Ep 432 Kings, Queens, and the Chessboard of Marriage w/A.D and Courtney

Ep 432 Kings, Queens, and the Chessboard of Marriage w/A.D and Courtney

Zach sits down with married couple A.D. and Courtney, who met on their first day at the University of North Texas and have been together, on and off, for over a decade. A.D. runs a coaching brand built around helping men value themselves inside marriage, and Courtney works in a corporate hybrid role while raising their three kids. Zach opens by asking what makes them tick, and gets a lot more than a love story. What follows is a conversation about inherited patterns, the cost of chasing validation, and what happens when two people in the same marriage see the same dynamic completely differently. A.D. traces his approach to relationships back to a chaotic, unstable childhood and a mother whose love felt conditional on performance. He built a framework he calls relationship mathematics, arguing that in any couple, one partner is always the pursuer and one is the pursued, and that most men undervalue themselves in ways that show up as resentment, moodiness, or letting a partner speak to them poorly. Courtney pushes back in real time, particularly on his claim that women need chaos to feel fulfilled. She also brings a sharper account of their two rounds of couples therapy, describing what it felt like to sit across from a therapist who did not stay neutral. What makes this one land is the disagreement itself. A.D. and Courtney do not perform a united front. They correct each other, laugh at each other's memory of their own meet cute, and land in different places on some of the biggest ideas in the episode. Listeners get a real look at how one couple negotiates whose theory of the relationship actually holds up, and why that negotiation might matter more than either theory on its own. Key Takeaways * A man who does not value himself cannot be treated better than he treats himself, no matter how much money or status he accumulates * Growing up performing for love often turns into needing constant validation as an adult * Couples therapy fails fast when a client feels the therapist has taken a side instead of staying neutral * Framing a partner's directness as "bullying" can flatten a real need into a character flaw * No two people in a relationship show up with equal levels of investment, and naming that imbalance out loud can be clarifying rather than threatening * A shared metaphor, like a chessboard, can hold two different perspectives without either partner needing to be wrong * Healing a strained parent relationship sometimes starts with a health scare or crisis, but the amends still matter even if the timing feels unfair * Broad theories about "how women are" or "how men are" tend to break down the moment they meet an actual partner sitting next to you Guest Info A.D. and Courtney are a married couple based in the North Dallas area. A.D. works as a relationship coach under the brand name "the Kingmaker," coaching men on self-worth and what he calls the desire equation, and previously worked as an RPA developer before moving into coaching. Courtney works a hybrid corporate role. They have three children together: a 14 year old son, a 3 year old son, and a 1 year old daughter. https://www.instagram.com/adthekingmaker/ [https://www.instagram.com/adthekingmaker/] See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy [https://art19.com/privacy] and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info [https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info].

