“If at first you don’t succeed, give up!”

My dad used to say that. I thought it was shit advice because almost everyone else was telling me the opposite: try, try again. Never quit. Keep pushing.

Almost 30 years later, I’m starting to think Dad might have been onto something.

In this episode, I talk about the difference between taking a break and genuinely giving up, why persistence isn’t always a virtue, and the strange freedom that can come from letting something actually end.

Sometimes we eventually come back with a fresh perspective.

Sometimes we discover there was never a good reason to go back.

Maybe giving up deserves a better reputation.

I used to gobble up every bit of news I had time for. It left me stressed, angry, and carrying emotional reactions to things I couldn't influence.

These days, I don't follow the news. I seek out information when it directly affects me, the people I care about, or a decision I can actually make.

In this episode, I talk about the pressure to "stay informed," why I don't think being less informed is necessarily a bad thing, how news competes for our attention, and what became more obvious in my own life when I stopped paying attention to everything happening somewhere else.

The world is going to keep happening whether I'm watching it or not. My own life is happening too.

When I was a kid, the rule was pretty straightforward: have fun and come home when the streetlights come on.

For hours at a time, we were largely responsible for ourselves. We took stupid risks, got hurt, wandered into places we shouldn't have been, fought with our friends, worked things out, and occasionally learned the hard way why our parents had rules in the first place.

Some of what we did was genuinely dangerous. I'm not interested in romanticizing that.

But as we've made childhood safer, more supervised, and more structured, I wonder if we've also taken away some of the experiences that prepared us for adulthood.

In this episode, I talk about risk, independence, conflict, screens, changing communities, and the difference between knowing someone will rescue you and knowing you can handle your own shit.

Maybe the problem isn't that kids today are different.

Maybe we gave them a completely different childhood.

In the first episode of Call Me Tony, I told a story about someone I'd loved when I was young. Someone I hadn't seen since 1994, but who remained a significant part of my emotional life for more than two decades.

At the time, Facebook kept suggesting her as someone I might know. I chose not to reconnect. I wanted to preserve what we'd had rather than find out what reality might do to the memory.

Years later, I went back and listened to that episode.

I remembered almost every word. I still understood the person who recorded it. I still agreed with most of what he said.

I just didn't feel the same fondness attached to the memory anymore.

This isn't really a story about getting over someone. It's about recognizing that something which once had enormous power over you has quietly become history.

The relationship mattered. The love mattered. The longing mattered.

None of it needs to disappear for me to stop trying to live in it.

Curiosity has shaped my life. It has changed my beliefs, challenged my assumptions, and helped me see the world differently. I wouldn't want to lose that.

At the same time, I've learned that not everything valuable needs to be completely explained.

In this episode, I explore the difference between curiosity and control, why we feel uncomfortable with uncertainty, and how the search for answers can sometimes cause us to lose sight of the experience itself.

This isn't an argument against critical thinking. It's a reflection on knowing when to keep asking questions and when it's okay to simply let something matter.

We all like to think we evaluate evidence objectively.

I'm not sure we do.

In this episode, I explore why different beliefs often seem to receive different standards of evidence, whether belief is actually a choice, and why certainty can become a trap. Along the way, I reflect on my own experiences changing my mind, why curiosity has always been more persuasive than humiliation, and why I'm far more interested in how people think than what they think.

Seven years ago I recorded a short podcast asking myself a difficult question: Am I a failure?

Finding that old script forced me to confront a different question entirely. By what standard do we decide whether a person has succeeded or failed?

In this episode I revisit that younger version of myself, not to correct him, but to understand him, and explore how my thinking has changed over the last seven years.

How do we know when someone has truly changed? This episode explores the difference between remembering the past and allowing it to permanently define the present. It's a reflection on accountability, evidence, boundaries, and why we should be careful not to confuse history with identity.

Two days after my father died, I walked into a toy store and found comfort in a place I never would have expected: a giraffe finger puppet named Richard.

What began as an impulsive purchase quickly became a private coping mechanism during one of the most difficult periods of my life. While arranging a funeral, supporting family members, and trying to hold everything together, Richard became a quiet source of comfort that nobody else fully understood.

In this deeply personal episode, I reflect on the loss of my father, the pressure of being strong for others, the childhood lesson to "grow your own muscles," and the unexpected ways people sometimes find their footing when life changes forever.

This is a story about grief, responsibility, love, memory, and a small giraffe finger puppet that helped carry the weight of a difficult season of life.

Connect with the show:

YouTube: https://youtu.be/7hNQ5lXLH_0

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fischer.acb

Website: https://acfischerpod.neocities.org/

The 12 Thoughts That Trap Us When Life Gets Heavy

When life gets heavy, our minds often fall into familiar patterns. We ask ourselves why we're suffering, what we did to deserve it, why nobody understands, and whether things will ever get better.

In this episode, I walk through twelve common thoughts that tend to appear during periods of depression, anxiety, grief, burnout, and emotional overwhelm. Rather than accepting these thoughts as facts, I examine the assumptions hiding beneath them and explore whether they deserve the authority we often give them.

This isn't a clinical discussion or professional advice. It's a human conversation about the stories we tell ourselves when we're hurting and the questions we can ask that might help us see things differently.

Sometimes the most important thing we can do is stop treating our thoughts like verdicts and start treating them like questions.

We often treat time as if it automatically creates value. The longer a friendship lasts, the more pressure we feel to preserve it, even when it's become unhealthy.

In this episode, I reflect on the end of a 24-year friendship and the realization that history alone is not a good reason to remain invested in someone. What began as loyalty gradually became enabling. What looked like patience became a habit of overlooking reality.

