Paternal
147 episodes - English - Latest episode: 15 days ago - ★★★★★ - 113 ratingsPaternal is a show about the brotherhood of fatherhood. Created and hosted by Nick Firchau, a longtime journalist and podcast producer, Paternal offers candid and in-depth conversations with great men who are quietly forging new paths in fatherhood. Listen as our diverse and thoughtful guests – a world-renowned soccer star in San Diego, a Oglala Sioux elder in South Dakota, a New York Knicks barber in Queens, a pioneering rock DJ in Seattle and many more - discuss the models of manhood that were passed down to them, and how they're redefining those models as they become fathers themselves.
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
#105: Dr. Dennis S. Charney: How To Raise Resilient Kids
April 10, 2024 05:00 - 33 minutes - 46.1 MBPaternal listeners email the show regularly with requests to cover various topics on the show. Some are serious and some are silly, but one request just keeps coming: How do we teach our kids resilience? Dr. Dennis S. Charney is a leading expert in the study of resilience and has spent decades examining the causes of anxiety, fear and depression. He’s also interviewed prisoners of war, victims of rape and assault, survivors of natural disasters, and frontline healthcare workers about the tra...
#104 Rob Flanagan: Straddling Acceptance and Hope
March 27, 2024 06:00 - 42 minutes - 58.6 MBRob Flanagan is a husband and father who lives with his family outside of Boulder, Colorado, and roughly one year ago he and his wife Dana began an ordeal that changed their lives. After a few days of fighting a cold and a slight fever while missing out on attending kindergarten, their daughter Saoirse was suddenly hospitalized and then intubated, and it was unclear if she would ever wake up. On this episode of Paternal, Flanagan recounts the experience of spending days in the ICU with hi...
#103 Waubgeshig Rice: The Pressure In My Head (2022)
February 28, 2024 06:00 - 38 minutes - 53.4 MBGrowing up on the Wasauksing First Nation indigenous reserve in Ontario, journalist and bestselling author Waubgeshig Rice learned early in his life about the value of culture and community. But as an Anishinaabe young man schooled in the challenges his ancestors faced as indigenous people in Canada, Rice was also keenly aware of what happens when a community loses its connection to its history, traditions and culture, and how men can easily fall victim to the effects of intergenerational tr...
#102 Kwame Alexander: What My Father Taught Me About Love (2023)
February 14, 2024 06:00 - 37 minutes - 51.5 MBMost people know Kwame Alexander as the Newbery Medal-winning author of The Crossover, the bestselling children’s book about two young brothers hooked on basketball. Long before he was an award-winning author, however, Alexander spent his time writing love poems, in an attempt to impress women and find his voice as a poet and a young man. But three decades and two marriages later, Alexander is a 54-year-old father of two now reconsidering those relationships from his past, and what exactl...
#101 Tim Alberta: My Father, My Faith, and Donald Trump
January 31, 2024 06:00 - 45 minutes - 62.9 MBLongtime political journalist Tim Alberta spent more than three years speaking with pastors and churchgoers across the country in a search for answers about what’s happening in contemporary Evangelicalism. Why were so many congregations becoming more political, and seemingly less invested in traditional Christian values? Why were they so motivated by fear? How could so many Evangelicals support Donald Trump, who doesn’t share their beliefs? And what do all these dramatic changes mean for the...
#100 Curtis Chin: Lessons From A Chinese Restaurant
January 17, 2024 06:00 - 38 minutes - 52.7 MBCurtis Chin spent most of his childhood looking for a comfortable place to sit. And that was especially difficult for Chin, who grew up in the 1970s and 80s as one of six kids raised by parents who owned Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine, one of the most revered Chinese restaurants in Detroit. Despite its location in one of the roughest neighborhoods in the city, the restaurant sold more than four thousand egg rolls every week and was frequented by celebrities like Joni Mitchell, Smokey Robinson, an...
