When do we get to the point in life when we begin to lose just as often as we win? Career restarts, divorces, the death of a parent, the loss of a friend? For Chris Jones it all began roughly a decade ago, when he discovered his wife’s romantic texts with a close male friend, and his marriage ended abruptly with a single sentence: “I’m done.” That moment led Jones - an award-winning former writer for Esquire, The Atlantic and ESPN - into a new phase of his life, when introspection, vulnerability, and love for a blue collar English soccer team gave him a new perspective on what it means to win and lose in life.

On this episode of Paternal, Jones recounts the moment he discovered his wife’s infidelity, why his therapist recommended he consider picking up trash around town, and how he used soccer to connect with his British ancestors and his teenaged son during a time when he needed a win more than ever.

By his own admission, Chuck Park lives in a cramped, two-bedroom apartment in Queens with his kids’ drawings on the wall, a stroller by the door, and a dog who just won’t stop barking. He’s a dad concerned about the cost of health care and child care, and he’s eager to fight for working families just like his. But can a normal dad with no experience in public office actually win a seat in the U.S. Congress?

On this episode of Paternal, Park explains why he left a cushy job to run for Congress to represent New York’s 6th Congressional District, and how his young son played a major role in the decision. He also discusses the level of anxiety in his community amid ongoing ICE raids, and the experience of growing up as the son of Korean immigrants who worked tirelessly as street peddlers in Manhattan to pay the bills and raise a family.

Just a few months after the birth of his son in 2019, Kevin Maguire noticed he wasn’t feeling quite right. At times he resented his newborn son, other times he would cry for seemingly no reason. He lost interest in his work and some of his hobbies, and he just couldn’t quite shake this idea that maybe something was wrong with him. After all, wasn’t this supposed to be one the happiest moments of his life?

Then Maguire discovered he was suffering from paternal post-partum depression, and the diagnosis sent down a path that changed his life. Two years later he launched The New Fatherhood, a hugely popular international forum for men that Esquire dubbed “one big group text with other guys fumbling their way through fatherhood.” Beginning with one email to friends that began with the line “being a dad isn’t easy,” The New Fatherhood now boasts a weekly newsletter read by nearly 20,000 dads in more than 150 countries. 

When Jordan Ritter Conn was a teenager growing up in an Evangelical Christian family, he met with a half dozen male friends every Saturday night for Bible Study. The sessions were a free-for-all for owning up to masturbation or admitting your insecurities, for speaking frankly about your father or dreaming about your future. Now a veteran journalist covering sports and culture for The Ringer and the author of the new book American Men, Conn still considers those Saturday nights “some of the best of my life.”

On this episode of Paternal, Conn discusses why so many men are struggling to make similarly meaningful connections, as well as what he learned from years of intimate and revealing conversations with four men from diverse American backgrounds for his new book. He also examines the male loneliness crisis, why all men have to face “the masculinity gap” at some point in their lives, and why he always texts a male friend after a meaningful conversation.

Brooklyn-based psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author Daniel Smith has a motto: Feel everything, don’t look away. But how exactly are men supposed to confront some of the most challenging emotions in their lives, especially when society tells them to suppress or even ignore feelings like shame, envy or regret?

On this episode of Paternal, Smith examines our relationship to what he calls “Hard Feelings,” and why reconsidering how we relate to these emotions can be beneficial for men as they become fathers. He also recounts his own story of growing up with a father who lingered at an emotional distance, and why modeling that emotions are off-limits can lead to shame and anger in our kids.

Tom Junod spent more than two decades as one the most celebrated writers in the men’s magazine game, winning two National Magazine Awards and penning unforgettable articles about everything from 9/11 to Mister Rogers. Dubbed by Esquire as the man who has “helped teach readers what masculinity looks like in the 21st century,” Junod has been considered one of great writers in the magazine’s nearly 100-year history, alongside Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Tom Wolfe.

