Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Darby Saxbe (on Dad Brain)

Episode Date: June 10, 2026

Darby Saxbe (Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives) is a clinical psychologist, tenured professor, and researcher on family stress and the transition to parenthood. Darby joins Armchair Expert to discuss growing up in an academic household, her parents’ dramatic divorce, and watching her surgeon father suddenly learn how to become the primary parent. Darby and Dax talk about why fatherhood research has lagged behind motherhood research, what happens chemically and neurologically to new dads, and how hunter-gatherer societies, Barcelona playgrounds, and Swedish “latte papas” reveal very different models of raising children. Darby explains why “dad bod” is a real thing, how dads’ brains physically change when they engage in caregiving, and why kids may need more community, boredom, roughhousing, and freedom than modern parenting usually allows.Check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds: https://www.allstate.com/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair, expert, experts on expert. I'm Dax, Randall Shepard, I'm joined by Monica Lily Padman. This was a big exception. As you know, UCLA and USC are rivals. Okay. They're the enemy if you went to UCLA. But I got over that so that we could host our guest, who is a professor at the University of Southern California, clinical psychologist and tenured full professor at the University of Southern California,

Darby Saxby. Also my favorite name of a guest, I think we've had. Great name. Saxby. What a fun, fun name. She has a new book out called Dad Brain, the new science of fatherhood and how it shapes men's lives. This is really important stuff. Yeah, as she will tell us in this, although historically only men have been research for medicine, which is an atrocity, mostly only women have been research for parenthood. Correct. So that's the counterbalancing disparity. And so she has studied men, thank God. And she's studied dads in one.

Now we've learned a lot about it. And it's very exciting. It's really fascinating chemically, like what goes on. Yeah. Dad bod. We get a scientific explanation of Dadbod. We sure do. Finally.

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I'm in a check, square. I'm not sure. Oh, my pleasure. Hi. Look how many items you have. I really brought a lot of stuff. Hi, Jack. Nice to meet you.

Yeah. Yeah, you know, you never know how much downtime you'll have, so I figured I could do some grading. You're thinking ahead. Yeah, sure, sure, sure. We're in Ohio, because, you know, I'm right up the street from you. I think you're from Michigan. Yes.

And were you in the shadow of Cedar Point? Oh, of course. Yeah. Yeah, well, how close to Zanda? So I'm from Oberlin. So it's like a small college town. It's between Toledo and Cleveland. Right.

As is Sandusky. As is Sandusky. Yeah, yeah. And, yeah, you know your Cedar Point well. Oh, come on. It's my religion. Oh, yeah. Did you have a season's past because you were so close?

You know, my parents were nerds. Yeah. So we actually didn't go there that often, even though it's really close. But my mom now has a house on Lake Erie. Oh, wonderful. And so we go every summer for like a month. month and it's like one of the only things to do with the kids is take them to Cedar Point. How old are your kids?

They're 14 and 17. Oh, a deal. They run wild there. Yeah, they love it. Cheese on a stick, the cable ride. I'm so happy for them. I'm ashamed that I haven't brought my kids to Cedar Point yet. Honestly, it crosses my mind.

I'm like, I'm not doing a good job as a parent. Yeah, you're feeling. Yeah. Last year, we went to Daliwood for the first time. We're going in June. You are? Yes. So my book tour is a road trip to Dollywood. Oh.

So it's a book tour, college tour road trip to Hollywood. It's like a triple purpose book tour. Oh, that's fantastic. So we're going to drive from New York down to Tennessee. Okay. And stop along the way in D.C. I'll do some book stuff there. My daughter's going to look at some colleges. To her mom Vernon.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, we're going to go to Charlottesville, look at UVA. Nice. Which is where my husband went. Great school. Totally great school. And then we culminate at Dollywood. This is the huge upside of being a professor.

Because you have a summer man. Lucky kids. Okay, so mom and dad, both doctors. One's a surgeon. One's a... Internist. Okay, so as a kid, they were married to what age for you? I was nine when they got divorced. Okay. How many siblings? So I have an older half-sister and then two brothers who are my full brothers. So my dad has four children altogether.

My mom has three. Okay, so when they met, he had already been married and had a child. Exactly. Okay, now, this is very scandalous by all accounts. Yes. Your mother had a patient. Yes. Okay, please tell us.

Yes. So she treated a patient who was dying of cancer, and cancer treatment often takes a long time, and she fell in love with the patient's husband during that process. Wow. David. And I think that was. was with the sort of awareness and consent. I don't know the full story because I was a kid when all of this happened.

This is wild. But so they fall in love. And my mom ultimately marries David. Left your father for David. By the way, I have to imagine that's not an insanely uncommon thing in that situation. Because you are seeing a man at potentially his best or worst. Yes. Caring for a dying spouse. You're going like, wow, this person's very loving. They're committed. you're showing a very nice side of yourself. Yeah, and I think he truly did love his wife who died. You know, it was tragic. So it wasn't like he was looking to move on and she just happened to be there. It was a process.

Yeah. How old was everyone in this situation? So I was nine. My brother Bo was six and my brother Tom was three. And how old was your mom? Oh, gosh. She had me when she was 31. So she was 40.

Okay. Now I'm 49. So that seems young to me. Right, right. But at the time, she was super old. Yeah. Yeah. Did they tell you right away what happened?

We knew that my mom was moving out, and it was sort of a process. Like, she moved to an apartment down the street, and then later that year moved across town. Oberlin is a small, small town. So across town is like two miles. I could ride my bike between their houses. Yeah. And so then we did this joint custody thing. So every other week, I would switch between my mom.

mom's house and my dad's house. But at first, my dad just got sole custody because my mom was the one who left and the courts in Ohio were like... Poor. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to give the kids... Divorced woman. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Also, we're of a similar age. And so I'm a child of divorce. Certainly in my neighborhood, I want to say it was like one in every 15 houses, not half. It was still like I wasn't allowed to hang out with certain kids because they didn't like that I had a single mom. Yeah, like I felt like the first kid I knew whose parents were divorced. Yeah. Even though, yeah, statistically it wasn't that uncommon. How much does your dad fall into the surgeon's stereotype?

Because your dad's a surgeon. And there's a stereotype. And we've interviewed a bunch of them. And it's pretty fucking consistent. I'm going to have to acknowledge. So you're going to say the stereotype is what, like power hungry? I don't even know power hungry, but a little bit arrogant. Yep.

A little. I don't want to say narcissists. I have the wrong word. But there's this true confidence in a bit of, they feel like they've mastered something that is almost Godlike. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think some myopic thinking a little bit.

It's crazy. So I helped my dad do surgery. We did these sort of charity trips to the Dominican Republic when I was a teenager. And I was allowed to scrub in and kind of assist. Oh, my God. I know, which is like probably really unprofessional, actually. I think there was one time I almost passed out. But it was the first time I'd ever saw my dad in that role.

And I was like, it's like a superpower. Oh, it is. Like you're literally cutting into a human. body. Saving them. And then you're moving things around. It's like a crazy power. And put them back together and they work. Yeah. And they work. So I was kind of blown away. It's worthy of some confidence. Yeah. And I always thought my dad was like a pretty humble, low-key guy. But in the OR, you have to be like the king. Yeah. So that's the other factor that I don't even blame them so much is the role is such that you are at the top of the decision making. This is the same as a director. Like,

if you've been directing movies for 25 years, guess what? You start kind of thinking everyone should value your opinion a little more than they should. It's just kind of inevitable. Yeah. As a professor running a lab, I work with my grad students and I'm like, they have to listen to me. Yeah. It's a powerful narcotic. Yeah.

Then you go home and you're like, oh, right, no one here gives a shit. Oh, no. My kids could not be less impressed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So suffice to say dad had virtually zero experience dadding, even though he was your father, until this divorce. And he had quite a rocky road, but he did figure it out. So just tell us what the experience was like once Mom was out of the picture. Yeah.

And I will say that my dad, having read the book, thinks that he was very involved when we were little. So in his defense. Sure. And when I tried to qualify it, the book didn't make so. But he was, I think, an 80s dad. He was pretty hands-off. He was not super involved in our daily routines, our bedtimes. He didn't know what time you went to school, probably.

You didn't know what time your school ended. He was doing his own thing. Yeah, yeah. He was going to the Masonic Lodge. So my mom left, all of a sudden, he is the sole parent. And he had to figure a lot of stuff out. Like, he made dinner for us. He cleaned the kitchen.

You guys eat lunch for school. Woke us up. He packed our lunches. He actually made really good lunches. He was good at it. I think the meticulousness that you need to have where you're scrubbing in as a surgeon made him like a very natural cleaner of the kitchen. Sure, sure. Yeah.

I think he kind of leaned into it. He was tracking our routines. He was driving us to school. He became the parent. But Andy also had moments where he like through TV sets out in the snow and stuff, right? He had a temper. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's overwhelming.

Yeah. Especially if you haven't been doing it. Exactly. And I think he was like, what is happening here? His life is really falling apart. Yeah. And he was depressed. And yeah, like my brothers one morning wouldn't wake up to go to church.

and he took the TV set out of the wall and was like, oh, gosh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Into a snowbag. Yeah. It might shock people to know how often those types of solutions cross your mind. Yeah. Like when your dad, you're just kind of like, okay, so the problem is these iPads, easy fix. I'll throw these fuckers in the trash.

We have these impulses. I can eliminate the problem entirely. It's not the move, but I have to fight through a lot of these urges. Yes, I've made the threat to throw my kids' fall into. out the window. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Many, many times. Yeah, yeah.

You then go on to get a PhD in psychology. Yes, in clinical psych. What's so funny is in your book, you say that all research is me search. I had never heard that term and we heard it yesterday. Yeah. Oh. Or Monday. Yeah.

Weird. It is. And you guys all know that as standard, but I'm like, how could we have interviewed this many social scientists and not learn that? Two in one week. Every time you interview one, you should be like, what's wrong with you? Well, I do that anyway. Yeah.

And someone finally said when I asked that question, like, you don't study something on accident. We're all trying to answer some weird question that irked us since childhood. Right. And that person said, yeah, well, all research is me search. And then you said it. So you were drawn into studying parenting. Does it start specifically with fathering or is just general parenting? So originally transitioned into parenthood.