#99 Best of 2023: Conversations of the Year
December 20, 2023 18:59 - 1 hour - 83.6 MBPaternal closes out the year with a collection of the best conversations from 2023, curating five of the best segments from the past year into one collection. On this episode, Paternal guests discuss a variety of topics including the challenges of raising mixed-race kids, how father-son relationships impacted some of the biggest rock acts of the 1990s, how burnout at work can affect your parenting, dealing with grief after the loss of a partner, and how we can hold all the good and bad of li...
#98 Paternal Workshop: Sex and Intimacy
December 06, 2023 06:00 - 33 minutes - 46.6 MBAward-winning research psychologist and professor Dr. Michael Addis returns to Paternal for the latest in a series of special episodes, this time to discuss the connection between the social construction of masculinity and men’s relationship with sex and intimacy. Men receive convoluted messages about what sex and intimacy are supposed to look like from an early age, but can they really take stock of what they’ve learned and change their behavior as they get older? Dr. Addis also discusses...
#97 Brandon Stosuy: The Crying Guy
November 22, 2023 06:00 - 30 minutes - 41.6 MBBack in 2016, Brandon Stosuy began to notice something strange about many of the people around him. Seemingly no matter where he went - jogging in Brooklyn, riding the subway into Manhattan, waiting for a plane at JFK - he spotted someone crying. Stosuy has spent the past seven years thinking about those people and what brought them to tears, and now he’s become known to a number of his friends, thousands of strangers, and even a few famous rock musicians as The Crying Guy. On this episode...
#96 Isaac Fitzgerald: Hope For A Lost Cause
November 08, 2023 06:00 - 36 minutes - 50.5 MBIsaac Fitzgerald has a large tattoo on his right forearm of Saint Jude, the patron saint of impossible or lost causes. It might seem like a fitting mark for a man who resorted to drugs and alcohol to endure a childhood full of insecurity and violence, but Saint Jude is also the patron saint of hope. And for Fitzgerald - the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Dirtbag, Massachusetts - hope lies in the communities where others might never expect to look. On this episode of Pater...
#95 Bill McKibben: The Decade That Changed America
October 25, 2023 05:00 - 41 minutes - 56.8 MBBill McKibben doesn’t exactly do memoirs. But the latest work from the bestselling author and influential environmental activist is about as close as he’ll get, examining why two crucial moments from his childhood - an anti-war protest followed by the rejection of low and middle-income housing in his otherwise affluent Massachusetts suburb - helped symbolize a dramatic and costly shift to individualism in America during the 1970s. On this episode of Paternal, McKibben reflects on those mom...
#94 Andre Dubus III: Fighting To Get Free
October 11, 2023 05:00 - 37 minutes - 51.4 MBAcclaimed author Andre Dubus III once wrote that he’s drawn to writing about “working class men who work with their hands … men up against it who only know one or two ways how to get free, both of which can hurt other people or themselves.” Dubus knows from experience. He grew up in the 1970s and 80s with a famous but notoriously absent father in the mill towns along the Merrimack River in Massachusetts, always eager to throw a punch if it proved his worth as a man. His experiences led to th...
#93 W. Kamau Bell: Comedy, Cosby, And Raising Mixed Kids
September 27, 2023 05:00 - 41 minutes - 57.7 MBOver the past few years comedian and filmmaker W. Kamau Bell has become one of America’s most recognizable purveyors of humor and smart social commentary. And his success is due in large part to his willingness to tackle thorny topics like race, sexual assault, education, and policing, be it as a standup comic, an Emmy-nominated reality show host, or from behind the camera as a documentary filmmaker. On this episode of Paternal, Bell discusses his latest film 1000% Me: Growing Up Mixed an...
