Paternal
Paternal 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.
- Update frequency
- every 14 days
- Average duration
- 37 minutes
- Episodes
- 104
- Years Active
- 2020 - 2025
#137 Robert Gallery: Football, Rage, and Recovery
When Robert Gallery was a senior at the University of Iowa, he was one of the most respected and feared college football players in the country. At 6-foot-7 and 320 pounds, Gallery leveraged his size…
#136 Aymann Ismail: Three Generations of Men in the Mosque
What were the first words you said to your child when you became a parent? Was there something you needed to say to officially welcome him or her into this world, or was it all just a blur? For longt…
#135 Jonathan Malesic: Dads, Work, And Burnout (2023)
Jonathan 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 w…
#134 Jayson Greene: Can Artificial Intelligence Help Us Cope With Grief?
Proponents of Artificial Intelligence assure us that everything in life is about to change: Work, education, healthcare, art, and even how we remember our loved ones. But what role can AI actually pl…
#133 Augustine Sedgewick: A History of Fatherhood, From Thomas Jefferson to Bob Dylan
How did Thomas Jefferson’s thoughts on fatherhood influence the American Revolution? What did Charles Darwin learn about evolution from watching his own kids? And why did Bob Dylan tell everyone he c…
#132 Sam Graham-Felsen: Where Have All My Male Friendships Gone?
In the final scene of the 1986 coming-of-age film Stand By Me, the film’s narrator sums up boyhood friendship with the simple line, “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was tw…
#131 James Patterson: The King of Paperback Fiction Tackles Fatherhood
James Patterson has sold more than 425 million books over the past 30 years, making him one of the richest and most successful authors in the world. At 78 years old and entering the final stage of hi…
#130 Paternal Workshop: Your Tween’s Mind, Explained
You could fill an entire bookshelf with guides on babies and toddlers, or the best strategies for dealing with teenagers. But for Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg, one of the most critical stages for child devel…
#129 Christopher Blackwell: How A Prison ‘Heal Circle’ Helps Incarcerated Men
Christopher Blackwell has been a lot of things in his life. As a young boy he was a son longing to connect with his father over classic cars and football. As a teenager he was an insecure class clown…
#128 Austin Davis: A Young Father Forges the Future of Pennsylvania Politics
Austin Davis was just a teenager when the trajectory of his life changed forever. A fatal shooting rattled his neighborhood in the working class Pennsylvania town of McKeesport, and spurred him to at…
#127 Jake Tapper: Leadership and Vulnerability (2023)
Jake 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-h…
#126 Paternal Workshop: Why It’s Hard For Men To Say “I’m Sorry”
Award-winning research psychologist and professor Dr. Michael Addis returns to Paternal for the latest in a series of special episodes, this time to discuss a subject that a number of past guests hav…
#125 Joseph Earl Thomas: Fatherhood, Regardless of Your Expectations
Acclaimed author Joseph Earl Thomas spent much of his childhood watching everyone around him, trying to figure out where he belonged. He grew up attending public school in Philadelphia and constantly…
#124 Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg: What Type Of Parent Are You?
Authoritarian parents. Permissive parents. Disengaged parents. Lighthouse parents. How would you describe the parents you had as a kid and, more importantly, what type are you now that you’re a paren…
#123 Frank: A Father’s Week Of Life On The Street (2018)
Meet Frank. He’s a 62 year-old father of four grown kids, and grandfather to seven grandchildren. Back in the summer of 2017, Frank decided to leave his home in San Diego and spend a week in Denver w…
#122 Scott Oake: The Perfect Place To Heal
Bruce Oake didn’t speak until the age of two, but once he started, he never stopped. A precocious kid with boundless energy growing up in Winnipeg, Oake was an amateur boxer as a teenager and a talen…
#121 Best of 2024: Conversations of the Year
Paternal closes out the year with a collection of the best conversations from 2024, curating five of the best segments from the past year into one collection. On this episode, Paternal guests discuss…
#120 David Robertson: Learning To Live With Anxiety
When David Robertson discovered a mouse living in his minivan years ago, he knew it meant trouble. But what happened next - six weeks of Googling for information about mice, the viruses they carry, a…
#119 Charles Bock: A Man In Over His Head
Sixteen years ago, novelist Charles Bock was the kind of guy who would never, ever want to appear on a podcast about fatherhood. He was single and living in New York City as an aspiring writer aching…
#118 Ian Marcus Corbin: The Science and Philosophy of Community
Four years after the worst of the COVID pandemic, is it really possible that America is still trapped in an epidemic of loneliness and isolation? Many of the nation’s experts believe it’s true, so mu…