But Junod certainly didn’t learn about masculinity from a magazine. Instead he absorbed lessons about manhood imparted by his father Lou, a man who emulated the leading men of 1930s Hollywood and offered a treasure trove of men’s-only secrets of success about wearing turtlenecks, making eye contact, and offering a firm handshake. But then Tom learned the details of his father’s other secrets, and it reshaped his opinion of what it means to be a good man.

John Elway. Joe Namath. Johnny Unitas. Peyton Manning. If you look into the backstory of just about any star quarterback you’ve ever heard of, and you’ll find either an overbearing father, or an absent one. 

In honor of the Super Bowl and the men who play the biggest role in this game, author and ESPN senior writer Seth Wickersham joins Paternal to discuss why there’s no cooler job title in America than quarterback, but each star’s story often traces back to the influence of his father. He also discusses the challenges the sons of these star quarterbacks face in living up to the legacy of their dads, the perils of father/son relationships built on football, and why even Tom Brady struggled to be a quarterback and a father at the same time.

As a teenager, Julian Brave Noisecat often heard ghost stories about the history of the Canim Lake Indian Reserve. He considered them simply rez legends, and figured the details of the stories - that indigenous babies had been born and left in the incinerator of the Christian residential school - simply couldn’t be true. But then he learned the origin story of his own father, and everything changed.

Now an acclaimed author and the first Indigenous North American filmmaker ever nominated for an Academy Award, Noisecat opens a new year on Paternal with the story of discovering the truth about his father, and why the story was largely shrouded in silence for decades. He also discusses how adults sent to residential schools as kids sometimes struggle as parents themselves, and what he’s learned about forgiveness and acceptance for his own father after learning more about his life.

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, talent and tenacity into a lucrative contract and an eight-year career in the National Football League. But all the while he was quietly suffering one concussion after another on the football field, and when his career finally ended, he struggled to handle bouts of rage that left him shaking in a chair after his young child spilled a glass of milk.

On this episode of Paternal, Gallery reflects on the difficult transition from high-performance athlete to stay-at-home dad, the moment he learned about the extensive damage done to his brain, and how a vivid two-day psychoactive drug treatment in Mexico changed the course of his life. Gallery is the co-founder and CEO of Athletes for Care, a non-profit organization supporting athletes through mental health and alternative therapy advocacy. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2023.

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 longtime Slate journalist and author Aymann Ismail the task was clear: He had to recite a Muslim call to prayer into his newborn son’s right ear, a ritual that’s been performed by countless Muslim fathers through the generations, all over the world. But was he appeasing God, or his own father? 

On this episode of Paternal, Ismail discusses a life spent navigating being a Muslim kid who preferred cartoons over daily prayers, and then how his faith influences his role as a father to two young kids now. And all the while he’s been trying to somehow live up to the expectations of his father, a devout and educated Muslim man fixated on the kind of man he believes his son should be.

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 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 2023 episode of Paternal, Malesic recounts the experience that led him to studying the phenomenon of burnout, how it affects men and women differently, what role work plays in defining a man’s sense of masculinity, and the effects of burnout on men when it comes to fatherhood. Malesic’s 2022 book The End of Burnout is available wherever you buy books, and he is also the author of the 2022 essay “How Men Burn Out,” from The New York Times.

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 play in alleviating psychological and emotional suffering, especially when a parent loses a child? Welcome to the mind of author Jayson Greene, who penned the celebrated memoir Once More We Saw Stars back in 2019 after the tragic loss of his daughter Greta, and who’s very familiar with how opportunistic companies position AI technology as a solution to avoid feeling the pain of grief and loss.

On this episode of Paternal, Greene discusses the AI themes in his debut sci-fi novel UnWorld,  how he’s faring 10 years after the death of his daughter, what he’s learned about how men connect over grief, and what it’s like to receive DMs from strangers who have lost their child. He also examines how he and his wife Stacy dealt with grief differently in the wake of Greta’s death, and why he often wonders what kind of person he has become after losing her.