#92 Israel del Toro, Jr.: You’re Not Gonna Die Here
September 13, 2023 05:00 - 32 minutes - 44.9 MBWhen Israel “DT” Del Toro, Jr. was 12 years old, he made a promise to his ailing father that he would always watch over his younger siblings, and take care of his family. When he was a 30 year-old Staff Sergeant in the Air Force, he made a promise to his wife and young son that he would return safely from Afghanistan. But then everything changed with a flash of light and an explosion that literally shook the ground beneath his feet, leaving Del Toro, Jr. severely wounded and wondering if he ...
#91 Jay Rosenblatt: How Do You Measure A Year?
August 23, 2023 06:00 - 29 minutes - 40.1 MBRoughly two decades ago filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt started a ritual with his daughter Ella that he never expected would lead anywhere but the family archives. But the project that unfolded - an annual series of questions he asked Ella on her birthday until she turned 18 - eventually led to an acclaimed portrayal of a father-daughter relationship, and an Academy Award nomination. On this episode of Paternal, Rosenblatt looks back on the origins of his celebrated short film How Do You Measure...
#90 Alexi Lalas: Embracing Kids And Critics (2018)
August 09, 2023 05:00 - 35 minutes - 48.9 MBAlexi Lalas knows all about opportunity. As a professional soccer player and member of the United States national team during the 1990s, Lalas used the global platform of the 1994 FIFA World Cup to introduce the world to his carefully cultivated image of a rebellious red-headed rockstar with a love for the world’s game, and life’s never been the same since. More than two decades later Lalas is still in the public eye as a television analyst for Fox Sports at this summer’s Women’s World Cup...
#89 Rob Harvilla: Dad Rock Comes For Every Man
July 26, 2023 05:00 - 48 minutes - 66.8 MBLongtime rock critic Rob Harvilla has made a lengthy career out of his love for the '90s-era songs that shaped his days as a teenager and college student. He’s the host of the hit podcast “60 Songs That Explain the ‘90s” and he’s built a devoted fan base of equally obsessed music fans while exploring songs from artists like Nirvana, Madonna, REM, and the Wu-Tang Clan. But despite his success, sometimes he just likes to mow the lawn with an old Soul Asylum album in his headphones before he ge...
#88 Jake Tapper: Leadership and Vulnerability
July 12, 2023 06:00 - 36 minutes - 50.2 MBJake Tapper has been a leading figure in American media for more than a decade, serving as the chief DC anchor at CNN, the host of the network’s weekday show “The Lead with Jake Tapper,” and the co-host of the Sunday public-affairs show, “State of the Union.” During that time he’s interviewed some of the most consequential and controversial figures in American politics, and in the process learned a few things about why powerful men are so reluctant to admit when they’re wrong, and what it co...
#87 Matt Moore: Meat, Men, And The Fourth of July
June 28, 2023 05:00 - 26 minutes - 36.7 MBGood food has always been an integral part of Matt Moore’s family. As the grandson of a man who helped run a popular food store in southern Georgia and the grand nephew of a soldier who endured World War II in part on his family’s famous fried chicken, Moore has always been connected to the role food can play in a family’s story. And now, as a Nashville-based cook, father, and the author of five popular cookbooks, Moore spends his days cooking for his family and preaching how other men can m...
#86 The Best of Paternal: Advice For New Dads, Part 2
June 14, 2023 07:00 - 35 minutes - 49.3 MBPaternal celebrates Father’s Day by paying tribute to all the new dads out there celebrating the holiday for the first time, this time by bringing back three of the show’s most beloved guests to weigh in on how they survived the early days of parenting. The guests weigh in on what surprised them about becoming a father, what they did right as new dads, what they did wrong, and which piece of advice they would give their new-dad selves all these years later. Guests on this special episode o...
#85 Kwame Alexander: What My Father Taught Me About Love
May 17, 2023 05:00 - 36 minutes - 50.7 MBMost people know Kwame Alexander as the Newbery Medal-winning author of The Crossover, the bestselling children’s book about two young brothers hooked on basketball. Long before he was an award-winning author, however, Alexander spent his time writing love poems, in an attempt to impress women and find his voice as a poet and a young man. But three decades and two marriages later, Alexander is a 54-year-old father of two now reconsidering those relationships from his past, and what exactl...