And I was curious about couples and how they navigated relationships and roles. And I worked on this big study at UCLA. which was called the Center for the Everyday Lives of Families, where we basically camped out in family's homes. Oh, boy. Like anthropologists. Yeah, and there were a bunch of anthropologists on the study team. So it was this cool collaborative study,

and we tracked them around their houses. We borrowed this technique that you used for primate research called scan sampling where we were recording their movements. Like every 10 minutes, where is everybody? What are they doing? And so we had this really cool corpus of data, and I worked with the cortisol data, which is stress hormone data,

to see how are their physiological stress levels tracking with their relationship quality and how they feel about their homes. And so that kind of got me interested in family stress. And then I wanted to kind of go to the source, which is, you know, when does a couple become like a triad? When do they start a family, basically? And so when I had the chance to start my own lab,

USC, I knew I wanted to do a transition to parenthood study. And I got interested in fathers, actually in part out of convenience, which was that I knew I wanted to do a brain scanning component. And as a postdoc who was starting to plan this study, I was not allowed to go into the scanner because I was pregnant. So I was working on a neuroimaging study, and they were keeping me out of the neuroimaging suite. And you can scan pregnant women, but it's just like a couple layers of extra care. And so I was like, how am I going to study women's brains? Well, why don't I scan the dads? And then as soon as I thought of that, I got really interested because I kind of dug into the research on fatherhood and there's so much. It's scant. And I got fascinated with that. Yeah. So historically,

medical research has been extremely asymmetric and we've studied men, you know, at a really high rate to the detriment of a lot of women's health. But this is completely reversed. right? I think in the book it says one in ten journals on this topic are about fathers. The rest are about mothers. Exactly. So our parenting research, research on the parent-child bond, research on the transition to parenthood, it's completely mother-centric. So we just don't really understand men's experiences of parenting as well. And I think there are emerging research programs that are attempting to answer these questions. And that was one reason I was excited to write the book. Okay, so let's start with just mammals. How frequent do mammals father their offspring? And maybe we should

pick some terms, right, because you can father offspring. But we're going to talk about the process of raising or being involved. So what should we call that fatherhood? Yeah. So in the book, I kept calling it hands-on fatherhood. And then I was like, I'm talking about mammals. So should it be like pause on fatherhood? You know, like tendrils on fatherhood depending on. So I guess active fatherhood is a good term, right? So you can sire offspring, but to be involved in their actual rearing, turns out humans are pretty unusual because we do have human fathers who are actually involved in day-to-day care. And so actually, if you look across all the species, fish, males are primary parents. Birds, bi-parental, males do a ton of parenting, frogs, lots of male parenting. But in mammals, it's fairly unusual to

have biparental. Is that because of mammary glands? Is that because we have a unique style of feeding our young? Exactly, which is where the term mammal comes from, right? So it comes from milk. So literally, it's baked into the term that this is a mother-centric animal. Right. And, I mean, you do have some examples of primates and rodents where males are participating

in rearing. But what makes humans unusual is the sort of flexibility and the fact that we raise children and kind of collectively. And so that's called cooperative breeding or alloparenting. And that's sort of our signature style of how we raise kids. Yeah, we only kind of see this in primates.

You see this in primates to varying degrees, right? Yeah. Really social group animals where you're going to have aunties helping and you're going to have wet nursing and you're going to have a lot of different things. Exactly. Like a lot of shared care.

So you kind of need a complex social brain that can track who's safe. And the reason I think that style originates is just because our babies require so much care. Like our human babies are so half-baked when they emerge. And so you really need this tag team. And then fathers become really important. Okay, so now let's talk about hunting and gathering groups or societies or whatever you want to call it.

First, we must point out the vast majority of time we've been here. We've been here for 300,000 years as a species, give or take. And agriculture comes around 16,000. years ago. So we're talking about 95% of the time we have been here. We lived a certain way, which I think we regularly underestimate. Monica and I get in some debates sometimes. And I'm like, you have to accept that we were designed and wired to function in a certain dynamic that we no longer do. And there's a ton of challenges that come with having left that design. Right. Rather left that context with the same design. So let's talk about what parenting looks like for hunting and gathering groups.

hunter gatherers live in these small sort of mobile bands of 20 to 30 people. There isn't a lot of private enclosed space. We don't have our big houses and our backyards. So everybody is helping everybody. And parenting looks pretty collective. And that can include fathers. So there's all this cultural variability in how much men are doing. But in hunter gatherer societies, you sort of have.

these egalitarian social structures because you sort of don't want to compete for resources because everything is shared. And you have some flexibility around gender roles because women actually are bringing in as many calories as men. Oh, way, way more. They're responsible for like 90% of the calories. They are really important resource gatherers, which is why it's funny when people are like, women shouldn't work. They should just mother. They've been working since the beginning of time. No, what's very weird is that they didn't work for a few hundred years. That's what's really weird. Like we have this strange blip

where women sort of stayed home and were specialized to the domestic realm. But again, they lost their whole support system, so kind of they had to. Yeah. So going back, though, to, I talked to an anthropologist who studied this hunter-gatherer tribe

called the ACCA, and the men are super hands-on with the babies. They're holding babies. I think they're within arm's reach of their babies about 47% of the time. They let a baby suckle

from their nipel that's 90% and giving milk. Exactly. Like you'll see a group of men hanging out and they're drinking wine and they're all holding babies. Cute. You know? I know.

It's adorable. Hot. But there's huge variation within hunting and gathering groups. So then the other one is, what is it, the king's spiggy? Yeah. Yes. The Kipzigis. And if you think about how much fathering are men doing, it's like, well, how does the culture make

its living? In the Kipsigis, which is a different tribe where there's this totally different style of fathering, there are all these prohibits. against men picking up babies and interacting with babies too much in the first year after birth. It's emasculating. It's unmanly. Exactly. But how did that even evolve? So there, the resource gathering is more risky.

It's more hazardous. And so you end up just getting more specialization. You're not bringing a two-year-old along on this hunt. Exactly. So you might be involved as a father with older kids, right? You're going to take older kids along to show them how to hunt. But you are not carrying babies around the way the ACA are. Well, think of the Inuit, only the males are hunting whale and other fish.

And they're out in these canoes. You're not bringing one or two or three. You know, you're not bringing out a young boy until they're pretty self-sufficient. So in that case, it would make total sense that that's how they would function. Exactly. I think there's a lot of dynamics that are worth thinking about from that hunting gathering. And we kind of already talked about it. But I often say, in my own experience parenting, I feel so blessed that I studied Anthro.

because many new parents talk about the moment they drive home from the hospital with the baby in the back seat, and they're like, oh, Jesus, we don't know what we're doing. But I've watched hundreds of hours of video of children in hunting and gathering societies. They rear themselves. A nine-year-old's in charge of like 12 kids. Everyone's climbing a tree. Many are falling out. People are breaking bones.

They're so fucking resilient. It's crazy. If you get to see how we actually live for so long. So I kind of didn't have that panic just because I got to observe how we're really designed to do it. We're pretty resilient. Yeah. Kids are designed to, I think, be somewhat free range. Having a parent who's on top of a kid at all times is actually not always the best.

Minimally, it's not how we live for most of the time we've been a species. You've got mixed age playgroups is like the classic kind of configuration for how kids are learning. They're learning from their peers. Even if we had stayed a galitarian in sharing the parenting duties, it still would have become much, much different because to your earlier point, we lived in longhouses. There was always someone around to help. Everything was communal. And then we ultimately evolve into like single house dwelling with just two people. And even if both people had split it, which they didn't, it would have been infinitely more stressful.

This is a uniquely stressful way to rear kids the way we do it. Yeah, this is not how we evolved as humans. We need community support. And yet we live in suburbs. We're car dependent. We don't have our extended family nearby. We don't have those multi-generational networks. If you knocked on your neighbor's door in any apartment,

I need you to watch my baby for three hours while I go to this. They would panic, right? Or you'd be like something's wrong with them. Yeah, who would trust me with their baby. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. It's a very bizarre way we're living in. some regards. It's like money driven, really. Yeah. I mean, that's part of why we live away from

our parents and stuff. It's like we're going to go chase success. And even your house is an example of success. Yeah, totally. It's this kind of late capitalist way to live. Yes. So you had a Fallbright Fellowship and you went to Spain in 2019 and you got to kind of observe how they do parenting there. So what did you gather from them? Because obviously there's huge cultural differences in how we're all doing it around the globe. So tell us a bit about different places and how they're doing it. Yeah, it was super fun. So my kids were pretty young when we did that. They were 8 and 10. It was right before the pandemic. So it was good timing. And we did like the playground tour of Barcelona, just like every playground. And there were a lot of young parents

out and about. And I think it's because like most countries, except for the U.S., there is really generous maternity and paternity leave. So your home, you have flexibility. in those early years. And so the whole society just feels a little more oriented to what young kids need. Public places like our apartment is on a square where, you know, you have the cafe where people are smoking and eating tapas

and you have the old guys on the bench gossiping. And then there was always a play structure. All the squares have a little play structure. So there are just a lot of public spaces for kids and so it feels more integrated. And what were you observing about fathering there? I would see men outside our apartment window pushing strollers around and hanging out with each other. And there was more of a sense, I think, of connectedness and a kind of society of fathers that you just don't see as much in the States when you're kind of more isolated in your home.

What happens in Sweden? What's going on in Germany? So my husband's sister lives in Sweden and raised her kids there. And you've got really generous your plus long maternity leaves. And you also have really affordable early child care that's high quality. So the stress level there for parents, I think, looks really different. And for fathers in particular, because you have these kind of paternity leave incentive programs that are designed to normalize and destigmatize dad's taking leave. So basically, the couple gets a certain amount of leave.

Some of it is earmarked for dad. If he doesn't take it, it goes away. They lose that benefit. So a lot of men take it because that's a free benefit. It's like vacation days. Yeah. You got to use them. Totally. So you have, it's called the Latte Papa's, which is like this society of guys who are like holding the little to go cups and just walking around the cities. But Bjorn's on and stuff.

Exactly. So again, it's just like a very normalized thing that men are going to be very hands on because it's baked into their policy. It is so weird because I feel like even here, even when there are paternity leaves, a lot of men don't take the full thing. Well, again, it's emasculating here. It's like your buddies at work and be like, you're fucking going up. You know, like there's a stigma about it. And there are studies on this that men are really reluctant and they think they're going to get punished at work. And I think we still have this ideal worker idea that you sacrifice everything for your job. And if you take time off after a baby's born, you're a slacker.

Or minimally, you're removing yourself from advancement. You're not out competing a coworker. Someone else will get the account. There's a lot of different pressures. Yeah. Okay, so when you started studying this in your lab, we had some stereotypes, right? We had this notion that mothers are natural parents and mothers and nurturers. And then we know all these physiological changes that happened to them, both when pregnant,

we know about their hormones changing. We all accept this and know this. And then just the general assumption is like probably nothing happens to dad. Even I think when we first had kids, I was susceptible to that. where I was like, I think this crying is at a different volume to me than it is to her. I think she has better chemistry than I have currently for this. So let's talk about first what you started finding when you would look at what happens to dad between conception and birth. Because there's all these documented changes for mom.

