Paternal

Nick Firchau

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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.

#11 in the Top 100 masculinity All time chart

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Top 10 Paternal Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Paternal episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Paternal for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Paternal episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

#30 Jesse Green: The Gay History of Your Favorite Children’s Books

Paternal

05/08/19 • 36 min

Back in 1970, author and illustrator Arnold Lobel released the first in a series of award-winning children’s books chronicling the adventures of two good friends: Frog and Toad. Though the pair’s sexuality was never explicitly disclosed in the books, was it possible that Lobel created the characters to teach children about ideas of acceptance, tolerance and compassion?

Author, father, and New York Times co-chief theater critic Jesse Green recently examined works by Lobel, 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.

In this episode of Paternal, Green discusses the effect those books had on children both gay and straight, why it’s such a triumph that these books have persisted through the years, and what that says about the connection between creativity and repression. He also offers a candid reflection on his own life as a father and the challenges gay men faced in raising children decades ago in New York City, not long after the panic and confusion of the AIDS crisis and when prejudiced polices and strict laws forbade gay men from adopting kids of their own.

Learn more about Paternal and sign up for our newsletter at www.paternalpodcast.com. You can also email host Nick Firchau at [email protected] with any comments or suggestions for men he should profile on the show. Make sure you subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you’re listening, then keep an eye on your feed for new episodes.

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#21 Eric Larsen: On The Ice With A Polar Explorer

Paternal

11/14/18 • 32 min

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.

Eric Larsen is one of those people, a veteran explorer who 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.

His latest mission is to establish a new speed record in reaching the South Pole, skiing and walking across 700 miles of Antarctica alone and unsupported, hauling roughly 160 pounds of gear on a sled behind him. But he’ll also be 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. On this episode of Paternal, Larsen discusses the conflict of being a leading-edge American explorer and an engaged father at the same time, and how he and his wife have worked on the unique elements of their relationship.

#45 Jesse Thistle: Tracing Our Fathers’ Footsteps

Paternal

09/22/21 • 35 min

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.

But how much of his father’s troubles can be traced back to the generations of men who came before him? On this episode of Paternal, Thistle wrestles with the myths he’s been told about his father, discusses how his own indigenous heritage contributed to years spent living on the streets of Canada, and breaks down the manifestations of intergenerational trauma, including addiction, abuse, homelessness, and crime.

#24 James Vlahos: The Quest For Artificial Immortality

Paternal

01/09/19 • 36 min

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, an interactive and compelling program that questions if artificial immortality might actually exist.

Listen as Vlahos describes the experience of interviewing his father during the final months of his life, and how an early interest in computers as a kid - and a New York Times Magazine article about a talking Barbie doll - helped bring the Dadbot to life. The bot says the kinds of things James’ father would say, it cracks the same jokes, it even sometimes sings songs, using audio clips from the oral history interviews.

And while the technology at play might still be in its infancy and certainly has its critics, Vlahos suspects that the idea of artificial immortality - when we use modern technology to better preserve the memory of those we’ve lost and even interact with their avatars after the real people are gone - will be a very real part of our future.

#26 Andy Johnson: Farmering Up A Marriage

Paternal

02/20/19 • 29 min

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.

But when his wife, Sarah, was involved in a serious car accident just days after Thanksgiving, he began to ask himself one question: How do I fix this?

On the latest episode of Paternal, Johnson recounts the moment he learned of his wife’s injuries, but also what happened in the months that followed. As his wife slowly recovered from a traumatic brain injury, Johnson found himself balancing the responsibilities of caregiver and husband, and playing a larger role in the life of his young daughter. A task as simple as doing his daughter’s hair for a dance recital made Johnson realize his shortcomings as a dad, and how he needed to reach out to community for help, advice, and counsel.

“You wake up thinking you have an idea, and then life throws you a curveball, and you just get the job done,” Johnson says. “How do we get through this? How can we keep going?”

#66 Chris Ballew: Fame, Fatherhood, and Caspar Babypants (2020)

Paternal

08/10/22 • 29 min

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.

Ballew has released 17 albums and been nominated for a Grammy during his career as Caspar, all driven by a desire to imbue his music with the same lyrical elements he found in the music of the Beatles, and to help weary parents make it through the day.