#84 Jonathan Malesic: Dads, Work, And Burnout
May 03, 2023 05:00 - 38 minutes - 53.6 MBJonathan Malesic spent more than a decade in what he thought was his dream job as a college professor. But after years on the clock he found himself exhausted, angry, and struggling to feel like he was making an impact with his students. But even when he quit his job in order to solve one problem, he quickly realized he had another on his hands: Without a job, was he suddenly less of a man? On this episode of Paternal, Malesic recounts the experience that led him to studying the phenomen...
#83 Bryce Andrews: My Grandfather’s Gun
April 19, 2023 07:00 - 39 minutes - 53.7 MBWhen Bryce Andrews was a kid growing up in Seattle, he always admired Montana-born cowboys, and men who rope and herd cattle. So when he finally drove over the Cascades and settled in Montana as a young, do-it-all cattle rancher working under an endless blue sky, he knew he’d found his place. But then he was gifted his grandfather’s Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum revolver, a weapon that fascinated him as a little boy and haunted him as a man living alone on a desolate cattle ranch an hour’s dr...
#82 Paternal Workshop: Everything Turns Into Anger
April 05, 2023 06:00 - 32 minutes - 45.3 MBAward-winning research psychologist and professor Dr. Michael Addis returns to Paternal for the latest in a series of special episodes, this time to discuss the complicated relationship so many men have with anger. We teach boys that anger is an acceptable emotion even at a very young age, but what’s really at the core of the issue when a boy or man loses his temper? Dr. Addis also dives deep into the connection between anger and control, why so many men are ambivalent about each other's a...
#81 Clint Smith: Holding It All Together
March 22, 2023 07:00 - 37 minutes - 52.1 MBClint Smith is a man deeply interested in the contrasts and complexities of the human experience. Be it in his professional life as the author of the acclaimed New York Times bestselling narrative nonfiction book How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery, or in his personal life as an often-humbled father to two young children, Smith is constantly considering how experiences shape us as people. “Parenthood is the most remarkable, awe-inspiring experience of your life,”...
#80 Matthew Salesses: A Sense Of Wonder
March 08, 2023 07:00 - 38 minutes - 52.5 MBMatthew Salesses clearly remembers the first time he saw Jeremy Lin on the basketball court. It was three years before Lin became an international celebrity and “Linsanity” took over Madison Square Garden in New York City, but even then Salesses knew there was something special about watching an Asian American basketball player dominate on the court. More than a decade later Lin’s rise to fame - and the mix of recognition and racism he endured on the way - is the template for Salesses’s new ...
#79 Jaed Coffin: Bloodlines And Boxing (2020)
February 22, 2023 06:00 - 39 minutes - 53.9 MBWhen Jaed Coffin was 23 years old he had recently graduated from college, and like a lot of people in that stage of their lives, he found himself looking ... for something. What he found was an austere and single-minded life in Southeast Alaska, training to become the next big thing in the sport of roughhouse boxing, a boozy, bloody, and rugged class of amateur boxing. Coffin chronicled his rise from wide-eyed novice to eventual middleweight champion in his 2019 memoir Roughhouse Friday, whi...
#78 Dan Houser: Anger Is Your Armor
February 09, 2023 18:14 - 31 minutes - 43.8 MBWhen Dan Houser was in his 20s, he would walk down the street and smash the windows out of parked cars. In the bars he would have a few drinks, eyeball the worst-looking guy in the place, and start a fight. After years of powerlifting he had built himself into a frightening 250-pound man who never cared about consequences, and knew that no one could stop him. But now, more than 20 years removed from his days as a man motivated by confrontation, Houser reflects on the armor he built around...