Ep 431 The Couple Who Healed Their War Zones w/Frannie and Danny

Zach sits down with Frannie and Danny, a married couple and wellness practitioners based in Florida who run an energy center in Palm Beach Gardens and lead workshops rooted in trauma recovery, energy work, and conscious relationship practices. Both come from what Frannie calls "war zones." Danny grew up in Israel with an Egyptian-French mother. Frannie was raised in Canada by Holocaust survivors, kept her Jewish identity secret, and spent decades working through what she describes as inherited PTSD. Their life together, and the tools they use to sustain it, form the backbone of this conversation. What emerges is a vivid picture of what intentional partnership looks like in practice: morning hugs with spoken affirmations customized to each other's tender spots, humming exercises to shift body chemistry in real time, inner child meditations done side by side, and a shared commitment to flooding the end of every day with joy and laughter before sleep. Danny talks candidly about going from hot-headed and heavy to lighter in every sense over the past six months. Frannie traces the roots of that transformation to the willingness to stop fighting your old story and start feeling a new one. The conversation goes deeper when Zach asks about the "woo-woo" question and Frannie's answer grounds all of it: the quantum field, nitric oxide, vagal nerve activation, heart-brain coherence. None of this is fringe anymore. It is the science behind why these practices work. And when she walks through the inner child work she and Danny do together, including forgiving the inner children of parents who caused harm, something clicks about why this couple carries so little weight for people who came from so much pain. Key Takeaways * Wars between people, and within relationships, often begin with a war inside the self. Healing starts with learning to love who you are. * Affirmations work best when they are personalized to your actual vulnerable spots, not generic positivity scripts. * A daily heart-to-heart hug of over a minute creates measurable physiological shifts in the body. It is not sentimental. It is chemical. * Humming is an ancient, science-backed tool for stress regulation. Exhaling on the word "home" activates nitric oxide and the vagus nerve throughout the body. * Shame is often the hidden block that keeps people from changing their story. It is not about accountability. It is about the fear that if you could have shifted sooner, you wasted time. * Inner child work is not just about forgiving yourself. Visualizing your parents as innocent children who only wanted love is one of the most effective ways to release intergenerational resentment. * Affirmations require emotional alignment, not just words. The mind and the emotion have to move together, or the words are just noise. * Ending your day on purpose: choosing funny, light, joyful content before sleep is a form of nervous system hygiene, not just a preference. Guest Info Frannie Sheridan Wellness practitioner, performer, storyteller, and workshop facilitator specializing in stress management, inherited trauma recovery, inner child work, and humming-based somatic techniques. Originally from Canada, raised by Holocaust survivors. Decades of international work in healing and performance. Recipient of multiple Mayoral Awards and accolades. Book: I Tried to Be Normal, But It Was Taken (Kindle version now available on Amazon; audiobook coming July via ACX/Amazon) Amazon link: https://a.co/d/03D3L5zR [https://a.co/d/03D3L5zR] Companion guide: The Post-Traumatic Joy Overload Playbook (32 actionable stress management techniques) Website: franniesheridan.com [http://franniesheridan.com] All social links: linktr.ee/StressBUSTERHumFEST [http://linktr.ee/StressBUSTERHumFEST] Danny Co-facilitator and Frannie's husband of twenty-plus years. Background in business; grew up in Israel. Co-leads workshops and runs Loving Light Regeneration (lovinglightregeneration.com), a holistic light frequency center in Palm Beach Gardens, with Frannie. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy [https://art19.com/privacy] and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info [https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info].

Ep 430 When the Therapist Comes Home: Marriage, ADHD, and the Work Behind the Work w/Eli & Ariella

Zach sits down with Eli, a therapist, podcast host, and author, and his wife Ariella, a registered dietitian, for an honest look at what it actually takes to build a good marriage, not the sanitized version you'd expect from someone with a therapy practice and a book on relationships, but the real one. Seven weeks from welcoming their third child, living in Las Vegas with two kids already in tow, this couple brings both credentials and candor to a conversation about the daily, unglamorous work of staying close. The conversation covers the full terrain: how they define a good day versus a bad one, the specific argument that sent Ariella to two books in one week, the way Eli's ADHD reshapes how they communicate and how Ariella has had to rewire her instinct to simply fix or suppress conflict, and what they have learned after 11 years of marriage and counting. Eli is refreshingly unguarded about the fact that knowing everything about relationships professionally does not mean you execute perfectly at home. Ariella matches that candor, walking through her peacemaker wiring, her inherited anxiety around conflict, and the work she has had to do to give Eli the space to fully express himself instead of rushing toward resolution. What comes through most clearly is that the couple treats their marriage as a system they are actively tending, not a fixed state they arrived at. The "tank check," the "flash mode" codeword, the end-of-argument debrief, the habit of asking what kind of conversation this is before jumping in: none of this happened by accident. It came from arguments, mess-ups, therapy, books, and a genuine willingness to keep being curious about each other even when things get hard. Key Takeaways * Knowing the theory does not guarantee you live it. Even a therapist has bad days, snaps at his wife, and has to walk it back. * Checking in on each other's "tank" before making requests can short-circuit a lot of unnecessary conflict. * "Don't go to bed angry" is not universal wisdom. Sometimes sleeping on it is the smarter move. * ADHD in a marriage is not a dealbreaker. It requires over-communication, agreed-upon signals, and a partner who stays curious rather than just compensating. * The "matching principle": knowing whether a conversation is logistical, emotional, or relational before jumping in prevents a lot of crossed wires. * Repair matters more than a clean fight. What you do at the end of the argument, the debrief, the "what's our takeaway," is where growth actually lives. * Accountability does not mean your partner gets to stay heated indefinitely. Both people have a job: one to express fully, one to stay present without shutting it down early. * Keeping the effort you put in while dating, the check-ins, the curiosity, the showing up, does not stop being necessary just because the relationship became official. Guest Info Eli Weinstein, LCSW is a licensed clinical social worker, therapist in private practice, and host of "The Dude Therapist" podcast. He is the author of From I Do to We Do: Navigating Marriage in the Parenting Years, an honest, humor-forward guide for couples working to stay connected through the chaos of raising kids. The book is available now via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, and Books-A-Million. Website: eliweinsteinlcsw.com [http://eliweinsteinlcsw.com] Personal: @eliweinstein_lcsw [https://instagram.com/eliweinstein_lcsw] Ariella is Eli's wife of 11 years, a registered dietitian, and a full-time working mom of two with a third on the way at time of recording. She is not currently active on social media. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy [https://art19.com/privacy] and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info [https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info].