Songs Featured In This Episode:

Spider John - Caspar Babypants
A Day In The Life - The Beatles
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band - Caspar Babypants
Naked and Famous - The Presidents of The United States of America
Kick Out The Jams - The Presidents of The United States of America
Sun Go - Caspar Babypants (featuring Frances England)
Nap In The Afternoon - Caspar Babypants

#79 Jaed Coffin: Bloodlines And Boxing (2020)

Paternal

02/22/23 • 39 min

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.”

On this 2020 episode of Paternal, Coffin discusses life in the small Alaskan coastal town of Sitka, the phenomenon of roughhouse boxing, and how a complicated relationship with his father helped steer Jaed into the ring, where he came up close and personal with a unique cast of characters looking to prove their manhood in the ring.

Coffin also discusses his 2019 New York Times essay about his father’s need to go “Out to Sea,” an idea that offers forgiveness for men who sometimes or even permanently abandon their families when the burdens of real life become too overwhelming.

#41 Chris Jones: When Life Becomes A Smoking Crater

Paternal

07/21/21 • 33 min

Journalist and screenwriter Chris Jones spent 14 years as a contributing editor and writer-at-large for the men’s magazine Esquire, writing everything from celebrity profiles on George Clooney and Penelope Cruz to in-depth features on astronauts, soldiers and wild animal zookeepers. He twice won the National Magazine Award in Feature Writing for his work at the magazine, in large part because of his commitment to looking back on past events and dissecting how they happened. And what went wrong.

On this episode of Paternal, Jones looks back on two major events in his life, and how they shaped his stance on what it means to be a man today. The anxiety from work, fatherhood, and marriage led him to nearly commit suicide twice more than a decade ago - he wrote about the experiences for Esquire in a candid essay in 2011 - and then his first marriage fell apart years later, leaving him to sort out fatherhood and what the second half of his life looks like now. “If your life becomes a smoking crater,” Jones says, “it’s little fixes everyday. You can’t fix it all at once.”

If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts please visit suicidelifeline.org to access a national network of local crisis centers that provides free and confidential emotional support to people in suicidal crisis or emotional distress 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

#31 Keith Gaston: Tales of Teaching Fatherhood

Paternal

05/29/19 • 27 min

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 those same men the skills of being a father.

On this episode of Paternal, Gaston reflects on an ambitious five-year study that gathered young fathers from right off the streets of Hartford. These were young men who perhaps became an accidental father years ago and have struggled to build a relationship with their young family, or even avoided the responsibility all together, and it became Gaston’s task to help teach them about the impact an engaged dad can have not just on his own family, but also on the community.

Raised in the 1960s and 1970s in a family with seven kids, Gaston says his father took every step to stress the importance of education, family and safety, and that allowed Gaston to become an ideal mentor for men looking for help.

#102 Kwame Alexander: What My Father Taught Me About Love (2023)

Paternal

02/14/24 • 37 min

Most 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 exactly he knows - and doesn’t know - about love. And in order to do that, he’s thinking more about the marriage his parents modeled for him as a child, as well as what he learned about love and relationships from his father, a hard-nosed Baptist minister who rarely showed affection. Alexander’s book, Why Fathers Cry at Night, is available wherever you buy books, as is his latest collection of poems, This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets.

Episode Timestamps:

00:00 - 07:25 - Intro

07:25 - 09:50 - on learning to love from watching our parents’ relationship

09:50 - 19:47 - discussing Kwame Alexander’s father’s version of tough love

19:47 - 24:26 - digging into his father’s jazz collection

26:31 - 32:40 - on the vulnerability required to write about broken relationships

32:40 - 35:36 - on talking to our parents and children about love

Read The Transcript For This Episode

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FAQ

How many episodes does Paternal have?

Paternal currently has 120 episodes available.

What topics does Paternal cover?

The podcast is about Society & Culture, Kids & Family, Family, Podcasts, Dads, Kids and Masculinity.

What is the most popular episode on Paternal?

The episode title '#30 Jesse Green: The Gay History of Your Favorite Children’s Books' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on Paternal?

The average episode length on Paternal is 36 minutes.

How often are episodes of Paternal released?

Episodes of Paternal are typically released every 14 days.

When was the first episode of Paternal?

The first episode of Paternal was released on Sep 19, 2017.

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Paternal

Nick Firchau

Top 10 Paternal Episodes

FAQ

How many episodes does Paternal have?

What topics does Paternal cover?

What is the most popular episode on Paternal?

What is the average episode length on Paternal?

How often are episodes of Paternal released?

When was the first episode of Paternal?

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