#77 John Vercher: Acting In The Face Of Fear
January 25, 2023 06:00 - 27 minutes - 37.2 MBWhat does it mean to truly face down one of the biggest fears in your life? John Vercher went through much of his life being scared, until he couldn’t take it anymore. Following years of training and decades after he was weaned on 1980s-era martial arts theater programs on television, Vercher stepped inside the cage for a mixed martial arts fight during his mid 30s, seeking the answer to one question: Can I do something in the face of my fear? More than a decade later Vercher is a father o...
#76 Jesse Leon: The Unbreakable Man
January 11, 2023 06:00 - 33 minutes - 46.5 MBPaternal opens 2023 with a conversation with Jesse Leon, a 48 year-old author and social impact consultant who has endured life experiences unlike any other guest in Paternal’s past. As the son of immigrants and raised in a working-class neighborhood in San Diego, Leon grew up hiding a painful secret from his community and from his father, a former Mexican boxer who embodied the negative aspects of machismo culture and lived by the motto, “there are no friends in this world, and trust no man...
#75 Best of 2022: Conversations of the Year
December 29, 2022 05:01 - 54 minutes - 75.5 MBPaternal closes out the year with a collection of the best conversations from 2022, curating five of the best segments from the past year into one collection. On this episode, Paternal guests discuss a variety of topics including the personal, psychological effects of waging war in Afghanistan, why there are no father figures in the world of Star Wars, the legacy of Richard Pryor on comedy and male vulnerability, why your kids are smarter and more capable than you think, and why sons are tas...
#74 Paternal Workshop: The Scallop Problem
December 14, 2022 06:00 - 28 minutes - 38.8 MBAuthor and professor Andrew Reiner returns to Paternal for the latest in a series of special episodes, this time to discuss how and why men often neglect to examine and express their emotional needs in a relationship, and what happens when they seethe in silence. Reiner is the author of the 2020 book Better Boys, Better Men and earlier this year wrote an article for The Washington Post about why men are often taught very young to diminish, or even ignore, their emotions in relationships....
#73 Kurt Braunohler: You’re Such A F*cking Baby
November 16, 2022 06:00 - 33 minutes - 46.5 MBDoes the world really need another dad comic? Kurt Braunohler certainly doesn’t think so, but as a 40-something father of two and a proven comic who’s been on stage since the late 1990s, Braunohler is walking a fine line. Dubbed “a charismatic comedian with a flair for the absurd” by the New York Times and “the closest thing we have to a real-life Willy Wonka” by Vice, Braunohler is discussing more personal and vulnerable topics these days, including fatherhood, and his own relationship wit...
#72 Pietro La Greca Jr.: The Don Corleone of Mexico
November 02, 2022 06:00 - 36 minutes - 50.8 MBWhen Pietro La Greca Jr. was 13 years old, his father bought him a solid gold Piaget Polo watch. Not because it was his birthday or because it was Christmas. Just because he could. When Pietro Jr. learned to drive, his father gave him an all-white Mercedes-Benz 500 S Class with white rims that could do 170 miles per hour on the highway between San Diego and Tijuana. Such was the life for the son of the greatest money man along the U.S.-Mexico border, and someone once dubbed “Mexico’s real li...
#71 Cory Silverberg: Sex Is A Funny Word
October 19, 2022 05:00 - 40 minutes - 55.3 MBWhen Cory Silverberg was 17 years old growing up in Canada, there simply weren’t many resources available for a teenager confused about gender. But Silverberg - who uses they pronouns, and doesn’t identify as a man - found surprising solace in the form of a retail job at a local sex shop, and discovered a rare super power that would shape their life. “Other people’s sex stuff didn’t freak me out,” Silverberg says, “and I knew how to show that it didn’t freak me out.” Decades later Silverb...