Ep 429 The Therapist and Her Partner: What It Actually Looks Like to Live the Work w/Anna & John

Zach sits down with Anna, a faculty member at the Relational Life Institute and one of his mentors, and her husband John, a self-described practitioner of life rather than therapy. Together, the three of them get into something that rarely happens on relationship podcasts: a real, textured, honest look at what it means to actually live relational principles inside a marriage, not just teach them. The episode turns on a fascinating contrast. Anna has been steeped in Relational Life Therapy for years, knows the language and the tools inside and out, and still finds herself slipping into covert control. John has no clinical training, no internet footprint, and no interest in marketing the work, but walks into every conversation with an intuitive grasp of what healthy relating requires. Zach presses both of them on this. What does doing the work actually mean when one partner has the vocabulary and the other just seems to live it? The answers are more interesting than either of them might have predicted. The centerpiece story is a moment from a joint retreat in Costa Rica, where Anna had to manage a minor household crisis back home without telling John what was happening. She kept things managed, kept things calm, and kept him in the dark, and then eventually had to reckon with the fact that her "helpfulness" had crossed over into exactly the pattern she spends her professional life helping couples dismantle. When she finally told him, his response was one of the most reparative moments she had experienced in their relationship. That single story opens into a much bigger conversation about the difference between protecting your partner and controlling the room, about what it costs to never let yourself be surprised by someone else's goodness. What sticks is this: the goal is not to never get off balance. It is to catch it sooner. Anna says it plainly and Zach echoes it with his now-running story about screaming at strangers in the Costco gas line. Nobody has figured this out. Nobody is immune. But some people are getting better at noticing, and this episode is 45 minutes of what that actually looks and sounds like in a real marriage. Key Takeaways * Intimacy requires level ground. You cannot have real closeness from a one-up or one-down position, whether that means superiority, caretaking, or control. * Covert control often starts as kindness. What begins as "protecting" your partner can quietly become a way of managing your own anxiety about their reaction. * Predicting a bad response can cost you a good one. When Anna stopped waiting for John to disappoint her and told him what was going on, she got one of the most reparative moments in their relationship. * The work is not a destination you arrive at. It is the repeated, unglamorous act of noticing when you have drifted, and coming back. * Doing the work is not the same as talking about the work. John's ability to intuit the relational principles without the clinical vocabulary challenges the assumption that people who read the books and say the right things are necessarily further along. * How you show up solicits how your partner shows up. Bringing your grounded, adult self to an interaction invites the same from the person across from you. It is not a guarantee, but it raises the odds significantly. * "On a good day" is not the benchmark. The real growth shows up in what you do when it is a bad day and the old patterns are calling your name loudest. * Repair is available more often than we let ourselves believe. The barrier is usually not the other person. It is the story we are already telling about how they are going to respond. * Guest Info Anna is a therapist, teacher, and faculty member at the Relational Life Institute. She is a practitioner and trainer in Relational Life Therapy, an approach developed by Terry Real. She references her use of RLT both in her clinical practice and in her own marriage. She is also Zach's mentor, a relationship he acknowledges directly during the episode. John is Anna's husband. He is not a clinician. He came to the relational principles through personal experience, yoga, mindfulness practice, and what he describes as a forced epiphany roughly a decade before this recording. His perspective as the non-therapist partner in a therapist-led framework is one of the central tensions the episode is built around. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy [https://art19.com/privacy] and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info [https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info].