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 couldn’t stand his father? After becoming a father himself, historian and author Augustine Sedgewick dove into the past to learn more about these and other hugely influential men, and how being a father and a son shaped their lives and work, for better or worse.

On this episode of Paternal, Sedgewick reflects on why he went looking through the past for paternal role models, and why the lives of Jefferson, Darwin, Dylan, Henry David Thoreau and Norman Rockwell reveal problematic habits dads can avoid today.

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 twelve.” And that’s largely true for a number of men who had no trouble developing deep, meaningful friendships with other boys. So why has a lack of friendship among dads become a cliche, or even a running joke? Why can’t guys hang onto those intimate friendships from their past, and what keeps them from making new friends as adults?

On this episode of Paternal, journalist and novelist Sam Graham-Felsen examines how one of his strongest childhood friendships has eroded over the years in the wake of marriage and fatherhood, and why men are reluctant to reach out to close friends when they’re in distress. He also discusses why listening to Joe Rogan offers some men a community in place of real-life friendships, and what men can do to rediscover the old friends they thought they lost.

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 his career, Patterson has legions of fans devoted to his brand of psychological thrillers and police procedurals, and he can effectively write about anything he wants, whenever he wants.

So what’s the king of paperback fiction doing writing a book about fatherhood? On this episode of Paternal, Patterson discusses the motivations for his new how-to manual The #1 Dad Book and what he’s learned from his own experience as a father, and how to turn kids on to reading. He also reflects on the life of his own dad, who grew up in a poorhouse in upstate New York without ever knowing who his father was.

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 development is the pre-adolescent phase, when kids really begin to push their parents away and first ask the biggest questions of their lives: Who am I? Am I normal? Where do I fit in?

On this episode of Paternal, Dr. Ginsburg returns to the show for the first in a series of special episodes devoted to the issues affecting our kids. He dives deep into the idea of brain puberty and what’s happening in the minds of kids in this pre-adolescent phase, why they’re trying harder than ever to break free from their parents, how screen habits figure into their development, and why you should leave your own painful memories of middle school out of the conversation with your kids.

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, and then a dropout. In his 20s he was a drug dealer living in survival mode in a neighborhood riddled with crime and violence. And now he’s an inmate in the Washington Corrections Center, serving a 45-year prison sentence for robbery and murder.

But Blackwell is also an award-winning journalist, the co-founder of a non-profit organization focused on prison reform, a mentor to other inmates, and a husband. On this episode of Paternal, Blackwell reflects on how growing up without community and positive male role models led to a tragic robbery gone wrong, and how he’s transformed himself thanks to prison’s “heal circle,” where inmates share their stories and discover a sense of honesty and camaraderie they never had as young men.

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 attend a city council meeting of all white officials who were skeptical of the concerned Black teenager raising his voice. “ The people closest to the pain should be closest to the power,” Davis says. “ I had a stake in that community just as much as they did as somebody who lived there and grew up there, and I wanted to make it a better place.”

Nearly two decades later Davis was elected the Lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania, becoming the first African American to ever hold the office and the youngest Lieutenant Governor in the United States. On this episode of Paternal, Davis recounts how the son of a bus driver and hairdresser rose to one of the most powerful positions in Pennsylvania, why becoming a father helped him focus his energy on fixing the state’s childcare problem, and where he finds hope for the future despite extreme partisanship and vitriol among today’s politicians.

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-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 costs them in the end.

On this episode of Paternal, Tapper discusses how he balanced a high-powered career in journalism with a life as a father of two children, how his own father influenced his upbringing in Philadelphia, and the traits that make a successful leader. Tapper’s new book, All the Demons Are Here, is available wherever you buy books.

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 have brought up over the years: Grace and self-compassion. He examines why some men hold themselves to impossible standards when it comes to work, relationships and parenting, and why the inability to forgive yourself is connected to the ability to apologize to others, and actually mean it.

Dr. Addis is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. He also provides personal coaching and consultation for men at www.incontextcoaching.com.