#70 Ted Bunch: A Cry For Healthier Manhood
October 05, 2022 05:00 - 30 minutes - 41.5 MBTed Bunch has spent the bulk of his adult life as an educator, activist and lecturer, focused specifically on the intersection of masculinity and violence against women. He’s also spent 18 years as the Chief Development Officer of the violence prevention organization A Call To Men, and in that time he’s become one of the nation’s leading voices on the perils of male socialization and the misperception of toxic masculinity. On this 2020 episode of Paternal, Bunch breaks down the challenges ...
#69 Dr. Michael Thompson: Emotional Illiteracy Of Fathers And Sons (2018)
September 21, 2022 05:00 - 45 minutes - 62.8 MBLong before he became one of the nation’s leading voices on the emotional lives of adolescent boys, psychologist and New York Times bestselling author Dr. Michael G. Thompson actually focused his studies on the psychological issues of young women. “I got into schools as a consultant,” Thompson says, “and all of a sudden, all of my work was little boys.” Thompson and co-author Dan Kindlon released their acclaimed book Raising Cain in April 1999, six days after the shooting at Columbine Hig...
#68 David Ambroz: A Place Called Home
September 07, 2022 05:00 - 40 minutes - 55.4 MBMemories are a tricky subject for David Ambroz. He has no photo albums documenting his childhood, and no adults who he can ask about where he came from. He never marked the passage of time by holidays or school years, and his height was never measured on a wall in the kitchen of a home. Instead Ambroz and his family moved in and out of apartments and homeless shelters and lived a life of poverty, violence, and instability wherever they turned. Now in his early 40s, Ambroz is considered on...
#67 Paternal Workshop: The Problem In Your Group Chat
August 24, 2022 05:00 - 31 minutes - 43.4 MBAward-winning research psychologist and professor Dr. Michael Addis returns to Paternal for the latest in a series of special episodes, this time to discuss how male group dynamics work, and what happens when one guy crosses the line. He also explains why some men lean on misogyny or homophobia in order to win over a crowd of new male friends, and the stakes for everyone involved. He also introduces the concept of TRAP (trigger, response, avoidance pattern) and why it’s crucial for men to ...
#66 Chris Ballew: Fame, Fatherhood, and Caspar Babypants (2020)
August 10, 2022 05:00 - 29 minutes - 40.9 MBEven before his third birthday, Chris Ballew was transfixed by music. He would sit on the floor in his parents’ Seattle-area home and listen to The Beatles’ seminal 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and not long after he was writing and performing his own songs. By the mid-90s he was fronting the Presidents of the United States of America - one of the hottest bands in rock'n'roll - and appearing regularly on MTV. But he was quietly harboring a secret: “On a gut level, I want...
#65 Steve Leder: Twelve Questions to Tell a Life Story
July 27, 2022 05:00 - 38 minutes - 53.5 MBSteve Leder is a husband, father, bestselling author and, as the senior rabbi at Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles, one the most influential religious leaders in America. During his 35 years at Southern California’s oldest synagogue he has proven to be something of an expert in the human experience, and overseen not just regular services at the temple, but also countless weddings - including that of his friend and Academy Award winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin - and his fair share of...
#64 Jason Kander: Politics, Parenthood, and PTSD
July 13, 2022 05:00 - 41 minutes - 57.6 MBBack in early 2018, Jason Kander was riding high as one of the brightest young stars in American politics. After becoming the youngest statewide elected official in the nation and nearly toppling a Republican incumbent for a U.S. Senate seat from his native Missouri, Kander was invited to meet with Barack Obama, where the former president personally encouraged Kander to one day consider his own run for the White House, telling Kander, “You have what I had. You’re the natural.” But Kander’...
#63 Jesse Thistle: Tracing Our Fathers’ Footsteps (2021)
June 22, 2022 05:00 - 36 minutes - 50.8 MBJesse Thistle is an assistant professor at York University in Toronto and an award-winning memoirist who wrote the top-selling Canadian book in 2020, but his success didn’t come easily. Prior to penning his celebrated emotional memoir From the Ashes, Thistle spent years struggling with issues of addiction and homelessness, a lifestyle he sees to some degree as the result of the absence of a father figure in his life. His own father was an addict and a thief who disappeared nearly 40 years ag...
