What 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 of two young sons and the author of a pair of acclaimed novels, now facing a new set of fears as a father. How does he teach his two sons to face a frightening world with their own sense of courage?

Paternal 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.” 

On this episode of Paternal, Leon discusses how he suffered so much pain from the deeds of bad men, but also how the empathy of stronger men changed the course of his life. Leon is the author of the 2022 memoir I’m Not Broken, which was praised by NPR as “sad, brutally honest, and emotionally gritty,” and is available now wherever you buy books.

Paternal 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 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 tasked to acquit the souls of their fathers through their own experience as parents.

Guests on this episode of Paternal include politician Jason Kander, comedian Michael Ian Black, author Daniel Jose Older, theater actor Mickey Rowe, and Senior Rabbi Steve Leder. Stay tuned for all new episodes of Paternal in 2023.

Author and professor Andrew Reiner returns to Paternal for the latest in a series of special Paternal Workshop 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. The article - which featured Paternal host Nick Firchau and a story about a scallop dinner gone wrong - subsequently became a lightning rod for comments about how, when, and why men should show emotion.

Does 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 with a dad who’s never seen one of his comedy specials.

On this episode of Paternal, Braunohler discusses comedians leaning into fatherhood for their material, and the perils of falling into comedy’s parent trap himself.

When 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 he 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 life Don Corleone.”

On this episode of Paternal, Pietro La Greca Jr. recounts what life was like growing up in a family that made all the money in the world and then lost it all, and what it was like to receive a death threat from his own father.

When 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 Silverberg is a celebrated sex educator, public speaker, and the author of three acclaimed books aimed at teaching kids how to talk about sex and gender, and how to think of sex as a path to understanding their place in the world.

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.

On this 2020 episode of Paternal, Bunch breaks down the challenges men and boys face due to the rigid expectations of who society expects them to be - strong, fearless, emotionless, and in control - and why it’s so dangerous for them and their kids to fall into that trap.

Long 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.”

On this 2018 episode of Paternal, Thompson discusses the impact of his bestselling book Raising Cain, his thoughts on how to protect the emotional complexities of young boys, and why fathers struggle to connect with their sons.

Memories 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.

On this episode of Paternal, Ambroz discusses a childhood spent battling hunger on the streets of New York, why women largely carry the burden in the cycle of poverty while men are nowhere to be found, and what it will take to encourage more middle class families to become foster parents.

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.”

On this episode of Paternal from 2020, Ballew looks back at his early experiences with fame, and examines the instinct that led him to leave modern rock behind to take on a new stage presence: celebrated children’s musician Caspar Babypants.

Steve 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 funerals, of which he has performed more than a thousand in his career. Not bad for the son of a junkman from Minnesota.

Back 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’s public presidential aspirations were derailed by anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, and eventually crippling bouts of shame as he finally confronted his diagnosis of PTSD, and he quietly wished he could be a better husband to his wife, Diana, and better father to his son, True.

Jesse 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 ago, and no one has seen or heard from him since.

The 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, author Waubgeshig Rice, and journalist and screenwriter Chris Jones.

A 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?

After 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 Better Man: A (Mostly Serious) Letter To My Son, which offers a candid take on his own boyhood, the death of his father, and why he’s concerned for his own son’s future.

Of 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.

For 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. On this replay of his Paternal episode from 2018, veteran explorer Eric Larsen discusses the conflict of being a leading-edge American explorer and an engaged father at the same time.