What happens to dad in that period? With mom, you can literally visibly see her body changing, right, if it's a biological pregnancy. And with dad, there's a lot going on under the hood. So there's research that suggests that testosterone levels drop, oxytocin levels change, hormone called prolactin changes as well. What is prolactin do? You can tell from the name. It promotes lactation.

Okay. So it's very good for breastfeeding, which obviously is not that helpful for dads. And in men, surprisingly, prolactin levels before birth seem to predict, at least this is what we found in our lab, predicted dad's kind of bonding and motivation to parents. in the early postpartum period. So we found that guys with higher prolactin levels prenatally had more enjoyment of the infant postpartum. We're spending more time with the infant postpartum.

And it's interesting because in fish, and I mentioned that fish are primary caregiver fathers, if you dump prolactin into the water, fish will start acting really paternal. So it's actually a hormone that kind of turns on fatherhood in fish. And it turns out it might work in a similar way in humans. Wow. Well, the testosterone thing is fascinating. I'd like to hear what the current theory is on why that drops. To me, it seems quite obvious. It's like you're going to need maximum patience and minimize aggression. Yeah. Exactly. They don't want you to squeeze and pop the baby. Yeah, like we just don't need a ton of testosterone. You don't need that grip strength. Exactly. When you're scared and there's a baby crying, you don't know how to solve it. Do we think that's why it lowers? Yeah. We need high testosterone if we're competing for mates. It will help us to. to be competitive, to focus on our status, to be aggressive.

And it's not that useful when we have a new baby. It's not as adaptive to sustain high testosterone levels. And testosterone comes at an immune cost for the body. So having jacked up testosterone is not that helpful to us when we're in a context that doesn't require that competition. What doesn't reward it? Exactly. And so even in birds, you see higher testosterone at the start.

start a breeding season when birds are like trying to find a chick. Yeah. I mean, a female. That's where we got it. Testosterone levels will drop once a male has sort of completed mating and needs to take care of hatchlings. So it's like this normative change that's occurring over the transition to fatherhood.

And then there's probably a rebound, right? And then dad maybe knocks up a new bird. But it looks like you see kind of similar patterns in humans, rats and primates as well. So testosterone levels sort of fluctuate with your reproductive demands and also with your reproductive strategy. So if you want to maximize your number of offspring, you probably want high tea. But if you want to actually do a good job of parenting,

you want lower tea. And also you're not as prone to create more progeny that you would have to then care for but be divided because you've just had this one. It's almost like going out of estrus a little bit for a primate. Right. There's like this life history theory that sort of determines when does it make sense for our hormones to change to support our different roles. Yeah. Stay tuned for more armchair expert.

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excellent plan. So check Allstate first for an auto quote. It could save you hundreds. And for fast, reliable help when you need it, add an Allstate roadside plan today. You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary. Insurance and roadside assistance plans are subject to terms, conditions and availability. Insurance provided by Allstate North American Insurance Company, Northbrook, Illinois, roadside assistance plans provided by Allstate Motor Club, incorporated in Allstate affiliate. Okay, now, until this book, I would have thought I was, well, not terribly unique, because I did get some anecdotal information, but we were one time at an ultrasound appointment

at the OB, and they're measuring Kristen's weight. And I decide to hop on that scale. And I just simply hadn't been on a scale and I think four or five months. And I just looked at it and I go, holy shit, I've gained like 20 pounds and I didn't even notice. That's never happened in my life where I just gained 20 pounds without noticing. And I've talked to other dads who have done that as well. Have you observed that?

What's happening there? Totally. So dad bod is a thing. It's like this humorous... Trope. Yeah, exactly. But it's a real thing. Men actually do often gain weight across the transition to fatherhood.

And it kind of connects back to what we were just talking about. Like that normative change in testosterone is one of the drivers of sort of adiposity or weight changes. Yeah, reduction of muscle mass, which is burning less calories. So there's that element working. I was more thinking of it in a nurture context, which is like she's eating like crazy, so I'm just joining her. Like, is that what's going on? You see it in primates, too.

So they increase in body size across a mate's pregnancy. It might be because a larger body is more imposing. They can more easily pick up offspring. And it's also like you want some reserve in case there's scarcity. Right. You might have to be giving your resources to another. That's really evolutionarily poignant, right? is I need a little buffer because I'm about to share now.

Yeah, which is true, I think, for why women gain weight, right? Because we gain more weight than our babies are going to weigh. Like, I was super bummed when I realized that. Oh, yeah, like four acts. Yeah, five hours. I was like, this baby is not 35 now. Yeah, yeah. Where does the extra weight go?

But it's like you actually need some reserve because who knows there could be a famine. Well, and you're going to be burning 2,000 extra calories a day to produce milk if you breastfeed. Exactly. Or whatever the number is. It's something very hot. Yeah, it's a high calorie demand. So it's like your body actually has to be sort of beefed up. So it might be that there's a similar process happening for dads.

Yeah, yeah. What other things are happening in that window before baby arrives? So there's the body, there's the hormonal drop. What's going on psychologically and behaviorally? So the hormones are changing. So psychologically, we can see mood disorder risk. Postpartum depression is something we think of as like a mom-only phenomenon. it can totally emerge in dads.

There's evidence that new dads have about twice the prevalence of depression as just men in the general population. Oh, wow. While mom's pregnant. It can be before birth. It can be after birth. Yeah. So it's like we call it postpartum depression, but it's really parinatal. It's like across that transition.

And if you think about it, it's like a lot of the same risk factors that moms experience, like sleep deprivation, increased stress, identity, conflict, rural confusion, relationships. stress and hormone changes. It's like that perfect storm. So that's affecting men too. Oh my God. The moms are going to hate this. They love that they can claim the hormone changes. I talked to a perinatal psychologist and we actually talked about this exact thing.

She said she's gotten a lot of pushback because she's tried to get postpartum depression in men more recognized and some of the advocacy groups are like, can't moms just have this one thing? Right. And she's like, yes. But also if men are struggling, that's. It's not great for mom either. Exactly.

No, it's helping moms to understand dads. Yeah, it's important. Yeah. Okay, again, this is very anecdotal, but this is what I've observed. I've seen a lot of people trying to get sober who tell themselves, I'm going to get sober when I have a child. And then you watch them, and I've watched addiction ramp up, not decrease, in a very unmanageable way as that date approaches.

It's over then. So cram it in now. And I'll even admit that during the first pregnancy, there is a new finality on the table that is very unique. I can't undad. It's permanent. Yeah. And I think that creates some angst and some fear. And you feel like, oh, shit, truly now I'm an adult.

I see a lot of antsy behavior in expecting fathers. Yeah. It's like getting a face tattoo. Yeah. But even that, you could get removed. You could. It's maybe the only. permanent thing. Yeah, you're going to be a dad for the rest of your life, no matter what now.

You might not be a husband for the rest of your life. Whether you show up or not, maybe you don't raise them or whatever, but you've created. But that kid will exist. Yeah. I think it's terrifying to a lot of men. Yeah, it's quite a ride. And women. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone. Scary. Okay. How do dads experience childbirth? It's interesting because if you think about it, men have not been present at childbirth for most of our human history. Childbirth has been this participatory experience where human women need a lot of help, but it hasn't typically been that the helpers have been men. And so we are kind of doing this experiment in just this last like 150 years, right,

where you have males as part of the birthing experience, either as doctors or as fathers. And stereotypically, men were kept out of... Oh, they would tell you, don't go in there. Yeah. Like, it's better for your marriage

if you don't see that. Totally. Yeah, in the 50s. Yeah. In the 50s, and you see the dad is handing out cigars, right, in the waiting room. He meets the baby once it's been washed.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and her makeup's on. Exactly. Yeah, she's brushed her hair. Yeah. Seeing birth, I think, really rocks a lot of dad's worlds, right? It's like both in, I think, really good ways and also in ways that can be hard.

Because it's this powerful experience. There's nothing like it. It can be scary for mom. It can be scary for dad. Things can go wrong. Things can also go beautifully well. So there's just a lot of variability. It's a very heightened experience.

And increasingly people have emergency C-sections, which is the way it happens, certainly in L.A. It's like almost everyone you meet with children our age. The same story. It's like I was in labor for 14 hours, the heart rate crash emergencies. So that was my experience, right? I'm not only seeing that.

I'm also seeing my wife get operated on. I saw my wife opened up and her organs being moved and it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah. This is terrifying. I'd say the beauty of it. And I just want to flag. I'm just going to tell my real experience. I'm really paranoid.

It's going to sound like virtue signaling like I'm an ideal. I don't want that to be. I'm just going to tell you the truth. Yeah. The amount of respect and admiration you have for your wife when you see what they go through. In my opinion is not to be missed. You go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Well, first of all, you might have the moment I had, which is like, you're so afraid you're going to lose her.

So that's its own experience. And then to see what they go through, you're going to minimally be grateful to that person for the rest of your life because they went through that for this thing you love. It's very powerful. Yeah, it is very powerful. My first birth was pretty straightforward, but the second one, I lost a lot of blood. It got complicated. Yeah. And my husband was terrified.

And I still hold that against our son, you know, every so often. You should. Clean your room. If he was a Nobel Peace Prize, you can go like, okay, you're now even. That's right. You're just now even. You're out of the hole. Yes, you've made up the dead.

Okay, so once the baby's there, dad's brain changes. We, in our lab, scanned men whose partner was midway through pregnancy. We then scanned the men again about six months after birth. And we found that men's brains were losing gray matter volume, which is probably reflecting a process of streamlining and pruning and becoming more efficient. Yeah, it sounds bad. It's kind of counterintuitive because mom's brain shrinks too. That's a little more well documented.

And you think, oh, my brain shrinks. It's like, no, but it weirdly is working more efficiently now. Exactly. And the brain shrinks at other windows in the lifespan, too. So in early childhood, we're in this kind of stage of lots of exploration and tons of inputs. And then as the child kind of gets ready for school age, the brain is actually losing a great matter of volume.

and it's becoming more streamlined and kind of canalized along certain pathways. So it reflects the process of learning. It's like you're consolidating. It's almost like if you think about refining a product and engineer, one of their main tasks is like which of these components is redundant? I can get rid of. Your whole goal is to keep getting it smaller and smaller and smaller. And I guess that's what's happening in your brain.

Yeah, exactly. You want like an efficient brain. And the parts of the brain that seem to shrink are the social cognition regions. which are linked with empathy, responsive caregiving. So that sort of supports the theory that it's not like a deficit model. Something isn't getting taken away, but it's rather this adaptive plasticity. You presumably have sample groups where it's like there's varying levels of participation. Are you seeing more shrinkage and increased participation?

What's happening there? Yeah, exactly. So as men are spending more time with babies, we see more gray matter volume decrease. So it was the men in our study who said they wanted to take more time off after birth. They were spending more day-to-day time with infants. They told us they enjoyed interacting more with infants. They had stronger bonding with the babies even before birth. And then they had stronger bonding after birth.

Those were the dads that seemed to show the greatest changes, like the greatest reductions in gray matter volume. So those dads looked the most like previous studies that have focused on mom. transitioning to parenthood. As men engage in parenthood, they're kind of building this parenting brain. I just love how flexible the human is. I know. Yeah.

It's really wild. And if he doesn't do that, his brain will be perfectly set up to do whatever occupation he's doing. We often think of the brain as like this fixed organ, but it is reshaped by our social experiences. And parenthood is one example of a window of plasticity where we want a brain that can,

mold itself to serve the functions of a parent. You have this incredibly new and novel experience we're all having. Yeah. It kind of goes against this idea that women are natural nurturers. That's why I think you say we debate, but I'm saying this. I think anyone can be a nurture. Oh, yeah, yeah. I agree.

And that's exactly one of the reasons I wanted to write this book, right? Because we sort of assume, like, women are built to kind of parent instinctively. and it's really the opposite. It's as we engage in parenting, we learn, and then we sort of build a neurobiology that supports that. Yeah. Yeah. Humans are built to nurture.

Yeah, exactly. Like, we all have this sort of parenting brain that's ready to go when we are ready to deploy it. What happens to dad's hormones when once baby has arrived? It's a continuation of that lowered testosterone and stuff? Yes. And you have a beef with oxytocin, yeah. I have a beef.

You lay out your beef with oxytocin. I love it. hate it. Okay, tell us. And it's because the research literature is a mess on oxytocin because it's super hard to sample it well. So you've probably heard it's the cuddle hormone. It's the love hormone. Women get a dump of it after an orgasm. Yeah, exactly. If you hug for 20 seconds, you get a release a blast. Yeah, massage. And all of that has a grain of truth, but it's hard to sample it because by the time it gets to your bloodstream, it's already moved on, like it's an organ that's active in the brain. So if you really want to sample it accurately, you need to take cerebral spinal fluid,

which, you know, not a great... No one's signing up for it. No one wants to come into the lab and do a spinal tap. It's hard to sample it accurately. And then the way that you assay it in the lab, this gets kind of in the weeds, but there are different ways to look at it and those ways don't always track well with each other. I think another fair way to also look at it is we really have only diagnosed, I don't know, six neurotransmitter. Like, we only have a chemistry set of five, six hormones. And we have behavior that's in the tens of billions of permutations. So at best, you're looking at some ratio of many different hormones acting in concert to produce an outcome, right? Yeah. We're so attracted to a singular cause. We'll go, boom, that's it, dopamine. It's

causing all this. Well, it's like in conjunction with a lot of things, right? Exactly. We are filled with all these different inputs. And we sort of glorify oxytocin. Or I often hear as a cortisol research, people say, my cortisol is too high. I have to treat my cortisol. It's like, no, you want high cortisol in certain contexts. And I think this is true with testosterone too. You want to be flexible.

You want to have a biology that can adapt to your context. And so there's no such thing as overly high this or overly low that. It's like, how flexible are you? Yeah, I think what they mean, is that this system has been hijacked, which does happen all the time, and your cortisol levels are responding as if you're being chased by a lion, but you have a deadline due. You know, there's some hijacking of the system. Yeah, because we live in these complex worlds that don't reflect what we need to survive. When I teach this to my undergrad, I always say, if I'm having a

fight or flight response because I'm stuck in traffic, what am I going to do? Like run across the freeway? not adaptive. So it's like having all the blood go to my large muscles is not helping me. You hit your brake pedal extra hard. Yeah, yeah, it makes me yell at the other drivers, but that's not super adaptive either. Right. But it's like the cortisol's not the problem. It's the situation that hijacked the cortisol response.

Right. It's our interpretation. What's that what's happening to dad's cortisol once the baby's arrived? So the cortisol literature also a bit of a mixed bag. Some studies find higher cortisol in new dads. Some studies find lower cortisol. It's very situational. But we do know, and I found this in my lab,

that hormones like cortisol, prolactin, and testosterone track within couples. So it may be that dads are kind of in training with a pregnant partner or with a new mom to sort of help jumpstart their own process of whether it's neurobiological remodeling or behavioral repertoire. It's like there's something about proximity to the heart. There's a mirroring, right? Yeah. Dads and moms hormones are fluctuating, if not at the same levels, in the same patternish.

Exactly. So there's like a synchrony within cohabiting couples. Which is dangerous and beneficial. Right. And actually, I've found that when cortisol patterns get too strongly linked, that's a risk factor that makes couples report more dissatisfaction. Yes. Yes. Yes. Someone should be resetting their cortisol at all times, probably. Yeah, you need to be balancing. I feel very blessed in that we read this. So we got this book, Brain Rules for Babies, in anticipation of our first child arriving.

And in maybe the introduction, it says quite starkly, I'll forget the number, but it was either 60 or 70%. A child will make 60 or 70% of relationships worse. That is the data, right? Yeah. And I was like, just helpful to know.

Going into this, this isn't going to make us happier with one another per se. Odds are it's going to make us less satisfied with our relationship. So like, you got to be extra aware of that high probability. So let's talk about what you call the parenting crisis. I often say to people, like, if you think that having a baby will save your relationship, bad idea, right? If anything, it's going to make it harder. It's going to shine a magnifying glass.

Exactly. This was true for my husband and I, like, you go from being fun time, friends who can go catch a movie or go out to eat to like you're running a small business and your product is the care and feeding of your baby is the most important product of all time right but you have to strategize and trade off and in the middle of the night maybe neither of you feels like getting up there is so much more of a breeding ground for conflict when you're both tired you're both kind of figuring out these new identities you don't really have the same opportunities for fun so it is a real challenge for a lot of couples. Yeah, I would even add too, it's like the general pattern,

there's lots of exceptions, but also you've probably chosen to have a child at the moment where you felt most stable and kind of financially sorted and all these other things you were waiting to gel before you commit to that. So it's like, you're probably going from the high watermark of the relationship. For Kristen, I was like, oh, we were starting to travel a lot, financially where we're good. So it's going to be a huge swing. Yeah, and you're like, how can I screw this up? Yeah, let's see if you can fuck this whole thing up. This is like just when my husband and I got to a place where our kids were older and could take care of themselves, we started getting pets.

It's like, wow. You're like, you just can't. Oh, my gosh. Why do we have more things to take care of? Have there been any studies? This would be so interesting. Studies of couples where the father is not the biological dad. Yeah.

Do they still experience all these hormonal changes? and things like that? Totally. Yeah. So I talk about there's one study where they looked at adoptive parents and it was gay male couples who had adopted a baby

and then they compared them to heterosexual couples. With adopted children? I think they were all biological parents. Okay, great. Yeah, you had this adoptive sample and they had in the heterosexual couples like a primary caregiver

and a secondary caregiver. I think they basically treated mom as primary dad as secondary. And then in the game, male couples, they said, who's the primary caregiver? Who's the secondary caregiver? And what was cool was that the primary caregiver gay male dads look just like moms. If you looked at their brain responses to baby.

And the secondary caregiver dads looked like heterosexual there. Whoa. So it kind of shows you how, again, adaptable the brain can be, right? That men can build these primary caregiver brains. Yeah. Okay, so part of this crisis in you, said is like you have this whole new list of chores. So when you're observing outcomes, is this crisis less or more when things are split more equitably? Yeah. So it seems like couples fare better

when they have a more egalitarian balance. But what's interesting is that parents are pretty bad predictors of what that's going to look like. We did a study where we brought couples into the lab. These were the couples in our longitudinal sample. And we said, what's your plan for splitting up baby care? We gave them a worksheet. We asked them to sort of estimate on a scale for each of 10 different baby care tasks. And then we brought them back six months after birth and said, well, who's doing what? And in every case, they had overestimated how much dad was going to do before birth.

And my guess, too, did they even agree about how much mom and dad were doing when asked six months later? Dad thought that he was going to do more and then after birth he thought that he was doing more. That's right, yeah. So dads were sort of estimating a higher contribution at both time points, but the couple was also just overestimating how much of an even split

they were going to achieve. Yeah, so this is tricky and I think it's like it's so generational, right? So when I compare my parenting to my father's, I mean, A, he split when I was three, but even when he was there for my brother up until eight, I'm doing a thousand X of what he did. It's really hard to quantify what's happening.

There are these markers that seemed obvious. Like my goals were like, I want to do half the feedings. So at night we both have to wake up four times. I want to do two of those. Diapers, I was hell bent on every other one. I'm going to do it. There's some aspect that kids do go to mom. There is something primitive going on that needs to be acknowledged,

even though I'm very progressive and I want to listen. to happen. There's some realities to once you have a kid. It's like, we were both present nonstop, but in the car, Lincoln would be like, Mama, yes, honey, Mama, yeah, hon, Mama. She just loves saying Mama over and over again. There is a pull on Mom, even if all the chores are split evenly. Right. There's an emotional drain that is really hard to right size. Yes, and I think it's hard to optimize a balance ahead of time. We were not surprised, actually, that moms ended up doing more after birth because there are a lot of reasons for that. If she's breastfeeding, the baby gets more comfortable with her early on.

Moms also have this head start of pregnancy to kind of develop that bond. And moms may even just have more time off from work. And so moms themselves may want to be the primary parent. It doesn't necessarily mean that there's something wrong. But we did find that the more dads were doing, the happier they actually were with parenting. So dads who were participating more had lower parenting stress and moms had better relationship satisfaction. Yeah.

This is where I'll say that this will go against any fear I have a virtue signaling. I reverse engineered selfishly why I wanted to do in my mind half. I didn't do half. I'm sure I didn't do half. And I'm sure I overestimated what I did. And I'm sure she has a better account of what I did. But my reasoning was I'm very opinionated. I care a lot about what decisions we make about.

the school and the sleep schedule and all the stuff. I can't sit idly by and just have my partner make all those decisions. It felt very important. And I knew I needed to earn my seat at the table. I'm like, there's no way I can blow in at night and kiss them good night and then tell them what approach I think we need to use because she'll go bullshit. You don't even know them. You don't know what they're like when they melt down over this. And so I just selfishly very much wanted to make decisions together. And I just knew you don't get that right if you're sitting it out. So that would be my call to dads. It's like if you want to say in this, you got to fucking earn the say. Yeah. And I think a lot of men increasingly, because you flagged a really important thing when you said you're doing so much more

than your dad did or than your grandfather did, contemporary men are doing way more hands-on child care than men of previous generations in the U.S. And I think men themselves, if you say, what are the most meaningful things you do in your life? Being a parent is up there and it's a similar number of men will rate that as their highest priority as women. Yeah, yeah. So it's also like not only do men want to be involved,

it's like there's a value. The pride, yeah. Yeah. I know we live in L.A. And we send our kids to a charter school. It's pretty progressive. But, and I might be mis-evaluating it, but I do drop off every morning.

And if it's not 50-50, it's probably 30-70. There's dads everywhere. When I was a kid in elementary school, I never saw a child's dad once in my life. You know, unless mom was in the hospital or something. So relative, I can a little bit understand why guys of this generation are overestimating our outputs. It's like, it's so drastically different. Well, women are also working so much more that you have to decide who's taking the kid to

school. It's not a given, but my parents both worked. So it was a split. Whoever could do it often was my dad because she also was gone. So I think as women have become much more in a breadwinner position, it's helped with a lot of this egalitarian nature of parenting. Yeah, exactly. The funniest thing happened when I was home in Georgia. I was with all my friends.

They all have kids. Last weekend. Yeah, last weekend. All the kids are running around. And these two, their dad and their mom are sitting next to each other. They came up to the table. They said, Mom, can dad take us to the grocery store? And I started laughing so hard.

And even he said, why aren't you just asking me? He was sitting right next to her. It was so funny. That was the instinct was to ask mom's permission. It just really made me laugh. That's the default. Yeah, a lot of the time. Well, also, it might be game theory, right?

So they know mom says yes more than dad. If they ask dad to go to the store, he's going to say no. But if they ask mom, they're used to getting a yes. So maybe mom will be able to get dad to say yes. There's a lot of strategy going on. Maybe if they were separated, but the fact that they were really, right next to each other. It was such a stark. Like, clearly that's the person to ask. Right. But in our house, we have domains, right? There's stuff. It's no problem for me to say no to.

There's stuff for her that's no problem to saying. And they just know if they want this thing, they go to me. If they want that thing, they go to her. Yeah, they're clever little monkeys. They know who to ask. Yeah. My kids know who to ask for takeout. My husband is much more likely to order. Are there ideal roles for dad in regards to parenting? I'm thinking about like play in sports. And I know for my girls like wrestling, they just love to wrestle me. Yeah. Mom did not want to fucking wrestle. I love to wrestle.

Are there roles that we are more geared to take on? Yeah, the kind of rough housing parent, the play parent. So dads do a lot of what's called proprioceptive touch, which is like moving babies around in space, right? If we're moving a child around, like picking them up, throwing them up in the air, chasing them, tickling them. And so there's a lot of evidence that dads just gravitate to that style of play. And that that style of play is really rewarding for kids. Kids seek it out. They benefit from it.

It builds their confidence. It builds their risk tolerance. Their balance. Their agility. Yeah. And I think the sports dad is kind of a continuation of that. It's a domain that a lot of dads feel comfortable kind of having mastery of. Yeah.

I think we always get into these murky water. of what we're supposed to be doing versus what kind of yields better outcomes. Are there domains that are best served by mom or dad? I mean, play is one of them, but can you think of others? Yeah, and I think even with play, like I'm always careful to not be too gender essentialist, right? Because there are totally moms that love to wrestle and are physical,

and they're totally dads that are the more cerebral parent or the more affectionate parent. But I think what works best for kids is when each parent has their own relationship and the kid gets exposed to different styles, right? You can have a really secure attachment to more than one parent. And the research suggests that dads and moms don't actually have dramatically different levels of attachment to their kids. So it's healthy for kids to realize there are safe, secure caregivers that I can depend on. And if this person isn't available, I can go to this person. Sometimes that's a child care provider. Sometimes that's mom or grandparent.

or a dad, different people have their own style. And kids, again, learn to be adaptable. They learn to be flexible. But there's no dead-end streets or are there, and we're just afraid to admit that. Like, what would a dead-end street be? I don't know. I just think of this imperative someone said, and it's just proven to be true, which is like, you should not teach your kids to do stuff.

If you want to take them skiing, bring in an outsider. They don't do well listening to you for that kind of thing. Or if you want to teach them piano lessons, get someone else that doesn't have all this murky, So I just wonder if we're trying to encourage men or women to do things that like, it's not really going to bear the outcome we want. Yeah, I do think because we don't have the collective network of caregivers that maybe we evolved to have, a lot of pressure is on mom and dad, the nuclear family. And they're trying to play all roles in a kid's life.

And I think as to whether parents can be good teachers, I know for my kids, definitely not. They don't want to listen to me. My son is in a phase where he wants to make hip-hop beats all day long. My husband is a music producer. Oh, wow. And you'd think. Maybe. It's like, you know, dad does this for a living.

He could advise on your beats. Like, no interest. I think it's good for kids to have their own things. Again, a brand new concept. With the exception of when someone's partner died, the step-parent is like an entirely new construct. Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare. You yourself had kind of a fun arc with Dave that I'd like to hear about.

And tell me what the role of a step parent is, a father. I've had only bad experience. Well, the last one was good, but I've had really bad experiences. Yeah, I had a sort of bad experience that became good. I did not want my parents to get divorced. I blamed my stepfather. and we had a really combative relationship when I was a teenager. Lots of fighting, tears, yelling.

And he was a really good cook, so that was actually one thing that helped me forge a connection with him. But beyond that, if you had asked me when I was like a 14-year-old, I would have said my stepdad sucks. And it was really only as I got older that I appreciated. He was a poet, he was a writer, he was a translator, he was an English professor at Oberlin, where I grew up. And was this, like, source of wisdom, he loved to travel. And sounds like the antithesis of your father who's a surgeon in many ways.

Yeah. Different vibes. And I think I got a lot from both of those relationships. When I became an academic, it was partially because I had seen David. I mean, basically his job just seemed fun. He could come home early after teaching a class and play Nintendo baseball. And he just seemed like he had a really chill job. And my parents were always working.

So I was like, well, obviously being a professor is great. That's my plan. Yeah, yeah. I think you were right. I think I was. A little did I know how hard it would actually be to get there. But now it's great. But he really inspired me.

I think I learned a lot from him. It's a tough role. It's totally hard. You both don't want to supplant the parent, but then also you are acting as a parent. So it's just a breeding ground. You're like a perpetual substitute teacher. Yeah, totally. But the rewards for stepfathers, do we observe those in the same way we see the biological fathers?

Yeah, I think our framing around step-parenthood has been so negative that people see the bad stepfather, the bad step-mother. And even in fairy tales, like the evil stepmother. And if you look at the research, a lot of kids who grow up with step-parents say this relationship is really valuable. And so to whatever extent a real bond can form, it can serve a lot of the same positive functions that a biological parent bond can form, right? Like we don't need to be biologically related to a kid in order to take care of a kid. That kind of goes with the whole aloe parenting idea. we evolved to sort of know how to take care of each other. And that could be through adoption, through step-parenthood, or through biological parenthood.

Tell me how fatherhood would best be seen as a public good. How would we all benefit from that? The more we can kind of empower men to participate fully in care, the more we can value care as something that isn't just the domain of one gender. That requires some investment. I think it requires really smart policy and it requires kind of cultural change, right, to kind of see men as natural caregivers. I think it's interesting.

We're living in this era where it feels like there's a resurgence of neo-traditional gender roles. The tradwife and the sort of breadwinner male, to me that runs a little counter to our evolutionary history, which is about flexibility and not about getting locked in

to this is the job of moms and this is the job of dads. So I really think that if we were a society that really valued the welfare of young kids, we would be a society that champions fathers. Not to the exclusion of mothers, but fathers are really important for mothers' well-being too. And we would be a society that really puts its resources into how do we nurture the next generation of humans. Do we have any proof of concept elsewhere that we can say,

this is a worthy investment that it yields some kind of a result we all want or benefit from? Yeah, definitely. Because you're like you're an employer and you don't have kids, you don't care about kids and you're thinking about kids. It's like, I don't know, I can see that being a tough sell unless we have some data that would say somehow the whole tide lifts. But yeah, what do we have to demonstrate? The research is finding that when companies have parental leave, paternity leave, it's good for retention. It's good for employee well-being. It's actually, Unfortunately, just in the last few weeks, there have been some headlines that some big companies are actually cutting their parental leave programs, sort of a cost-cutting thing.

But it's really good for worker loyalty and for worker productivity. And then we have these international models where we have more generous leaves in other countries. And you do see that as dads are getting more access to federally funded paid paternity leave, they're getting more involved. It's better for the couple relationship. It's better for mom's health outcomes. it's better for the kids' health outcomes and it's better for the father himself. Yeah, so let's talk about the fun benefits,

the kind of long-term impact that fathering has on men. In the short term, right, you're losing gray matter volume, your hormones are changing. It's this set of challenges. In the long term, the evidence is that becoming a parent is neuroprotective. So work on both fathers and mothers finds that if you look at how the brain is aging, you have markers of a younger-looking brain when you have children.

And so these are big scan studies that look at thousands of people in later life. And they find you can use like an computer machine learning algorithm to basically gauge the age of a brain. And people's brains look younger relative to a chronological age if they are parents. And you see that for fathers as well as for mothers, which tells me it's not just a pregnancy hormone thing. It's about caregiving. It's about social integration.

And we also know from longitudinal work that the quality of a man's relationships is what's really important for his health and well-being in late life. Men tend to be lonely. Yes. Right. Men are at risk for social isolation, which we know is a factor in all-cause mortality.

Worse than smoking. Yep. It is super bad for you. And we know this from the longest-running longitudinal study, which was done at Harvard. they recruited men who were undergrads and a comparison sample of inner city Boston teens, they followed them through the ends of their lives

and are now following their grandkids. So this is like a hundred year study. Wow. And they found that more than your income, your job prestige, it was the quality of your relationships with people close to you that predicted a longer, healthier life.

So the more I think we can encourage men to invest in relationships, the more we can benefit their health. We have this manosphere idea that men need to be making lots of money, dating lots of women. Driving lots of Lamborghinis. Lots of Lamborghinis. That is not really what's good for men.

Or anyone. Or anyone. Or for society. Well, let me try it out before we decide. I guess it's worth a shot. I'm trying it. How many Lamborghinis can you drive? Right, exactly.

One study that came out that made headlines last year that thrilled me to no end was this impact on men having daughters specifically. Are you aware of this one? It's cumulative as well. And so on average, it was like 1.7 years longer a man lives per daughter. And there doesn't seem to be an end of that. So if the man has five daughters, he's looking at like eight and a half years extra life. Yeah. Well, I think it's that social connection.

Do you have a support system in later life? Do you feel like you're part of a community? And we know that that is so important for human health. Yeah. This would definitely be kind of more of a psychological analysis of it. But I think men interacting with little girls allows them to embrace a whole side of themselves that has been excluded to them. Yeah.

For lack of a better word, the sweetness of the exchange has to be restorative. It's just such a beautiful feeling. I could cry thinking about just what my little girls give me, what they allow me to experience. I don't know where else I go get that. Right. We don't really let men have a lot of variability in how they express themselves. We have very strong opinions culturally about what makes a man masculine. and dressing up like a princess and doing a tea party usually is not part of that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think a lot of men enjoy playing with different sides of themselves. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's totally healthy and fun. I also think when you have a son and you're a man in this country in 2026, you still have this notion, like, I've got to toughen this kid up, right? Like, that's my role here is to present him to the world capable of taking on any challengers. That's not the funest.

way to parent, like making a kid tough and doesn't feel good. No one enjoys it. Whereas you don't walk in with that ridiculous notion with your daughter. I have to make them both savvy and aware of the world. But I don't think they need to punch other guys out at the bar at any point, you know. Let's hope not. Yeah. Teleco worker to fuck up. Like all these things we think we have to pass on to men that we don't necessarily think we have to pass on the girls. Right. Like we're tough on our sons in a way that we're not. I hate watching. Not. It's just going to lead to the end. It's So cyclical is great. He's got to go to a playground and watch how parents handle boys versus girls.

It's like a lot more grabbing them by the arm. We're still pretty rough on boys. Boys need a lot of love and care and nurturing. Maybe the most. Yeah, maybe the most. Yeah, their instinct is to smash everything with a stick. You've got to be like extra on them to show them a different way. I just want to finish on this because I read your New York Times article that I really, really liked.

It was just kind of a general call to ignore your kids. to some degree. So just tell us a little bit about what's happening and what we could adopt maybe from hunting and gatherings. Yeah, totally. And the idea for that outbed came actually from research for the dad brain book. Oh, did. Which was that I was interviewing this guy, Barry Hewlett, who was the anthropologist that studies the hunter-gatherer fathers. And he was just telling me about childhood in this society. The model of parenting is just different because it's about learning less through direct instruction like you're in a classroom. And more about modeling. Like you're following adults around and you're emulating what they do. And I think

we've got it totally backwards in contemporary society where we parents follow our kids around and create our lives that are molded around their interests. We're taking our kids to tons of activities. We're putting our kids in special classes. Kids actually aren't getting the opportunity to watch adults work. Our jobs are so atomized and hard for kids to grasp because they're happening on screens. that kids aren't moving around the adult world very often with this sense of, here's what I can imitate and what I can be. So my argument was that parents should just do boring things with kids

because actually it's good for kids to learn how to be patient and watch other people. And maybe that means taking them on social calls or to the gym or to the bank. I remember going to the hardware store with my parents as a kid being bored out of my mind. was so miserable. Talking to a neighbor, you've been stuck with your mom talking with the neighbor. 100%. When is this going to end? Yes. Like having tea with the 90-year-old woman down the street,

having to sit there, that's how you learn how to talk to other people, how to take turns into conversation. And so if everything is crafted around the kid. How are you not going to produce a narcissist? If you are the center of the world literally, and then you leave the house and you find out very abruptly, Oh, no, no, you're not the center of the world. You have to join other people's worlds. Right. That's how it works. It's actually better for kids to learn how to go along with a group, how to be an observer, how to

integrate yourself. And I think we sort of do try to create these kids who just the whole universe is revolving around them. And it's not normal in the grand scope of human history. No. And despite being a parent who, as I wrote in that op-ed, thinks that parents, should let their kids chill out. I somehow have gotten sucked into the team,

sports, baseball, club team. Well, if they love it, they love it. That's fine. And it's like my husband's thing, he loves it. He plays baseball. He's a coach. I got no problem with someone

whose kid desires to do something and you support that. That's not my issue at all. My issue is the kid doesn't like soccer. Half the people there, I see it when our kids were in soccer. Ours hated it. And then half the other kids hated it.

I'm like, what are we all doing? Why are we insisting that this is something that has to be done. No one here's enjoying this, except for the ones that are into it. Yeah. I know, but then that becomes a finish what you start. I mean, there's so many layers to all of this. That's right.

I do think a lot of kids are like, I want to play soccer. Johnny's playing soccer. We're going to do it together. They start and they're like, I hate it. But I do see a value in, well, you're a part of this team and you got to see this through. You don't ever have to do this again, but we're seeing it through. I understand that. That's how we handled it all.

We just didn't come back for the second season. Yeah, that's fine. But it's like team sports are real. They teach you things. and they teach you that. You've committed to this? But we had a great expert on, it might have been a childhood psychologist who was saying,

it's also important to figure out what it is your kid likes about it because you could not be diagnosing the right thing. Like a lot of kids that like soccer, they like being outside or they like being with friends. It might not be soccer they like. You got to actually figure out what is the thing that they are craving. It might not be the obvious thing. Yeah, in another cultural context,

that could just be them running wild with, band of kids. That's right. It was some hammers and some nails and saws they shouldn't have. Yeah, machetes. Yeah, I had access to all that stuff. Well, Darby, this has been delightful. This is a great book. I'm really glad you're studying this. I think to your point, the more we appreciate that dads are designed to do this too. I think that'll help further an expectation that they should do it. Yeah, I can't see an outcome that's worse with dads being more and more involved and taking on more things and feeling like, no, they're designed to as well. I agree.

I think dads can feel empowered that they actually do know what they're doing and can learn. Okay, so the book is called Dad Brain, the new science of fatherhood and how it shapes men's lives. Thank you so much for coming in, and I look forward to reading all the work you do in the future. Thanks. This was super fun. Hi there. This is Hermium Permian. If you like that, you're going to love the fact check, Miss Monica.

Cute shirt. Thank you. I'm wearing one of our new merch items. It's very cute. It's so cute. It's like a butter, like a very light yellow. Mm-hmm. And it has a really cute graphic.

It's very 80s. Yeah, it has like the 80s graphic. And it's, it fits really well. I really like the fit on it. It's got a nice, nice fit. Kind of cropped. Not really, but just. Yeah, I think it's a little fronken.

Yeah. It's very cute. It's something crazy happened. yesterday night. For both of us, you don't even know yet. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah.

Go ahead. No, you go. Because it's letting you know, this, it got more eventful. Wow. Yeah, there was a huge crash from, I was, I was working. Yeah, I was in my office doing some work. And then there was this huge, I had made dinner. So it felt like this was coming from the kitchen.

Mm-hmm. And it was this enormous crash. Did you think at any moment there had been a vehicle crash outside your house? No. No, it was definitely in my house. Okay. Yeah, it just was so loud. Thunderous.

Yes, and then I went out there and there's a full mirror in my bathroom. Size of the whole wall. The size of the entire wall mirror. Completely crashed all over the ground. I didn't say it last night, but there's got to be a couple hundred years of bad luck. I mean, that's it, that's an enormous mirror. If one little mirror... Why would you say that?

That's a crazy thing to say to me. I was looking at it. I was like, oh, there's so many broken shards. There's so much broken mirror. Yeah. So that sucked. It's because, right, you had a sink. Mm-hmm.

A temporary sink. A temporary sink. I had a temporary sink in, and they had taken it out yesterday to put in the news. the new, the real sink, prepare it for that like today or tomorrow or Monday or whatever. And that sink was... They underestimated how much that sink was holding up the mirror. Okay, I have a really interesting pickle. I have to go really quickly to sign something.

Okay. Is that okay? Yeah. Yeah. I didn't have to sign it actually. What you didn't? Oh. But I caught him.

What was it? A D.HL package. But what was in the packy? Boots that I got from the auction. Oh, okay. You were involved in a boot auction? Well, I went to Lakes Auction. Oh, right, right, right.

And I won these boots. I just got delivered. And you normally have to sign for D.HL. Yeah, they are strict about that, but not in this case. So I started running. He was already in his band was on. He had to do this. You were waving your arms.

Yeah. You're like, I am here. I can say. I did. He said, I left it at the door. Yeah, so it's been delivered. Yeah. I don't want to interact with you.

It's already delivered. Yeah. Okay, back to your mirror. Oh, yeah. You took it really well. Yeah. Oh, as I said, I'm privileged. Uh-huh.

I'm very privileged because I, well, first I called or I texted my dad Bill and my uncle Joe. And I said, well, this just happened. Mm-hmm. I think must have been doing more than anticipated. Giving water. Exactly. And Bill called, he was just like, oh my God. You know, he was very sorry.

And same with Joe. And I was just laughing. Yeah, good. It just really, but again, that is very privileged. I mean, at first I looked at it and I was like, oh, what, how do I do that? How do I clean this? up. Exactly. You know, you're, you're in the sweet spot of they just finished your house. So they're going to respond. Yeah, they're finishing it. Yeah. Where it gets dicey is like in one year if that

mirror falls off, right? Or in three years. Like at what point do these builders are no longer responsible? Yes. You know, in 15 years. And that's, that's where my story takes place. Okay. So yes, I thought, well, fuck, I wish I had a husband here who would deal with this. But I don't. So I just told Joe, I was like, I'm just leaving it. Yeah, yeah. I'm just going to leave it. He said, yes, leave it.

We'll take care of it tomorrow. Perfect. And so, yeah, that's extremely privileged. I knew I really wasn't going to have to deal with it. I, of course, am having to deal with it in other ways. Now we need new mirror. Now we need, you know, that's a whole annoying to do. He just texted me very sim.

my gosh. Yeah, it was just very startling, very loud. Scary. Very scary. Thank God you aren't in there popping a Zit. Right. Or even on the toilet, I mean, it was, it was. Glass was everywhere. Everywhere. And your child and her friends had come over like 20 minutes before that. They might have caused it with their energy. They had crazy energy. There was a sleep over, three of them, teenagers, they're fucking all got in these crazy outfits. They painted their whole face. And I so relate to this. This was me at this.

They just wanted to go out and make a little noise. They wanted to stir up the world. Some trouble, but really not really. They're not ready to. Yeah. They got a response that they should get. Yeah. And then they're like, ah, these boys are crazy. I'm like, girls, look at yourself.

Exactly. What did you think? Would you think you were just going to like? People were going to just not notice. Exactly. Yeah, they all look like rainbow bright or something. They looked nuts. It was really cute and fun. They came over and I did think, oh my God, what if one of those kids was in the bathroom when that happened? And then I get sued. What if I sued you? Yeah, you sued me. But you took yours well. I was really impressed with how chill you were about it. Yeah. I, um... Again, that's a privilege. It is privilege. In my journal this morning, I wrote, I'm dying under the weight of my possessions.

Because we were in Nashville last weekend. And I really went there because I had a boat lift installed in my dock so that I can get my boat out of the water. It doesn't get all gunked and fucked up. Yeah. They put it in. It's too shallow. Boat got stuck on the thing. Going to my bus to get something.

The bus inverters have collapsed. This is huge. The inverters have stopped. All the batteries have now collapsed. That's a huge project. And not cheap. The whole weekend was like I came to just fix one thing and I left with like eight things I had to fix Yeah, it's so annoying.

Yeah, I'm not going to bore you with the list. But while we were there, the sprinkler's fire suppression system in Kristen's office started leaking. Okay. And it's hardwood. Right. In front of that. Right. It warped all the wood.

Run down the plaster wall. Fuck that all up. It's all pushed out. They had to tear out all the wood. You know, it sucks. Yeah, that sucks. And then it gives you this anxiety. It's like, I don't know.

The fucking thing leaked that time. It's only a year. old or two years old. Is it going to leak again in two years where we'll be out, you know, whatever. So I've already like stressed to the max. Yeah. Go to bed last night. I was up pretty late researching our guests today.

3 a.m. Kristen, no, maybe Delta got sent upstairs. Dad, come downstairs. There's water leaking out of the ceiling at 3 a.m. Go down into the bedroom they're sleeping in. Sure enough, there's a fucking like 36 inch slice in the drywall and the ceiling. and it's just leaking water out. I'm like, where the fuck is that water coming from?

I'm like step outside. I'm looking, oh, my room's above it, but is my bathroom? No. I think my dresser's above that. Pull a panel out of the ceiling. Realize, oh, the air-conditioned coil system is in there. Oh. It has sprung a leak, and it's spraying water, and it's three in the morning.

And you're like, okay, how do I shut all this down? Like, turning the air off. It's still not shutting off. Then I'm hitting the breaker. Now all the air is off and it's still leaking and we buckets under the thing. And it's three and I'm like, I got to fucking wake up at six to drive Delta to school. And I got back in bed. I was like, listen, to dream known home?

It is. And it's also, it's stressful. By the time I laid down at 4.30 in the morning to go back to sleep, I was like, I'm going to move into a one-bedroom apartment. The second these girls are out of school. and I'm going to have no worries. Right. But that's not true. Nope.

Because I want all the upside. Mm-hmm. But sometimes when it rains, it pours. Yeah. Two ceiling leaks in a week with massive damage. That sucks. I wouldn't feel bad for me. I have too much shit.

That's what I was kind of saying this morning. I was like, yeah, you have too much shit. I know. Yeah, it is, you know, I just, I so rarely feel like, oh, fuck, I wish. And not even necessarily like, I wish I had a husband. I mean, that was the joke. That's a joke I made on Instagram. But, like, I wish somebody else was here right now.

Mm-hmm. I don't feel that all that often, but I did. In moments like that, I do wish somebody else was around. Uh-huh. That's what it activates. I mean, a little. Nothing crazy. I text a just, but he's, he would have come over, but he's in Texas.

Uh-huh. And also, what's he going to do? I know, but it's not about that. It's not about that. Yeah. I'm back in my mail way of thinking, like, what can I fix? Not about that. It's just about.

sharing the experience. Okay, you're ready for this? This was from a commenter CB9-1207. MD here. The reason women often have diarrhea when they are starting their periods is due to the release of progesterone. No, prostaglandins, which cause smooth muscle contraction in the uterus, but also cause smooth muscle. muscle in the intestines to contract. Interesting.

So we got an MD answering your belly issues every time you're on your periodics. Wow. Then how come everyone doesn't have it? Not everyone has that. Maybe they're being secretive about it and they're too shy. Maybe they're embarrassed that they have bottom issues when they have their... Wow. Okay.

Well, that's good. Thought you'd want that update. It's not you. It's the Proton of Relenis. Yeah. That's causing it. It's still happening to you, but it's nothing you're doing. It's still me who's gross.

It's still me who's going to poop in my car. I can't just be like, well, it's the prolactant end. That's what I just tell people. Like if you were in your car doing it and someone saw you, like, oh, great. And you're like, well, wait, it's a pro-lactal guns. Yeah, what? Why them? Yeah.

You judgmental. I think the first time it happened was also around that. I do think it was sort of connected to my period. So you just want to, I think you want to be mindful of your calendar for your flies and not do a lot of big cross town appointments. I have stuff to do. On those three days, just go like, I never more in a, the PMS symptoms are for a full week. Mine are. Okay.

So for that week, we never, we never get more than a mile away from home. No, I can't. You can't live like that. I can't live like that. Okay. Then put a trash bag in your car. Are you excited for summer? Kids are getting out of school, not mine, but many kids are out.

Lincoln got out. Delta is still in you. I am so excited for a summer. When I was this morning, your child, as previously mentioned, was wrapping up her sleepover. It was so cute, and they were playing outside. It was summertime for them. And Anna was there, and I was like, man, I'm so jealous. I'm so jealous of them.

right now. But what specific? Yeah, it's the level of carefree. You are never going to have it again. Yeah. You're never going to have again. But they're not worried about that. They have nothing to worry about for two months. Well, you know what they do have to worry about?

That'd be easy to like, to misremember how powerful it is. The amount of angst and preoccupation they have about who's going to whose birthday party and what rung of that ladder? Like, I got to drive everyone to dinner last, not everyone, I got to drive the three teens to dinner. And I was hearing them in the back seat. My favorite thing in the world is to drive them places with their friends because they forget I'm there.

And I, what just happened? My stomach rout. Oh. It wasn't a fart. Oh, yeah. I sent you a picture of the mirror and you said, what happened? Did you finally fart?

And I did laugh really hard. That was very funny. Okay, anyway, they were in your back seat. Yeah, and just you do forget the amount. of anxiety that you were carrying about all the social pressure. Yes, that is true. That's at a peak. And you and I aren't, like, this just happened, right?

You were like, oh, you're going to the Hanson's Memorial Day party. I'm like, oh, I wasn't invited. And you're like, I'm sure you were. And then we both looked and we hadn't been sent the invite. That never happened. Kristen didn't have it and I didn't have it. It was just a mix up. But it's not because your name was showed up on my, on the list you can see who's been

invited. And both of you were invited. Was it through Evite? I don't know. Where did you see my name? Like on the group email or on an Evite? No, no. On the, on the paperless post, whatever.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that never got to me. Yeah, it might be in your spam. No, no, I looked. I looked everywhere. I don't, it did not get to me for whatever reason. You're going to take this up with Amy because she's like, yeah, I sent it to them.

I believe that. Okay. All of it's true. She sent it. It didn't come. So maybe I've blocked paperless pose. store. Yeah, okay.

Whatever the reason is, I didn't have it and I searched everywhere. Right. And Kristen didn't have it. Okay. So neither of us had it. And I was like, oh, maybe we weren't invited. And literally, we're like, okay, that's fine. Yeah.

Truck along. If I was 13 and we had invited, it would rattle me. Sure. And now I'm like, yeah, if I'm not, someone doesn't want me in a party, fine. That's still rare. Sure. I'm only saying I used to be plagued by where am I, who invited me? What am I missing out on?

So that's an anxiety I had. Yeah. And although we don't have playing on the trampoline, what I have that offset that was like, it doesn't bother me if I'm not invited to the Hanson party. For whatever reason, they thought there's too many people or whatever they thought. I'm fine with it. But don't you think like this is interesting, but I guess I feel like maybe I wish you did care. Like, I mean, you were invited.

So this is why I can do this thought experiment is like if all of a sudden they stopped inviting you to things, if they stopped inviting me to things, I would I would be like, what happened? These are my close friends that I used to be invited to all of their things. If they decided to stop, that means something has happened. I've done something or they, something's gone on. And I care about these people. So I'd like to figure out what it is. Yeah. And I'm at a place in life where I don't have the thought of like what happened.

What did I do? My all, my only thought is like, whatever reason they didn't want to invite me is kind of, I don't care. It's in my business. they decided, for whatever reason, not to invite me, I know we haven't had a falling out. I know nothing weirds happen. I'm sure I'm going to see them next week. I'm not doing any of that stuff where I think like something must be wrong. I'm just like, oh, whatever, you have a party, you didn't invite me. I have parties. I invite some people and I don't invite all people. There's no comment on whether I want to be friends with those people or not. It's just like,

on that day I had these four people over and I don't know if you saw it on Instagram and you're upset and you're filling in all these blanks that there's issues now that's the all on you well again that's where i disagree but yeah yeah i guess all i'm saying is i now at 51 have the internal security of i'm not really worried about thinking about what i'm not invited to right and if someone doesn't want me to be at their party that's totally fine with me i don't want to be at someone's party that didn't want me there. But more, it's deeper than just being at the party. It's, is this relationship good?

And if you value the relationship, I would think you'd want it to be good. If I text Amy and she didn't get back to me and then I text her again and she didn't get back to me, now I'd be concerned because we have a personal relationship that we respond to each other. If I don't go to one of her parties, that's not how I'm evaluating whether we're connected or not or we have a good friendship. It's more when I reach out to you, do you respond to we reciprocate? Are we good? Whether I'm at your birthday party or your Halloween party, it's, I don't know.

That's not what I came for. All right, right. Yeah. So anyways, I'm just saying I think I have other concerns and worries, but I've also been completely liberated from a big bunch of concerns that used to bother me. Well, I just thought like, oh, man, they just have nothing. They have nothing to think about for two months, nothing hanging over their head, no homework, no work. Even if you don't have work for two months, it's like, when will I ever?

When I get back to work, what are we going to have to do? Will I ever work again? Well, is, like, there's a lot of thinking about the future when you're an adult. And that doesn't, I don't think that ends. And then, yeah, you just, you don't get those summers back. You don't get those summers back. So I was jealous, but I'm also so happy for her. And it looked so fun.

And sleepovers are so fun. And I miss them. I do a lot of playing in the sun. Like I feel, I said this to you out in the yard. I feel like them in the summer. Right. Like I have that sense of I'm waking up and today I'm going to play with my friends. In my play's different.

I'm on a boat instead of a trampoline or I'm on a dirt bike in my yard or I'm playing pickle bowl, whatever it is. I do have that sense of like, oh, it's playtime. That's good. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Want to do some facts? Yeah, let's do some facts.

Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare. Darby Saxby. Doesn't it sound like that could be a character and a fun English? Yes. It sounds like it's from, well, it sounds like it's from Flight of the Concords because Darby is. is one of the actors on that show. But I'm more picturing like a little girl in a rain slicker in London. Yeah, that's cute.

Darby Saxby. It is. Meet Darby Saxby. She loves her parents, but not her Uncle Mike. What did her Uncle Mike do? Uncle Mike is a chimney sweep who gets dusties all over her favorite stuffies. Oh, no. See, now we got a story.

I love it. I bought it. I want to know more. Yeah, well, how will she address this situation? know more about Darby. But, you know, she's going to be mean to her Uncle Mike. And her Uncle Mike's just sweeping a chimney. And then wants to play with her stuffies because he's lonely.

That's what she's going to figure out. She's going to learn compassion for Uncle Mike by the end. Yeah. Hopefully it's like three or four books. Her stuff you'll tell her, we don't mind getting dirty if it's to keep someone happy and feeling loved. And she's going to give her Uncle Mike a big hug at the end. Oh. And he's going to go, oh, Darby, I wasn't expecting you.

that you've never given me a hug and she's going to hug him and then he's going to cry with such joy that the tears will wash away all the soot all the dirt yeah oh I love that ending tear tear bath listen um the one thing though I don't like about that story is that the stuffies are are like they are being codependent only if they mind yeah but they're covered you're projecting No, they're covered in dirt. But they're stuffies. Like, they don't care. They're like the dirtier, the better.

They know Darby doesn't like it, and they know, like, itches them. Well, I don't know. Yeah, dirt itches. If you're, yeah, if you're an animal and you have dermis, these is stuffies. Okay, but they talk, so, you know, so we're playing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think they have feelings, like, physical and emotional. Okay.

You know, one time I got dirt. Unashit tea? No. Stuck. Okay, this is so gross. I'm sure I've told you that I got dirt stuck in my neck. I think you're talking about your stuffies, but you're, this whole time you've been talking about yourself. You're, okay, I got to rewind.

You don't like hugging chimney sweeps. You don't like. I got it. No. I'm saying, I'm saying I feel for these stuffies because I know. what it's like to have dirt. Dirt stuck in your neck? How did that happen? And it couldn't be cleaned? How long was this dirty in your neck? You had a dirty neck for a while? Yeah. How long? What's going on? What happened to your neck? Okay. I was like 10 or 11 or, God, I hope not 12.

Probably older, yeah. And I was at my, we were at a family event, my grandparents, and my mom, was like, looked at me and it was like, what's on something like, what's wrong with you? Something was like wrong with my neck. Yeah. Now, I have a huge crease across my neck. I've had it like high cholesterol since I was a baby. Okay. I hate it.

Okay. But I've always had it. Yeah. And it was really dark. You had been accumulating some dirt and went and stuff in the fold. Yes. Yeah. That's natural.

They all laughed at me because they realized it was dirt. Like, you know, she was nervous. Yeah, you had sliced your throat or something. Yeah, exactly. And then she's touching it and dirt's coming off. Getting everywhere probably. Yeah, like all the stuffies, you know. And then they all laughed at me and I didn't clean my neck and I have to clean my neck.

Monica, you got to clean your neck. Uh-huh. And I was really embarrassed. I probably cried. I'm sure I'm sure I cried. Have you seen this video of Malala talking to, quote, Indian. mom. I don't think so great.

It's like an Indian therapist. Mm-hmm. And Malala's like, yes, so I got shot. Okay, I'm hearing you got shot. A lot of people get shot. Like not taking it. Yes, everything she says is like, stop being a baby. Yeah.

And that might be your fault. Yeah. And it sounds to me like a lot of poor me, you know. Just stop being a victim. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so funny. You've not seen this clip. No, I haven't.

It's really. I'm trying to think who's sent it to me. That's very funny. Yeah, you know, my mom will do that. She, for a long time, if, like, I complained about something that was, like, from them. Yeah. You know, she would be like, when are you going to, like, when are you going to understand your own person? Like, we're not, basically, like, we're not responsible for any of your damage.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which, like. I respect it. I guess I get it. Yeah. But she did laugh at me when I had dirt on my neck. And probably because I was taking a bath. myself way too young.

That's what you think? Uh-huh. And you didn't know to clean that crease. No one taught me. Okay. Who's supposed to teach me? Well, I bet you're...

Mommy. I bet that crease has never been dirty again. That is right. Now it's all dried up. Could you scrub it? Because I put extra soap in there. Do you actually soap that? Yeah, I do.

To this day. Yeah, I wash my neck. Yeah. Oh, okay. I can't risk walking around with dirt neck again. I don't wash my neck. Yeah, you don't have a crease. Oh.

I'm not so lucky. It's not. Not the same. Okay. Rob, do you have a crease? I don't think so. So unfair. Well, this is actually ding, ding, ding since it's for Darby and that's parenting.

Dads, yeah. Dads, yeah. My dad, I don't think, laughed at me. He didn't even see it. He did not see it. They were like, look, and he's like, I don't see anything. Exactly. That's where I get my, that's probably where I get my non-judgment.

Like Sherlock would say my powers of observation, so you'd have to say, like, my deficit of observation maybe or something. But I'd like to twist it and make it positive. Like, that's where I get my just non-judgment. My nonchalance. I wouldn't say I'm laissez-faire or nonchalant, but I don't make judgments about people because I can't see what to judge. So that's cool thing about me.

Okay, you said that we've diagnosed like six neurotransmitters. Scientists have identified over 200 neurotransmitters. So it's a little off. Which are the body's chemical messengers. So yeah. Okay. Okay, brain rules for babies, you guys read. You said a child will make 60 or 70% of relationships worse.

In brain rules for baby, author John Medina notes that more than 80% of marriages experience a significant drop in relationship satisfaction after a child is born. Even better. 80%. John Gottman, who we love. Uh-huh. He highlights 67 to 70% of couples see the quality of their relationship plummet within the first three years of baby's life. Mm-hmm. People just need to have that warning.

Yeah, it's good to know. And they should know it'll pass. Yeah. Yeah. When you're in it, you don't think it's going to pass. Yeah. You're like, what have we've traded? This for that, for sure.

Yeah. Oh, percentage of men who rate having children as a high priority, like highest priority. So this is about 57% of men ages 18 to 34 want to have. have children one day, according to a Pew Research Center poll. Surprisingly, this means men are now more likely to prioritize having kids than women who report a desire for children at 45% in the same age group. Wow. This whole world is flipped.

Flippy flip. You got women in college at 65%. The boys want to have kids. Well, it's all connected. I think all of that is connected. Because if you're in college, as a woman, you have big career aspirations. You're not thinking about having kids. You're thinking about doing that.

Interesting. Now, studies on men having daughters. Yes, research suggests that having daughters increases the life expectancy of fathers. But the opposite is true for mothers. Did it say that? Yeah. They live less long with daughters? Come on.

Listen, it says for fathers, studies including landmark research published in the American Journal of Human Biology show that a father's lifespan increases by an average of 74 weeks for every daughter he has. Yeah, so that's about one point, whatever I said. Sons were found to have no significant impact on a father's longevity. Why? Researchers theorize that having daughters may lead men to adopt healthier lifestyle choices, taking fewer risks and build stronger emotional support networks.

Additionally, adult daughters are traditionally more likely to provide care and support as their parents' age. That's interesting. You can read more about the research. Well, they used to. This new crop. We'll see. Yeah.

I just want I'm kids. I doubt they're going to be. Now, for mothers, the physical toil of having children impacts mothers differently. Research shows that mothers experience a reduction in lifespan of about 95 weeks per child, regardless of whether the child is a son or a daughter. The cost is largely attributed to the biological and energetic demands of pregnancy and lactation. Interesting. So my dad got 74 more weeks for me, but he didn't get many from my bro.

And your mom lost 180 some weeks. Yeah. Thanks. Your mom lost. That's four years. On Elizabeth and Andy's podcast recently, they were talking about this. Like when you start counting how many months you have left. No, it's not a fun. It's not a good idea.

It's not a good idea. No, no. You don't even need to do it. Let's not do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I already did it. Yeah, I know. I know that.

All right. Well, that's it. Darby didn't have many facts. And it was a great episode. I hope men listen and women listen. Because I hate, this is going to sound like woman bashing or mom bashing, and I don't mean to do that. Okay. But I do think moms should realize the impact of kids on fathers.

Like, it's not having an impact on them. Yeah, well, there's like, there's upsides and downsides of this stereotype that the dad isn't even relevant. It's not naturally apparent. Yeah, exactly. So it's like they get out of a bunch of shit they shouldn't get out of. Right, I guess, yeah. But then also they get denied all this lovely stuff and they're seen as a totally expendable, which is not a nice thing to be seen.

No. It's not like what you want. And it, but it's not even like, you know, I do think moms, for a lot of obvious reasons and understandable reasons, do a lot of like, well, it's a default me, which it often is, but it can be changed as a whole point. Like, I think it's important for everyone to listen to this. I do think this is changing pretty rapidly. Yes. Again, because of women in the workforce. Because my dad dropped me off.

He would drop me off at school. On Monday and pick me up on Friday. Yep. No, he would drop me off at school and we would listen to that rain song. Beer Gabriel? No, it's like rainbows and sunshine. Rainbows up in my hand. No, not that one.

That's Kermit. This one is like No, that's rainbow connection You do you think rainbow I love rainbow Ranglement What's on the other side Peggy Lee

How does that go I don't know Sunshine rainbows Sunshine lollipops and rainbows Like Leslie Gore I see that Sunshine after the rain or something Yeah

Yeah I think it's this Let's listen Wow, you and your dad were having fun It's not that Fuck, yeah Can you imagine You were trying to keep a low profile If I saw the one Indian family

In my school pull up And the door open That song was fucking blasting And I was 10 I would just have to fill in so many Wrong assumptions Like oh wow Indians love dance music

Yeah Well I forget the song And that's sad That was our song I wonder if you called him He won't know right I bet he'll remember You think so?

Yeah, you listen with this little dotto. TBD. I think about that daily because I'm nearing the end of. Drop-offs. Delta's elementary school drop-off. And we ride the motorcycle every morning, which means I'm guaranteed to have my koala backpack on. Oh. Every morning. You wear her backpack?

I wear her as a backpack. She's sitting behind me and she's like holding on to me like she's a koala bear. Yeah. And we talk while we're riding. It's hard to hear. just gives me squeezes. And so, like, I'm excited to not have to be out the door at the same time every day. You're going to miss that.

But I, it's, yeah. As much as I don't like getting up and having to deal with it, I absolutely cherish that every day of my week starts with my koala bear on my back. I know. I love it. Kids will break your heart. They'll break your heart. They'll make your heart and then they'll break your heart. That's right.

I love you.