#62 The Best of Paternal: Advice for New Dads
June 15, 2022 05:00 - 42 minutes - 58.8 MBThe new dads have spoken, and they want some help. So in honor of those men celebrating Father’s Day for the first time this year, Paternal welcomes back four favorite guests from the past to offer advice on how to survive those early days of parenthood, including what they did right, what they did wrong, and what lessons they learned in the process of becoming a father. Guests on this special episode include New York Times chief theater critic Jesse Green, entrepreneur Jelani Memory, au...
#61 Andrew Reiner: Better Boys, Better Men
June 01, 2022 05:00 - 38 minutes - 52.8 MBA number of years ago, the dean at the Honors College at Towson University in Maryland went on the prowl for ideas for new seminar courses at the college. Andrew Reiner wasted no time in offering an idea for a seminar on a subject that he says has become a compulsion in his life: Masculinity. What if the school offered a course where he could work with students to deconstruct our ideas around masculinity and what it looks like now for a new generation of college students, men and women? On...
#60 Michael Ian Black: The Mystery Door To Male Competence
May 18, 2022 05:00 - 39 minutes - 54.1 MBAfter a particularly feverish Twitter rant in 2018 landed him an invite to write a guest opinion on boys and violence from The New York Times, Michael Ian Black had to ask one simple question: Are you sure you want me? After all, Black is best known as a sketch and standup comic, and a particularly snarky one at that. But he wrote the essay and it subsequently went viral, leading Black to eventually pen the 2020 memoir A Better Man: A (Mostly Serious) Letter To My Son, which offers a candid ...
#59 Akhil Sharma: Fatherhood at Fifty
May 04, 2022 05:00 - 35 minutes - 48.3 MBOf all the guests on Paternal over the years, it’s safe to say that Akhil Sharma was the last guy who would have expected to appear on a podcast about fatherhood. Over the past three decades he carved out a nice life as an Ivy League educated investment banker, and then a successful writer and college professor. Fatherhood never really entered the equation because, in his mind, he was worthless when it came to what he could possibly teach a child. On this episode of Paternal, Sharma reflect...
#58 Eric Larsen: On The Ice With A Polar Explorer (2018)
April 06, 2022 00:28 - 35 minutes - 48.5 MBFor centuries, the ends of the Earth have captivated and courted the world’s bravest characters. The highest peaks of the Himalayas, the furthest depths of the oceans, and the poles, frozen pinpoints on opposite ends of the globe that still serve as two of the most ambitious destinations for a certain type of person you may have thought died out years ago: The explorers. Eric Larsen is one of those people, a veteran explorer who has not only reached both the geographic north and south pole...
#57 Paternal Workshop: The Masculinity Trap
March 23, 2022 05:00 - 34 minutes - 47.6 MBAward-winning research psychologist and professor Dr. Michael Addis returns to Paternal for the third in a series of special episodes examining various issues affecting men’s mental health. In this episode, Dr. Addis calls on his decades of research to break down the links between social learning and the social construction of masculinity, and why he considers masculinity a form of anxiety disorder for some men. Dr. Addis also explains how and when young boys are first exposed to the ideas...
#56 Max Lowe: Daddy’s On The Mountain
March 09, 2022 07:05 - 38 minutes - 70.1 MBOne world-renowned climber dies and leaves a widow and three young sons behind, and his climbing partner and best friend helps pick up the pieces by marrying the widow and helping raise a trio of boys who lost their father. Among the world’s mountaineers, climbers and explorers, the life and tragic death of Alex Lowe is nothing short of legend. For newcomers hearing the story for the first time, it’s a fascinating examination of circumstance and fate, love lost and then rediscovered. ...