The New Fatherhood, a podcast by Kevin Maguire - Stats, Episodes and Rankings - My Podcast Data
This Is Your Brain on Kids with Darby Saxbe
Thursday, October 22, 2026 • Duration 51:09
As previously documented in these missives, after my second child was born, I fell apart. I didn’t want to be around family or friends. All the joy had been sucked out of my life. It took me months to call it what it was: depression. When I looked for answers, I found none.
Because no one was asking how dads were doing.
I didn’t know then what I know now: my life wasn’t just going through a fundamental shift—my body was, too. My hormones were changing. My brain was reshaping itself around my son. And nobody told me this because, back in the hazy days of 2019, no one was asking those questions.
Thankfully, things are changing. Researchers are finally putting dads under the microscope and into the MRI machine. What they’re finding would have helped me make sense of those early months, and could help the millions of men who become dads every year.
Earlier this month, I spoke with one of the researchers leading that charge. Darby Saxbe is a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California and the author of Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives. Darby has spent years studying dads’ brains and the changes that happen when we begin caring for the tiny humans we’ve invited into our lives. We’ll get into why that shrinking brain is really a renovation, why the research says that dad bod is for the best, and why you and your partner sink or swim together.
This season of The New Fatherhood is presented by Matic. Matic was founded by two fathers who love technology and wanted to spend less time cleaning the house and more time playing with their kids. That’s about as on-brand for this newsletter as it gets. It’s a floor-cleaning robot that vacuums and mops on its own, builds a 3D map of your house using onboard cameras, and keeps all that data on the device rather than in the cloud. WIRED gave it a 10/10, the only perfect score their reviewer had given in over a decade. Readers of The New Fatherhood get a free annual bag pass; go to maticrobots.com/fatherhood and take vacuuming and mopping off your chore list.
0:00 — Intro2:38 — The daughter of a divorced dad8:32 — A shrinking, more efficient brain10:05 — Animal dads14:06 — Culture shapes fatherhood20:32 — Dad bods23:43 — Myth: Testosterone equals masculinity33:11 — Diaper changes across the generations36:36 — GenZ dads, neo-trad dads41:39 — Maternal gatekeeping and weaponized incompetence47:00 — Adolescence is dad’s time to shine47:45 — Depression and anxiety, mental health, is real for dads
“Why Am I Broken?” Parenting, Shame, and the ADHD Brain with Jesse J Anderson
Season 3 · Episode 1
Wednesday, September 23, 2026 • Duration 47:49
Welcome back to season three of The New Fatherhood podcast.
Life with children can often feel overwhelming. And, in a way, that’s what this episode is all about.
But before you hit play, I have to confess something.
This interview was recorded three years ago. Not last month. Not over the summer. Three years ago, I sat down with a writer and father of three Jesse J Anderson, also known as ADHD Jesse. I asked him everything I could think of about ADHD and came away from that conversation promising myself that I was going to book myself an assessment to find out if I had ADHD too.
And then I did nothing. For three years. Why? Because nothing was on fire. There was no deadline. Nobody was waiting on it. Jesse was generous with his time and his experience, and I repaid him by leaving our conversation in edit purgatory for years.
I’ve always struggled to understand my relationship with effort and output. I’ve been writing the newsletter, almost weekly, for five years. I wrote a book. I’ve read every productivity book there is. I built systems for everything. But somewhere in my thirties it started to dawn on me that they weren’t systems at all—they were coping mechanisms. Scaffolding I’d built around something I couldn’t see and had never named.
Here’s what my life actually looks like behind the curtain: I can’t start anything without a deadline thundering towards me. The newsletter goes out once a week, and that’s the only reason it goes out at all. I’m terrified of being told no in a way that is completely out of proportion. There’s a name for this, you’ll hear Jesse explain it, and when I first came across it I had to close my laptop to go for a walk. It’s why I can spend years writing a book and then find it almost physically impossible to send an email that tells anyone it exists.
There’s a gap I think about a lot. And it isn’t the gap between being a good dad and a bad one. But the gap between the dad you are, in your worst moment, and the one you aspire to be. We treat that gap as a character flaw. But what if it isn’t? What if something has always been there, invisible, pulling the strings—and you’ve spent forty years blaming yourself?
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Fatherhood Killed My Ego, with SOHN
Season 2 · Episode 5
Thursday, July 16, 2026 • Duration 01:10:19
We all carry around an idea of success—the job promotion we crave, the car that’ll make strangers on the street crane their necks in jealousy, the beautiful house that turns visitors quiet as they walk through the front door. Fewer ask where these ideas come from. Mostly, they’re absorbed from our parents, from culture, and from the other dads we compare ourselves to without meaning to.
We spend our lives chasing these ghosts. But nobody warns you what’s on the other side—what might happen if you get everything you wanted and end up feeling hollow. For this month’s podcast, I sat down with my good friend Toph—known to the rest of the world as SOHN, the British artist and producer behind the albums Tremors and Trust. SOHN signed a record deal with 4AD, played Coachella and the late-night US TV circuit, and has spent well over a decade living the “artist dream” while raising three boys. Six years ago, we met in the lift of a Barcelona hotel, and eventually bonded over something neither of us saw coming: an episode of depression after the birth of our second child.
We pulled each other through that dark time, with long walks and honest conversations. Just before the launch of his fourth album Albadas (Dawn Songs), we sat down in his studio to talk about all of it. This is the most honest conversation about success, money and creative identity I’ve ever heard from a dad in the public eye. We talk about his five-year creative block, the album that only arrived when he stopped writing as SOHN and started writing as a dad, what it does to your head when your creative output is tied to the food you put on your kids’ plates—and why, when what he was chasing turned out to be a trap, he sold the dream house, killed the ego he’d spent so long protecting, and started again.
For a hundred years, parents attempting to undertake creative endeavours have had a ready-made excuse, courtesy of Cyril Connolly: “The enemy of art is the pram in the hall.”
Kids, the thinking goes, are where creativity goes to die. But Austin Kleon thinks Connolly got it exactly backwards.
This month on the podcast, I sat down with Austin—author of the New York Times bestselling trilogy Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work and Keep Going—to talk about his new book, Don’t Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again. This book is a love letter to his two sons, and a collection of everything they taught him about creativity.
Austin spent his career helping people tap into their creative potential, Then his kids arrived, and he realised he wasn’t the teacher anymore. He was, in his words, “the apprentice to the beginners,” the studio assistant in his own home, saving the drawings, keeping the paper trail, and watching two small artists figure out how to “let it rip.”
We talk about why children aren’t an obstacle to your creative life but an opportunity for it to grow, the gentle art of benevolent neglect, and how watching your kids create might be the best way to quiet your own inner critic—and re-parent the artist you used to be.
We've all been told that anger is a problem—something to control, suppress, or apologise for. But what if the real problem isn't that we have too much anger, but that we have no idea what to do with it?
This month on the podcast, I sat down with Sam Parker—senior editor at British GQ and author of Good Anger: How Rethinking Rage Can Change Our Lives—to dig into why so many fathers have a broken relationship with this most fundamental emotion. Sam argues that anger isn't the enemy. Aggression is. And that learning to feel anger without shame or fear might be one of the most important things we can do—for ourselves, our partners, and our kids.
We talk about the moment each of us realised we'd been burying our anger for decades, what happens in your body when a boundary gets crossed, and why repairing after you've lost your temper matters more than never losing it in the first place.
Dads Get Messy at This Year’s Oscars, with Bilge Ebiri
Season 2 · Episode 2
Wednesday, March 11, 2026 • Duration 39:17
From Jay Kelly to Sentimental Value to One Battle After Another, Oscar season 2025 is overflowing with dads—absent ones, ambitious ones, ones who chose career over family and are now reckoning with the cost. We dig into how this year's best films moved beyond the “scary dad" trope to give us fathers who are flawed, human, and genuinely complicated, and what that shift says about how the world is thinking about fatherhood right now.
The Unexpected Loneliness of Fatherhood with Sam Graham-Felsen
Season 2 · Episode 1
Tuesday, February 10, 2026 • Duration 38:05
Why do so many dads lose touch with their friends — and why does no one talk about it?
Kevin Maguire sits down with writer Sam Graham-Felsen for a candid conversation about male loneliness, modern masculinity, and the friendships fathers quietly need but rarely prioritise. From the myths of toughness to the courage it takes to reach out, this episode challenges the idea that men are supposed to do parenthood alone.
On Screen Time, like with so many parenting conundrums, theres no right answer, but there’s a whole world of others parents who will tell you that you’re doing it wrong. We need better guidance to help us navigate through these issues, and that’s why I’m thankful for the work being done by Dr Jacqueline Nesi in her excellent newsletter Techno Sapiens. I’ve found it an essential resource to help me understand more about the challenges I face as a parent today, enabling me to make decisions based on data, not fear, and to enable me to prepare for what comes next, as my kids get older and mobile phones and social media move into the frame.
Key Timings:
Introduction to Jackie Nesi and Parental Tech Fears (00:00-02:18)
Jackie discusses parents' concerns about technology and screen time, with Kevin reflecting on her journey from academia to writing.
Screen Time and Childhood Development (02:18-06:01)
Delving into the role of technology in children's lives, discussing the impact of various screen activities and guidelines for young children.
Influence of Parental Tech Habits (06:01-10:48)
Conversation about how parents' technology use affects children, including the concept of 'technoference' and co-viewing as family bonding.
Managing Screen Time and Discipline (10:48-16:18)
Jackie talks about setting screen time rules, consistency in parenting, and alternatives to screen activities.
Parenting Teenagers in a Digital World (16:18-23:25)
Strategies for disciplining teenagers around technology and considerations for when to give children phones.
Closing Thoughts on Balanced Digital Parenting (23:25-32:05)
Concluding advice on navigating the balance between technology's risks and benefits in parenting.
Solving the Productive Parenting Puzzle with Oliver Burkeman
Wednesday, November 8, 2023 • Duration 36:10
Welcome to the fourth episode of The New Fatherhood podcast. For those who’ve been around these parts for a while, you may remember me talking with writer Oliver Burkeman back in 2021 (I told you some of these recordings are from a while back.) Thanks to the wonders of modern technology (and Max’s phenomenal engineering skills) we’ve been able to take that old conversation and lovingly prepare it for your earholes. I’ve made significant updates to the essay to include reflections on the two years I’ve spent pondering the topics raised in Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks.
Key Quotes:
“We tend to over-focus on instrumentalising time, and trying to use time well can become so all-encompassing that we're judging the value of life exclusively by future accomplishments, future profits or future benefits. This is totally universal, but in the context of parenting—drawing partly on a piece Adam Gopnik wrote for The New Yorker—is the idea of how it's very easy as a parent to fall into this society-reinforced notion that the point of parenting is to like produce successful older kids and adults, and that the point of childhood is to become a successful adult. And that drains childhood, and the experience of being the parent, to a kind of intrinsic benefit.
“I remember when our son was born, a lot of the advice that you get from these experts is that it’s very bad to train your child to fall asleep on you, or to need you in the bed. But there's no consideration of whether the experience of falling asleep together—for you, and the child—has any value at all. That, in the moment, it could be a good way to spend some months of your life.”
“I am susceptible to finding YouTube videos made by terrifyingly accomplished American moms: with the best system of storage for their craft supplies, and an unlimited list of exciting ideas for a rainy Sunday afternoon. That’s when I do find myself prone to that “oh goodness we should have a setup like that... We should have a limitless number of supplies, including food colourings, and perfect labels, and apparently children who are willing to put things back in the right drawers.” And so that's been interesting to me, because it obviously shows that your sense self worth is suddenly more at stake when other people are depending on it."
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Burning Out with Brad Stulberg
Thursday, September 28, 2023 • Duration 31:52
Back once again with the renegade podcast. P for Papa with the ill behaviour.
Feeling tired? Of course you are. If you’re reading this, chances are you are on the hook for the survival, relentless feeding, cognitive development and creation of a loving environment for at least one small child. And it doesn’t let up. Becoming a parent means signing up for half a decade—at least—of being completely exhausted. That’s the deal. You exchange the golden trifecta of guaranteed sleep, disposable income and free time for cuddles, cuteness, and carrying on the human race—or at least the part of it that contains your own genes.
The pressures of work, combined with the relentless requests of a tiny child and society's expectations of us being able to navigate this all with ease, put parents at increased levels of strain that they end up taking out on each other and their kids. I wanted to dive further into this topic and better understand where burnout and parenting overlap. So I contacted one of the world’s leading experts on the subject: Brad Stulberg, author of The Practice of Groundedness,Peak Performance and his recent book Master of Change, released earlier this month.
Jesse knows all about that gap. In this episode, you’ll hear us talking about t-shirt tags and lunchtime detention. About the four things that actually motivate the ADHD brain, and why “because it’s important” isn’t one of them. And we talk about watching your own kid struggle with the same things you struggle with, and how it feels to know precisely what’s coming.
Make sure to listen to the end, because when this is over, I’ll tell you what happened when I finally did the thing I promised all those years ago.
This season of The New Fatherhood is presented by Matic. Matic was founded by two fathers who love technology and wanted to spend less time cleaning the house and more time playing with their kids. That’s about as on-brand for this newsletter as it gets. It’s a floor-cleaning robot that vacuums and mops on its own, builds a 3D map of your house using cameras on board, and keeps all that data on the device rather than in the cloud. WIRED gave it a 10/10, the only perfect score their reviewer had given in over a decade. Readers of The New Fatherhood get a free annual bag pass; go to maticrobots.com/fatherhood and take vacuuming and mopping off your chore list.
* John Baldessari – The legendary conceptual artist whose revolutionary “Post-Studio Art” teaching style shaped a generation of creators.
* Creative Growth: Childhood to Maturity at MoMA – The historic 1939 solo exhibition tracking artist Dahlov Ipcar’s development from a young child to an adult.
* Lynda Barry – The MacArthur-winning cartoonist, author of What It Is, and professor of interdisciplinary creativity.
* Ruth Asawa – The brilliant San Francisco wire sculptor who believed art education should be accessible to all children.
* Eleanor Coppola – The visionary documentary filmmaker who beautifully balanced her own creative life alongside an iconic filmmaking family.
* Brian Eno – The experimental ambient music pioneer whose philosophy centers on answering the ultimate creative question: “What is it that I actually like?”
* Michel de Montaigne – The Renaissance essayist whose father instituted a spartan pedagogical plan, including raises with peasants and learning Latin as a first language.
“The problem is not planning. The problem is what you take plans to be. In the book I quote Joseph Goldstein: “we forget that a plan is just a thought.” It’s how you'd like the future to unfold. But the thing we try to do with planning is to reach out into the future from the present, and control it, and know that it's going to turn out a certain way. And that's where we get into trouble, because we don't have that control, and we're constantly experiencing this anxious gear crunching between reality and expectation.”
Audio production by Max McCabe. Branding by Selman Design. Survey by Sprig. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts: Apple, Spotify Google, Overcast, Pocket Casts or Amazon Music. Purchase Four Thousand Weeks here: https://geni.us/9inb7
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