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.

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Episodes

#43 Jordan Shapiro: The 21st Century Father Figure

It doesn’t really matter if you’ve seen a single episode of the 1950s sitcom Father Knows Best to understand the template for what a TV dad is supposed to be like. He works hard all day and inevitably serves as the family’s main source of some combination of three things: tough love, gentle fatherly insight or bumbling but endearing ineptitude. Jordan Shapiro is out to help break the mold. A father of four, senior fellow at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at the Sesame Workshop, and former New York ...

Aug 25, 2021•38 min

#42 Joshua Mohr: Father, Son, Addict, Survivor

Novelist and memoirist Joshua Mohr has managed to be a number of different men in his life. He’s been a writer, college professor, husband, father, son, addict and survivor, and he’s committed himself over the past few years to ensuring that his daughter understands exactly how all those men can fit into one lifetime. That effort culminated in the 2021 memoir Model Citizen , which looks back on Josh’s decades of drug and alcohol abuse in the bars and streets of San Francisco and subsequent healt...

Aug 04, 2021•36 min

#41 Chris Jones: When Life Becomes A Smoking Crater

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....

Jul 21, 2021•34 min

#40 Dr. Michael Addis: The Isolation Of Modern Men

The worst of the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be over in the United States. More than half the U.S. population has received at one least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, and new daily cases of the disease are at their lowest point since the early days of the pandemic in April 2020. But that doesn’t mean that the stress and anxiety building over the past 16 months is gone, especially for men still struggling to articulate or even identify how they’re feeling when it comes to careers, relationships...

Jul 07, 2021•37 min

#39 Chris Ballew: Fame, Fatherhood, and Caspar Babypants

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 ou...

Jul 22, 2020•29 min

#38 Jayson Greene: The Language of Grief

When Jayson Greene was in the fourth grade, his teacher gave him an assignment that most kids get at some point in grade school: 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. On this episode of Paternal, Jayson discusses his celebrated 2019 memoir Once More We Saw Stars , which chronicles the life and death of his two-year-old daughter Greta, and how he and hi...

Jul 01, 2020•32 min

#37 Ted Bunch: A Cry For Healthier Manhood

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 episode of Paternal, Bunch breaks down the challenges men and bo...

Jun 17, 2020•30 min

#36: Conversations About Race And Fatherhood

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. This special episode begins with Ryan Harris, who spent nine years as an offensive lineman in the National Football League and won a Super Bowl in 2015 with the Denver Broncos. In this excerpt taken from his May 2018 episode , Harris outlines his experience raising his son and daughter in Denver, and discusses the unspok...

Jun 03, 2020•27 min

#35 Jaed Coffin: Bloodlines And Boxing

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 ...

May 26, 2020•39 min

#34 John Richards: Quarantine Radio

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 in Seattle. KEXP is 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 s...

May 11, 2020•23 min

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