strip away every story you have been fed about money and success.

Connect with Deepak Saini: deepaksainihealth.com

Get the book F*ck The Script: https://www.amazon.com/-/es/CK-SCRIPT-Caring-Others-Rebuild/dp/B0FQ4F5NBB

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 who we've become.

political outrage, social media addiction, echo chamber, keyboard warriors, parenting, accountability, blue collar podcast, mens mindset, self accountability, media manipulation, solo episode, fuck the standard

Both sides catch it equally, nobody gets a pass, and if something in this episode makes you uncomfortable....THAT'S THE POINT!!!

This is what solo episodes on Fuck The Standard sound like now. Get used to it.

Rewrite. Rebuild. Repeat.

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 around her while privately believing she had nothing worth offering any of them. Then she lost the job, the relationship, and almost every person she knew inside of a year, and wound up alone on her kitchen floor asking out loud for someone to love her. What happened next changed everything.

In this episode, Rob and Laura go deep on what it actually costs to grow up under narcissistic control, why self-worth does not collapse all at once but erodes slowly through the relationships you tolerate and the crumbs you accept, and what the path back looks like when you have finally run out of crutches to lean on.

This episode covers:

• Growing up with a narcissistic, abusive mother and not recognizing it for decades
• The identity collapse that comes when you lose your job, your relationship, and your community at the same time
• Why the mother-daughter relationship is the foundation of every relationship a woman will have for the rest of her life
• Taking crumbs from people because bare minimum felt exciting, and what finally broke that pattern
• How low self-worth quietly destroys your finances without you noticing
• The kitchen floor moment that cracked everything open
• Rebuilding confidence as a single mother starting a business from scratch
• What a three-day solo backpacking trip in the woods taught her about what she was actually capable of
• The one thing she would scream at her eighteen-year-old self

Laura Ferri is the host of the My Inner Struggle podcast, author of Is It an Open Bar?, and has spent over a decade documenting her own transformation across more than 300 blog posts so that nobody going through the same thing has to feel like they are doing it alone.

Find everything Laura at https://myinnerstruggle.com/

Grab Rob's book F*ck The Script: https://www.amazon.com/-/es/CK-SCRIPT-Caring-Others-Rebuild/dp/B0FQ4F5NBB

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 nearly 30 years in active heroin and opioid addiction, served time in prison, and rebuilt his entire life from nothing at 47 years old. His framework for doing it draws from positive psychology, Stoic philosophy, cognitive restructuring, and the hard data of lived experience. This is not a sobriety story. It is an identity reconstruction conversation.

What this episode covers:

• ​The childhood trauma to addiction pipeline, how unresolved CPTSD and untreated early abuse create the psychological conditions that make substance dependency almost inevitable, and how medical prescribing can accelerate that cycle rather than interrupt it
• ​Ego vs. identity in long-term recovery, the clinical distinction between the protective false self built in response to trauma and the authentic identity buried beneath it, and why conflating the two extends victim mindset thinking long past the original threat
• ​The table leg method for breaking limiting beliefs, a cognitive restructuring framework that requires only three contradicting facts to dismantle an entrenched belief system, with direct application for anyone doing identity work in or outside of addiction recovery
• ​Positive psychology and sobriety; why short-term clinical intervention fails without addressing the underlying belief architecture, and how evidence-based psychological tools produce more durable long-term recovery outcomes than rehab alone
• ​Social environment as a measurable variable in rebuilding, the documented principle that your five closest relationships directly shape your trajectory, including the practical and emotionally difficult process of auditing that circle without external validation or permission
• ​Fixed vs. growth mindset after incarceration, how generationally inherited fixed mindset thinking contributes to recidivism and relapse, and why the ceiling most people in post-incarceration recovery accept as permanent is a learned condition rather than a structural one
• ​Stoicism as a daily recovery and grounding practice, the application of Stoic philosophy, specifically Marcus Aurelius, to emotional regulation, CPTSD management, and the development of a stable identity framework for men in long-term recovery
• ​The role of silence and discomfort in identity discovery, why sustained stillness without distraction is the primary mechanism for self-knowledge, and how avoiding it through social media, constant connection, and surface-level relationships keeps people in a holding pattern that looks like living but functions like stagnation

This episode is for:

• ​People in addiction recovery, relapse prevention, or long-term sobriety who want frameworks beyond the first 30 days
• ​Men doing inner work, identity rebuilding, and personal development after trauma or significant loss
• ​Life coaches, sobriety coaches, and practitioners working with trauma-adjacent clients who need real-world frameworks grounded in both lived experience and psychological research
• ​Anyone navigating a significant life restart after 40 and looking for proof that the timeline is not over

Mike Jarrell's books:

From the Streets to Redemption -- https://a.co/d/dJT0ALN\nHow to Find Happiness in the

Worst Possible Times -- https://a.co/d/fbnMaKU\n

Rising from the Ashes -- https://a.co/d/0W0pu4K

Mike's website: deaconslegacy.site

Mike's TikTok: @deaconslegacy

Grab F*ck the Script: https://www.amazon.com/-/es/CK-SCRIPT-Caring-Others-Rebuild/dp/B0FQ4F5NBB

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 go deep into the mechanics of how shame works, why nice guys are actually practicing self-abandonment, the specific tool Steve used to stop over-apologizing and start building real self-respect, what happened on a one-night backpacking trip that rewired everything, how he quit a corporate job, drove 24 hours to Colorado with his life in the back of his truck, gave himself three months to make it work, and never left, how to tell the difference between running away and running toward, and what it means for men to stop bottling emotions without losing presence and responsibility in the moment.

One of the most raw and complete episodes the show has produced.

Follow Steve at NoAlcoholNeeded.net

Listen on Spotify: 

Get the book F*ck The Script: