Even 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 wanted out immediately.”

When Jayson Greene was in the fourth grade, his teacher gave him an assignment that most kids get at some point in grade school. The question is What do you want to be when you grow up? Jayson mentioned two goals for himself, one of which may come as a surprise for a kid in grade school. He wanted to be a writer, and a father.

Ted 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.

Paternal dives back into the archives to share the stories of three previous guests all focused on one topic: What it’s like to raise African American kids in the United States.

When 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, which the LA Review of Books called “a beautifully crafted memoir about fathers and sons, masculinity, and the lengths we sometimes go to in order to confront our past.”

When news first broke that the Coronavirus pandemic had come to Seattle, John Richards had no idea how he could keep doing his job. More than two months later, his work has never been important. Richards is a father of two boys and the host of the “The Morning Show” on 90.3 KEXP FM, an independent radio station supported largely by its listeners, so that means John and the other DJs are free to take requests from people all over the world and play whatever they want. And the station has received more notes and music requests from listeners over the past two months than ever before in the station’s history, giving Richards and his fellow DJs a unique perspective into how people all over the world are coping with the pandemic, and which songs are helping them through.

Season 4 of Paternal opens with a conversation with Scott Cooper, a New Jersey-based single father of two with a daily glimpse into the severity of the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic. Scott is the Director of Professional Practice at Holy Name Medical Center in Teaneck, New Jersey, a hospital that has been inundated with Covid-19 patients since the virus took hold in March.

Paternal celebrates Father’s Day by looking back at some of the show’s best interviews while focusing about one thing in particular: What we think of when we think about our dads. Although that’s a topic that has come up quite a bit on the show over the first 31 episodes, certain guests over the years have offered candid insight into their relationships with their own dads, the good stuff and the bad.

Keith Gaston is a father, social worker and, just like his dad, a man born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut. But the city has changed in the decades since Gaston grew up there, with a climbing unemployment rate, a declining city population and issues with gun violence and drugs that are taking a toll on some of the city’s young men. That’s where Gaston has stepped in, focused on teaching young men the skills of being a father.

Author, father and New York Times co-chief theater critic Jesse Green recently examined works by Arnold Lobell, Margaret Wise Brown, Maurice Sendak and other prominent children’s book authors and illustrators of the past 50-plus years and discovered that a host of writers of a more conservative era created the best works of their lives - and some of the most influential children’s literature of all time - while largely hiding their sexuality from the public.

Craig Scott was a sophomore at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, when two students descended on the school and unleashed what was, at the time, the deadliest high school shooting in American history. And though Scott survived by hiding under a desk in the library, the shooters killed 12 students and a teacher that day, including Scott's friends, classmates, and older sister Rachel.

How many times have mothers and fathers argued about roughhousing with young kids, or why dad is a better disciplinarian than mom? After roughly four decades working in pediatrics and child psychiatry, Dr. Kyle Pruett knows the answer: Moms and dads simply parent differently, and that’s fine for everyone involved. Including the kid.

How would you describe the feeling when you first became a parent? California businessman Mark Eckhardt never seriously thought of starting a family before the birth of his first daughter. And when she finally arrived he was overcome with joy, but also with the feeling that his entire life had been forever disrupted.

Andy Johnson has spent much of his life fixing things. As a 35-year-old farmer growing corn and hay in Colorado, Johnson is a model of resourcefulness, spending the days on his 1,000 acres of farmland as an agronomist, a car mechanic, or a welder. Every year the summer storms come and go, crops thrive and die. But his farmer’s ingenuity has always persisted through the seasons, a trait passed down through five generations of men making their living off the land.

What if you spent the first three decades of your life building a relationship with your father, and then one day, you found out he wasn’t the only father you had?

There are two guests on this episode of Paternal - one is 33-year-old John Vanek, a husband and father of two young girls living in the suburbs of Minneapolis. And the other is his biological father, Dr. Bruce A. Olmscheid, a physician who lives nearly 2,000 miles away in Southern California. Neither man knew the other one existed for about 30 years.

How far would you be willing to go to somehow preserve the memory of someone you lost? When James Vlahos found out his father was dying of lung cancer, he set out to create a chatbot fueled by a treasure trove of interviews with his dad, and artificial intelligence software. The end result is the Dadbot, a program that questions if artificial immortality might actually exist.

Prior to the birth of his first son, the only things Schwan Park knew about autism were gleaned from watching Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. But after he and his wife realized something was different about the development of their son Max, Park reluctantly pushed himself to learn more about the symptoms of autism, and ultimately to accept a new reality for his family.

Jason Hairston was always up for a challenge. And by the time he was 47 years old he had overcome his fair share to become a family man, successful CEO of outdoor apparel giant KUIU, and a guru to thousands of like-minded men all looking for their own personal, primal experience on the hunt.

But to the shock of many who knew and loved him, Hairston took his own life in September. In his final in-depth interview before his death and of Paternal’s most intimate episodes to date, Hairston discusses all the experiences that shaped him as a father and a son.

Veteran explorer Eric Larsen has not only reached both the geographic north and south poles, but also summited Mount Everest. And in 2009 and 2010 he became the first person in the world to reach all three in the span of 365 days, an endeavor that cemented him as one of the most successful American explorers in recent years. But he’s also used to leaving his wife and two young children behind for weeks, which always raises some questions in his mind when he’s alone on the ice.

Joe Andruzzi has always been surrounded by family. And he never valued family more than in 2007, when he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer that nearly took his life. Andruzzi - who won three Super Bowls with the New England Patriots - went on to found the Joe Andruzzi Foundation, which has helped more than 8,000 families and individuals affected by cancer. On this episode of Paternal he discusses his battle with cancer and how his father’s role as a New York City police officer shaped the family’s values.