The breaking point wasn't dramatic. It was a routine conversation that forced me to recognize a truth I'd been avoiding for years: the relationship existed largely because I kept making excuses for it.

I discuss the sunk cost fallacy in relationships, the challenge of navigating mutual friends after a separation, and why walking away from a long-term unhealthy dynamic can feel less like a loss and more like relief.

Having history with someone may be meaningful, but history is not a contract. Sometimes the healthiest decision is to stop investing in a relationship that no longer serves either person.

This week, consider where you're investing your time and ask yourself a simple question:

Is that investment actually paying off?

Episode Summary:

What happens when a song you have never heard feels instantly, deeply familiar? At fifty-three, a chance encounter with a Willie Nelson classic sparks a raw reflection on aging, memory, and how music hits differently over time. Moving from the rebellion of youth to the quiet endurance of adulthood, this episode explores the heavy reality of carrying vanished worlds inside our heads and why life gets emotionally messier, not simpler, the longer we live it.

Key Takeaways:

• The Evolution of Listening: Youth listens for rebellion; age listens for endurance, compromise, and the wear and tear of real life.
• True Nostalgia: It is not a greeting card cliché; it is the sudden, heavy awareness that entire everyday human environments have completely disappeared.
• The Myth of Arrival: Adulthood is not a stable destination where we finally know what we are doing, it is learning how to carry heavy things without collapsing.
• Intensity versus Resonance: Youth excels at emotional intensity, but aging grants us resonance and a broader capacity for compassion.

After a long break, I’m back to podcasting...

This episode focuses on my experience caring for Fred Tober, a 76-year-old local musician who was going through a lonely period...

It led me to rethink community and support. I saw that strong community doesn’t depend on religious institutions, and that non-religious people often stepped up more consistently when help was needed...

Once upon a time, I chased every new gadget and app like they were tickets to the future. Now I’m wondering if this is the future I really want to live in. This week, I’m talking about how constant connection somehow makes life lonelier, how everything from music to conversation feels like it’s been processed through the same filter, and why common sense seems to have gone extinct because the instructions for everything are just a click away.

If you’ve ever caught yourself missing the world before everything was “smart,” this one’s for you.

acfischerpod.neocities.org

acfischerpod@protonmail.com

Turns out “staying connected” mostly means doomscrolling, fake friendships, and handing your attention to corporations who’d sell your soul for ad revenue. I was supposed to be networking and creating. Instead, I was melting my brain one scroll at a time.

So I pulled the plug. Before a hater could cancel me, I did it myself. This episode kicks off a new season where I talk about how the internet went from thrilling to trash, why I ditched social media, and how I’m clawing back focus and meaning without pretending likes equal connection.

If you think the web feels more like a trap than a tool these days, welcome!

https://acfischerpod.neocities.org

A rumour says my brother is dead. I don't know if it's true. No one has confirmed it, and no one will. But the grief is real anyway.

This episode explores the strange kind of mourning that comes when there's no clarity. It's about estranged siblings, unresolved childhoods, and the kind of silence that never really lifts.

I had a brother. Maybe I still do. Maybe I don’t.

Mentioned in this episode:

• The emotional cost of family estrangement
• The unreliability of closure
• How grief takes shape without confirmation

Contact and More:

📨 Email: callmetonypod@yahoo.com

🌐 Website: www.acfischer.com

In this episode of Call Me Tony, I talk about the kind of loyalty that builds us up, and the kind that quietly breaks us down. Some people treat loyalty like it's a virtue in itself, but what happens when that loyalty is used to protect ego instead of truth? I share thoughts on how misplaced loyalty shows up in relationships, brands, and belief systems, and why I’ve chosen to value peace, clarity, and self-respect over staying loyal just for the sake of it.

Addiction causes real harm. That part isn’t up for debate. But what happens when the damage doesn’t stop with the substance?

In this episode of Call Me Tony, I talk about how getting sober without a program didn’t make me a danger to myself or anyone else—but it sure made me a problem in the eyes of recovery culture. I unpack how many popular treatment models quietly discourage real healing, push fear over freedom, and end up poisoning the very relationships they’re supposed to protect.

We’ve built a culture where constant struggle is celebrated, while actual wellness is treated with suspicion. I’m not interested in protecting dogma. I’m interested in telling the truth.

She’s not the one who haunts me.

I don’t miss her. I don’t long for the relationship we had. But I do keep running into the version of myself I had to become when I was with her. The one who knew how to stay quiet. The one who filtered every emotion. The one who thought being easy to love meant making himself smaller.

Now that I’m in something different — something safe, honest, and mutual — I’m realising how many corners of myself I tucked away without even noticing. And just as I’m starting to feel whole again, life throws a little test: she’s coming back into my orbit for a moment. Not emotionally, just physically. But it’s enough to stir something I thought I’d outgrown.

This episode is about that version of me. The ghost.

Not to judge him, but to finally acknowledge what he had to do — and why he doesn’t get to drive anymore.

Mother’s Day just passed, and for some of us, it’s not a day of celebration. In this episode, I open up about the complicated relationship I have with my mother. I share what it was like growing up, the moments when I thought we were finally connecting, and the painful reality of feeling betrayed by someone I desperately wanted to love and trust.

I also talk about my father—the difference between his mistakes and how he chose to make amends, even apologizing until his final moments. As I reflect on the contrast between my parents, I explore the lingering struggle of letting go of hope for a relationship that never quite felt safe.

If Mother’s Day is a tough time for you, if it’s a reminder of something you never really had, I want you to know you’re not alone. Join me for an honest, vulnerable conversation about family, forgiveness, and the painful search for closure.