Ep 428 When the Laughs Are Real: How a Comedy Couple Keeps Their Marriage Honest w/Kevin & Annie

Zach sits down with Kevin and Annie, a married couple from Los Angeles who have built parallel careers in comedy, social media, and content creation while raising two kids and juggling a genuinely hectic life. Kevin is one half of the Dumb Dads, a social media comedy brand that has racked up viral moments and national media coverage, while also recently stepping into a finance job to add income stability. Annie is a story producer for non-scripted television and runs her own comedy account where she documents real parenting and relationship life with a voice that is sharp, honest, and very much her own. This is not a conversation about influencer culture. It is a conversation about two people who have made a shared philosophy out of not taking themselves too seriously, and what that actually looks like inside a marriage. What surfaces quickly is that Kevin and Annie's approach to comedy and their approach to their relationship are basically the same thing: find the seed of truth, name what other people are too embarrassed to name, and trust that the honesty will land. They talk about the chaos of the social media comment section, the difference between content that performs and content that resonates, and what it means to build something funny when half your audience is having a terrible day. Kevin walks through the arc of Dumb Dads going from a pandemic side project to Good Morning America to a grind where Instagram stopped paying for views and he quietly went back to a day job. Annie reflects on pulling down a video that made people feel bad, and how that one moment shaped her entire content philosophy going forward. But it is the stretch of conversation near the end of this episode that earns its MTR stripes. Annie mentions casually that she has been feeling unsettled since Kevin started working office hours again, that she asked him to call during lunch just to feel anchored. Kevin reflects on nine years of being the stay-at-home logistics parent and what it costs the family when that system changes. There is no drama here. There is just two people who know each other well enough to say the true thing plainly and trust that it will be received well. As Annie puts it: she always knows his intentions are good. That assumption, more than anything else they say, is the actual relationship advice. Key Takeaways * Assuming the best about your partner's intentions is a relationship skill, not just a personality trait. It is something Annie and Kevin have actively built. * When someone fires off an angry comment online or walks into the room furious, Zach points out what he tells couples in his practice: every single comment is about the commenter. The content is almost never the real issue. * Kevin and Annie's viral success came from naming the thing people were too embarrassed to admit. That works in comedy. It also works in relationships. * Defensiveness and weaponized incompetence eventually cost you things you actually want. The Dumb Dads made that the punchline of a sketch. It holds up in real life too. * Comedy and magic work the same way: draw people in with something familiar, then surprise them. Kevin applies this to his content, but the same principle shows up in how he and Annie talk through conflict without letting it calcify. * Annie took down a video because enough people told her it made them feel bad. She did not argue the intent. She just acted. That kind of responsiveness, inside a marriage or outside of it, is how trust stays intact. * When your domestic system changes, even for good reasons, the emotional math changes too. Kevin going back to office hours after nine years as the at-home parent created a gap neither of them saw coming, and they caught it early enough to name it. * Not taking yourself too seriously is not the same as not caring. Kevin has been doing comedy intentionally since he was 18. He cares deeply. He just refuses to let the weight of it make everyone around him miserable. Guest Info Kevin is one half of the Dumb Dads, a social media comedy brand he runs with his co-creator Evan. The brand grew from a podcast and parenting sketch series started around 2020 into a multi-platform presence that has been covered by Good Morning America, ESPN, and Barstool. Kevin also works in operations at a wealth management firm and has appeared in commercials, including one for Lowe's. https://www.instagram.com/thedumbdads/ [https://www.instagram.com/thedumbdads/] Annie is a story producer for non-scripted television, with roughly a decade of credits on fishing competition shows including Wicked Tuna. She also runs her own comedy account focused on real, unfiltered parenting and relationship content. https://www.instagram.com/annielaferriere/ [https://www.instagram.com/annielaferriere/] See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy [https://art19.com/privacy] and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info [https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info].